The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [59]
The advent of the Zaman Transformation, which involved engineering fertilized ova for extreme resistance to the aging process, had not only sidestepped many of the problems associated with IT repair systems but had appeared to strike a balance in the brain between Millerization and robotization. The neurones of ZT brains retained a greater capacity for self-regeneration than the neurones of ordinary mortals, but they retained the switching capacity that permitted rapid learning. Although the first generations of true emortals could keep a firm enough grip on their memories and learned skills, they seemed to be equally capable of further adaptation. Their memories of times past became increasingly vague, but never lost their coherence, while their capacity to assimilate new experience remained undiminished — or so, at least, the argument went.
Not everyone, it seemed, was convinced.
Many people believed that robotization remained a threat — and that many living individuals had, indeed, been robotized, although they retained the illusion of being fully human and continued to maintain that appearance. Opinions differed, as one might expect, as to exactly which individuals might have become existentially becalmed in this way.
On the other hand, many people believed that the bugbear of Millerization had not been entirely overcome, and that the real existential threat facing the new emortals was not mental petrifaction but a loss of the continuity of the self: too much change rather than too little.
Some people, of course, believed that both processes were observable in the world around them — usually, but not necessarily, in different individuals.
At any rate, the quest for a perfect mental balance within a brain whose developmental course avoided both the Scylla of Millerization and the Charybdis of robotization had not been abandoned once Zaman Transformations became the norm. Far from it. All kinds of research were continuing, based in many different theories and ideologies.
So-called cyborganizers had resuscitated many formerly abandoned lines of research into meatware/hardware collaboration, while “Zamaners” — including those sponsored by the Ahasuerus Foundation — had hardly paused to draw breath before producing hundreds of variations and refinements of their basic technique. The situation had been further complicated, it seemed, by a leap forward in the field of “genomic engineering” following the discovery elsewhere in the galaxy of natural genomic systems differing quite markedly from the one that was fundamental to Earth’s ecosphere.
In brief, there were now many different humankinds and not-so-humankinds, most of which laid claim to sole possession of the ideal emortality. The people of Excelsior seemed to me to be among the weirder lines in the posthuman spectrum — although that was not an impression encouraged by their own data banks — but there were undoubtedly others every bit as weird to be found among the fabers of the outer system microworlds and the cyborganizers of the Jovian and Saturnian satellites, not to mention the carefully adapted colonists of Ararat and Maya.
All of which was interesting, in its way, but did not seem to be of any immediate help in penetrating the motives of Davida Berenike Columella and her colleagues.
I now had a better understanding of how they fitted into the unfolding pattern of human history, but the questions still remained.
Why here?
Why now?
Why Christine Caine?
Why me?
And why would the suspicion not be quieted that I wouldn’t like the answers when I finally worked them out, even if I were fortunate enough to live that long?
Fourteen
The Garden of Excelsior
The artificial worlds of the twenty-second century had been little more than glorified tin cans — not quite sardine cans, but near enough.