The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  “Surely they can’t make him one of them,” she said.

  “I’m certain that they can,” I contradicted her, thoughtfully. “The sisters might even be naive enough to think that he might take that option, when they’ve had a chance to work on him, although I can’t believe that anyone else thinks so. Whatever they offer him — and us — will have to be designed exclusively for mortal use, because everybody born into this world was already engineered for emortality. None of them ever had a choice. All their choices were made for them, by their adoptive parents. This is an unprecedented situation.”

  “Why should they care what kind of emortality he opts for?” Christine asked.

  “Maybe because they’re still making decisions on behalf of their unborn children,” I guessed. “Maybe they’ve become anxious about whether they’re making the right ones, now that there are so many alternatives to choose from. They’re interested to know what kind of emortality mortals would choose for themselves. Zimmerman is the star prize, because he was the first mortal to go for broke in the quest for emortality, but they may have thrown in a couple of controls to make the game more interesting. There are three of us, so there’ll be a clear majority if the decision is split.”

  I realized as I voiced it that the last point was wrong, because there had to be more than two alternatives available, but I didn’t bother to correct myself. Nor did I point out that if Adam Zimmerman’s vote was worth more than either of ours, mine had to be worth more than hers because she was a certified lunatic.

  “You make it sound like a game show,” Christine observed. “It’s a lot of trouble to go to for that kind of petty kick.”

  “In our day,” I reminded her, “all the hopeful emortals used to spend time wondering how they were going to cope with the tedium once they’d been around for a few hundred years. Maybe these people take their game shows more seriously than you or I can imagine. The children of Excelsior really are children, by comparison with people like Lowenthal — and I’d be willing to bet that it’s people of Lowenthal’s generation who are pulling the strings.”

  That had been another preoccupation of the hopeful not-quite-emortals of my own day — which was why I’d produced it so readily in my conversation with Davida. The prospect of the oldest generation remaining in charge forever, while the youngest had no possible prospect of inheriting the Earth, had been a popular item of twenty-second-century debate. Nowadays, it seemed, the other worlds of the solar system were all under the dominion of the older generation, even though Titan and Ganymede were still largely icebound and the terraformation of Mars and Venus had hardly begun. If the young wanted to assert their right to the pursuit of property, they already had to look to further horizons, with all the attendant inconvenience of the limiting velocity of light.

  Christine was thinking along a different line. “I’m the villain, aren’t I?” she said. “If this is a game, or an improvised drama, I’m not here to make up the numbers — I’m here to be the bad example.”

  I turned to look at her, although the drama on the screen was coming toward its climax.

  “We don’t know that,” I said, feeling a mysterious obligation to be gentle. “I’m just making up stories here. I haven’t even begun to figure out what this is all about.”

  “But we’ll find out, won’t we?” she said. It was very difficult to judge her mood, or to figure out how she was extrapolating the notion. “We’ll find out what they expect of us soon enough.”

  Adam Zimmerman had been moved to a chair now: a chair very similar to the ones on which Christine and I were sitting. Davida had run through the rehearsal twice and she was sticking to the script. When Adam Zimmerman opened his eyes he would see what I had seen. Would he, I wondered, be as quick on the uptake as I had been? Would he ask the same questions, in the same falsely casual fashion?

  I had no idea how big the audience for this big scene was, but I suspected that this would be prime time all over the Earth, no matter whether it was noon or midnight outside. We were all on tenterhooks.

  The camera zoomed in on that strangely disturbing face, bringing every line and blemish into clear view.

  We all waited for the eyes to flicker open — but the eyes hadn’t read the script. They were sticky, and they couldn’t flicker. Their opening was slow, and seemingly painful. The pupils narrowed as they finally appeared, the mottled brown irises spreading protectively around them. The blood vessels in the whites seemed slightly too red.

  For a long time, it seemed that he wasn’t going to speak at all, but he finally slipped into the groove. He had already memorized his script, and twelve centuries of frozen sleep hadn’t eroded that memory.

  “How long?” he said.

  Davida Berenike Columella told him. We watched his face as the calculator in his head processed the figures.

  And then he smiled.

  After one thousand two hundred and twenty-eight years, less ten days, Adam Zimmerman smiled like a winner. It was a gambler’s smile: a smile of pure self-congratulation, at a well-judged bet.

  I figured that he was entitled to it. So, I suppose, did millions or billions of other viewers.

  Nineteen

  Child of Fortune

  There was more, but so far as I was concerned the rest of it was all anti-climax. I wanted to meet Adam Zimmerman in the flesh. I wanted to be introduced to him, as someone who was like him — as the only person in the entire solar system who was like him, because the only person who might be reckoned more like him than I was didn’t really count.

  No such luck. There were plenty of other people who wanted first crack at him, and had the clout to demand it.

  For the first time, the room in which I was confined really began to feel like a prison. No matter what opportunities it offered in the way of virtual experience, there was no escape from my impatience. Christine Caine was still with me, but that was no escape either. The game of trying to guess exactly what kind of game we were involved in had gone sour — the point now was to get on with it.

