The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  Extreme danger! the mechanical voice said, displaying a fine flair for melodrama. All crew and passengers to emergency life support. Immediate response required. All crew and passengers to emergency life support. Extreme danger! Immediate response required.

  Nobody seemed to know which way to go. We had been shown preformed pods and generative blisters aplenty, and had stared at them with the dutiful interest expected of interested tourists, even though they looked exactly the same as the pods on Excelsior that served as transportation devices and VE immersion suits — but none of us, including Niamh Horne, knew how to find or manifest the right kind of pod, or to open it. None of us knew which way to run.

  I didn’t even know how to run, when the only thing holding me to the “floor” was the floor itself. Fortunately, the floor and the walls did know what to do. They were not only smart, but the kind of smart that didn’t need rehearsals. The real function of the mechanical voice wasn’t to urge us to action but to prepare us to be acted upon.

  The corridors, which had seemed to my ungrateful eye to be merely corridors, had abilities that might have been explained to Adam Zimmerman, but came as a complete surprise to me. I wasn’t in any state to notice exactly how they coped with the fact that we had been walking two abreast in our horribly ungainly fashion, but they sorted us out with no difficulty at all. They closed in on us, and engulfed us.

  Maybe Niamh Horne and her fellow crew members knew enough to be reflexively grateful for that, but I hadn’t been educated to their kind of world. I was terrified. I had the words extreme danger ringing in my ears, and I had no idea what form that extreme disaster might take. When the walls rushed in upon me I had no way of judging whether that might be an aspect of the danger in question rather than my salvation: a danger whose extremity would make itself manifest by crushing me to a pulp, or perhaps by asphyxiating me.

  I might have screamed — but if I had, I don’t think anyone could have heard me. I didn’t hear anyone else’s scream.

  Twenty

  Invaders from Beyond

  The impression that I was in the process of being unceremoniously killed can’t have lasted more than five or six seconds, but time really does become elastic when you’re in the grip of that kind of terror. The moments stretch as your mind tries to make the most of the little time you have left, and the terror is compounded by the tortuous strain of their extension. My IT must have been doing its best to help, but IT can only deal efficiently with the underlying physiology; consciousness remains a mystery, which works in its own strangely creative ways.

  In retrospect, I suppose I should have been glad of the terror and the way it expanded to fill the horizons of time, on the grounds that it offered further evidence that I really was alive and that I really was myself. Alas, I wasn’t capable of being grateful at the time.

  When the moment came to realize that I was actually in the process of being saved — that the walls were bearing me away to the pod where I was supposed to be, snugly and securely cocooned against any probable disaster — I was in no mental state to seize the realization. More hideous seconds had to tick by while I was lost in confusion, unable to recognize the mercy of my situation.

  Somehow, the pod didn’t feel like a pod at all. My internal organs still seemed to be jostling for position, but now it was impossible to tell whether they were still confined by my body wall. I had a peculiar sensation of having been turned inside out. It was false, but it was the kind of illusion that my clever IT couldn’t even begin to cope with.

  Subjectively speaking, it took a long time for me to reconcile myself to the fact that I wasn’t dead, or dying, or in pain, or mad…and that all I had to do to retake control of myself was to accept that I was still alive and still in the game. “In the game” was, I realized, the best way to think about my predicament. I had played my share of scary games while wearing a full-body VE suit. I had done this sort of thing for fun, and still could, if I could only calm down and go with the flow.

  It wasn’t until I finally opened my eyes that I realized that I wasn’t blind. The ship’s AI could feed information to me exactly as if I were in a VE immersion suit — which, in essence, I was. Even then, it wasn’t until I had been looking out into a visual field filled with mile-high letters saying

  PLEASE REMAIN CALM for at least three minutes that I remembered that I could still interact with the pod. I didn’t have to settle for the default setting.

  “What’s happening?” I demanded, as soon as I figured out that I could make demands and get answers.

