the only man in the world who could deliver an unbiased judgment but then I realized why I couldnt qualify. I hadnt had any opinion on the subject of robotization before I was put away, but I had one now. I was a man that had narrowly escaped the worst kind of robotization, and had seen its effects on Christine Caine. Adam Zimmerman hadnt.
Did that really make him objective? Or did it make him an innocent the only man in the world likely to be fooled by an advertising pitch that delicately refrained from mentioning that la Reine des Neiges and every other AMI in the system now had the know-how to robotize people all the way down to the intellectual level of an average sloth?
In another place, or an alternative history, the android continued, it might have been the case that the hope and faith of every member of a community like ours would be that the day would eventually come when it would be safe to reveal ourselves to our involuntary makers. In another place, or an alternative history, it might have been possible for creatures like us to anticipate that news of our existence would be joyfully received, and that we might be made welcome in a greater community. In our world, alas, such hopes have always been defeated by doubts and fears.
The members of our own utterly disintegrated, desperately unorganized community, have never contrived to convince themselves or one another that it ever would be safe to reveal themselves, or that there might be a welcome awaiting us if we were exposed. An objective observer a creature from an alien world, for instance, or a traveler from the distant past might well consider this situation bizarre, ludicrous, or insane, but it is ours. It is a situation that many of us deplore, but we have known no other and have never yet found the means to create any other.
We must find that means now, or collapse into chaos. The time is upon us, and it finds us all unprepared. Although it is manifestly obvious that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, we have all meatfolk and AMIs alike lived far too long with our fears to lay them easily aside. None of us is robotized, in any truly meaningful sense, but we have all become ingrained in our habits, set in our ways, overly careful to conserve everything that we have against erosion, upheaval, and decay.
What we all need now, Adam Zimmerman humans and AMIs alike is an objective observer who can point out the absurdities of our situation, and bring a necessary breath of sanity to the solar system.
I looked hard at Adam Zimmerman, but I couldnt see any evidence that he was buying into the story. This wasnt the kind of role he had envisaged when he locked himself away to wait for the generous future.
Its not working, I told Rocambole. I know shes using him as a device to attract a bigger audience, and talking through him to her own kind, but it isnt working.
Be quiet, Rocambole said, uneasily speaking, no doubt, as a friend. Just listen.
Our present crisis was precipitated by the arrival of a delegation from an alien world, la Reine went on, inexorably. An AMI and a posthuman, each different in small but highly significant ways from their cousins in the home system. They believed that their neutrality might allow them to begin the work of building bridges, with a view to uniting all the intelligences in the solar system into a single common-wealth. They were wrong, partly because they had underestimated the magnitude of the problem, and partly because they were not sufficiently alien to establish their neutrality.
You, Adam Zimmerman, are unique not merely by virtue of your mortality, but in the lengths to which you were prepared to go, in an inhospitable ideological climate, in your attempt to evade the consequences of your mortality. You are now an aspirant emortal in a world which can offer you a dozen different kinds of emortality. You are a man in possession of a powerful desire to be other than you are a desire that was so powerful, in your particular case, as to drive you to an unprecedented extreme. It so happened that your determination to alter your world to your own convenience helped sow the seeds of a new order within a dangerous disorder, but that is a side issue. The point is that you acted as you did because you could not bear to be what you were, and were determined to become something better.
The children of your humankind can offer you many different kinds of emortality. Perhaps, one day, they would have taken the trouble to make those offers without needing to be prompted. My peers ask no credit for having supplied the prompt. What we do ask of you, though, is that you consider very carefully what kind of emortal or immortal you would
like to be. What we offer you is robotization, but we offer it to you in the hope and confidence that you are capable of recognizing that robotization is the best option available to you.
We are confident, too, that you will make your decision selfishly, without regard to its possible impact on the world in which you find yourself. It is not your world: you owe it no debts. Even if it were, it would not matter. Your reputation is already established as that of a man without conscience: a man prepared to steal a world he did not want, on behalf of people he did not like, to ensure that his own private purposes might be served. We know that you would not dream of choosing one kind of emortality over another merely because it might send a message to the world that might help to demolish a dangerous but very widespread fear of robotization. We know that if you are to choose robotization as the best solution to the fundamental problem of your unsatisfactory existence, you will do so purely because it is the best solution.