“By definition,” she said. “Because enough is whatever you make it. Maybe you want to have thirty kids. ‘Enough’ for you is more than ‘enough’ for me. Maybe you want to get your calories in a very specific way. Maybe you want to live in a very specific place where a lot of other people want to live. Depending on how you look at it, there’ll never be enough, or there’ll always be plenty.”
While they’d gabbed, three other walkaways prepped tea, hand-finished scones and dainty sandwiches and steaming pots and adulterants arranged on the trays. She consciously damped the anxiety at someone doing “her” job. So long as the job got done, that’s what mattered. If anything mattered. Which it did. But not in the grand scheme of things. She recognized one of her loops.
“Well that settles that,” she said, jerking her chin at the people bringing out the trays. “Let’s eat.”
“I don’t think I can.” He patted his stomach. “You guys should install a vomitorium.”
“They’re just a legend,” she said. “‘Vomitorium’ just means a narrow bottleneck between two chambers, from which a crowd is vomited forth. Nothing to do with gorging yourself into collective bulimia.”
“But still.” He looked thoughtful. “I could install one, couldn’t I? Login to your back-end, sketch it out and start looking for material, taking stuff apart and knocking out bricks?”
“Technically, but I don’t think you’d get help with it, and there’d be reverts when you weren’t around, people bricking back the space you’d unbricked. I mean, a vomitorium is not only apocryphal – it’s grody. Not the kind of thing that happens in practice.”
“But if I had a gang of trolls, we could do it, right? Could put armed guards on the spot, charge admission, switch to Big Macs?”
This was a tedious, noob discussion. “Yeah, you could. If you made it stick, we’d build another Belt and Braces down the road and you’d have a building full of trolls. You’re not the first person to have this little thought-experiment.”
“I’m sure I’m not,” he said. “I’m sorry if it’s boring. I know the theory, but it seems like it just couldn’t work.”
“It doesn’t work at all in theory. In theory, we’re selfish assholes who want more than our neighbors, can’t be happy with a lot if someone else has a lot more. In theory, someone will walk into this place when no one’s around and take everything. In theory, it’s bullshit. This stuff only works in practice. In theory, it’s a mess.”
He giggled, an unexpected, youthful sound.
“I’ve got a bunch of questions about that, but you had that so ready I’d bet you can bust out as many answers like it as you need.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” she said. She liked him, despite him being a shlepper. “Does it scale? So far, so good. What happens in the long run? As a wise person once said—”
“In the long run, we’re all dead.”
“Though who knows, right?”
“You don’t believe that tuff, do you?”
“You call it tuff, I call it obvious. When you’re rich, you don’t have to die. That’s clear. Put together the whole run of therapies – selective germ plasm optimization, continuous health surveillance, genomic therapies, preferential transplant access... If I believed in private property, I’d give you odds that the first generation of immortal humans are alive today. They will outrace and outpace their own mortality.”
She watched him try to disagree without being rude and remembered how she’d worried about offending people when she’d first gone walkaway. It was adorable.
“Just because money can be traded for lifespan to a point, it doesn’t follow that it scales,” he said. “You can trade money for land, but if you tried to buy New York City one block at a time, you’d run out of money no matter how much you started with, because as the supply decreased—” He shook his head. “I mean, not to say that there’s supply and demand when it comes to your health, but, diminishing returns for sure. Believing that science will advance at the same rate as mortality is mumbo jumbo.” He looked awkward. She liked this guy. “It’s an act of faith. No offense.”
“No offense. You missed the most important argument. Life-extension comes at the expense of quality of life. There’s a guy about two hundred miles that way—” she pointed south – “worth more than most countries, who is just organs and gray matter in a vat. The vat’s in a fortified clinic and the clinic’s in a walled city. Everyone who works in that city shares that guy’s microbial nation. It’s a condition of employment. You’ve got one hundred times more nonhuman cells in your body than human ones. The people who live in that city are 99 percent immortal rich-guy, extensions of his body. All they do is labor to figure out how to extend his life. Most of them went tops in their classes at the best unis in the world. Recruited out of school. Paid a wage that can’t be matched anywhere else.
“I met someone who used to work there, gave it up and went walkaway. He said the guy in the vat is in perpetual agony. Something tricked his pain perception into ‘continuous, non-adapting peak load’. He’s feeling as much pain as is humanly possible, pain you can’t get used to. He could tell them to switch off the machines – and he’d be dead. But he’s hanging in. He’s making a bet that some super-genius in his city who’s thinking about the bounty on the bugs in this guy’s personal bug-tracker will figure out how to solve this nerve thing. There’ll be breakthroughs, if everything goes to plan. So the vat will just be his larval phase. You don’t have to believe it, but it’s the truth.”
“It’s not weirder than other stories I’ve heard about zottas. The only unlikely thing is that your buddy was able to go walkaway at all. Sounds like the kind of deal where you’d get hunted down like a dog for violating your NDA.”
She remembered the guy, who’d gone by Langerhans, all weird tradecraft stuff – dead drops and the lengths he went to in order to avoid leaving behind skin-cells and follicles, wiping down his used glasses and cutlery. “He kept a low profile. As for that NDA, he had weird shit to tell, but nothing that I could have used to kickstart my own program or sabotage the man in the vat. He was shrewd. Absolutely raving bugfuck. But shrewd. I believed him.”
“It’s just like I was saying. This guy is enduring unimaginable pain because of his superstitious belief that he can spend his way out of death. The fact that this guy believes it doesn’t have any connection with its reality. Maybe this guy will spend a hundred years trapped in infinite hell. Zottas are just as good at self-delusion as anyone. Better – they’re convinced they got to where they are because they’re evolutionary sports who deserve to be exalted above baseline humans, so they’re primed to believe anything they feel must be true. What, apart from blind, self-serving faith by this zotta leads you to believe that there’s anything other than wishful thinking?”
Limpopo remembered Langerhans’s certainty, his low, intense ranting about the coming age of immortal zottas whose familial dynasties would be captained by undying tyrants.
“I admit I don’t have anything to prove it. Everything I know I learned second-hand from someone scared out of his skin. This is one of those things where it’s worth behaving as though it was true, even if it never comes to pass. The zottas are trying to secede from humanity. They don’t see their destiny as tied to ours. They think that they can politically, economically and epidemiologically isolate themselves, take to high ground above the rising seas, breed their offspring by Harrier jets.