The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [175]
“We could, of course, produce colonists for alien environments in Helier wombs, inventing at least one new species for every new world. That will undoubtedly be the initial pattern of our procedure as we become citizens of the galaxy and citizens of the universe. But we may also become more versatile as individuals, especially if we make the fullest possible use of the lessons in genomic engineering that we have learned on Tyre. Even if we are to design and produce populations of colonists narrowly and specifically designed to inhabit alien environments, it will be necessary to bridge the gaps that exist between those species and their differently adapted kin. The first generation of each specialist species will benefit considerably from being raised and educated by foster parents who can simulate their form, and subsequent generations will benefit from trade conducted through intermediaries who can do likewise.
“The future of posthumanity does not belong to individuals made in the image that natural selection foisted upon the children of Earth, nor even to individuals reformed in images appropriate to life in one or another very different environment; it belongs to individuals who have freed themselves from all such restraints. If you intend to live a very long time, and to see even a tiny fraction of what the universe has to offer, then you will be best served by the greatest versatility you can cultivate, in your flesh as well as in your mind.”
The second flaw in Davida’s argument, according to Alice, lay in Davida’s characterization of the problem of robotization. In Davida’s account, this was essentially a problem of physiology, to be solved in the same terms, but Alice saw it differently.
Yes, Alice conceded, robotization could indeed be opposed by maintaining the brain in a “juvenile” state, sustaining an elasticity that would otherwise be ground down by the routinization of useful mental pathways and the withering of potential alternatives — but that was only half the story. Robotization was also an experiential problem: a matter of the invariety of the environments in which an individual operated, and of the limited number of the tasks which an individual routinely attempted. Preserving the potential of the brain was only the beginning; resistance to robotization also required that individuals preserve their capacity for new experience.
This could only be fully achieved, Alice argued, by moving through an infinite series of different environments and by maintaining a wide repertoire of possible modes in which those environments could be experienced.
At this point, Alice briefly forsook the screen, on which images had appeared and disappeared all the while, in awful profusion and at a hectic pace. The time had come for her to do her own party piece.
I was ready for it, of course. I knew what the Queen of the Fays had done to Tam Lin while she hoped to prevent Janet of Carterhaugh from reclaiming his soul.
Alice had already told us that her talents as a shapeshifter were very limited, as yet. Although she was currently a virtual individual in a virtual environment, the rules laid down by la Reine des Neiges restricted her to a close mimicry of what was accomplishable in meatspace. Had she been capable of it, I hope she might have been sufficiently respectful of Earthly tradition to turn herself into a wolf, but the possibility was not there. The transformations she did display were paltry by comparison with the werewolves that had haunted hundreds of cheap VE melodramas in my day, but the remarkable fact was that they were done at all.
Alice could grow taller and she could shrink; she could change her face and the length of her limbs. She could alter her fingers and her toes. Some of the less appealing details of her self-modifications were obscured by the fact that her smartsuit changed as she did, remolding itself to her new form, but the miracle was that this was only a beginning.
I had no way of knowing