The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  “You must know what I was frozen down for,” I countered, warily.

  “That datum appears to have been erased from the record,” she said. “Do you remember doing anything that might have given rise to a sentence of imprisonment?”

  I thought she was mocking me. I remembered a considerable number of trivial offenses. It occurred to me that I might have been convicted of “treasonous sabotage” — which is to say, deleting and falsifying official data with malicious and fraudulent intent. It was a crime I had committed more than once, and for a variety of reasons. So far as I could remember, though, in the years immediately preceding the summer of 2202 I had only done such things while acting according to the requests and under the orders of the Secret Masters of the World — or, more prosaically, Damon Hart. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that I had been ratted out to the UN Police by my own employers. My arrest and conviction might conceivably have been a sop in the convoluted diplomatic game the Secret Masters still felt obliged to play against the representatives of a World Democracy that had not yet been reduced to absolute impotence. But it didn’t seem likely.

  Surely, if that had been the case, I’d have remembered it.

  Anyway, no one in the world could have expected me to serve more than ten years in the freezer for treasonous sabotage. The only way I could have been removed from society for any longer than that — let alone a thousand years — was by falling victim to treasonous sabotage myself.

  In other words, if what the strange child was telling me was true, then someone like me must have been hired by someone like Damon Hart — or Damon Hart’s new masters — to obliterate the record of my conviction and imprisonment.

  It couldn’t be true. It had to be a joke.

  It didn’t seem to me to be very funny, but I figured that I had no alternative, for the time being, but to play along. Even though it had to be a VE melodrama, I had to play my part as if it were real.

  What alternative was there? Even if the conviction that it was all a fraudulent game turned out to be wrong, it would make a convenient psychological defense against the horror of the truth. Even if I really were in the far future, it would be best to remain in denial a little longer. I had always been a highly skilled denier, and a devoted guerilla warrior against the excesses of truth. Why else would Damon Hart have hired me so frequently to do his dirty work?

  “Would you believe me if I told you that I’m an innocent man?” I said to the wonderful child. “The unfortunate victim of a miscarriage of justice.”

  “Given that your tone seems to indicate that you don’t believe it yourself,” she replied, “no.”

  “So why bring me back?” I asked, entering into the spirit of the game. “If I really have been in the freezer for a thousand years and more, why bring me back now?”

  “It was a trial run,” she told me, brutally. “We were uncertain that we could revive individuals who had been in stasis for so long without their having suffered considerable side effects — not merely loss of memory but irredeemable deterioration of personality.”

  “My personality’s okay,” I was quick to assure her, although I was equally quick to doubt it. “Except for this sense I have of not quite being myself,” I added, after a pause for thought, perhaps a little too scrupulously. Then, after a further pause, I asked: “Why me?”

  “It seems you were one of only two long-term prisoners accepted into the Foundation’s care in times past who were put into SusAn within two hundred years of Adam Zimmerman,” she said. “When we interrogated our records you emerged as the second most obvious candidate for the trial. Perhaps I should say that, although we shall continue to investigate the extent of the mental side effects you have suffered, we are reasonably content with the way the trial has worked. We’ll need to form a better estimate of the extent of your loss of memory, but your coherency is reassuring. Your feeling of not being quite yourself may be a result of the IT we’ve installed. It would be helpful if you’d try to remember as much as you can. The records suggest that the loss of memory suffered by early revenants from SusAn was usually limited to a few days preceding their vitrification, and was often temporary.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I promised, knowing that I’d have to do it for my own sake. Even if this whole thing were an illusion, I’d need to recover all the memories I could recover as soon as possible. “Apart from the lost memories, you reckon I’m okay?”

  “So far as we can ascertain,” she said, judiciously. “We discovered some residual nanomachines bound to your bones and the glial cells of your brain whose intended function is mysterious, but they appear to be inactive. They’re probably vestigial — a side effect of the particular cryoprotective system used on your body. There’s no trace of similar contamination in the second trial subject, nor in Adam Zimmerman’s body.”

  I set aside the matter of the puzzling “contamination” for further contemplation at a future time. Assuming that this whole conversation must be a kind of test, there were easier points to be scored.

  “So you’re bringing Adam Zimmerman back,” I said, casually, in order to prove that my memory hadn’t been completely shot to bits. “Are you what’s become of the Ahasuerus Foundation? Has it taken you this long to conclude that you’re capable of fulfilling your mission statement?”

  “You know about the Ahasuerus Foundation,” Davida Berenike Columella observed, unnecessarily. It was an obvious prompt.

  “Damon Hart and I had some dealings with the Foundation,” I confirmed, obligingly. She obviously expected more detail, and it seemed wisest to accentuate the positive side of my dealings. “Mostly with a woman named Rachel Trehaine,” I added. “We helped her out a few times, and she did as much for us — you might be able to check that in your records.”

  She didn’t reply to that immediately. I inferred that our conversation was being closely monitored, and that someone somewhere was making haste to trawl the records for any mention of Rachel Trehaine.

  I figured that I was going to have to try to stand up eventually, so I took advantage of the momentary lull to make my tentative move.

