He knew what that phrase would mean to me. He knew that Id lived through a period of intense Eliminator activity, when the web had been host to all kinds of discussions about who was and was not worthy of immortality, and there had been more than enough crazies in the world to take potshots at those whose elimination from the pool of hopeful emortals was widely deemed desirable.
I had been saving my best arguments for la Reine des Neiges, but I couldnt ignore the prompt.
I was never an Eliminator, I said, by way of preamble but he was quick to pounce on that one.
You posed as an Eliminator more than once, he said, perhaps just to prove the extent of the records the machines had kept. Given that almost all the others also thought of themselves as mere poseurs, is that not enough to make you one of them?
I was always a maker of disinformation, I admitted. I did it for fun before I started doing it for profit. I was a slanderer, a black propagandist. Yes, I posted a few denunciations, some more malicious than others. I never got anybody killed, but I was reckless of the danger. Even so, I wasnt an Eliminator . I didnt think anyone, including me, was qualified to judge who might or might not be worthy of emortality. Im not going to offer any opinion as to whether Lowenthal and Horne really deserve the gift theyve been granted. As for whether theyve been robotized, Im in no position to judge. Nor are they, apparently. Lowenthal and Ngomi may have got the argument backwards in that particular conversation, but that doesnt mean that they arent versatile enough to take it forwards once theyre that way inclined.
He grinned, in apparent approval. And why shouldnt he, if he really were a friend? Why do you think theyve got the argument backwards? He asked.
I wondered briefly whether he even existed, or whether he was just a puppet that la Reine des Neiges was using to speak to me while pretending, for her own mysterious reasons, that she wasnt.
I may not have been an Eliminator, I told him, but I read the bulletin boards. I knew the theory, and all the catchphrases. Quote, the first prerequisite of immortality is the ability to move beyond good and evil, unquote. Throughout history, people had mostly defined good in terms of the absence of evil: the amelioration of hunger, the end of war, the conquest of disease, and above all else the avoidance for as long as possible of death. In a world without death, so the argument went, we would have to think in different terms. We would have to take the absence of all the evils for granted, and would have to define good
in positive terms: in terms of achievement. Instead of thinking in terms of good and evil we would have to learn to think in terms of good and bad, where bad was the negative term, signifying an absence of good.
We had already made a start, in aesthetics: bad art wasnt an active evil, it was just the absence of any of the qualities that could make art good. Unfortunately, there wasnt any universal consensus as to which works of art actually were good, or why. The principle remains, though: emortals shouldnt define the goodness of their lives in terms of the absence of manifest evils which have been stripped of all their power; theyre supposed to do it more constructively.
Thats what the Eliminators thought a thousand years ago, and thats what theyd think today if they could eavesdrop on Lowenthal and Ngomi the way we just did. Theyd assert that the threat of the Afterlife isnt sufficient to justify the perpetuation of posthuman life, and that if were to justify our continued existence convincingly, we ought to do it in terms of positive goals.
Its not enough for us all to be on the same side against a common enemy we need to know what the side will play for once the enemys dead and gone. Hardinism doesnt qualify as an answer because its an implicitly defensive philosophy: a matter of protecting the commonweal from the evils of unchecked competition. The owners of Earth are stuck in a rut, and theyd be fools to think that the ultrasmart machines will simply jump in along with them to help dig it deeper. The real question is: what do we intend to do after the Afterlife is defeated? Whats the grand prize were all working towards?
When I stopped, my mechanical friend merely waited, as if he expected me to provide definitive answers to those questions. It might have been flattering, if I hadnt understood the game as well as I did.
Im not an Eliminator, I insisted, again. Im not about to deny anyone their right to exist because they cant come up with an answer to a question like that. Nor am I fool enough to imagine that youd be interested in my particular solution to the existential challenge when you have real experts like Adam Zimmerman and Mortimer Gray on hand. What youre really challenging me to do again is to guess your answer. You want me to be a part of this because you want me to serve as a human mouthpiece for your own ideas. I dont think it will work. I dont think the ditherers will listen.