The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [58]
Why?
There was no shortage of information on file to explain the decision to eliminate sex from the design of Excelsior’s inhabitants, although the sheer profusion of that information was testimony to the controversy that must have surrounded the plan.
Apparently, several schools of thought had recently grown up as to the merits of arresting the aging process in different phases. The school that had settled on the position that the ideal age for an emortal was prepuberal had extrapolated the line of thinking a step further, reasoning that if the sexual organs were better left undeveloped it would be better still to eliminate them altogether, liberating valuable anatomical space for useful augmentation within the basic “functionally evolved corpus.”
Taking the research a step farther back into the realm of theory and technics, I soon became lost in specialisms of which I had not the least understanding, but I gradually pieced together a picture of the background against which this strange experiment had been set.
It seemed to me that it all came down, in the final analysis, to the Miller Effect.
Morgan Miller was the twentieth-century scientist who first stumbled upon a technology of longevity: a rejuvenation technique that worked by diverting a mature organism’s reproductive apparatus to the production of stem cells that could enhance the organism’s powers of self-repair dramatically. There were, however, two catches. Firstly, Miller’s method only worked on organisms in possession of the appropriate reproductive apparatus — which is to say, females. Secondly, the relevant power of self-repair enabled the cells in the organism’s brain to recover all the neuronal connections that experience had selectively withered — which is to say that it obliterated memory and learning on a massive scale.
Rejuvenation of the kind that Miller discovered continually restored the innocence of the individual. Mice could cope with that kind of continual loss, because they could learn everything they needed to know to get along as mice over and over again. Higher mammals couldn’t; even dogs rejuvenated by the Miller technique were reduced to helpless imbecility, unable to learn as quickly as their learning evaporated. That was why rejuvenation research in the following century had been concentrated on more selective and more easily controllable Internal Technologies: technologies which my generation were the first to exploit on a wholesale basis.
People of my generation had hoped — maybe even expected — that nanotech systems would continue to improve as we got older, so that every extra decade of life we obtained would produce further rewards. What the history book told me now, though, was that the escalator had run into the law of diminishing returns.
Two hundred years of life became routine, three hundred just about possible for the very rich and the very lucky. Damon’s three-hundred-and-thirty-some year span had been highly unusual even for members of the Inner Circle. Repairing the body parts below the neck had not been unduly problematic in the majority of cases, although periodic invasive and incapacitating “deep-tissue rejuvenations” had been required to support the routine work of IT repair, but keeping the brain going without destroying the mind within had proved much more difficult.
The menace posed by “Millerization” had been complemented soon enough by “robotization”: the loss of a brain’s capacity to further refine its neuronal configurations. Carefully protected from the obliteration of memory and personality, the brains of men of Damon’s generation had tended to the opposite extreme, settling into a quasimechanical rut which made them incapable of assimilating new experiences or reformulating their memories. Attempts had been