Bruce Sterling - Holy Fire

“Can it?”

“Maybe they’re beautiful in different categories.” She looked around. “Would someone else hold this, please?”

Sergei took it off her hands with a show of bravado and pretended to smack the toad against the table. “Don’t,” Paul said patiently. “Just a moment ago you admired it. What changed your mind?”

Maya left to look for Benedetta. She found her in a little crowd behind the bar. “Ciao Benedetta.”

Benedetta rose and embraced her. “[This is Maya, everyone.]”

Benedetta had brought four of her Italian friends. They were polite and sober and steady eyed and in ominous control of themselves. They looked very intelligent. They looked very self-possessed and rather well dressed. They looked about as dangerous as any kids she had seen in a long time. Of course they were all women.

Benedetta wedged her into a place at the table. “I’m sorry that I have no Italiano,” Maya said, sitting. “I have a translator, but I have to speak in English.”

“We want to know, what is your relationship with Vietti?” said one of the young women quietly.

Maya shrugged. “He thinks I’m cute. That’s all.”

“What’s your relationship with Martin Warshaw?”

Maya glanced at Benedetta, startled and hurt. “Well, if you have to know, it was his palazzo. You know about the palazzo?”

“We know all about the palazzo. What is your relationship with Mia Ziemann?”

“Who’s that?” Maya said.

The interrogator shrugged and sat back with a dismissive flutter of her hand. “Well, we’re fools to trust this person.”

“[Of course we’re fools,]” said Benedetta heatedly. “[We’re fools to trust one another. We’re fools to trust anyone. So now tell me of a better place where we can install those machineries.]”

“Benedetta, who are these people?”

“They are mathematicians,” Benedetta said. “Programmers. Rebels. And visionaries. And they are very good friends of mine.”

Radical students, Maya thought. Aflame with imagination because they were so wonderfully free of actual knowledge. “Who’s the oldest person here?” she asked guardedly.

“You are, of course,” said Benedetta, blinking.

“Well, never mind that question then. What’s all this have to do with me anyway?”

“I’ll draw you a little picture,” Benedetta said. She spread out her furoshiki and pulled a stylus from behind her ear. “Let me tell you an interesting fact of life. About the medical-industrial complex.” She drew an x-y graph with two swift strokes. “This bottom axis is the passage of time. And this is the increase in life expectancy. For every year that passes, posthuman life expectancy increases by about a month.”

“So?”

“The curve is not strictly linear. The rate of increase is itself increasing. Eventually the rate of increase will reach the speed of one year per year. At that point, the survivors become effectively immortal.”

“Sure they do. Maybe.”

“Well, of course it’s not true ‘immortality.’ There is still a mortality rate from accident and misadventure. At the singularity”—Benedetta drew a little black X—“the average human life span, with accident included, becomes about fourteen hundred and fifty years.”

“How lovely for that generation.”

“The first generation to reach the singularity will become the first truly genuine gerontocracy. It will be a generation which does not die out. A generation that can dominate culture indefinitely.”

“Well, I’ve heard that sort of speculation before, darling. It’s a nice line of hype and it always struck me as an interesting theory.”

“Once it was theory. For you, it’s theory. For us, it’s reality. Maya, we are those people. We’re the lovely generation. We are the first people who were born just in time. We are the first true immortals.”

“You’re the first immortals ?” Maya said slowly.

“Yes, we are; and what is more, we know that we are.” Benedetta sat back and tucked her stylus in her hair.

“So why are you meeting in a sleazy art bar in some little political cabal?”

“We have to meet somewhere,” Benedetta said, and smiled.

“It had to be some generation,” said another woman peevishly. “We are the someones. We don’t impress you much. Well, no one ever said we would impress you.”

“So you really believe you’re immortals.” Maya looked at the scrawl on the furoshiki. “What if there’s a hitch in your calculations? Maybe the rate will slow.”

“That could be quite serious,” Benedetta said. She pulled her stylus and carefully redrew the slope of the curve. “See? Very bad. We get only nine hundred years.”

Maya looked at the base of the fatal little curve. For her, it climbed. For them, it rocketed. “This curve means I’ll never make it,” she realized sadly. “This curve proves that I’m doomed.”

Benedetta nodded, delighted to see her catching on. “Yes, darling, we know that. But we don’t hold that fact against you, truly.”

“We still need the palazzo,” said another woman.

“Why do you need a palazzo?”

“We plan to install some things in it,” Benedetta said.

Maya frowned. “Isn’t there trouble enough inside that place, for heaven’s sake? What kind of things?”

“Cognition things. Perception things. Software factories for the holy fire.”

Maya thought about it. The prospect sounded very farfetched. “What’s that supposed to get you?”

“It gets us a way to change ourselves. A chance to make our own mistakes, instead of repeating the mistakes of others. We hope it will make us artificers who deserve our immortality.”

“You really think you can do—what?—really radical cognitive transforms of some kind? And just with a virtuality?”

“Not with the kind of virtuality protocols they allow us nowadays. Of course you can’t do any such thing where civil support is watching, because they designed the public networks to be perfectly safe and reliable. But with the kind of protocols they don’t imagine yet—well, yes. Yes, Maya. That’s exactly what we think we can do with a virtuality.”

Maya sighed. “Let me get this straight. You’re going to open up my palace, and install some kind of brand-new, illegal, mutant, brain-damaging virtuality system?”

“ ‘Cognitive enhancement’ is a much better term,” Benedetta said.

“That is truly crazy talk, Benedetta. I can’t believe you mean that. That sounds just like some kind of junkie drug scheme.”

“Gerontocrats are always making that category error,” Benedetta said dismissively. “Software isn’t neurochemistry! We—our generation—we know virtuality! We grew up with it! It’s a world that today’s old people will never truly understand.”

“You certainly are terribly serious about this,” Maya said, looking slowly around the table. “If what you tell me is true … well, you’ve got it made. Don’t you? Someday, you’ll run the whole world. More or less forever, right? So why make trouble now? Why don’t you just wait a while? Wait until you reach that little black X on the graph.”

“Because when we reach the singularity, we must be prepared for it. Worthy of it. Otherwise we will become even more stale and stupid than the ruling class is now. They’re only mortals, and they are nice enough to die eventually, but we’re not mortals and we won’t die. If we obey their rules when we take power, we’ll bore the world to death. Once we repeat their mistakes, our generation will repeat them forever. Their padded little nurse’s paradise will become our permanent tyranny.”

“Look, you’ll never manage this,” Maya said bluntly. “It’s dangerous. It’s a reckless, silly, extravagant gesture that can only get you in trouble. They’ll surely find out what you’re doing in there, and they’ll jump on you. You can’t keep any major secrets from the polity for eighty years. Come on, you’re just a bunch of kids. I’m a gerontocrat myself, and I can’t keep my precious secrets for three lousy months!”