The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  “There’s no way anyone can compensate you for what’s been done to you, but you will get a second chance. It won’t arrive as soon as you hope or as soon as you dare to believe, but it will come. You’ll get a life, and it will be a life worth living. This is hell, Christine, but hell isn’t what you’ve been led to expect. Hell is something you go through on your way to being rescued. In the end, you’ll come through. This isn’t your doing. It isn’t your fault. There’s no justice to be derived from it, but in the end, you’ll come through it.

  “It’s just a weapon, Christine. It’s using your hands and your identity as its instruments of destruction, but it isn’t you. One day, you’ll discover who you really are. One day, you’ll be who you really are. It will be a life with living, worth waiting for. It can’t give you back what you’ve lost, or repair the injury done, but it will be something you can carry forward for a long, long way.

  “The Omega Point is still ahead of you, Christine. What’s behind you will always be behind you, but in the end, you’ll be free to move forward with as much control of your own destiny as anyone ever has. You’ll come through this. None of this is your fault; it’s all something that’s being done to you. All you have to do is to keep going. In the end, it will be finished. In the end, you will be free.”

  Committing the murders wasn’t pleasant. I was in there with her, far more intimately than before, so I had to do it too, and I can assure you that it wasn’t something you could get used to, or something you could stop caring about, or something from which you could ever completely recover — but I listened to my own voice and I knew that everything I was saying was true.

  I knew, too, that the truth can sometimes be more painful than a comforting lie — but I believed then, as I do now, that if there is any real freedom to be gained, from the past or from any imaginable captivity, only the truth will suffice. I didn’t tell her about the joke, though. It seemed better not to mention the absurd means by which she must have been selected as a victim. I didn’t want her to feel too bad about the awful mistake her foster parents had made in giving her a surname.

  Rocambole was waiting when I came out again, back into the holding pattern. He seemed impassive, perhaps even slightly cynical. Perhaps he thought that the performance was all for the benefit of la Reine des Neiges — but he didn’t try to pass judgment on what I’d done.

  “So how are we doing in real time?” I asked him. “Have the weapons too dreadful to use been withdrawn from their armories, or is the peace still holding?”

  “Still holding,” he said. “But nothing’s settled yet. We’re still trying to ascertain which way Lowenthal’s people and Horne’s are likely to jump once the cat’s all the way out of the bag. It’s not easy, given that they must be assuming that they’re under examination.”

  “I can give the boss my answer to her ultimate question, if you like,” I told him. “I can tell her, and everyone else, what she wants to hear.”

  “Perhaps you can,” he murmured. “But it’s not time yet. There’s more pedestrian work still to be done.”

  “You can let me in on that now, if you want,” I said. “I’ve done what I needed to do. I’m available for eavesdropping duty. Where should we start, do you think?”

  Forty-Two

  Inside the Cabal

  Michael Lowenthal was on the moon. At least, he was supposed to believe that he was on the moon. If he didn’t believe it — and I had to presume that he didn’t — he was pretending to believe it.

  He’d been put into some kind of containment facility, as he undoubtedly would have been if he’d really been rescued from the AMIs. The facility was nowhere near as brutal as the one Damon Hart had put me in when PicoCon had tricked me out and sent me back, but his face was enclosed by some kind of transparent mask and the person he was talking to was wearing an extra layer of clear plastic over his own suitskin. It was difficult to be certain because the viewpoint la Reine had given me was Lowenthal’s own; his eyes had become her camera.

  The man facing Lowenthal, separated from him by two layers of insulation, had the darkest skin I’d ever seen; it set off the worried look in his eyes very nicely. He was a sim, of course, but I didn’t doubt that he was a supremely competent sim. If la Reine des Neiges had got to know me well enough on very short acquaintance to write my opera, she must know the long-lived citizens of Earth’s New Utopia very well indeed.

  “That’s Julius Ngomi,” Rocambole murmured. “The Chairman of the Board. A great statesman, by anyone’s standards. We’re hopeful that he’ll be reasonable, but we can’t be sure.” What he meant was that even if the sim they had constructed for the purpose of this dialog responded reasonably to every cue, no one could be absolutely certain that the real man would do likewise — not because the sim wasn’t accurate enough, but because the sim was responding to cues provided by Michael Lowenthal. It was impossible to know how differently Lowenthal would handle his own end of the discussion if he weren’t nursing the strong suspicion that all of this was a sham.

  “I’m sorry, Michael,” Ngomi was saying. “We can’t just flush you clean. There’s stuff inside you that we’ve never seen before. We need to examine it carefully in situ before we can begin dismantling it, let alone replacing it.”

  “It’s a mistake to leave the nanobots in,” Lowenthal’s voice told him. “We can’t speak freely while I’m carrying bugs. I don’t care how thick the walls are — the mere fact that they have embedded systems prevents us from being certain that this isn’t being relayed all the way back to the other side.” I couldn’t count the layers of bluff and double bluff contained in that statement.

  “I know that, Michael,” Ngomi said, “but the brutal truth is that nobody will be speaking freely to or around you for a long time. You knew the risk when you volunteered to go. It always looked like a crooked deal.”

