John Ringo: There Will Be Dragons

“But we are past that, surely,” Ishtar said. “Such mistakes no longer happen.”

“Perhaps and perhaps not,” Sheida replied. “I choose, however, to retain my own form. It’s good enough for me.”

“So he thinks you will vote with him?” Ishtar asked.

“Probably. At least from the hints he has been dropping. And I gave him no reason to doubt it, while not committing. Also, I think he waited until Chansa was elected to the Council.”

“Chansa is… odd,” Ishtar said. “I’ve heard some very ugly rumors about his personal life.”

“Odd but brilliant,” Sheida replied. “Like the rest of Paul’s faction. So bright and yet so lacking in… wisdom. It seems to be the one trait we could not enhance in humanity. Immunity, processing power, beauty.” She sighed and shook her head. “But not wisdom. They are so very very smart and yet so very stupid for all that the problems do exist.”

“You are opposed, correct?” Ishtar asked with a delicate frown.

“Oh, yes,” Sheida said with a nod. “They are right that there is a problem. That does not mean that their solutions are either optimum or even in order. But I wonder what he will do when he finds out?”

“I would say ‘to be a bug on the wall,’ ” Ishtar said with a smile. “But unfortunately I’m going to be at the center of the debate.”

“Change is an inevitable outgrowth of our technology,” Sheida said with a shrug. “From the nannites and the replicators we get the medical technology. And that same technology permits people to be…” she glanced at her companion and smiled, “whatever we can imagine.”

Ishtar laughed at the ambiguity of the ending and shrugged her slim shoulders. “Perhaps Paul simply means to end all medical technology? Perhaps that too is ‘unnecessary’?”

“If so he can take it up with my sister.”

Herzer awoke in light; his genie had changed the force screens from opaque to transparent and now “stood” by, holding out a robe.

The boy floating, horizontal, in midair was young and tall with broad shoulders and close cropped black hair. His body seemed to be wasting away, but something of it conveyed an aura of former strength, like an old strongman, far past his prime. Herzer blinked his eyes uncertainly, working them to clear a crust gluing his eyelashes shut. After a moment he sent a command and nannites scurried across his face, clearing the debris of sleep.

“Master Herzer, your appointment with Doctor Ghorbani is in one hour and thirty minutes.”

“Thonk ’ou, genie,” the boy slurred, sending a mental command to the grav field holding him suspended. Most people found it easier to interface vocally, since direct mental interaction required a tremendously disciplined thought process. But in Herzer’s case, his vocal systems had deteriorated so fast that he had been forced to the disclipine.

The grav field rotated him vertical and he waited until he was sure his legs would hold him before he released the last tendrils of support. Then he shakily donned the robe, with the assistance of the genie, and shuffled across the room to a float-chair.

He collapsed in the chair and let the genie begin the process of feeding him. His hand shook as he reached for the spoon floating above the bowl and then started to shake more and more until it was flailing in the air. He sent another command to a medical program and the recalcitrant hand dropped to his side, momentarily dead. He hated using the override; he was always unsure if the part would “restart.” But it was better than letting it flail him to death.

At a nod the genie took up the spoon and carefully fed the boy the bland pap. Some of it, inevitably, dribbled out of his malfunctioning lips but the nannites scurried across, picking it up and translating it out to be reprocessed.

When the food was done the genie produced a glass of liquid and Herzer carefully reached for it. This time both his hands were more or less working and he managed to drink the entire glass of water without spilling much.

“Su’cess,” he whispered to himself. “Have ’een any me’ages?”

“No, Master Herzer,” the genie replied.

Of course not. If there had been the genie would have told him already. But, what the hell, no reason not to hope that someone would give a damn if he was alive.

He sent a command to the chair to lift him to his feet and then another to clothe him. A loose coverall of black cosilk appeared on his body and he nodded in satisfaction. If his progressive neurology got much worse he might not even be able to manage direct neurological controls. What then?

He’d long before come to the conclusion that if that happened he would use his last commands to take him high in the air, turn off his protection fields and drop him. One last moment of glorious flight. Some days he wondered why he hadn’t done it already.

But not yet. One more doctor. Maybe this one would be able to do something.

If not…

Paul Bowman pursed his lips and fingered the titanium strip that was his badge of office as the last members of the council filed into the Chamber.

Bowmam was abnormally short, barely over a meter and a half, and human in appearance. His age was indeterminate, since the privacy barrier on personal information was rigidly enforced by the Net, but his black hair was turning to gray and his skin was beginning to show fine lines. Assuming that he had refused all longevity Changes, that would make him around three hundred or so years old. For at least one hundred of those years he had been a member of the Council that governed the information web of Earth and if he had anything to say about it, the time had finally come to take his rightful place as its undisputed leader.

Meetings of the Terrestrial Council for Information Strategy and Management always took place in the Chamber. Given modern technology it was too difficult to simulate one of the council members if the meetings were held remotely. This did cause a few problems for some of the members, but at least currently all the members were terrestrial — or avian in the case of Ungphakorn — so it was unnecessary to have, for example, aqueous support.

The room occupied nearly the entire immense building, but the sole furniture was a circular table in the middle. Around the rim of the vast room, more like an auditorium or theater than a boardroom, rank upon rank of seats were ranged, ramping upwards in tiers almost to the top of the chamber. Once upon a time it had been the boast of the world that all meetings of the Council were fully open to the public. “All shall view the sparrow’s fall.”

With incredibly rare exceptions, none of the seats had been filled in nearly a thousand years.

Like the Knights of the Round Table, all who sat at the table were considered equal. There was no specific head of the committee, the gavel being passed in rota or held by whoever called a special council. There were thirteen chairs, for the thirteen Key-holders who governed the Web, but only eleven were normally filled. Over the three-thousand-year lifetime of the Web, the control Keys had changed hands and fallen in and out of “licit” control. At the moment two were in the hands of individuals who existed outside of the mainstream and who refused, by and large, to work with the committee.

Most of the rest of the room replicated the interior of the ancient Greek Parthenon. The exception was the ceiling, which was covered with a mural of the ascent of man through the ages, culminating in the current era. It started with panels of early hunter-gatherers, showing their technology and cultural motifs, then progressed up through early agriculture, metallurgy, the discovery of philosophy and scientific method, democracy, industry, the rights of man, information technology, advanced biology, quantum engineering and finally an almost God-like succession as the combination of the advances led to a world of peace and plenitude for all.