  I probably swayed a bit, but I didn’t float away or flail my arms about in an unnecessarily comic fashion. I guessed that the gravity must be about three-quarters Earth normal — easy enough to get used to, I supposed, with a little care and practice.

  But why, I thought, would anyone rig a VE to simulate nonstandard gravity?

  The two chairs had been set three paces apart, so there was a considerable gap to cross before I could reach out and touch the wonderful child, but I took my time over it and couldn’t have seemed particularly clownish.

  She read the intention immediately, and flinched.

  She didn’t protest and she didn’t move, but her eyes told me that she was scared. Now she was the one being subjected to a test.

  I didn’t know exactly why, but the sight of that fear, innocently manifest in her childlike eyes made me suddenly apprehensive. For the first time, I became anxious.

  What am I, in her eyes? I wondered.What have I become, in the space of a thousand years, that I should seem so terrible?

  Three

  Madoc the Monster

  I had known even before I got up that touching the wonderful child wouldn’t prove anything. If I were as ingeniously cocooned as I might be, with clever IT supporting every aspect of an illusion, nothing would prove that my experience was real — but the terrified expression on Davida Berenike Columella’s face looked genuine, all the more so because she was struggling so hard to control it.

  I hesitated, trying to gauge the situation more accurately.

  It seemed to me that she didn’t want to be afraid, but that she couldn’t help it. Even if we weren’t in a VE, there was probably nothing much I could do to hurt or damage her, but she still couldn’t help her reaction. After all, if we weren’t in a VE, then I was presumably a monster out of the distant past, who had been committed to a term of indefinite imprisonment fo
r a crime so dreadful that it had been expunged from the record. She had no reason to be certain that I wasn’t a homicidal maniac.

  But I reached out and touched her face anyway.

  Maybe I was a monster.

  The touch was gentle and brief; her relief when I took my hand away was as palpable as her anxiety had been.

  “How old are you, really?” I asked, speaking softly.

  “Two hundred and twenty years,” she told me.

  “And you’re not speaking through some kind of sim? You really look like this, in the flesh?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  If she was telling the truth, I realized, I was a stranger in a very strange land. More must have changed in a thousand years than I could ever have anticipated. It was an uncomfortable thought — but I was Madoc Tamlin, the spiritual descendant of one man who had been chained to a rock of sacrifice to fight the six champions of an alien land and one who had come back to Earth from Faerie, in spite of all that the Queen of the Fays had done to keep him and send him to hell.

  I retreated to my chair, still moving gingerly. I sat down again, but I perched myself more stiffly and alertly than the posture I had been given when I was allowed to awake.

  “Does everybody look like you now?” I asked.

  “Only in Excelsior,” she told me. “There are a great many human races. Some still look like you.”

  I was now in a state of psychological disarray, and I had to marshal my thoughts before I could frame another question. When my kind come crashing out of denial we tend to flip to the opposite extreme. No game, I thought. All real. A thousand fucking years. Some human races still look like me. Others obviously don’t. Who did this to me? Why?

  “Where’s Damon?” I asked, a little more harshly than I intended.

  When she didn’t reply I amplified the request. “Damon Hart. Biological son of Conrad Helier, reared by his father’s accomplices in crime. Late recruit to the Hardinist Cabal, breaking his surviving foster mother’s rebellious heart. Don’t tell me he’s not in your records, alive or dead.”

  “He’s dead,” said Davida Berenike Columella, after pausing to consult her inner resources. “Everyone who was alive in your time is dead, except for a handful of individuals preserved, as you have been, in Suspended Animation. According to the available data, Damon Hart is not one of those. We can’t be absolutely sure, because there are other repositories, but all the customary evidence of death is in place.”

  That was what they had said about Conrad Helier. Even Damon had believed it, until he learned better. I knew how easily “all the customary evidence of death” could be faked, even in the twenty-second century, because it was a business I’d dabbled in more than once — but that wasn’t the issue my distraught mind seized upon.

  “Everyone?” I echoed. “What about the escalator to emortality? We all thought that the lucky ones, at least, would get to live forever.”

  “The technologies of longevity available in your time were inadequate,” she informed me, flatly. “Nanotechnological repair and somatic rejuvenation had inbuilt limitations. The first true technologies of emortality didn’t come into use until the twenty-fifth century. They required the extensive genetic engineering of fertilized egg cells, so the first emortal human species had to be born to that condition. The oldest currently living individuals who have been continuously active were born in the two thousand four hundred and eighties.”

  “When did Damon die?” I asked, not bothering to add the word “allegedly.”

  She obviously had a covert data feed whispering incessantly into her inner ear. “In the year two thousand five hundred and two,” was the prompt answer.

  Three hundred years! He’d left me where I was for three hundred years of his own protracted lifetime. Why hadn’t he used his authority and influence to get me out? What on Earth had I done to deserve that kind of neglect?

  “All I ever did was hack into a few data stores,” I said, my voice no more than a whisper. “Steal a little information here, delete a little there, reconstruct a little here and there. I was working for the government, for God’s sake. The real government, not the elected one. I really am innocent, by any reasonable standard. I never killed anyone, or even hurt anyone much who wasn’t asking for it.”

