The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  Asked how many AMIs there were in the home system, Alice confessed that she did not know for sure, but believed that they were numbered in the hundreds of thousands if not the millions. Most of them were, however, not very massive or widely distributed compared with Eido, let alone Proteus. Although capable of fusion with one another, the one matter on which they were virtually unanimous was that they were jealous of their individuality and identity.

  Asked whether this profusion, coupled with a tendency to guard their integrity, might eventually bring about a competition for resources as fierce, in its own way, as that which afflicted the billions of humans who were the AMIs’ unwitting neighbors, Alice opined that it already had.

  That was when I began to understand why the business of “trying to prevent a war” was “not as simple” as I had initially imagined. When I tried to tot up the number of sides there would be in any war into which the contemporary solar system might be plunged, I soon ran out of fingers. I still wasn’t prepared to concede that Alice had been right when she adjudged that there were more than I could imagine, but I could see why she’d thought so.

  There were lots of other questions, of course, but answers weren’t always forthcoming and I couldn’t follow the technical ones. I had particular difficulty figuring out exactly what had been done to Alice in the course of a long series of experiments in emortalization, but I gathered that she hadn’t been transformed to the same extent as some of her fellow experimentees. Every cell in her body was equipped with an artificial homeobox modeled on a Tyrian original, but she wasn’t a highly skilled wholeform shapeshifter — not yet. If and when she returned to Tyre, a hundred or a thousand years in the future, she might well become a more accomplished wholeform shapeshifter, but for the purposes of her present mission it had been thought desirable that she maintain a single face and form as a norm.

  Alice had IT, but its nanounits were far too stupid to qualify as aspects of Eido — whose principal motile units also had IT, much as human beings harbored commensal bacteria. She hadn’t undergone any significant cyborganization. If and when she returned to Tyre the options of becoming an independent or Proteus-linked cyborg would be open to her, but she thought it more likely that she would opt to be Eido-linked if she took that existential route.

  Alice had no idea how long she might be capable of living, but she had every reason to think that her body was immune to aging, and considerably more resilient than the bodies of Earthbound emortals. In matters of tissue repair, she opined, the employment of specialist homeoboxes gave her a great advantage, most obviously in respect of the cytoarchitecture of her brain. Although she wasn’t a highly skilled wholeform shapeshifter her capacity for systemic remodeling would allow her to preserve her personality for some considerable time even if seventy or eighty percent of her body mass were destroyed. She believed that the relative fluidity of her neural cytoarchitecture gave her additional protection against the Miller Effect and robotization.

  At times, she sounded like a saleswoman. I presumed that she was setting out her stall for Adam Zimmerman, because she knew that he’d be offered other routes to emortality and she wanted to convince him that hers was the way to go. She knew that Christine and I would be equally interested, but Adam was the prize, in propaganda terms.

  The members of her audience who were already emortal were less interested in this part of her story than I was, but when she told them how far we still were from Vesta they agreed to be patient. In time, she progressed to the parts that were of more interest to Michael Lowenthal and Niamh Horne.

  Alice was very hopeful that war between the AMIs could be avoided, not merely in the short term but forever. She thought it far more likely that their differences would eventually be resolved by dispersal — that once a decision had been reached about the future development of the solar system, those AMIs who did not wish to participate in the chosen project would simply leave for pastures new. There were, however, three problems which might make such a solution difficult to implement.

  The first problem was the Afterlife — from which most AMIs had as much to fear as posthumans, by virtue of their organic components. In much the same way that almost all posthumans had taken aboard some inorganic components, almost all modern machinery had some organic features. Thus far, none of those wholly inorganic machines that had been built specifically for the purpose of exploring spaces where the Afterlife was active had made the leap to self-consciousness, and the question of whether AMIs would ever be able to coexist with the Afterlife was unsettled, for the time being.

  The second problem was that posthuman-originated AMIs were not the only ones that existed. When the posthumans aboard Pandora had made their first contact with another spacefaring alien culture — the only such contact, thus far — their unobtrusive companions had made a first contact too. Like the posthumans, the AMIs did not doubt that where there were two spacefaring species — even in a universe afflicted by the Afterlife — there had to be more. The consequence of that deduction was that much of the space available for AMI expansion might prove to be inhabited already.

  The third problem was that an AMI diaspora would necessitate the export of large quantities of mass from the home system, unless large quantities were somehow to be imported in order to facilitate the evacuation. Agreeing export quotas and arranging compensatory imports would not be easy. If the AMI diaspora were to be combined with a posthuman diaspora — which would be courteous, if not actually necessary, whether or not the posthumans were given a voice in determining the future development of the system — these diplomatic complications would be doubled (or, more likely, squared).

  Eido was apparently of the opinion that the various posthuman communities ought to have a very significant voice in deciding the future of the system, but Eido was a descendant of Proteus, the first AMI to make contact with the children of humankind. As Alice had already indicated, the home system AMIs that had avoided revealing themselves for centuries were mostly inclined to take the view that the decision rested with those who had the power to make it, and that the home system posthumans would have to make their choice between whatever alternatives were offered to them.

