The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [32]
She didn’t seem certain. “Your internal technology is programmed to compensate for discomfort,” she admitted, “but not to substitute a positive reward. That would be dangerous.”
I nodded, to signify that I understood the distinction and the reasons for making it. One of the first uses to which experimental internal nanotech had been put was feeding the so-called pleasure areas in the hind brain. That way lay addiction, and severe distraction from the business of living. The systems that had been released on to the market in my day were supposed to be finely tuned to administer pain relief without blissing people out. The masters of PicoCon were firmly committed to the idea that people ought to earn their pleasures.
Even a dedicated rebel like me could see the sense in that. The only gratification worth having is the gratification of achievement, even if the achievement in question is the mere exercise of good taste.
I deduced, therefore, that I would get used to the food if I persisted, but I wouldn’t be forced to like it. I wondered how many other aspects of my second lifetime would be subject to the same principle. Perhaps I’d even get used to being a specimen in a zoo — but I certainly wasn’t going to learn to like it.
I ate a little more, but I really wasn’t hungry. I had other things on my mind.
“Can I take a look around now?” I asked my captor-in-chief. “Not through the picture-window — I’d like to look at Excelsior itself. The houses and the fields. The real windows.”
“There are no real windows,” she told me. “Nor any fields. The artificial photosynthetic systems are like big black sails. There is a garden, but it’s sustained by artificial light. You’ll be able to see it tomorrow.”
There was no point in asking why I couldn’t see it today. I was still under close observation and they didn’t want to let me out of my cage just yet, not even for a stroll in the garden.
“How about a VE hood and access to your data banks?” I asked. “I’d like to read up on my history.”
“You only have to ask,” she said. Having seen the way she’d produced a dining table and a plateful of bad food I knew that she didn’t even have to ask. She was IT-linked into a microworld-wide communication system that allowed her to issue commands and initiate semiautomatic responses almost unobtrusively — not just by forming the thought, I assumed, but certainly by means of carefully contrived subvocalizations. I didn’t have that kind of IT. I couldn’t give orders directly to the walls or the window — but if I spoke my requests aloud, someone would overhear, and decide whether or not to turn the request into a command.
I only had to ask, and anything within reason would be delivered to me…but I did have to ask, and anything my captors thought unreasonable would not be forthcoming. For the time being, the walls confining me would only produce an exit door for Davida Berenike Columella.
“I could be useful, you know,” I told her. “I was born two hundred years after Adam Zimmerman, from an artificial womb rather than a natural one, but I have a lot more in common with him than you do. By the same token, I have a lot more in common with you than he does. I could be a useful intermediary, if you let me. That might not be why you woke me up, but it’s a definite plus.”
Secretly, of course, I was hoping that it was one of the reasons they’d woken me up — but I knew better than to take it for granted.
“Thank you for the offer,” she said.
For a moment she seemed almost human. I’d been brushed off in exactly that casual manner a hundred times before, though never by a nine-year-old. I knew that I’d have to try harder.
“I know how he’ll feel,” I told her, flatly. “You don’t. You think he’ll be grateful. You think you’ll be waking him up to tell him exactly what he always wanted to hear: that you can finally give him the emortality he craved. But I know how he’ll really feel. That’s why I’ll be able to talk to him man to man. That’s why I’ll be the only one who can talk to him man