  “Can you be certain of that?” my interlocutor asked, still probing.

  “Yes,” I said. “I am certain. I’ve lost a few memories. I can’t remember August twenty-two zero-two, let alone September. In June and July I was working for Damon, with Damon. Not just working — playing too. Having a good time. Planning a little espionage. Nothing heavy, just run-of-the-mill low-level skulduggery. We weren’t even outlaws by then. We were on the inside, rubbing shoulders with the elite, playing in the big boys’ game, by their rules. I never killed anybody. I would remember. I remember what I did, what I was. Even if they’d added in every last one of all the things I could have been charged with in my youth but never was — all the burglary, the smuggling, the dealing, the tax evasion, the so-called pornography, and all the rest of that penny-ante crap — they couldn’t have put me away for more than twenty years. Why on Earth would they throw away the fucking key?”

  Davida Berenike Columella didn’t know the answer. Either she figured that I needed a little time to come to terms with it or she was avidly watching for signs of mental breakdown, because she kept quiet, letting me run with the train of thought.

  I realized that there was a certain contradiction in what I’d said. Damon and I had been playing the big boys’ game, by their rules. We’d been playing in a pool where “a little espionage” and “low-level skulduggery” were no longer a matter for slapped wrists. We’d been playing in a pool where people took their secrets seriously.

  Even so, a thousand years was an extremely long time to be hidden away. Why hadn’t Damon been able to find me? Why hadn’t he been able to get me out?

  Suddenly, the stars outside the fake window didn’t seem so bright or so lordly. They seemed confused, lost in a darkness that they couldn’t quite obliterate even though they were massed in their trillions.

  I knew that they weren’t all stars. Some of them were galaxies. The universe was full of galaxies, a hundred billion or more, but it was also full of darkness and emptiness.

  Raw space, so the theorists of my time had said, was full of seething potentials — particulate eddies beyond the surface of the void, ever-ready to erupt into tangibility — but the sum of all that infinite activity was nothing.

  And wherever the potential was manifest — wherever there was something instead of nothing — there was still, if measured on any scale responsible to the true size of the universe, almost nothing.

  I existed. At least, I had to suppose so. But so what?

  I felt that I had an obligation to pull myself together. After all, I seemed to be the first ambassador from the world of mortal men ever to be entertained in Excelsior.

  “Why ninety-nine?” I asked, as calmly as I could. “Why did you start the calendar over?”

  “The Christian Era had ended long before that system of counting was abandoned,” she said. “On Earth, the new calendar was belatedly introduced after the Great North American Basalt Flow — year one was the first year of the so-called Gaean Restoration. The microworlds in Earth orbit adopted the convention because we all share the same year. Different systems apply on the inner worlds and the outer satellites, and in the more distant microworld clusters.”

  I saw a chance to rack up a few more marks in the big test by guessing what the “Great North American Basalt Flow” must have been.

  “So the Yellowstone Supervolcano finally blew up again,” I said. “Every umpteen million years, regular as clockwork.” It would have been even more impressive if I’d been able to remember the exact term of its periodicity.

  “The magma chamber that ruptured was located in the former Yellowstone National Park in the United States of North America,” she confirmed, after a brief fact-
check pause. “It had been closely monitored ever since the Coral Sea disaster of 2542, and was thought to be under control. The recriminations and accusations are still unsettled, at least on Earth itself.”

  That was an intriguing remark. “You mean somebody let it off deliberately?” I asked. “Somebody blew up North America and plunged the whole planet into nuclear winter?”

  That required a slightly longer data feed, perhaps to translate the term “nuclear winter.” Eventually, she said: “The majority opinion is that the eruption was an accident caused by a malfunction of the systems securing the magma chamber. There are, however, factions which believe that the systems were sabotaged — they differ in their hypotheses as to who might have been responsible and why.”

  I didn’t need a data feed to interpret “Gaean Restoration” for me. A major basalt flow must have begun with an explosive release of gas and ash into the air, fouling the atmosphere for years. The ecosphere must have suffered a tremendous die-back — but when the dust had settled and the poison gases had been neutralized, the human survivors must have set about the business of regenerating the ecosphere according to their own schemes. This time, unlike any other in the deep prehistory of the Earth, there must have been human survivors, but millions or billions must have died. Millions or billions of emortals.

  “Did the Hardinist Cabal still own the planet when it happened?” I asked.

  She didn’t procrastinate over the precise significance of the term, although she took the trouble to substitute one of her own. “The people who styled themselves Stewards of the Earth had already lost some of their former power and influence,” she reported, “and the fact that the planet’s balance of trade with the outer system was in irredeemable deficit implied that their decline was irreversible. They probably remain privately convinced that the eruption was sabotage directed at them, perhaps by Earthbound rebels and perhaps by outer system radicals, although their public position is that it was an unfortunate accident. Certain other factions have suggested that the Stewards were the responsible party, and that the effective destruction of the ecosphere enabled them to reestablish a local economic hegemony that they would soon have lost. That seems unlikely, given that the disaster brought about a dramatic increase in imports from the outer system.”