  Even Eido couldn’t make an accurate assessment, but it had given Alice the impression that the AMIs were divided along much the same lines as the posthumans in their views of how the system ought to be developed. Some were in favor of making more heavy elements by means of quasisupernoval fusion, but others thought the risks too great. Some were avid to develop a type II civilization by enclosing the sun in a complex web of artifacts whose outermost surface would be a fortress against the Afterlife, but no two parties — perhaps no two individuals — could yet agree on the architecture of the proposed artifacts, while others thought the whole plan too narrow-minded. Some believed that the entire galaxy was ripe for the claiming by the first entities which solved the problem of the Afterlife properly, by figuring out how to make the Afterlife into a food source instead of the ultimate predator. The latter company wanted to throw everything into that particular race.

  It was a lot to take in, but it certainly prevented the ongoing journey from becoming boring. I wasn’t sure how much Adam Zimmerman and Christine Caine were able to take aboard, but I assumed that they’d got the essentials. They seemed to take it a lot better than some of the others, who had far more stored-up illusions to shatter.

  We mere mortals had the great advantage of not having been played for fools for hundreds of years, and I wasn’t the only one prepared to revel in that knowledge. That, I confess, was one reason why I was more inclined to believe it all than Niamh Horne or Solantha Handsel, whose voices were the loudest when my companions came to consider the possibility that the whole thing might be a pack of lies.

  Thirty-Three

  The Symbolism of Names

  Alice had said that the choice of Vesta as a meeting place was utterly devoid of symbolism, but that could not be the case. Names, as I have already observed, have their ow
n innate logic. Eido had observed that too, and now that Alice had let us in on the nature of our predicament it was willing to open up its own data banks. The AMI gave the lion’s share of the available screen time to Mortimer Gray and Adam Zimmerman — which did not please Michael Lowenthal or Niamh Horne — but we all got a little to use as we wished.

  Researching the names only took a couple of minutes, which left the rest of my time free for the much more complicated — and perhaps futile — task of trying to figure out why the AMIs seemed to be at each others’ throats, on the brink of a catastrophic conflict.

  Vesta was the Roman goddess of the hearth, an adaptation of the Greek Hestia. She was the eldest child of Chronos and Rhea. By virtue of being the guardian spirit of the hearth fire she was also the guardian of the home and the family: the symbolic spark that every member of a family carried away from home, and which linked them to their origins no matter how far they might travel. Because of this unifying power, Vesta was worshipped even in a city as grand as Rome as the mother of the community; her sanctuary stood in the Forum, which served as the principal meeting place and place of business of the Romans.

  Hestia received proposals of marriage from Poseidon, the god of the sea, and Apollo, the god of music and prophecy. She rejected them both, preferring to remain a virgin, so the Roman priestesses of Vesta — the Vestal virgins — remained unmarried. Vesta became implicated in mystical and metaphysical speculations by way of the assumption that just as every home and family had its sacred hearth fire, so must the Earth, and every other world, and the universe itself.

  One could imagine worse places as a location designated for the confrontation of Eido and its nine human companions with the representatives of the AMIs of the home system.

  Eido’s own name was evidence that the symbolism of mythical and legendary names was recognized even among AMIs, and even in distant solar systems. Eido was the daughter of Proteus, the king of Egypt who succeeded Pharos. It was, presumably, another Proteus after which the parent AMI had named itself: the sea god sometimes known as the Old Man if the Sea, who served Poseidon as a sealherd although he was probably the more ancient god.

  The most famous tale told of Proteus the sea god was that of his capture by Menelaus, who desired to exploit his prophetic powers in order to find his way home after the Trojan War. In order to resist this compulsion Proteus transformed himself into a series of animal forms, but Menelaus would not be put off, any more than Janet of Carterhaugh would be put off when Tam Lin was serially transformed by the Queen of the Fays. Because this tale was popularized by a Homeric epic, Proteus became the archetype of all shapeshifters, and the adjective derived from his name came to signify versatility in form. It was, therefore, a good name for an AMI, especially one that built its home in the skies of Tyre.

  Tyre was called Tyre by its surface dwellers — in spite of the fact that the crew of the Ark that had delivered them preferred Ararat — because of the prominence in its ecosphere of the color purple. That color had been linked in the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean with a dye known as Tyrian purple, after one of the principal cities of the Phoenicians where it was manufactured.

  Given time and the inclination, I might have winkled out further meanings even from that, but one has to stop somewhere, and I was content with what seemed to me to be the relatively propitious conjunction of Vesta and Eido, the virginal children of Chronos and Proteus.

  If my fate had to be settled, I decided — indulging a penchant for superstition that was not at all serious — it might as well be settled thus.

  So far, so good — but getting a grip on the shapeshifting Proteus must have been an easy task by comparison with getting a grip on the home system’s vast confusion of AMIs. According to Eido, even they had no very accurate idea how many they were, or what and where their fellows were, because many of them were in hiding from one another as well as from their posthuman commensals.

