The future of posthumanity does not belong to individuals made in the image that natural selection foisted upon the children of Earth, nor even to individuals reformed in images appropriate to life in one or another very different environment; it belongs to individuals who have freed themselves from all such restraints. If you intend to live a very long time, and to see even a tiny fraction of what the universe has to offer, then you will be best served by the greatest versatility you can cultivate, in your flesh as well as in your mind.
The second flaw in Davidas argument, according to Alice, lay in Davidas characterization of the problem of robotization. In Davidas account, this was essentially a problem of physiology, to be solved in the same terms, but Alice saw it differently.
Yes, Alice conceded, robotization could indeed be opposed by maintaining the brain in a juvenile state, sustaining an elasticity that would otherwise be ground down by the routinization of useful mental pathways and the withering of potential alternatives but that was only half the story. Robotization was also an experiential problem: a matter of the invariety of the environments in which an individual operated, and of the limited number of the tasks which an individual routinely attempted. Preserving the potential of the brain was only the beginning; resistance to robotization also required that individuals preserve their capacity for new experience.
This could only be fully achieved, Alice argued, by moving through an infinite series of different environments and by maintaining a wide repertoire of possible modes in which those environments could be experienced.
At this point, Alice briefly forsook the screen, on which images had appeared and disappeared all the while, in awful profusion and at a hectic pace. The time had come for her to do her own party piece.
I was ready for it, of course. I knew what the Queen of the Fays had done to Tam Lin while she hoped to prevent Janet of Carterhaugh from reclaiming his soul.
Alice had already told us that her talents as a shapeshifter were very limited, as yet. Although she was currently a virtual individual in a virtual environment, the rules laid down by la Reine des Neiges restricted her to a close mimicry of what was accomplishable in meatspace.
Had she been capable of it, I hope she might have been sufficiently respectful of Earthly tradition to turn herself into a wolf, but the possibility was not there. The transformations she did display were paltry by comparison with the werewolves that had haunted hundreds of cheap VE melodramas in my day, but the remarkable fact was that they were done at all.
Alice could grow taller and she could shrink; she could change her face and the length of her limbs. She could alter her fingers and her toes. Some of the less appealing details of her self-modifications were obscured by the fact that her smartsuit changed as she did, remolding itself to her new form, but the miracle was that this was only a beginning.
I had no way of knowing how much energy was required to fuel these transformations, although Alice seemed drained and exhausted when her original form emerged again at the end of the sequence. Perhaps she could have done more had she had the opportunity to replenish herself, but her time was running out. She had to reactivate the screen in order to demonstrate the further ranges of this kind of possibility. Again she used it as a window, displaying exotic morphs achieved by humans, by Tyrian natives, and by some individuals who seemed to be hybrids.
The more adventurous forms included a huge bird with multicolored iridescent plumage and an awesome wingspan. There were several reptilian morphs, including a dragonlike lizard and a huge constrictor snake, whose scales were as brightly patterned as the avian forms feathers. These were creatures that might have been plausible inhabitants of Earth but the whole point of the show was to display plausible inhabitants of worlds less Earthlike than Tyre.
Like Alice herself, the models grew taller and shorter, but they also grew limbs of many different kinds, arranged in many different patterns. They became more fluid and they became more adamantine. They really did look like alien beings fit for life on alien worlds.
All in all, it was an impressive presentation. One had to be prepared to set aside doubts about the energy-economics of the process, but I was prepared to do that. One also had to shelve reservations about the ability of bodies to sustain and protect themselves during the transitional phases of what were, after all, fairly slow and carefully measured metamorphoses but I was prepared to do that, too. I had no way of knowing whether doubts of those kinds had occurred to Adam Zimmerman, but his expression suggested that he definitely had doubts.
I wondered if he had caught on to the fact that all this was virtual experience. He was the only one of us who ought to have been gullible, but he might have seen enough thirty-third-century technology by now to be suspicious. Having been told that no one but a fool could be taken in by Child of Fortunes imaginary alien invasion, he might be wary of this experience too for the wrong reasons. He might well be thinking that it was all faked, including Alices demonstrations of what Tyrian biotechnology could do.