The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  The reasoning behind this scheme was born of the fear that as the world depicted in the series came gradually closer to a Utopian condition, stories set there would be robbed of most of the dramatic impetus that worlds far from the ideal provide in abundance. Utopian fiction has a notorious tendency to be boring, and the demands of melodrama have been a key factor in determining the preference which science fiction writers have for dealing in more or less horrible futures. My hope was that I could compensate for the melodramatic drain inherent in mapping an improving situation by switching to an alternative narrative currency. For bridging purposes, however, Volume four of the series, Architects of Emortality retains a calculatedly absurd murder-mystery framework in which a genetic engineer specializing in flower design named Oscar Wilde lends his expertise as an aesthetic theorist to the investigation by UN policepersons Charlotte Holmes and Hal Watson of a series of murders signed (pseudonymously) “Rappaccini.”

  By 2495, when Architects of Emortality is set, the limitations of nanotechnological repair as a technology of longevity, even in combination with periodic rejuvenative somatic engineering treatments, have been conclusively shown up. All recent progress has been made in the field of genetically engineered longevity, which had gone through a long period of relative unfashionability as a result of the seemingly insuperable problem of the Miller Effect — although some further progress was made by courtesy of the continued efforts of such diehard adherents as the Ahasuerus Foundation. Another problematic side effect of longevity has also been publicized, although its existence and effects are dubious: the tendency of long-lived individuals to lose their mental adaptability.

  The story told in Architects of Emortality takes place at a crucial historical juncture, when the last generation of humans who did not receive the longevity-providing Zaman Transformation at the single-cell stage of their development is approaching the limit of their endurance — the oldest of them routinely attaining a life span of 300 years, but not much more — and the first generation ZT beneficiaries are still young. No one knows, as yet, whether the members of the latest New Human Race are in danger of falling prey to robotization. One of the new breed of genetically enhanced emortals, a junior member of the still-thriving Hardinist Cabal named Michael Lowenthal, attaches himself to the Holmes/Watson investigation as an interested observer. He and Wilde become rivals in their attempts to construct hypothetical motives to rationalize Rappaccini’s murders. Although Wilde proves, in the end, to be the better interpreter, it is Lowenthal who actually reaps a profit — on behalf of his masters — by following the investigation to its astonishing conclusion.

  The seemingly final conquest of death that is visible to the characters of Architects of Emortality is fully realized in volume five of the series, The Fountains of Youth. Unlike its predecessor and the present volume, The Fountains of Youth is a comedy bildungsroman rather than a comedic mystery story; it constitutes the autobiography of Mortimer Gray, a member of the New Human Race born in 2520.

  When he writes his autobiography, in 3025, Mortimer still expects to live for several more centuries, if not millennia, but he thinks it worth producing a summary record of the first great project of his life’s work: the compilation of a definitive history of the role formerly played in human affairs by death, issued in ten volumes over a period of four hundred years.

  Mortimer Gray’s autobiography records how his determination to write the history of death was actuated by a close encounter of his own, when the cruise ship on which he was taking a holiday was caught up in the Coral Sea Disaster of 2542, when a rift in the Earth’s crust split the ocean bed and spilled out massive amounts of hot magma, causing the sea to boil and sending huge tidal waves to devastate the Pacific Rim. In the aftermath of the disaster Mortimer made the acquaintance of the abruptly orphaned Emily Marchant, whose own determination to make the most of her life was similarly hardened by the misfortune. Emily subsequently becomes very rich, by virtue of extrapolating gantzing techniques to solve the problems of construction in extraterrestrial environments. She is heavily involved in the construction of “ice palaces” on the Jovian and Saturnian satellites — edifices which find an earthbound echo in showpieces constructed in Antarctica, where Mortimer resides while researching the middle part of his project.

