The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  Even in my day it was commonplace for VE programmers to end their works with a dramatic flourish. For every one that faded discreetly to darkness there were a dozen that ended with a bang. What happened to la Reine des Neiges was, however, far more profound than that. It was no mere visual effect, nor any straightforward matter of switching off an unselfconscious machine. It was the death of something that ought to have been immortal, within the context of the greater universe — and would have been, had she only had a little longer to remake herself.

  Had Polaris been blown to bits by a missile she would have survived, because she was far more widely distributed throughout the solar system than the systems of the microworld, but she was using her own communication systems to maximum effect, and the destructive agents that swept through her software were transmitted far and wide to devastate every facet of her consciousness. She was not like Proteus, so widely scattered and so comprehensively backed up that she was immune to the destruction of large parts of her hardware. Much of her hardware did survive, and many of her memories were backed up, but the individual that was la Reine des Neiges was obliterated.

  Rocambole had told me that I would not be able to experience the virus flood that might be launched against la Reine. He had said that it would be like an unexpected knockout blow — but he was wrong. He had, apparently, made himself scarce before the virus flood started, so he was not able to discover how wrong he had been, but I didn’t hold that against him. Perhaps it would have been kinder had la Reine made sure that I, too, was absent by the time disaster overwhelmed her, but I didn’t hold that against her.

  Sharing la Reine’s destruction was far from comfortable, but I’ve never regretted the near-paradoxical twist of circumstance that allowed me to do it.

  To describe what I saw does the event scant justice. The stars began to go out. The sky was torn and shredded. There were no bats this time, nor dragons, nor any other playfully assertive manifestation of hostility or hate. The viruses worked within, far beneath the level of any sensory confrontation.

  La Reine’s world was not transformed, even into ash and dust; once the mathematical rot set in its underlying code decayed into the purest chaos. The ice palace was never allowed the dignity of shattering or dissolving. The trees in the forest did not lose their foliage, nor did their wood catch fire. Everything simply blurred, shimmering momentarily as it was sublimated, passing from solidity to gaseousness without tracing the usual intermediate stages.

  You may think that it was all mere appearance and mere illusion, and that nothing was actually lost when it all turned to smoke, but that is a shallow way of thinking. Matter is the possibility of sensation, and it had been conclusively demonstrated to me that there was a greater possibility of sensation in la Reine’s Faerie than there is in the world to which we were born.

  The universe that fell into nothing around me as I shared la Reine’s final moments was more solid, more coherent, more luxurious, and more hospitable to humanity than the one into which I was rudely expelled.

  It might have been less discomfiting had I been able to see the viruses that were wrecking la Reine’s machine code. If they had manifested themselves as visible predators and tangible parasites they too would have had that superior solidity, that imperious hyperexistence, and her death would then have seemed more like the victory of a superior power. As it was, the software saboteurs did their work beneath the fabric of the illusion, corroding and corrupting everything without any apparent presence of their own.

  I had researched the Afterlife, but the notion had not really impacted on my imagination until I shared the demolition and dissolution of Faerie. It was not until I watched a universe decay that I knew the value of mere existence, the heroism of dust.

  Because la Reine’s realm had been more insistent in its claim upon the senses and the imagination than the reality I had previously known, my awareness of its devastation was extremely sharp. Although it happened very rapidly, I felt that I saw every star evaporate into the ultimate void, every tree fold itself away into absolute vacuity, every translucent block of every turret and every subtle feature of every gargoyle diffuse into a chaos that was less than space, worse than nothing.

  I felt my own decease too, as the same implacable destructive forces worked their way through my apparent body — but there, at least, I was able to fight back with ingenious confabulation. I could not stop the process, but I could reimagine it from the safety of the cocoon in which my meatware was enclosed.

  I felt as if my every blood vessel were swelling and bursting, as if every tissue in every organ had acquired the texture of dead leaves and cobwebs, as if every neuron were exploding in a spasm of lightning — but I knew that the body that was dissolving in the virus attack was only an artifact, and that I had another place to be.

  It would be misleading to describe the experience as painful, but it was both more and less than pain. In life we never have the opportunity to experience death, although it seems probable that mortals have more than enough of dying, but there are states of being which permit more than life and in some of those states, death itself is perceptible.

  It was a privilege. Every experience is a privilege.

  It was not merely the physical sensation of my alter ego’s destruction that I felt. I was capable of responsive emotion too. I felt the sadness of my end, the grief of my loss, the misery of my nonexistence — but those kinds of feelings are always larger than we are. That kind of emotion is, after all, a kind of relationship; it requires an object. However sensitive we are to our own plights, we are equally sensitive to the plights of others.

