[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
chance of riding the escalator all the way, but you'd undoubtedly take the view that he'd want the benefit
of much better rejuve technology than the current market standard- technology that could be guaranteed
to beat the Hayflick limit and the Miller effect."
"With all due respect," said the red-haired woman, "the internal affairs of the foundation are none of
your concern."
"I understand that. I'm only talking hypothetically. I'm intrigued by the question of how we could ever
know that we were in possession of a technology of rejuvenation that would stop aging permanently,
preserving the mind as well as the body. How could we ever know that a particular IT suite was good
for, say, two thousand years, without actually waiting two thousand years for the results of the field tests
to come in? What sort of data analysis would allow us to reach a conclusion regarding the efficacy of the
technology ahead of time?"
"It wouldn't be easy," Rachel Trehaine admitted warily. "But we now have a very detailed knowledge of
the biochemistry of all the degenerative processes we lump together as aging. At present, we arrive at
estimates of projected life spans by monitoring those processes over the short term in such a way as to
produce an extrapolatable curve. That curve has to be adjusted for rejuvenative interruptions, but we can
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
do medium-term experiments to monitor the effects of repeated rejuvenative treatments."
"Do you still use mice for those experiments?" Damon asked.
"We use live animals in some trials," she countered rather stiffly, "but most of the preliminary work can
be done with tissue cultures. I assume that what you're driving at is the impossibility of getting rid of the
margin of uncertainty which arises from dealing with any kind of substitute for human subjects. You're
right, of course-we'll never be sure that a treatment which multiplies the lifetime of a cell or a mouse by a
thousand will do the same for a human being, until we've actually tried it."
"As I see it," Damon said, "we'll never be able to tell the difference between a technological suite that
will allow us to live for a long time and one which really will allow us to live forever. Most people, of
course, don't give a damn about that-they only want the best there is-but you have to decide when to
wake Adam Zimmerman up. You have to decide, day by day and year by year, exactly how to balance
the equation of potential gain against potential risk-because you can't leave him in there indefinitely, can
you? Nor can you keep waking him up to ask his advice, because every journey in or out of susan
multiplies the risks considerably, and even the nanotech you pump into him while he's still down and out
can't fully compensate for the fact that the first susan technology he used was pre-ark."
"You're right," she admitted. "For us, if for no one else, nice statistical distinctions are important. What's
your point?"
"For a long time, Ahasuerus must have been field leaders in longevity research. Your heavy investment
in biotech put you on the crest of the wave-and you presumably had a healthy and mutually supportive
relationship with other researchers, all the way from Morgan Miller to Conrad Helier and Surinder Nahal.
You were all on the same side, all trading information like good team players. Then PicoCon and
OmicronA came at the problem from a different angle, with a different attitude. They're the field leaders
now, aren't they? While they've been forming their own team, yours has broken up. Nowadays, it must
require serious industrial espionage to discover what the boys across the street are up to, and exactly
how far they've got."
"The Ahasuerus Foundation is not involved in industrial espionage," she informed him as stiffly and as
flatly as she was bound to do.
"It's not simply a matter of there being a new team in town, is it?" Damon went on softly. "The real
problem is that they're trying to redefine the game. They're moving the goalposts and rewriting the rules.
They're worried about your willingness to play by the new rules because they're worried about the terms
of your charter-about the responsibility you owe to Adam Zimmerman. Is it possible, do you think, that
they're anxious that let ting Adam Zimmerman out of the freezer might be tantamount to letting the cat out
of the bag?"
"What's that supposed to mean, Mr. Hart?"
"Let me put it this way, Dr. Trehaine. It might well be that the people with the very best internal
technology would consider it desirable, or even necessary, to play down its power: to maintain the belief
that what people insist on calling immortality not only isn't immortality but isn't even true emortality. It
might well be that the people who control the IT megacorps consider it desirable or necessary to
persuade their would-be heirs that patience is still the cardinal virtue-that in order to inherit the earth they
only have to wait until their elders lose their memories, their minds, and, in the end, their lives. If that
reality were mere appearance and illusion-if all the patience in the world wouldn't be enough to allow the
young to come into their inheritance-what hope would there be for people like me? What is there to wait
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
for, if my generation can never become the inheritors of Earth?"
"If you think that we already have true emortality, Mr. Hart," Rachel Trehaine said dryly, "you're
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]