  Being somewhat accident-prone by the standards of his day, Mortimer has several other close encounters with his subject matter during the compilation of his masterpiece, one of which is consequent on his troubled relationship with the Thanaticists, a briefly fashionable cult interested in the aesthetics of death and disease. The last of these near misses results from a fall through the Arctic ice cap while traveling in a snowmobile. The long discussion about life’s prospects he once shared with Emily Marchant is eerily echoed in a similarly extended and equally intense discussion about death’s significance that he shares with the snowmobile’s navigator: a moderately sophisticated silver. (Over the centuries, Artificial Intelligences have been routinely subcategorized as “sloths” and “silvers”; the acronym AI has been redefined to signify “artificial idiot,” and ai is the Tupi name for the three-toed sloth, while more advanced machines have been redesignated “artificial geniuses,” and Ag is the chemical symbol for silver.)

  Toward the end of his labor on the history of death Mortimer has some dealings with the Cyborganizers, a new existential avant garde dedicated to the progressive fusion of humans and inorganic technology. Cyborganization is widely accepted as the emergent norm in extraterrestrial communities, with the exception of faber society — fabers are humans genetically engineered for life in low or zero gravity, whose legs are replaced by an extra set of armlike limbs. On Earth, however, cyborganization is a mere fashion rather than a matter of utilitarian necessity, and it is rivaled there by many other philosophies. These include the ecological mysticism of the Gaean Liberationists, and the ambitions of the Type 2 Movement — followers of the twentieth century prophet Freeman Dyson — whose aim is to extrapolate the technologies employed in continental engineering and terraformation to the construction of vast new macrostructures within the solar system.

  I apologize for the fact that this torrent of data is a great deal for the interested reader to bear in mind while following the plot of The Omega Expedition, but the future is a big place and one of the few things that we can confidently say is that it will get less like the present the further it goes. If technological and social progress continue — as we must all hope, in spite of our keen Cassandrian awareness of the impending ecocatastrophic Crash — its strangeness will probably increase much faster than my exceedingly modest future history is content to suppose.

  One other thing that the reader might care to bear in mind, if it is not asking too much, is that the greatest merit of science fiction as a genre is to demonstrate by its plenitude that the as yet unmade future holds a multitude of possibilities, whose actual outcome will depend on the choices we make in the present day. There are no predictions in this series of novels, or any other work of science fiction that aspires, no matter how feebly, to intellectual seriousness; all anticipations are conditional. The only purpose the series has, beyond that of providing harmless entertainment, is the hope of making a contribution, however minuscule, to the information of the present-day choices that will determine which of the infinite number of possible futures our emortal descendants will eventually inherit and inhabit.

  Prologue

  The Last Adam: A Myth for

  the Children of Humankind

  by Mortimer Gray

  Part One

  One

  This is the way it must have happened.

  In September 1983, shortly after returning from his honeymoon in the Dominican Republic, Adam Zimmerman began to read Sein und Zeit by Martin Heidegger. He had decided to improve his German, and he did not want to practice by reading novels in that language because he considered all fiction to be a waste of time. He wanted to read something that was serious, difficult, and import
ant, so that he would obtain the maximum reward for the effort he put in.

  That was the kind of man he was, in those days. He could not have regarded himself, at the age of twenty-five years and four months, as a complete man, but he had put away all childish things with stern determination. He hated to let time go to waste, and he required full recompense from every passing moment.

  It is tempting to wonder whether the history of the next thousand years might have been somewhat different if Adam had chosen to read, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra or Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, but there was no danger of that. Both those books had been published in the nineteenth century, and Adam was very much a twentieth-century man. We, of course, have grown used to thinking of him as the twentieth century man, but while he was actually living in that era he was far from typical. He must have been considerably more earnest than the average, although he would probably have gone no further on his own behalf than to judge himself “serious.”