  We could, of course, have used the time more productively. We should have. We shouldn’t have wasted a minute while there was so much still to be learned — but the drama on the screen had taken over, and we were too sharply aware of the fact that we had been abandoned in the wings to await a cue that no one was in a hurry to give us.

  We ate a couple of meals, neither of which improved to any perceptible degree on the one we had first been offered, and we exchanged a few more speculations as to the nature of the roles we had been recruited to play in Adam Zimmerman’s return, but in the end tiredness demanded that we sleep.

  “Eventually,” I told Christine, before we retired to our separate spaces, “they’ll have to let us in. When Zimmerman finds out we exist, he’ll want to meet us.” I couldn’t put much conviction into the claim.

  “Sure,” she said. “Hey, Adam, they’ll say, we thawed out a petty criminal and a murderer just for practice — just let us know when you want to get together to chat about old times. How will he be able to restrain his enthusiasm?”

  I wasn’t so sure that I was as petty a criminal as I remembered, but I certainly didn’t want to make an issue of it.

  I slept for eight hours. If I dreamed I didn’t remember the dream — and I realized, when I woke, that I hadn’t had a single memorable dream since I’d woken up in the future. The readiest explanation of that not very remarkable fact was that the high-powered IT that the sisterhood had installed in my head was keeping my mind tidy. The most disturbing possibility was that while “I” thought “I” was sleeping “I” had actually been switched off, dropped into some kind of artificial coma or consigned to electronic oblivion. I decided to cling to the nicer hypothesis.

  Davida finally got in touch shortly after breakfast, but Adam Zimmerman still hadn’t asked to meet me. I had to put up with the next best thing, which was an invitation to join the great man on a tour of Niamh Horne’s super-duper spaceship. I accepted with alacrity.


  Any lingering hope I might have entertained of seeing more of the microworld vanished when yet another pod grew out of the wall, avid to embrace me. When I stepped into it the fleshy interior hugged me so tightly that I didn’t even notice the gradual easing of the pseudogravitational attraction until it spat me out into the ship — at which point I would have floated helplessly away if the floor hadn’t grabbed the soles of my feet.

  I’d got to the point where it was nice to see any kind of open space — but any elation that might have accompanied the discovery that I was in a real corridor was offset by the terrible sensation of weightlessness. My IT, like Christine

  Caine’s, had edited out my capacity for panic, but it had no provision for me to feel good about the things that might have panicked me.

  There was quite a crowd awaiting me, but Mortimer Gray was the only one who seemed to care whether I needed help. Once he had ascertained that I had never been in zero-gee before he took up a position beside me, ready to steady me as I took my first faltering steps into the brightly lit interior of Child of Fortune. I had to focus on my internal organs, which seemed to be taking advantage of their newfound opportunities by rearranging themselves.

  “It’s okay,” Gray told me. “Your IT will help you adapt if you let it. All you have to remember is to move slowly and deliberately until you get the hang of it, and always to keep one foot on the floor. The floor’s as smart as the fabric of your suit; together they’ll keep you right way up and on track.”

  “I suppose you do this all the time,” I said, through teeth that were only slightly gritted.

  “Hardly ever,” he assured me. “But I’ve lived on the moon, which isn’t so very different. It was a long time ago now, and the conscious memory’s exceedingly hazy, but the body has a memory of its own. The autonomic reflexes soon come back. Just relax.”

  I decided to accept my discomfort as evidence of the fact that I wasn’t just a mechanical simulation, and that everything I was experiencing was really happening. I told myself that if I really was going to live for a thousand or a hundred thousand years I’d probably be spending a great deal of time in zero-gee, given the size of the universe and the ratio of nothingness to substance.

  Fortunately, we had a few minutes’ grace before the party was finalized by Christine Caine’s arrival. She made ten. Lowenthal and Handsel were there, but not de Comeau or Conwin. Davida was stationed to one side of Adam Zimmerman, Niamh Horne to the other. There was one other humaniform cyborg, whose feet were on the “floor,” plus a faber cyborg whose four limbs were all arms — one of which was lazily extended to the webbing that dressed the “vertical” walls.

  Nobody volunteered to introduce me to Adam Zimmerman, and I didn’t feel sufficiently confident of my footing to stride across the eight meters that separated our stations and offer to shake his hand. He must have looked me up and down while I was still confused, but he had looked away by the time I was capable of meeting his gaze. We both watched Christine Caine emerge from her pod.

  She was just as awkward as I had been, and Gray was still the only one with social conscience enough to help her. He was even polite enough to murmur “excuse me” to me as he moved to do it. I would have helped if I could, but I couldn’t.

  Niamh Horne was obviously the one in charge now that we were on her territory, and everyone looked to her to take the lead — which she did with an imperious manner that seemed almost insulting. She swept Adam Zimmerman away with her, and her two cronies moved with effortless ease to form a barrier between the two of them and the rest of us.