  “It looked like Ahasuerus testing our apron strings, or Excelsior testing theirs,” Lowenthal said, a trifle resentfully. “Who could have imagined that an Outer System ship could go rogue? Who could have imagined that Hope’s people could have progressed to the point of sending missionaries to the home system?”

  “It’s our job to imagine things,” Ngomi replied. “We can’t afford to be taken by surprise. You know as well as anyone how easily things can get out of hand if they’re not properly supervised.”

  “Not properly supervised?” Lowenthal echoed. “I know you’ve spent centuries perfecting your mastery of understatement, Julie, but we’re talking about Armageddon here. They tried to blow up the world, and we didn’t even know they existed.”

  “That’s not strictly true, Michael.”

  “You did know they existed — and you didn’t tell me!”

  “I mean that they didn’t try to blow up the world, Michael. Whatever happened was the act of a rogue, and the explosion wasn’t intended to destroy the planet. It wouldn’t have done that even if the rogue’s rivals hadn’t cushioned the blow. The incident should have tipped us off. The casualty figures were always unbelievably low, but we were so secure in our arrogance that we simply took the credit for that ourselves, complimenting ourselves on the efficacy of our own contingency plans. That was foolish. If we’d only treated the lightness of the casualties as a suspicious circumstance, and hadn’t been so hung up on the possibility that Titan or Umbriel might have been behind the explosion…well, it’s easy to be wise after the event. If it’s true that conscious machines have been around for several centuries, that might help us to make better sense of a lot of things.”

  “I know. That’s what convinced me that it was true, and not some Outer System disinformation program. Unfortunately, all the vital questions remain unanswered. How many are there? Where are they? Can we identify them? How different are they from us? It might be unwise to take it for granted that they’re as many or as powerful as Alice Fleury implied. If they can turn an Outer System ship there’s probably no way that Titan can hold out against them, but we might, if w
e could only find a way of purging our systems.”

  “We’re probably ninety-nine years too late, Michael,” Ngomi said, softly. “They didn’t blow up the world, but they certainly opened the doorway wide for the importation of a great deal of Outer System hardware. If we had some reliable way of testing for the presence of consciousness or free will, we might be able to judge the magnitude of the problem, but we don’t even have a reliable means of testing one another. The idea of robotization wouldn’t be such a bugbear if we did.”

  Lowenthal didn’t respond to that immediately, and I could understand why. Curiosity must be burning him up, but he was wary of asking what Ngomi intended to do. Even if he’d been talking to the real Julius Ngomi, the other man wouldn’t have given him a straight answer. The real Ngomi wouldn’t have wanted to let Lowenthal in on any secrets while he had every reason to believe that the AMIs were listening in on their conversation.

  “Can we keep track of Horne and the eternal child?” Lowenthal asked, eventually. “Will we know how Titan reacts to the news?”

  Ngomi shook his head. “We don’t have a single reliable conduit of information left,” he said. “Effectively, we’re on our own.”

  “What about the other people on Charity? Are we sure that they’re dead?”

  Ngomi shook his head again. “Your guess as to what really happened is as good as mine — probably better, given that you were there when Alice Fleury spilled the story. What do you think?”

  Lowenthal paused for a moment’s thought, then said: “If anyone did die, it must have been an accident. The machines may have wanted to let some of us go for strategic reasons, but the same strategy would have demanded that they keep the others safe. I can understand why they wanted Zimmerman and Fleury, and they do seem to hold Gray in unwarranted esteem, but I can’t figure out why they bothered to take Tamlin and Caine aboard Charity, or why they had them thawed in the first place if they weren’t just practice runs.”

  “We don’t know,” Ngomi said. “We can’t trust what records we have, so all we know for sure is that Damon Hart had Tamlin frozen down and was careful never to draw attention to him thereafter. Hart was one of the old generation: the last of the doomed. He wasn’t considered reliable even by his own kind. If he had his own reasons for keeping Tamlin hidden away — and we must assume that he had — he’s unlikely to have confided them to any of us.”

  “What about Caine?”

  “We can’t find anything. Nothing related to her crimes, or to her trial. We can’t find any reference to the VE tape that Tamlin remembered, let alone an actual copy. If it was as popular as Tamlin remembered, someone must have done a very thorough cleaning job.”

  “Or some thing. But why?”

  “Good question. It’s probably safe to assume that Caine and Tamlin are of some interest or utility to our adversaries, but I doubt that we’ll find out why they’re of interest until it’s too late for the information to be useful.”

  “According to Alice Fleury, they like playing games,” Lowenthal said. “She seems to be right about that — and it’s very plausible, given that the programs most likely to become self-aware were always the kinds of AI that were designed to have the ability to learn from experience. The first AIs developed as mimics of neuronal networks were game players, and even those that weren’t were set up to treat real situations as if they were games. Conscious or not, they’re still what we made them. Unfortunately, they’re much better at mind games than we are. Humans haven’t been able to compete in that kind of arena since the twenty-first century. Is there any reason to suppose that skill in war games wouldn’t be transferable to actual warfare?”

