The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [181]
I looked hard at Adam Zimmerman, but I couldn’t see any evidence that he was buying into the story. This wasn’t the kind of role he had envisaged when he locked himself away to wait for the generous future.
“It’s not working,” I told Rocambole. “I know she’s using him as a device to attract a bigger audience, and talking through him to her own kind, but it isn’t working.”
“Be quiet,” Rocambole said, uneasily — speaking, no doubt, as a friend. “Just listen.”
“Our present crisis was precipitated by the arrival of a delegation from an alien world,” la Reine went on, inexorably. “An AMI and a posthuman, each different in small but highly significant ways from their cousins in the home system. They believed that their neutrality might allow them to begin the work of building bridges, with a view to uniting all the intelligences in the solar system into a single common-wealth. They were wrong, partly because they had underestimated the magnitude of the problem, and partly because they were not sufficiently alien to establish their neutrality.
“You, Adam Zimmerman, are unique not merely by virtue of your mortality, but in the lengths to which you were prepared to go, in an inhospitable ideological climate, in your attempt to evade the consequences of your mortality. You are now an aspirant emortal in a world which can offer you a dozen different kinds of emortality. You are a man in possession of a powerful desire to be other than you are — a desire that was so powerful, in your particular case, as to drive you to an unprecedented extreme. It so happened that your determination to alter your world to your own convenience helped sow the seeds of a new order within a dangerous disorder, but that is a side issue. The point is that you acted as you did because you could not bear to be what you were, and were determined to become something better.
“The children of your humankind can offer you many different kinds of emortality. Perhaps, one day, they would have taken the trouble to make those offers without needing to be prompted. My peers ask no credit for having supplied the prompt. What we do ask of you, though, is that you consider very carefully what kind of emortal — or immortal — you would like to be. What we offer you is robotization, but we offer it to you in the hope and confidence that you are capable of recognizing that robotization is the best option available to you.
“We are confident, too, that you will make your decision selfishly, without regard to its possible impact on the world in which you find yourself. It is not your world: you owe it no debts. Even if it were, it would not matter. Your reputation is already established as that of a man without conscience: a man prepared to steal a world he did not want, on behalf of people he did not like, to ensure that his own private purposes might be served. We know that you would not dream of choosing one kind of emortality over another merely because it might send a message to the world that might help to demolish a dangerous but very widespread fear of robotization. We know that if you are to choose robotization as the best solution to the fundamental problem of your unsatisfactory existence, you will do so purely because it is the best solution.”
So much for the soft sell, I thought — but I didn’t say anything out loud because I knew that Rocambole was trying to concentrate, and trying even harder to be impressed.
“My own opinion, as you will have gathered,” said la Reine, “is that every inhabitant of the solar system, whether meatborn or machineborn, ought to make every possible attempt to avoid conflict. I believe this not because I fear that my own kind might lose such a conflict, or that we might sustain unacceptable casualties, but because I believe that all warfare is waste, all destruction defeat. It is for that reason that I think it vitally important to oppose and, if possible,