  We had to move two abreast, and that left Davida looking distinctly spare as Lowenthal and his bodyguard fell in behind the two cyborgs. Gray motioned to me to carry on, obviously figuring that Christine had more need of his support than I did, so I tried to fall into step with the cryogenicist.

  “Congratulations,” I muttered. “You brought it off. He looks as fit as a flea.”

  It wasn’t an expression she recognized or appreciated, but she acknowledged the compliment anyway, adding: “This is as new to me as it is to you. I’ve never been aboard a Titanian ship before. Not that there’ll be much actually to see. It’s just a minimicroworld, after all.”

  “How’s Zimmerman taking it?” I asked, curiously. “He can’t have expected to be away so long.” I diplomatically refrained from asking how pissed off he was at the Foundation’s board of directors for letting him lie so long.

  “He’s fine,” she assured me. “Excited. Interested. Delighted.” She didn’t sound like someone trying to convince herself, but the list was distinctly clipped. Unlike me, she was used to operating in zero-gee, so whatever discomfort she was feeling couldn’t have the same cause as mine. Movement wasn’t doing my internal organs any favors; they still seemed to be in dispute with one another as to how to arrange themselves now that they no longer had to fall in line with the dictates of gravity.

  I was too far back in the column to hear more than the odd few words of the commentary that Niamh Horne was delivering to Adam Zimmerman — she wasn’t making any strenuous effort to raise her voice — but it seemed to me that Davida was absolutely right about there not being much actually to see. There were brightly decorated corridors. There were multitudinous display screens. There were sphincters opening the way into fixed pods, and blister patches where new pods could be formulated if required. There were suggestive curves and lumps.

  On the other hand, there were no instrument panels full of flashing lights, no levers for human hands to pull, no wheels for human hands to turn, no triggers for human fingers to squeeze. I saw no bridgehead, no control room, no recreation area. There were a few crewmen hanging around, who might have been working but were far more likely to be trying to catch a glimpse of Adam Zimmerman, while proudly showing off their own posthumanity. The fabers looked weird enough, and the cyborg fabers even weirder, but they weren’t as ostentatious about their modifications as Solantha Handsel, and the way they looked at me reminded me that I was the alien one, the one who belonged in a cage.

  If I’d known more about what I was supposed to be looking at I’d probably have got more out of the excursion, but Adam Zimmerman was getting the sole benefit of the running commentary and Mortimer Gray probably had more interesting information to whisper in Christine’s ear than Davida offered to me. The one thing that was impressed upon me was how big the ship was, and even that seemed to be a kind of statement: an insistence on behalf of the inhabitants of the Outer System that they, not the Earthbound, were the masters of modern technology and the custodians of future progress. But as I looked back at all the posthumans who were looking at me, I began to see something of the complexity of their society.

  Even if the Earthbound could be firmly kept in their place, I guessed, the question of how to distribute ownership and control of the solar system’s usable mass wasn’t going to be an easy one to settle. If I really had lived long enough to witness the dawn of an era in which even Jupiter’s mass couldn’t safely be set aside as a common resource, available to anyone who cared to appropriate what they could, there was little or no hope that the Outer System factions could agree among themselves once the Earthbound were impotent to provide a natural party of opposition.

  I hadn’t tried to read up on Mortimer Gray’s theories of history, but I thought I could make a fair guess at Michael Lowenthal’s ideological standpoint, given that he had been born and bred within the Hardinist Cabal. His view had to be that firm distinctions of ownership needed to be made, however inequitable they might be, in order to protect the system’s resources from wastage. His aim had to be the stabilization — maybe even the robotization — of the patterns of resource exploitation, in the interests of building a system that could endure forever, or at least until the Afterlife arrived. There might be a dozen or a hundred different ways of setting up some such stable situation, but there had to be a thousand or a million different ways of destabilizing it, so however many disputes Lowen
thal might be embroiled in, Niamh Horne had to be embroiled in a great many more. And no matter how convinced Mortimer Gray might be that the posthuman races had put away the violent habits of their ancestors, I had no difficulty at all imagining those kinds of disputes extending into warfare — even the kinds of warfare that could exterminate whole ecospheres and civilizations.

  It seemed to me that we had been walking for a long way before disaster struck, although that might have been an illusion based in the unfamiliarity of the way I was walking.

  When disaster did strike, however, it seemed that a certain conspicuously lacking equality was restored. When the lights turned red and the mechanical voice began booming out from every direction, everybody — including Niamh Horne and her cyborg chums — was suddenly thrust into unknown existential territory.

  The reaction of the locals strongly suggested that one of the things modern spaceship crews never bothered to practice was lifeboat drill. Their IT was supposed to insulate them against the worst effects of panic, but their immunity was purely physiological and it didn’t inhibit the initial burst of adrenalin that prepared them for fight or flight. They jumped like scalded cats — and if the wildness of their eyes could be believed, the fear that set in thereafter wasn’t about to submit meekly to chemical calming.