Achilles choice

“And you turn geniuses into weaklings. You kill innocent people.”

This time he ignored her. “Some died. Some went Feral. Eighty of us had control of most of the world’s wealth before we came into serious conflict. Eleven of us are left, and another eighteen who came later, and we constitute the Council. But as for war, it’s more like a quarrel at a bridge club-“

“You must have killed thousands of people by now!”

“You’re misusing the word, but it’s not your fault. We’ve altered the records.” For an instant he looked haggard. “After you’re Linked, spend an hour reading about war. You’ll have access to the reality. The death rate could be millions.”

She didn’t want to think about that at all. She said, “You don’t really call yourself the Old Bastard.”

“I call myself Saturn. You could hunt up my original name, but it wouldn’t tell you much.”

Saturn? Leave it. “What do you look like now?”

Then she jumped. There was a great oval bed in the car with them; its far edge was beyond where the tramcar’s wall should have been. Its surface rolled in slow shallow waves, a sluggish ocean, as if the bed were more alive than the patient. Machinery hovered above the bed, fading above the tramcar’s roof, extending thick umbilicals that bifurcated repeatedly to cover the patient in a fur of silver spiderweb.

That impossibly ancient figure seemed to be part man, part machine. Just as she decided that the thing must be dead, its head popped up and slurred, “Did you ever see a movie called Two-Thousand-One? Eh, eh,” and fell back.

The kid said earnestly, “That’s me. Barely. It’s the pattern that’s important, and the pattern is in the bubbles… recorded in bubble memory,” he amplified before she could say, Huh?

“So why not kill the thing?”

The old man’s head lifted again. It spoke with mushy difficulty. “Here I have senses I don’t have elsewhere. Smell. Memory. Shtuff that’s hard to retrieve, but imposh-impossible to copy over. I don’t mean I can’t make it work. I mean, impossible.”

“Saturn. Are you still human?”

The ancient smiled; the boy spoke. “Very good, Jillian. But leave it for a moment, okay?” Again he’d answered instantly. He never stopped to think.

His holographic appearance was older than she had originally thought. Twenty-five? His posture: he was not awkward, not diffident, not watching a desirable woman and praying she wouldn’t notice. He leaned forward, looking directly into her eyes, challenging, good smile lines at the corners of his mouth.

Jillian said, “Okay. There are problems the Council doesn’t solve. Crime. Disaster control. Safety designs. We could make Paradise, and I’m not the only Olympic contender who’s proved it. Saturn, what’s wrong with Paradise?”

“Wrong problem.”

“Then why did Lilith Shomer die?”

He said, “A small group of people can control an entire world. Can evaluate a trillion bytes of data without a moment’s personal experience. Can reduce people, animals, plants, whole populations and ecologies to integers to be manipulated. The Council does that.”

“Nobody cared enough?”

“That’s part of it. Jillian, it is very tempting.”

“Why aren’t you tempted?”

For the first time, Saturn broke eye contact with her. “If you look at a human being as a machine,” he said softly, “as a stimulus-response loop, what happens when every urge can be met with a trickle of electricity? When fantasies are as powerful as reality? The world… your world is no more real than what’s in the bubbles… what happens in my own mind. Megalomania and catatonia are very real companions to the Link. That’s the rest of the problem, Jillian. Citizens die when we go Feral.”

Oh.

“I give Donny five years.”

“And the rest of humanity?”

“That’s up to you, Jillian.”

Now it was Jillian’s turn to be silent

“Why me?” she asked finally. “What is this all about? And what makes you any different?”

“I created the game. And when I Linked, and lived more in the machine than in my body, and could create or reexperience every sensation imaginable, I thought I would be happy.”

“And you weren’t?”

“No, and it frightened me. If you have everything, and the hunger still exists, then the hunger has nothing to do with stimulus and response. The answer doesn’t lie in the realm of objective reality or subjective experience. It has to do with the function of the observing mind in the creation of its world. Jillian, who is the ‘I’ that sees and desires?”

“That. -.,” she said carefully, “is a very old question.”

“And a very new one. Am I really in the bubbles? We need an answer. For the first time in human history, we can have literally anything that we want, including immortality… and the Linked are proving that it’s not enough. We wage petty power-game wars. Homicidal intrigue. We totter into insanity. It’s the furthest reach of human technology and experience, and it might be a dead end.”

Perhaps for dramatic effect, the light had shifted to highlight Saturn. She noticed that the bed was gone, patient, machinery and all. Saturn was a sensitive host.