  The answer I got wasn’t reassuring, but it was an answer.

  “The ship is under attack,” the voice of Child of Fortune’s AI autopilot told me. It wasn’t shouting now, but its slightly breathless timbre seemed perfectly appropriate to the gravity of the news.

  “By whom?” I demanded, incredulously.

  “I do not recognize the attacking vessels,” the AI told me.

  It took a couple of seconds for the implications of that statement to sink in. Child of Fortune was a state-of-the-art ship, if not quite the pride of the Saturnian fleet then not so far behind. It had to be programmed to recognize any spaceship built or employed within the solar system.

  What the AI was telling me, indirectly, was that we were being attacked by aliens. Aliens from God-only-knew-where were trying to murder Adam Zimmerman. And me. Not to mention Niamh Horne, Christine Caine, Mortimer Gray, Michael Lowenthal, Michael Lowenthal’s bodyguard…

  That was when it first occurred to me that the AI might be lying. I was, after all, in a VE suit, prey to any manufactured illusion the AI cared to feed me. I wasn’t even completely sure that I had been in meatspace before the melodrama had got under way, and given that this was melodrama through and through, the hypothesis that it was all fake couldn’t be ignored.

  I tried to think it through.

  If the AI was lying about the attack, then what I was involved in was a kidnapping. The ship had been taken over, and whoever had taken control of it was kidnapping Adam Zimmerman. And me. Not to mention…except, of course, that if the ship’s AI had been programmed to do all this, then it must be Niamh Horne who was kidnapping Adam Zimmerman. And me. Not to mention Michael Lowenthal, etc, etc.

  Or must it?

  I didn’t like Niamh Horne, but the scenario that gave her the role of evil mastermind seemed, nevertheless, to be a much less worrying alternative than the ones in which we really were being attacked by aliens from God-only-knew-where, or hijacked by persons unknown. It was bad enough to have to worry about the posthuman races going to war with one another, without factoring hostile aliens into the picture, and the probability that anyone else could have masterminded the hijack of Niamh Horne’s ship seemed slim. In which case, Niamh Horne surely had to be the one who was playing us all for fools…

  Nothing dispels terror more efficiently than a conviction that one has been taken for a mug. Emotional arousal is negotiable, and fear can be readily transmuted into anger.

  “You lying bastard,” I said to the AI. “Tell me the truth. Where are we going? Why? In my day, one of the major driving forces behind the evolution of the artificial idiots the people called sloths into the artificial geniuses that people called silvers was the demand for sims that could answer the phone, filter the desirable calls from all the silvery junk, and reply adequately to those callers who only required simple responses. It would be an oversimplification to say that the principal functions of everyday AIs were telling lies and spotting lies, but it wouldn’t be too far off the truth. Ergo, I knew better than to imagine, even for a moment, that telling an AI to tell me the truth would be a viable command — but I was under stress, and we all do stupid things when we’re under stress. Even AIs do stupid things when they’re under stress.

  “We are heading away from the sun,” the AI told me. “Should we contrive to evade the continuing pursuit, I shall seek guidance as to an appropriate destination. For the time being, I am making every effort t
o avoid being destroyed or captured.”

  I had no alternative but to think: What if it is true?

  “Show me,” I demanded — but the supersilver came over all pedantic and didn’t respond until I made myself clearer. “Show me the ships that are attacking us,” I said, glad to be able to be businesslike.

  The virtual space surrounding my gently cradled head was abruptly filled with starlight, but the controlling intelligence moved swiftly to dim the background glare and pick out four objects that might otherwise have faded into it. The viewpoint zoomed in, tacitly admitting that the image I’d be getting had been heavily processed in the interests of clarity.

  One of the objects was easily recognizable as Excelsior. The other three seemed, at first glance, to be more closely akin to the microworld than to the Titanian ship. Unlike the vessel I was on, whose furled “wings” had linked it in my imagination to a seabird, the things that were pursuing us looked more like a small school of squid, all jetting along with their bunched tentacles trailing behind.

