The robot female had very pale skin textured like porcelain, and silver hair. I figured that this was my first clear sight of la Reine des Neiges, or one of her avatars. I figured, too, that this was why I
seemed to be stuck in a queue awaiting her attention. No matter how ultrasmart she was, or how good she was at inattentive multitasking, she could only concentrate intently on one scenario at a time. For the present, she was devoting her best effort to this one.
I inferred that the three women would rise to their feet one by one, to make their presentations to the man who had made a present of the world to the Pharaohs of Capitalism, or had at least tied the pink bow on the fancy wrapping. What they were trying to sell him was emortality not the versions of it that they already possessed, but the next versions due from their various production lines. I wasnt sure why la Reine was bothering to put on this part of her show, but I had enough respect for her by now to assume that it wasnt just a stalling tactic. She had a point to make and would presumably make it herself
If you want a better mythological parallel, Rocambole whispered in my ear, think of Paris.
He didnt mean the city. He meant the prince of Troy appointed as a judge in a beauty contest by three goddesses, each of whom had offered him a bribe. It seemed to me to be a singularly unfortunate and hence rather subversive analogy. That particular contest had been secretly provoked by Eris, the embodiment of Strife, and she had done a good job.
Like an idiot, Paris had gone for Aphrodite, who had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world, instead of Hera, who had promised to make him ruler of the world, or Athene, who had promised that he would always be victorious in battle. The result had been the Trojan War, which his side lost.
Personally, Id have made a very different decision. I hadnt yet had time to get to know Adam Zimmerman well, but I was fairly confident that he, like me, would have entered into negotiation with the goddesses in order to obtain the reward he wanted rather than any of those on offer. On the other hand, I was also fairly confident that he and I wouldnt have been shopping for the same fate.
Davida went first, having drawn the shortest straw in a rigged ballot.
Davida explained that although the members of the sisterhood had all been born to their condition they now had the technology necessary to offer anyone else a makeover. They could reconstruct Adam Zimmermans body cell by cell, retaining all the neural connections in his brain to preserve the continuity of his personality. They could make him one of them: childlike and sexless, his internal anatomy carefully redesigned in the interests of nutritive efficiency and the emortalization of body and mind alike. They could offer him the widest spectrum of emotions available to any posthuman species, and the most effective processes of intellectual tuning thus enabling him to establish a balance between the rational and emotional components of his being to suit every occasion.
Many of the other posthuman species regard our seeming juvenility and apparent sexlessness as limitations, Davida told her Adam, as she warmed to her pitch, but that is a misconception. It is, in fact, their preference for what would once have been considered adulthood and for a physiological sexuality roughhewn by natural selection that are limitations.
The mental elasticity of early youth is a uniquely valuable possession. The great bugbear of the emortal condition is robotization: a state of mind reflecting the fact that the brain has become incapable of further neural reorganization, manifest in consciousness and behavior as an intense conservatism of opinion, belief and habit. The assumption that this is a relatively remote danger is, in our view, mistaken. You come to us from a time in which what we call robotization was clearly manifest as a natural consequence of advancing age. Indeed, you come from a time in which the only release from robotization was senility.
The people of your era undoubtedly had their own ideas as to when the natural conservatism of adulthood began to set in. Historical research suggests that some of you would have set the prime of life at forty, others at twenty-one but if you had been able to study the development of the brain in more detail and with more care, you would have seen that the robotizing effects of adulthood began to set in much earlier, at puberty. Freedom from robotization requires that the development of a posthuman body be arrested much earlier than the people of your era supposed.
It is true that the other posthuman species have achieved remarkable success in preserving and exploiting those juvenile aspects which remain to a partly matured brain. They have made the most of the mental flexibility left to them, but our assessment of the current situation is that everyone born
in the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth centuries is now on the very threshold of robotization, desperately employing the last vestiges of their potential flexibility to maintain the illusion that they are capable of further personal evolution. Their bodies are probably capable of thousands of years of further existence, but their minds will settle into fixed routines long before they reach the limits of their bodily existence.