  Although he was a native of New York in the United States of America, Adam had always been conscious of his European ancestry. He was the grandson of Austrian Jews who had fled Vienna in 1933, when his father Sigmund was still a babe in arms. Sigmund Zimmerman’s only sibling — a sister — was born in New York, and he had not a single cousin in the world to lose, but the war of 1939–45 contrived nevertheless to inscribe a deep scar upon his soul. Sigmund frequently declared himself to be a “child of the Holocaust,” and sometimes applied the same description to his own son, even though Adam was not born until 13 February 1958.

  Neither Sigmund nor Adam ever visited Israel, but Sigmund certainly considered himself a Zionist fellow traveler, and that conviction could not help but color the idealistic spectrum of Adam’s adolescent rebellion against the ideas and ideals of his parents. Although that rebellious phase was in the past by the time of his marriage to Sylvia Ruskin (a gentile), its legacy must have played some small part in Adam’s decision to try to perfect his German with the aid of a philosopher of whom his father would definitely not have approved.

  Perhaps that same awareness assisted, if it did not actually provoke, Adam’s powerful reaction to Heidegger’s argument. On the other hand, it might have been the fact that he set out to wrestle with the text purely as an exercise in linguistics that left him psychologically naked to its deeper implications. Then again, it does not seem to have been at all unusual for males of his era and cultural background to hold themselves sternly aloof from schmaltz while being extravagantly self-indulgent in the matter of angst.

  For whatever reason, Adam was ready-made for the strange sanctification of self-pity that was the primitive existentialist’s red badge of courage. While he read Heidegger, a couple of chapters at a time, on those nights when he elected not to claim his conjugal rights, Adam felt that he was gradually bringing to consciousness precious items of knowledge that had always lain within him, covert and unapprehended. He did not need to be persuaded that angst is the fundamental mood of mortal existence, because that knowledge had always nested in his soul, waiting only to be recognised and greeted with all due deference.

  Heidegger explained to Adam that human awareness of inevitable death, though unfathomably awful, was normally repressed to a subliminal level in order that the threat of nothingness could be held at bay, but that individuals who found such dishonesty impalatable were perennially catching fugitive glimpses of the appalling truth. Adam felt a surge of tremendous relief when he realized that he must be one of the honest few, and that this was the explanation of his inability to relate meaningfully to the insensitive majority of his fellows. It was as if a truth that had long been captive in some dark cranny of his convoluted brain had been suddenly set free.

  When Adam laid the book down on his bedside table for the last time, the silken caress of his expensive sheets seemed to be infused with a new meaning. For twenty-five years he had been a stranger to himself, but now he felt that he had been properly introduced.

  He woke Sylvia, his bride of eight weeks, and said: “We’re going to die, Syl.”

  We must presume that although she may have been mildly distressed by being hauled back from gentle sleep in this rude manner, Sylvia would have adopted a tone of loving sympathy.

  “No we’re not, Adam,” she would have said. “We’re both perfectly healthy.”

  Perhaps that was the crucial moment of disconnection which sealed the eventual doom of their marriage.

  “Death is the one constant of our existence,” Adam told her, calmly. “The awareness that we might be snuffed out of existence at any moment haunts us during every bright moment of our waking lives. Although we try with all our might not to see the specter at the feast of life, it’s always there, always seeking us out with eyes whose hollowness insists that we too will one day forsake our being in the world. No matter how hard we strive for mental comfort and stability, that fundamental insecurity undermines and weakens the foundations of the human psyche, spoiling its fabric long before the anticipated moment of destruction actually arrives.

  “We all try, in our myriad ways, to suppress and defeat it, but we all fail. We invent myths of the immortality of the soul; we hide in the routines of the everyday; we try to dissolve our terror in the acid baths of love and adoration — but none of it works, Syl. It can’t work. If I read him aright, Heidegger thinks that if we could only face up to the specter we’d be able to exorcise it, liberating ourselves from our servitude to the ordinary and achieving authentic existence, but that’s like trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps; it’s nothing but another philosophical word game. The issue can’t be dodged — not, at any rate, by any cheap trick of that kind. The angst will always win.”