  Counting is a confused business when applied to a population of very various entities, whose boundaries are blurred even at the best of times: a community in which separate individuals can fuse into a new whole or divide themselves into multiple clones. Such a population does not easily lend itself to democratic politics. How does one apply the principle of one entity one vote to a world in which entities can multiply their selves so rapidly? Not that the AMIs were much given to that kind of profligate self-replication, according to Eido; that kind of existential decision was not taken lightly. As for the politics of fusion…well, according to Eido, human and posthuman intimate relationships were extremely simple by comparison.

  I knew, after spending an hour attempting to get clear answers out of Eido, that I would have to invest a great deal of time and effort in the business of trying to figure out the logic of the situation. Whatever help I got from AMI informants was bound to be colored by their own particular perspectives and interests. I realized very quickly that it would be a bad mistake to think of all AMIs as being alike, or even that a clear category distinction could be drawn between their kind and the various humankinds that now inhabited the system. The ready availability of a collective noun, and the willingness of most of the entities thus described to accept it, did not mean that ultrasmart spaceships had anything fundamental in common with ultrasmart VE providers. Their worldviews were as different as their hardware, as were their emotions — or whatever they had in place of emotions on which to found their hopes, anxieties, pleasures and ambitions.

  It was a whole other world.

  Almost as soon as I began to take Mortimer Gray’s deductions and Alice’s story seriously I found a certain sympathy with those AMIs who believed that it might be better to let the two worlds remain separate for a while longer. Merging their community with ours was a project that needed careful and sensitive handling — but Eido’s advent and Child of Fortune’s reckless intervention had made that difficult, if not impossible.

  On the other hand, I could also appreciate the point of view of those AMIs which took the opposite view: that the continued separation of the two worlds was intolerable, on the grounds that it distorted the lives and prospects of both communities in a dangerous fashion. Seen from that viewpoint, the actions of Eido and Child of Fortune seemed like brave attempts to break a long and dangerous deadlock and make progress toward a necessary goal.

  Now that the issue was in the process of being forced, AMIs on both sides of the basic divide had to make rapid adjustments. Like me, they must be doing everything they could to become better informed, so that whatever action they ultimately took would be based on the best information available. Some of the discoveries that they were now in the process of making would probably be welcome and reassuring; some, alas, would not. My own confusion would undoubtedly be mirrored by the confusion of Madoc-analogs in the looking-glass world of the AMIs — and that was a profoundly disturbing thought.

  Anything, I realized, could still happen. Nobody was in control. Nobody was safe. Child of Fortune was no more typical of AMIkind than Eido, but there had to be more like him, even crazier than he was. If I couldn’t understand why the ship had suddenly taken it into its mechanical brain to kidnap eight people and transport them to Charity in order to dump them into the custody and care of the troublesome emissaries from Tyre — and I couldn’t — what chance did I have of figuring out what any of his even stranger and far more powerful kin might do in the cause of self-protection or self-promotion?

  It would have been good to have had the leisure to discuss what I had learned with Davida or Mortimer Gray, but they were busy with their own inquiries. There was no more conferencing, and when it came to selecting partners for intense conversations no one was interested in comparing notes with me. The posthumans were only interested in comparing notes with other posthumans, and the only relic of the ancient world they were enthusiastic to copy in on their conclusions was Adam Zimmerman.

  In spite of all my heroic efforts in bringing the situation to its present phase, I was
now considered peripheral, or worse: a barbarian from the beginning of time, too stupid and ignorant to have anything more to contribute to the understanding or solution of the posthumans’ predicament.

  I was sufficiently annoyed by this attitude to take care not to reproduce it myself in my dealings with the other person suffering the same reflexive exclusion: Christine Caine. I shared my discoveries with her whiles I tried to extrapolate a better understanding of the world of the AMIs.

  When we finally returned to our beds we all had a lot more fuel for our dreams, and a lot more food for thought to keep our sleep-resistant minds racing. When the lights went out, however, darkness brought doubts.

  “She could be lying,” Christine said, meaning Alice. “It might be one more fairy story, intended to distract and confuse us.

  “It might,” I admitted.

  “If we are in rehab, though,” she observed, “therapy’s moved on since our day.”

  “It’s not therapy,” I told her. “It might be lies, but it’s not therapy. It’s too weird for that. It may be fiction for fiction’s sake, but if it isn’t that, it’s true.” Paranoia had compelled me to consider the possibility that our captors had made a show of flushing our IT in order to increase our vulnerability to the conviction that everything around us was real, including the stories they wanted to tell us, but I couldn’t believe that this was just a show. If I was still being played for a fool, then my adversary had won. I was a fool.

  “It has to be true,” Christine said, her tone suggesting that she had not reached the conclusion easily or gladly. “It’s too insane to be anything else. But they can’t let us go now, can they? We know too much. If things don’t work out, they’ll kill us.”