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genetic revolution....
He saw a gang fight in the derelict suburban wasteland of a city he couldn't name: young men costumed
and painted like crazy fetishists, wielding knives and razors, eyes wild with adrenalin and synthetic
ecstasy, living on and by the edge. He watched the vivid blood spurt from wounds, and he winced with
sympathy because he knew full well that these would-be savages must be equipped with relatively
primitive internal technology, which provided elementary protection against permanent injury but left them
horribly vulnerable to pain and the risk of death. He heard their bestial cries, their wordless celebration of
their defiance of civilization and all its comforts, all its protective guarantees....
It was as if the virtual aspect of the life of modern man were being condensed into a stream of images.
Silas couldn't help but feel annoyed about the fact that his captors seemed hell-bent on educating him, but
the process had a curious fascination of its own. Much of the imagery was, of course, "reality-based"-
videotapes of actual events reformatted for VE playback, sometimes in 2-D, sometimes in 3-D-but even
in the documentary material, reformatted footage was juxtaposed and mingled with synthesized material
produced by programmers. Today's programmers were almost good enough to synthesize lifelike
fictions, especially when they used templates borrowed from reality-based footage which could be
mechanically animated and subtly changed without losing their photographic appearance.
With only a hood at his disposal, Silas couldn't obtain the full benefit of such illusions, most of which
were designed to provide tactile sensations with the aid of a full-body synthesis suit, but the detachment
that was heir to limitation made it all the more difficult to tell the reformatted real from the ersatz.
Silas saw himself standing by Conrad Helier's side, listening to the older man saying: "We must regard
this new plague not as a catastrophe but as a challenge. It is not, as the Gaian Mystics would have us
believe, the vengeance of Mother Earth upon her rapists and polluters, and no matter how fast and how
far it spreads it cannot and will not destroy the species. Its advent requires a monumental effort from us,
but we are capable of making that effort...."
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He saw two women, naked and oiled, caressing one another sinuously, engaged in carefully
choreographed mutual masturbation, first with fingers and then with tongues, moving ceaselessly, putting
on an ingeniously artful and tantalizing display for voyeurs. The soundtrack was soft music, overlaid by
heavy breathing and gasps of simulated ecstasy, and the flesh of the two women seemed to be taking on
a life of its own, a strange glow. Their faces were changing, exchanging features; they seemed to flow and
merge, as though the two were becoming one as the carefully faked climax approached....
Silas recognized this as one of his foster son's compositions, as crudely and garishly libidinous as one
might expect of a young man's imagination. He was glad when it was replaced by scenes from a food
factory, where tissue cultures were harvested and processed with mechanical efficiency and hygiene by
robot knives and robot packagers.
After that there was more Conrad Helier, this time in close-up-which meant that it was probably faked.
"We must be sure," the probably fake Conrad was saying, "that our motives are pure. We must do this
not to secure an advantage for ourselves, but for the sake of the world. It is time, to set aside, for the last
time, the logic of the selfish gene, and to proclaim the triumph of altruistic self-awareness. The first
children of the New Utopia must be not the children of an elite; they must be the children of everyman. If
we ourselves are to have children we must allocate ourselves the lowest priority, not the highest."
The viewpoint swung around to bring Eveline Hywood's face into embarrassingly intimate focus. "It's the
privilege of gods to move in mysterious ways," she said laconically. "Let's not tie ourselves down with
self-administered commandments that we'll surely have occasion to break and break again."
Conrad Helier's disciples had, in fact, bound themselves with edicts and promises-and had kept them,
after a fashion. Silas believed that he had kept them better than most, in spite of the heresies which had
crept upon his mind and condemned him, in the end, to confusion. He had kept almost all his promises, if
only in order to ensure that whatever else he lost, he would have clean hands.
Now he was looking out at the factory again, at the robot butchers working clinically, tirelessly, and
altruistically for the greater good of ambitious humankind. He presumed that the image was meant to be
symbolic, but he refused to try to figure out exactly what it was symbolic of, and why it had been laid
before him now.
The robot butchers tirelessly plied their gleaming instruments for a few seconds more, and then
dissolved into a vision of cars racing through city streets, speeded up until they were little more than
colored blurs, racing ceaselessly past.
But it is true, he reflected, that some of those of us who are left over from the old world remain
anchored to that world by our habits of mind. Some of the old haven't yet become accustomed to the
new outlook, and perhaps I'm one of them-but we can't be expected to shed the superficialities of our
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