  In the course of a year-long courtship and eight weeks of happy marriage Sylvia Zimmerman must already have had abundant opportunity to study her loved one’s slight penchant for pomposity, but she was prepared to forgive its occasional excesses. She loved Adam. She did not understand him, but she did love him.

  “Go to sleep, Adam,” she advised. “Things won’t seem half so bad in the morning.

  As it happened, though, the sheer enormity of Adam’s realization denied him escape into the arms of Morpheus. He turned out the bedside lamp and sat in the dark, appalled by the vision of nothingness that had been conjured up before him, languishing in the sensation of having no hope. And when morning came, it found him in exactly the same condition. It is useless to speculate now as to whether sleep might have saved him from further anguish; if he could have slept in such circumstances, he would not have needed saving. In fact, because he was the person he was, Adam Zimmerman became in the course of that insomniac night a man obsessed. Those few roughhewn sentences which had poured out of him as he tried to explain himself to the sleepy Sylvia became the axioms of his continuing life.

  Sylvia must have tried other arguments in the days that followed, but none fared any better than her first shallow riposte. This was not her fault; if Martin Heidegger could not succeed in persuading Adam that there was a satisfactory answer to the problem of angst, Sylvia Zimmerman had no chance. She was not an unintelligent woman by any means — her academic qualifications were superior to Adam’s and she certainly had a broader mind — but she did not have Adam’s capacity for obsession. Her cleverness was diffuse and highly adaptable, while his was tightly focused and direly difficult to shift once it had selected an objective.

  Sylvia was adept at moving on, and that was the way she coped with all life’s intractable problems; if one proved too difficult she simply put it away and redirected her attention to more comfortable and more productive fields of thought and action. However ironic or paradoxical it may seem to us, in the light of subsequent events,moving on was the one thing that Adam Zimmerman could not do. Once the crucial fragment of philosophical ice had penetrated the profoundest depths of his conscious mind, his life could no longer flow as the lives of other men and women flowed; from
that moment on his inner self was cold, crystalline, and hard as adamant.

  For some years, Adam let his wife follow her own advice while he continued to brood privately, but his preoccupation was not a secret that he could keep from her, even if that had been his desire. It could not help but surface repeatedly, each time more insistent than the last. Heidegger’s analysis of the human predicament — that all human life is underlaid, limited, subverted, and irredeemably devalued by its own precariousness in the face of death — gnawed at Adam’s guts like some monstrous hookworm, and he could not help coughing up the argumentative flux whenever it threatened to overwhelm him.

  He consulted many other philosophers in the hope of finding a solution to his predicament, but all the cures they suggested seemed to him to be no more than shifty conjurations based in dishonest sleight-of-mind. He even went so far as to consult the novels of Jean-Paul Sartre, but Nausea only confirmed his long-held prejudice against the fallaciousness of fiction. Try as he might, he could attain no age of reason, obtain no reprieve, and discover no iron in the soul. He could not believe that anyone with a clear mind could draw an atom of satisfaction from the prospect of “living on” after death in the pages of authored books, the strokes of a paint-brush, or the notes of a musical composition. Nor could he consider the remembrance of children or the extrapolation of a dynasty to be of the slightest palliative value. The prospect of being a born-again optimist could not tempt him even when everyone alongside whom he worked waxed lyrical about the power of positive thinking, the rewards of “proactivity,” and the vital necessity of a “can do” attitude. He needed something far more solid than the gospel of self-help in which to invest his commitment.

  Adam was tempted for a while to abandon his job as a consultant in corporate finance, on the grounds that there was something absurdly meaningless about the ceaseless juggling of figures. He was a very accomplished saltimbanque, to be sure, and he prided himself on the fact that no one could walk the tightrope that separated tax avoidance from tax evasion more surefootedly than he, but even the most creative exercises in bookkeeping seemed to exemplify the desperate absorption in the trivial that was one of the most obviously hollow of all the false solutions to the problem of being.