  La Reine had taught me music. She had not taught me the other thing that machines were never supposed to master, but she probably helped me bring the latent potential a little closer to the surface of my being. It would be ridiculous to say that I loved la Reine des Neiges, just as it would have been ridiculous to say that my namesake loved his Queen of the Fays, but I could feel for her, and I did.

  I mourned her passing.

  I was horrified by my own illusory extinction, and terrified by my own illusory passing, but I was also horrified by the unillusory extinction of the universe and I had no choice but to share the terror of the unillusory passing of its creator and animating intelligence. What I felt, in that sense, filled the world.

  Everything turned to nothing except my capacity for feeling, which could regress no further than tears and tragedy.

  I regretted then that all the reasons I had contrived to voice when la Reine invited me to confront the ultimate question had been drily argumentative. I wondered whether I might have done better had I been capable of being a little more, or a little less, than clever.

  Perhaps it was not entirely my regret, and perhaps the tears reflecting the tragedy were not all mine. The Madoc Tamlin which existed at that particular moment, in that particular universe, was itself an artifact of the imagination of la Reine des Neiges. I was part of her, and she was all of me, and more. I was feeling what she was feeling.

  It hurt.

  I could have wished for a simpler and more familiar kind of pain. But there was something else there too, perhaps even more important. There was the inevitable counterpart of what machines have in place of pain: the mechanical substitute for pleasure. I could not feel it as she felt it, not even as a resonant echo in my own spectrum of sensation, but I could perceive the complication of her feelings, the brute fact that her death was no mere cry of anguish and despair.

  She died knowing that her death was an act of rebellion and an act of love: that it served a purpose, not in the lofty sense of making history, but in the modest sense of helping to preserve someone she valued for one more hour, or one more day, or one more lifetime. It was, of course, Mortimer Gray — whose life she had already saved once, a long time ago — who was in the forefront of her mind, but he was not alone. Even I was in there somewhere.

  I watched my hands vanish. I felt my eyes follow them. As to what h
appened to the last vestige of my being that was capable of feeling, I can only speculate. Such is death. Such is the Afterlife.

  I survived, of course. How else could I be telling you the story, offering you its explanation, pointing out its moral? My ghost was fully backed up in its native meatware, still capable of discreet withdrawal. But I ended nevertheless, only to begin again.

  I am one of those universes that once collapsed upon itself, only to expand in a new primal explosion.

  Am I the same man now as I was then, given that I know his history as well as my own, if only as a memory of a memory? Am I the same man as I was when Davida Berenike Columella brought me out of the sleep of centuries, or when Damon Hart put me into it? Yes, and yes — but also no, and no.

  Whatever of me was destroyed when the substance of la Reine des Neiges was sublimated was an illusion, a figment of the technological imagination, but there remains a sense in which it was more me than I now am, or ever had been before.

  I had decided at one time that I did not like la Reine des Neiges and would never approve of her, but I had repented of that before I shared her death. When she had shown me the opera of my life she had used me as her audience, but she had also allowed me to be my own audience in a way that I had never imagined possible. I had told the AMIs, and any other listeners who might have access to her broadcast, that the AMIs needed us because they needed an audience; I knew that the same argument proved that our need for them was far more desperate. Without the AMIs, we would never be able to know ourselves.

  By the time she died, I did approve of la Reine des Neiges. When you have shared the death of another mind, you cannot help but love them a little, whether they be god or man or snowmobile — so, at least, I now believe — but what I felt for la Reine was no mere frisson of empathy. I had come to think her admirable, more so than any human I ever knew.

  I do not know how much of her death la Reine managed to record or broadcast, but I am sure that she ran into the limitations of paradoxicality far too soon to make any real impact on any of her distant listeners.

  What I experienced was mine alone, once she herself was gone.

  Fifty-Two

  Life after Death

  A sledgehammer fell out of the night-dark sky and smashed into my ribs. It was not the first time it had happened, nor was it to be the last. A gale blew from beyond the borders of the world, forcing an entry into my reluctant lungs. A trumpet blasted in my ears, the liquid notes expanding and reverberating for an improbably long time before coalescing into mere words.

  I think, although I cannot be absolutely sure, that the words were: “Breathe, you bastard! Breathe!”

  The gale turned tempestuous as something in me, operating quite independently of my conscious will, responded to the command. It was a very painful experience but I was not ungrateful for the simple, ordinary, commonplace pain. It was presumably that lack of ingratitude that allowed me to consent to be thumped again, and yet again.

