Well, what is "real"? If a man whispers loving words to his sweetheart on the long-distance phone, what is it that she "really" hears? It isn't his own dear voice. That was a mere shaking of the atmosphere. It has been analyzed and graphed and converted into a string of digits; what is reconstituted in the phone at her ear is an entirely different shaking of the air. It is a simulation.
For that matter, what did she hear even when her darling's lips were only inches away? It was not her ear that "heard" the words. All the ear does is register changes in pressure by their action on the little stirrup and anvil bones. Just as all the eye does is respond to changes in light-sensitive chemicals. It is up to the nerves to report these things to the brain, but they only report coded symbols of the things, not the things themselves, for the nerves cannot carry the sound of a voice or the sight of Mont Blanc; all they transmit is impulses. They are no more real than the digitized voice of a person on a phone.
It is up to the mind that inhabits the brain to assemble the~e coded impulses into information, or pleasure, or beauty. And a mind that happens to be inhabiting machine storage can do that just as well.
So the pleasure, all the pleasures, were as "real" as pleasure ever is. And if the mere pursuit of pleasure began to pall, after a (subjective) millennium or two, he could work. Some of the greatest music of the period was composed by "ghosts," and from them came some of the greatest advances in scientific theory.
It was really surprising that, nevertheless, so many people still preferred to cling to their organic lives.
All of this led to a rather surprising situation, though it took awhile for anyone to realize it.
When the Gateway explorers started bringing back useful Heechee technology, the world population on Earth wasn't much more than ten billion. That was only a tiny fraction of all the human beings who had ever lived, of course. The best guess anybody would make about the total census was-oh, well, maybe-let's say, somewhere around a hundred billion people.
That included everybody. It included you and your neighbor and your cousin's barber. It included the president of the United States and the pope and the woman who drove your school bus when you were nine; it included all the casualties in the Civil War, the American Revolution, and the Peloponnesian Wars, and their survivors, too; all the Romanovs and Hohenzollerns and Ptolemys, and all the Jukes and Kallikaks, as well; Jesus Christ, Caesar Augustus, and the innkeepers in Bethlehem; the first tribes to cross the land bridge from Siberia to the New World, and also the tribes who stayed behind; "Q" (an arbitrary name assigned to the unknown first man to make use of fire), "X" (the arbitrary name of his father), and the original African Eve. What it included was everybody, living or dead, who was taxonomically human and born before that first year of Gateway.
That came, as we said, to a grand total of 100,000,000,000 people (give or take quite a lot), of whom the great majority were deceased.
Then along came Heechee, or Heechee-inspired, medicine, and things got started.
The numbers of the living meat people doubled, and doubled again, and kept on doubling. And they lived longer, too. With modern medicine, they didn't die before they wanted to. With medical encouragement and no painful penalties, they generally
and generally lots of them. And when they did Well, when they did "die" they also still "lived" in mechanical
storage, and among that growing electronic population there were no fatalities at all.
So the number of the living continued to increase, while the number of the truly dead remained essentially static, and the result was inevitable. But when the point was reached it still took everyone by surprise; for at last in human history the living outnumbered the dead.
All of that had some interesting consequences. The eighty-year-old woman writing her X-rated memoirs of youthful indiscretions couldn't drop the names of video stars, gangsters, and bishops anymore-not unless the indiscretions had really happened, anyway-because the video stars, gangsters, and bishops were still around to correct the record.
It was a great plus for the oldest persons in machine storage,
though. The names that they dropped from their meat days were
well and truly dead, and in no condition to dispute the stories.
It wasn't bad to be a meat person anymore. Hardly any of them
were poor.