  They were shooting at us, and hitting us almost every time. At least, they seemed to be shooting at us, the way spaceships in VE space operas that were dated even in my day shot at their targets. I knew that the lines the AI was tracing across the image were diagrammatic representations, and that they would have to be diagrammatic representations even if there really were ships pursuing us, shooting all the while. It had always been the requirements of melodrama rather than respect for realism that had forced tape programmers to depict space combat in terms of beams of colored light, but there was no other way for real spaceships to represent real combat in a readily perceptible fashion. Given that there was nothing out there that a naked human eye was actually capable of seeing, the only way for Child of Fortune to answer my request was to feed me a fiction, together with the insistence that it was as accurate a representation of the reality as it could contrive.

  There were four aliens now, then five…and they kept on coming.

  They seemed to be popping out of nowhere — but that too was a necessary fiction. Even if the AI were trying its damnedest to show me the truth, the most it could do was register presence as soon as it became detectable. If the alien ships — or could they possibly be creatures? — really were popping out of some kind of hyperspace, this was all that the AI could show me.

  If, on the other hand, the aliens were merely coming to the attention of Child of Fortune’s sensors, having moved unobtrusively by perfectly orthodox means to where they were first apprehended, all the AI could show me was what it was showing me. There was no way to determine where they were actually coming from, or how they were avoiding detection until they became manifest.

  The aliens could certainly move. I had no idea how fast we were going, but I figured that we had to be accelerating at one gee or more. We were already way past the velocity at which we could make sharp turns, no matter how expert our cocoons might be at preventing momentum from crushing us to pulp — but the attackers didn’t seem to be laboring under that kind of inconvenience. They were hurling themselves all over the sky, like icons in a combat game.

  It was all absurd, and plainly so.

  It was absurd to suppose that a fleet of alien space fighters was bursting out of some kind of space warp. It was absurd to suppose that they were shooting at us, and hitting us, without actually smashing us into little bits of molten slag. It was absurd to suppose that aliens, or anybody else, would go to such lengths merely to harass or destroy a man whose messianic status was entirely a matter of human estimation. Or me. Or even Michael Lowenthal and Niamh Horne.

  But melodrama has its own attractions, its own button-pushing power over those emotions that even the cleverest IT can’t muffle.

  It’s not just us, I thought, as more squiddy things popped into existence, swarming across the whole vast starfield. It’s the whole damn system. We just happened to be out here. They’re invading the whole solar system. They’re going to annihilate the entire population. It’s finally happened. After a thousand years of cultivating a false sense of security, it’s finally happened, in the very same week that I finally get out of jail.

  It was the last — and, admittedly, least — improbability that derailed the train of thought.

  It’s an illusion, I told myself. It isn’t even a good illusion. It’s a practical joke. Someone’s playing with me, treating me with contempt. Niamh Horne’s playing me for a sucker, and she’s playing Adam Zimmerman too. But I don’t believe it, and neither will he, if he’s got any sense.

  I thought I owed it to myself not to be taken in. I owed it to myself as a man of the twenty-second century and a designer of virtual experiences not to be a gullible fool. Adam Zimmerman had grown up in the twentieth century, when TV was flat, and came in a box. If all of this had been set up to fool someone, he was the one, and he was the one on whom it might just work — but I had higher standards.

  It’s all fake, I told myself, sternly. That much is definite.

  The hope that it was all an illusion, all a third-rate VE space opera, was further encouraged by the fact that I couldn’t feel any effects of the shots that were supposedly striking home against the hull of the Titanian ship.

  I suspected that I ought not to read too much into that item of negative evidence. I knew that it was always the requirements of melodrama rather than respect for realism that had led the programmers of old to make the bridgeheads of hypothetical spaceships shudder and lurch when the vessels were supposedly hit by exotic ammunition — but I allowed myself to be encouraged anyway. I needed every scrap of “proof” I could find to bolster my conviction that I was not an easy man to take for a ride.

