Wherever Adam went he attracted far more attention than he desired, and the attention in question was always focused on the question that he had declined to answer, on the grounds that the matter required extremely careful thought.
When Adam had spoken to his twenty-first-century contemporaries of vulnerability to the iniquities of inquisitiveness and heightened susceptibility to flattery, he had always been talking first and foremost to himself. When he had told others that flattery was a powerful force, whose attractions were difficult to resist, he was recognizing a weakness in himself. He had been correct in observing that fame tends to breed sickness and self-abuse, and in judging that the unluckiest people in the world are those who have a fame thrust upon them from which they cannot escape.
Men are few who can endure much trouble , had been his watchword, in the days when he prided himself on the amount of trouble that he was able to endure. In our world, his endurance was more fully tested, and he found his limitations.
I find myself wondering, more and more, what I am, he told me, when I asked him to explain the decision he eventually made. Am I the young man who became obsessed with the idea of escaping mortality, or am I merely the tragicomical end result of that obsession: an old man pretending to be something half-forgotten, half-remade?
What matters, I told him, is what you intend to become.
And what if that becoming were a betrayal of what I am? he asked. What if that becoming were a denial and an abandonment of everything that Adam Zimmerman was, everything that was Adam Zimmerman?
The old Adam Zimmerman was a mortal, I told him. It is time now to become emortal. The old Adam Zimmerman was a human. It is time now to be posthuman. You must leave the old Adam Zimmerman behind if you are to receive the rewards of futurity.
It was not, in the end, a price he was willing to pay.
In his own estimation, Adam had not needed courage to be different in the twenty-first century, but he
certainly needed it in the first. He found that courage, quickly enough to be able to declare, on his one thousand and three hundredth birthday, that he did not intend to avail himself of any of the technologies of emortality that had been offered to him.
He told the inquisitive world that he had decided to remain as he was: the only person in the world doomed to senescence and death; the only person in the world who knew the luxury of angst.
Nine
Adam Zimmerman explained to anyone and everyone, whenever he was asked, that the decision he had made seemed to him to be the only way that he could maintain his self-respect. He had realized almost as soon as he had opened his eyes on Excelsior, that he was no longer the man he had once been. Worse than that, he had realized that no matter how secure his body might become to the corruptions of ageing and decay, the pressures exerted on his personality would be irresistible.
He wanted to remain as he was. He wanted to remain what he was. He wanted to remain who he was. In the past, he had believed that the only way to do that was to refuse to die. Now, he had arrived at an opposite conclusion. He now believed that the only way to do that was to refuse the gift of emortality.
The great majority of his hearers thought him insane. Perhaps he was but even if he was, his was an insanity that we need to understand, not merely as historians but as sympathetic human beings.
This is my understanding.
Adam Zimmerman had awoken to find himself famous. By virtue of his nature he was the object of a fascination greater and more widespread than had been attained by any other man in history. There was not a man, woman or self-aware machine in the solar system who did not know about Adam Zimmerman, not one who did not hunger to be kept informed of every detail of his progress, not one who did not want to know what kind of emortality he would choose for his own. The world was hungry to hear his every thought, besotted by the observation of his every action, desperate to know the outcome of his quest.
The people of the first century tried, of course, to be scrupulously polite. The machineborn tried even harder. They readily acknowledged his right to privacy, and tried not to invade it. They did nothing that involved him without seeking his informed consent. They apologized for every intrusion, and begged his leave for every question they asked. If he asked to be left alone, they left him but they always hovered nearby, in order to be responsive to his every whim. When he chose not to be alone and he could hardly bear solitude there was no way for them to set aside their curiosity, their utter absorption in the mysteries of his fate and fortune.
Adam knew that whatever he were to ask of his new hosts would be given to him. He no longer had a vast fortune to pay for his upkeep and guard his interests, but in the world that was born in the AMI war the most important currency was need itself. The AMIs had pledged themselves to common cause with humankind on exactly that basis. Whatever Adam needed, he could have but that was exactly the situation that would lead a man like Adam Zimmerman to invert the question, and say to himself: What does the infinitely generous world need from me? What can I give to a world that is prepared to give me everything?