[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
The Smith Family Cryonic Trust would receive the actual amount of the fraud
based on Webster s most honest recollec-tion. But $6.98 million today was
worth barely $240,000 in the dollars of 1992, when the last overbilling had
occurred.
As his decaying legs, aided by quasi-bionic muscle-stimulation trousers,
carried him outside to his waiting programmed-transport vehicle, he
considered the ever-expanding dominion of the AI machines.
With a machine doling it out, justice was an objective measurement
of human input, uncolored by emotional reprisal or lenience.
A decade ago such authority in the tenure of machines would have been
alarming. No human could match their intellectual horsepower, and throughout
history the greater minds had tended to enslave those lesser endowed. The
machines had no weapons, of course, but given time, communication
becomes persuasion, and persuasion is enough to command.
Power corrupts, the old saying went, and absolute power cor-rupts absolutely.
Yet the machines did seem to render justice with a consis-tency no human could
match. Since the
United States Software Act of November 7, 2022, and similar legislation in
every other nation, it had been illegal for any machine to be programmed with
a survival instinct or emotions. And now, with the
Page 133
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Truth Machine at society s command, no attempt by human program-mers to
violate this act was likely to go undetected.
Armstrong s Truth Machine had also made biostasis infi-nitely safer.
Intentions of terrorism were routinely detected in everyday licensing
scips, long before any such plans could be carried out. Not a single
suspendee in the U.S. had been lost to terrorism since the infamous January
2025 attack on the cold-storage cylinders of Forest Lawn in Burbank,
California.
Following the lead of the United States, many other nations had passed laws to
deal with the plethora of crimes committed before the Truth Machine had
eliminated such temptations. In Paris, for example, on the same day as
Webster s routine con-fession, Drs. Claude Noire and Edouard Binette were
forced to endure a harsher inquisition, their crimes being far more
signifi-cant. The doctors had failed a customs scip (Truth Machine test) that
morning while attempting to leave Paris for a pharmaceutical convention in
Hong Kong, and were invited by the douanier to answer questions.
If we refuse to answer ...? Binette had asked the young bureaucrat at the
Institut Nationale pour la
Vérification des Recherches Scientifiques.
No problem. The man had pointed the Truth Machine at himself. We will just
assume that every experiment you have ever submitted is fraudulent, and
sentence you accordingly.
The ACIP light glowed a chilling, steady green.
Confined to separate rooms, the two doctors gave virtually identical
testimony. Both testified that the deep-frozen-mouse revivification, which had
changed the worldwide paradigm on cryonics, had been a simple scientific
fraud. A genetically iden-tical clone of one of the cryonically (minus 79
degrees C) frozen mice had been deanimated, cooled to 25 degrees
Fahren-heit, and secretly switched prior to the reanimation. Of course,
the replacement had been the sole survivor out of the entire group of 1,300
mice.
They had repeated the fraud nearly a dozen times in subsequent years, with
convincingly mixed re-sults, but for purported competitive reasons had
refused to re-lease the formula to other scientists.
The only significant difference in their testimony concerned motive. Noire had
perpetrated the fraud to attain wealth. Bi-nette s purpose had been less
rapacious but equally selfish: He hoped to foster public acceptance of
cryonics. Both still be-lieved that vitrification under the guidelines
of the Prometheus
Protocol was the best hope for preserving identity and memory of mammalian
brains.
Of course, now it was apparent that they were only guessing.
May 30, 2031
Memorial Gardens on the World Wide Web reports reaching a milestone 750
million grave sites where family members and friends post permanent
epitaphs, stories, photographs, and record-ings of their departed or
suspended loved ones. The statistic does not include deceased pets or
inanimate objects, which if added would raise total sites to nearly one
billion. In a speech to Republican supporters, Senator and likely
presidential candidate Jonathan Salyers warns a largely indifferent audience:
The meme of the mouse reanimation has infected our brains to the point where
we can t seem to recover from it, even after Nobine s exposure as
fraud. In fact, pre-death cryonics is the equivalent of simple suicide.
President David West asserts, It is interesting that this bombshell has
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]