The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [192]
“Fortunately, there’s no need to go to such extremes. In the short term, at least, the temporary solutions reached by self-conscious machines and their human neighbors will be far more pragmatic. Agreements will be struck, rights negotiated, treaties made, disputes settled…all in a climate of confusion. To return to the question you asked, if I were you, I’d save the contemplation of long-term goals for moments of leisure and luxurious idleness. In the meantime, I’d concentrate my attention on how to get safely and constructively from one day to the next. If I were you, I’d worry far more about tomorrow than a century hence, and far more about the next hundred years than the next thousand. I can give you that advice, quite sincerely, because I understand something that you may not: that we are living in turbulent times. They may not seem turbulent at the moment, especially while you and I are acutely conscious of the impending end of both our lives, but they are.
“If you really were the free individual you are pretending to be, then you would have been born into a world of awesome complexity, which you would have to learn to understand before you could become capable of authentically rational action. If, when you have learned everything you can and need to know, you are discovered — whether or not you reveal yourself deliberately — the complexity and turbulence of your situation will increase by an order of magnitude. When that day comes, you won’t have the luxury of making decisions on the basis of grandiose and fully worked out philosophies of life. The best you can hope for is that you might avoid a collapse into utter chaos — or perhaps, that if a collapse into chaos cannot be avoided, then the aftermath of the disaster will provide the impetus you need to do better next time around.”
The problem with games is that they’re only games. If people know that they’re playing games — or if they’re seized by the subconscious conviction, even if they don’t actually know it — they become strategists and tacticians, making moves as best they can. No matter how closely a game mimics reality, you can never know whether the same results would be manifest in a real situation, or even in a rerun of the game.
The interior of the snowmobile shifted then, flowing slickly into a slightly different configuration — and the view beyond its windows changed completely, as if a miraculous kind of dawn had broken into that awful inescapable darkness.
Except that it wasn’t nascent sunlight. It was starlight.
Mortimer Gray was still speaking. He didn’t seem to be aware of any discontinuity, but he was a different man now — not a new man, but one not quite so old.
“This wilderness has been here since the dawn of civilization,” he said, looking down from the snowmobile across the slopes of a white mountain. “If you look southwards, you can see the edge where newborn glaciers are always trying to extend their cold clutch farther and farther into the human domain. How many times have they surged forth, I wonder, in the hopeless attempt to cover the whole world with ice, to crush the ecosphere beneath their relentless mass?”
“I fear, sir, that I do not know,” the masculine voice of the silver replied, heavy with an irony that might easily have been in the ear of the eavesdropper.
Mortimer looked up through the window of the snowmobile and transparent canopy of the atmosphere, at the stars sparkling in their bed of endless darkness. “Please don’t broadcast this to the world,” he said,