  I watched the formations of the attacking entities shift and change, looking more and more like cyborg octopodes built for exotic combat, but I couldn’t tell whether the changes were a result of their maneuvers or a mere matter of altered perspective caused by Child of Fortune’s own evasive action. I wasn’t aware of any momentum effects in my own body, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything either, given that the elastic inner surface of the pod was so firmly bonded to my own smartsuit. There was no way to tell how fast the Titanian ship was moving…if it was moving at all.

  “Are we shooting back?” I asked the AI.

  “No,” said the mechanical voice, obviously not feeling the least need to apologize or explain.

  “Can we get away from them?” I asked.

  “No,” was the discomfiting reply.

  “Will they destroy us?”

  I took the consequent silence as an I don’t know, but the image suddenly shifted as if to supply an answer of sorts. I saw that out of the entire alien school, only four of the attackers now seemed to be concentrating all their attentions on us — but the fourth was not like the other three.

  If the three I’d already seen were run-of-the-mill calamari, the fourth was a record-breaking giant. In the absence of any benchmarks, and knowing full well that the AI’s external eyes were using all kinds of vision-enhancing tricks even if they were being scrupulously honest, it was difficult to judge exactly how gigantic it might be, but appearances suggested that this was the mother squid, the queen of all the other squids — and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the reason my own dutiful mothership wasn’t pitching and shuddering under the impact of unfriendly fire was that we weren’t actually being shot at at all, in the strictest sense of the term.

  We were being pushed.

  We were, I suddenly realized, being herded toward the giant — and the giant was already opening her vast tentacles, spreading them like the petals of a world-sized flower to expose an avid maw.

  But it had to be fake — didn’t it?

  It was all third-rate space opera, as cartoonish as the garden on Excelsior…or the continents and cities of the Gaean restoration.

  It’s just a show, I told myself, insistently, as Child of Fortune hurtled helplessly into that awesome pit.It’s all just pretend, to cover up Niamh Horne’s
snatch plan, to put one over on poor Adam Zimmerman. But that short-lived conviction had already begun to fade into uncertainty again — and the fear that had always been fear, even while I had insisted on construing it as ire, was working away at the base of my brain.

  Some scenarios, I thought, are surely so preposterous that no one would bother to pretend them, even before an audience as ill prepared for contemporary life as Adam Zimmerman. Some lies are so unbelievable that their very absurdity defies scepticism.

  While I was trying to weigh that paradox, the Titanian ship was falling into that huge dark mouth. Child of Fortune still urged on by the three spitting babies, which still drifted into the periphery of the visual field on occasion, their whips of virtual light licking out again and again.

  The tentacles within the array were moving, groping as if in parody of the microworld’s similarly hungry mouth-parts.

  If this is real, I thought, it has nothing to do with Adam Zimmerman. If this is real, it has to be the start of something much bigger and much weirder. Humankind won’t have to wait for the Afterlife; something else is taking over.

  There was no way to tell how big that mouth was. For all I knew, it could swallow planets as easily as spaceships. It seemed incredible — but I couldn’t be sure that my standards of credibility were still applicable.

  “Are we shooting back yet?” I asked.

  “I am unarmed,” said the AI, in a sudden burst of confidentiality. I could almost have imagined that it was as over-awed by possibility as I was, and that intimidation was making it plaintive.

  “Is there nothing you can do?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” it admitted.

  “It’s a show, isn’t it?” I said, firmly. “It’s just a silly melodrama, intended to confuse us. Where are we going, really? Titan? Earth?”

  I knew that the AI wasn’t going to admit anything, no matter how accurate my guesses were, but I was hoping that it might somehow give itself away.

  In the event, all it said was: “I don’t know.”