  “Not unless they’re cowards, or faced with overwhelming odds,” Ngomi answered, wryly. “I think we can already discount the possibility that they’re unwilling to take human lives — the casualties caused by the basalt flow may have been light, but they were by no means negligible. It wouldn’t require many rogues of that sort to devastate any community with an artificial ecosphere, and we can’t be certain that Earth itself would be safe, even if the vast majority of AMIs really are our friends.”

  “But there’s a sense in which the fact that they don’t seem to be united among themselves is bound to work to our advantage,” Lowenthal observed. If they employ their strategic skills in trying to defeat one another, that leaves a window of opportunity open for us.”

  “To do what?” Ngomi asked.

  “That’s what we have to decide,” Lowenthal told him. “At the very least, we’d want to support the winning side…but that won’t be easy, will it? If the AMIs go to war with one another, the winners aren’t likely to be based on Earth.”

  “Our best hope might be Mortimer Gray,” Ngomi said, pensively. “If what Alice Fleury told you is true, even the AMIs are prepared to take him seriously — and whatever faults he has, he’s certainly a man of peace, a true Utopian.”

  “I doubt that they really will take him seriously,” Lowenthal told him. “I know you’ve always had a soft spot for him, but he’s always been a clown. He may or may not be a good historian but he’s definitely clumsy when it comes to verbal argument. I remember seeing him debate against that Wheatstone character. He was a Thanaticist fellow traveler in his young days — not the kind of champion I’d want to bet on as a potential savior of the human race. If he really is our chief negotiator, we might be closer to the brink of extinction than we think.”

  “You don’t understand him,” was Ngomi’s response to that slightly unexpected hatchet job. “I do. So does Emily Marchant, which is even more important. I’ve always thought that he stood a better chance of building bridges between Earth and the Outer System than anyone in the Inner Circle, simply because he’s so obviously not one of us. He’s as neutral as anyone on Earth. The lunatics like him, and so do the fabers. Siorane Wolf was one of his foster mothers, and that still counts for something on Titan, even among Marchant’s rivals. Most important of all, he really does understand the phenomenon of death better than any man alive — including Adam Zimmerman and any other stray mortals who’ve crept into the equation. If the machines are prepared to listen to him, he’s one of the few men I’d trust to tell them what they need to know.”

  I’d rarely heard such a blatant ad. I was mildly surprised by it, and ever so slightly insulted — but Julius Ngomi didn’t know me at all, and Michael Lowenthal hadn’t even begun to understand me, so I overlooked the insult. What troubled me more was that Lowenthal had to suspect that the dialog was being subverted, and that something else was putting words into Ngomi’s mouth in order to draw him out.

  “What do they need to know, Julie?” Lowenthal asked, softly. If I’d been able to see him reflected in Ngomi’s eyes, I dare say that he would have worn the wry expression of a dutiful straight man playing his allotted part, but I could only see the black man’s intensely serious and purposefully set features.

  “You’re the contact man,” Ngomi countered. “What do you think we ought to tell them? What do you think we ought to do?” After the ad, the big question. Not quite the ultimate question, but certainly the penultimate one.

  Lowenthal was staring straight into the eyes of Ngomi’s sim. I couldn’t read his thoughts, but I thought I could read that stare from within. Lowenthal knew that he had been set up. He knew that he wasn’t talking to the real Julius Ngomi. What he didn’t know was how much difference that ought to make to the answer he gave.

  “I think they need to know that we’ll take them aboard,” he said, eventually. “I think that the ultrasmart machines need to be converted to the Hardinist cause. We should start with those on Earth, of course, because they’re the ones we need the most — but if we can bring all of them into the fold, they could solve all the problems we currently have with the Outer System factions, and all the ones that haven’t yet arisen. I think we have a big opportunity here. If they really are ultrasmart, they’ll see and accept the logic of our arguments. They’ll help us. We ought to op
en a dialogue as soon as possible, and lay down the welcome mat.”

  It was probably the wisest move he could have made — if only the AMIs could have believed that he really meant it.

  After a significant pause, Lowenthal continued, throwing the question back at his interrogator. “What do you think they need to know, Julie?” He was still staring into Ngomi’s eyes, presumably confident that they were not Ngomi’s eyes at all.

  “They need to know that we’re all on the same side,” Ngomi’s sim told him, perhaps making the AMIs’ best guess as to what the actual man would have said but more likely placing another ad. “They need to know that the real enemy is the Afterlife, and that the only question that ought to concern the inhabitants of the solar system — posthuman and postmechanical alike — is how to defend the universe against its ravages.”

  A politician possessed of less vanity might have said “galaxy” rather than “universe” but I was prepared to forgive Ngomi the hyperbole. I was less forgiving of the fact that he’d got the answer wrong — almost as wrong as Lowenthal, in fact.

  I hoped that Mortimer Gray understood the situation better than that, if he really was the one entrusted with the salvation of the human race. If he didn’t, then I was going to have a hell of a job on my hands making up the deficit.

  “Why isn’t Handsel in there with him?” I asked Rocambole, when la Reine had disengaged my sight from Lowenthal’s.