“I love the toad,” Maya volunteered. “I wouldn’t mind owning that toad myself.”
“What would you do with it, Maya?”
“I’d keep it on my bureau and admire it every day.”
“Then take it,” Paul said. He handed it to her. It was surprisingly heavy; it felt just like a red stone toad.
“Of course that’s not really a valuable Fabergé heirloom,” Paul told them all, casually. “It’s an identical museum replica. The Fabergé original was laser scanned to an accuracy of a few microns, and then instantiated in modern vapor deposition. Oddly, there were even a few flaws introduced, so that the artificial ruby is indistinguishable from the genuine corundum that forms a natural ruby. About a hundred toads were made in all.”
“Oh, well, of course,” said Maya. She looked at the little red toad. It was somewhat less beautiful now, but it was still a remarkable likeness of a toad.
“Actually, there were over ten thousand made. It’s not artificial ruby, either. I lied about that. It’s only plastic.”
“Oh.”
“It wasn’t even fresh plastic,” Paul said relentlessly. “It was recycled garbage plastic, mined from a twentieth-century dump. I just pretended it was the Fabergé original, in order to make my point.”
“Oh, no,” Maya mourned. People began laughing.
“I’m joking, of course,” Paul said cheerily. “In point of fact, that truly is a Fabergé original. It was made in Moskva in 1912. The labor took fourteen skilled artisans a full five months to complete. It’s one of a kind, completely irreplaceable. I’ve borrowed it from the Antikensammlungen in Munchen. For heaven’s sake, don’t drop it.”
“You’d better have it back, then,” Maya said.
“No, you hold it for a while, my dear.”
“I don’t think so. It wears me out when it keeps mutating like this.”
“What if I told you that it wasn’t even made by Fabergé? That in fact, it was an actual toad? Not human workmanship mimicking a toad, but an actual scanned garden toad. Cast in—well, you can choose the material.”
Maya looked at the sculpture. It was a sweet thing to hold, and there was something about it that she truly did like, but it was making her brain hurt. “You’re really asking me if a photograph of a toad can have the same beauty as a painting of a toad.”
“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.”