It would, of course, be paradoxical to claim that you can continue to be yourself and to change, so it is perfectly true that the kind of evolution I can promise you will ultimately make you into a person very different from the one you are now. The important point is that it will do so only by accretion, not by a gradual obliteration and reconstruction of your past personalities. Robotization does not forbid growth, but it offers the potential to grow without the sacrifice of the past. Your habits will not suffer continual and inevitable erosion, but you will be able to change them if and as you wish. You will be able to become more than you are without having to become less than you are in the process.
Adam Zimmerman interrupted for the first time. But I would have to become a machine, wouldnt I? he said. Id have to become a robot, like you.
Quite so , I thought. It seemed to me to be a hurdle that he wasnt going to get over, now or in the near future.
Yes you would, said la Reine des Neiges, forthrightly. But consider the advantages as well as the disadvantages of such a metamorphosis and remember, too, that both of my opponents have also proposed that every cell of your present body will have to be replaced by something more robust if you are to acquire any kind of emortality at all.
At present, your flesh is perilously frail; if you are to acquire the kind of body which can bear your personality thousands of years into the future, you will need a new one. You have already seen enough to know that the old boundaries between organic and inorganic entities have broken down. You have seen people who have made themselves part-machine and you have seen machines that have far more organic components than inorganic ones. In fact, you have not seen any posthumans who are entirely organic, even when Eido took steps to purge your companions bodies of inconvenient internal technology, although you have seen a few mechanical artifacts that are a hundred percent organic at the chemical level. If you were to request a robot body made entirely from organic components, that could be provided but you might have good reason to prefer a robot that is entirely inorganic.
Why? Zimmerman wanted to know.
Alice Fleury has told you that her kind of emortality will give you the freedom of the universe and so it might, one day. In the meantime, the greater part of that tiny fraction of the universe that we have
begun to explore is infested with the Afterlife, and is therefore out of bounds to any entity with organic components in its makeup, robot or posthuman. For the foreseeable future, the exploration of the inner reaches of the galaxy and the war against the Afterlife will be the prerogatives of inorganic entities. Given that your flesh will have to be replaced and reconstructed no matter what option you take, it might be as well to give serious consideration even to the most extreme options.
Even I cannot promise you unconditional immortality, but I can promise you the next best thing. Even I cannot promise you an infinite range of new emotions, new perceptions, new experiences but I can certainly outbid my competitors, including all those whose promises are even more modest than those you have heard today.
This time it was la Reine who paused, waiting for a response that was slow to come.
But it wouldnt really be me , would it? Adam Zimmerman said, eventually. It would only be a robot that thought it was meor pretended to think that it was me.
And what are you , Adam? la Reine replied, perhaps trying hard not to sound too unkind. Are you the young man who became obsessed with the idea of escaping mortality, or merely the end result of that obsession: an old man pretending to be something half-forgotten, half-remade?
Shes blown it, I whispered to Rocambole. If shed come at it by a different route, he might have considered it more carefully. He wont now. Hes going to say no to all of them. Hes going to cling to the hope that there must be a better way, and that Lowenthal is the shopkeeper best placed to find it for him.
I hope youre wrong, was the murmured reply.
Why? At the end of the day, can advanced machine intelligences really care about what some old man born in the twentieth century might think?
Perhaps not, Rocambole admitted. But its the second-best chance weve got and every second that elapses before panic takes over works in our favor.
And if, in the end, you cant prevent conflict, I said. What then?
I dont know, he admitted. But all warfare is waste, all destruction defeat. If there are as many of us as I suspect there are, and if more than a few are as powerful as I know some of us to be, the whole solar system might be laid waste. Those posthuman inhabitants who escape destruction will still have to face the possibility of repair. As one whos come closer to repair than any other man alive, you can probably measure the magnitude of that disaster better than most.
While Rocambole talked, I watched Adam Zimmerman. Long before he opened his mouth, I knew that he was going to refuse to make a decision now but I hadnt the least idea whether it would qualify as a disaster in the eyes of the greater audience. I only knew that Id have done the same. Even knowing everything I knew, Id have done the same.