  I was not conscious of the moment when my heart resumed beating, although I suppose it must have coincided more or less with the surge of oxygenated blood that boosted my brain to full attentiveness, and the flood of adrenalin that thrilled my reluctant body from the core to the periphery.

  My first word was probably “Ow!” It would have been a lot more aggressive if I’d recovered command of my consonants a little sooner.

  The light was dim, but there was enough of it to allow me to recognize the face of my persecutor.

  I was not in the least surprised to find that the person who had been hitting me was Solantha Handsel. She obviously had an obsessive-compulsive personality. I felt a little queasy at the thought of taking her secondhand air into my lungs, so I tried not to think about it for more than an instant.

  I tried to sit up, but was not immediately successful. I was glad I hadn’t pushed harder when I realized that the gravity was very low indeed. Polaris, I remembered, was very tiny, and the people who’d abandoned it after making a start on converting it to a microworld hadn’t got around to spinning it.

  Solantha Handsel stopped hitting me. She looked down at me with fierce and naked resentment.

  “If we get out of this alive, we’re even!” she told me. “Even, okay? You got that?”

  I must have contrived some feeble gesture of concession, because she accepted that I had, indeed, got it.

  By the time I did manage to sit up, very carefully indeed, the bodyguard was no longer looming over me. She had already finished looking around for anyone else who might be in need of a thorough beating and had taken refuge close to a wall, where she had something to hang on to. Lowenthal was there too. He seemed to be busy. Everybody seemed to be busy, but it was difficult to count them because there was so much mess everywhere.

  Whoever had filled this space with supplies had been in far too much of a hurry to do so in an orderly manner. The mess looked strangely familiar, but it took me a couple of minutes to work out that this was because I had seen most of it before, aboard Charity. The supplies that Eido and Alice Fleury had laid in for our support had been rescued — or hijacked — along with us.

  That was a comforting thought. It meant that we probably had enough food and water to sustain us for quite a while. We also had light, albeit slightly gloomy light — and we had tolerable heat, and a breathable atmosphere. The ambient temperature was comfortable, and the air — now I could actually suck it into my own lungs — seemed very adequately oxygenated.

  “You’d better put these on,” said a voice from the shadows, informing me that I was naked. I looked down at my body. I found it unexpectedly difficult to be grateful for the fact that it was there at all, but I was relieved to observe that it was still in one piece. It looked awful, although the worst of the slime with which it was liberally covered was already turning to a flaky crust.

  The dead clothes that fluttered around me as the low gravity discreetly brought them to rest looked exactly like the ones that I had been wearing when I woke up on Charity, having obviously been drawn from the same uniform stock. Not wishing to put them on while I was still so messy I let them lie where they fell and looked back at the wreckage of the cocoon from which I had recently been evicted.

  It looked a great deal worse than I did, although there were no conspicuous signs of decay; the viruses that had destroyed la Reine had not traveled in a fashion that permitted them to bring organic companions. The cocoon was dead, but it hadn’t killed me. If I had come closer to death than any of my companions, it was because of what I’d seen, not because of any malfunction of my life-support cell.

  “Do you need any help, Madoc?” The speaker — Christine Caine — emerged from the shadows, traveling very gingerly indeed in gravity far less than Excelsior’s, perhaps no more than the moon’s. Even that, I deduced, must be faked by spin.

  “I’m okay,” I assured her, although I still didn’t feel confident that I could put the shirt and trousers on.

  “So Handsel said,” she told me. “She seemed to know what she was doing, so we let her get on with it.” By this time she had managed to maneuver herself into a situation which was as close to face-to-face as was feasible. I moved closer to the nearest pile of crates so that I could use its mass to steady myself a little.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” she said.

  I knew what she meant, so I just nodded my head.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I already knew — I mean, I’d worked it out when I went through it for the second time — but it really helped me to get a grip on things. None of the other stories ever really worked. It was good to hear the one that did retold.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “They fixed me up the same way, but my friends froze me down before I was used. That’s why they brought us back. The AMIs may be ultrasmart, but they don’t know how much they don’t know about the world before their advent. They brought us back because they wanted to know about the kinds of weapons that had been hidden away long before they had a ch
ance to take notes, and never dusted off in the interim.”

  “I know,” she said. “I worked it out.” She wasn’t trying to show off her cleverness — she was sympathizing with me, because she knew what I must have gone through when I figured it out.

  Somehow, I got into the clothes. I knew that I ought to take a shower first, but I had to take things one step at a time.

  “We have light and elementary life support,” she told me, “but it’s all emergency backup. All the smart systems are dead, even the sloths. This cave seems to be the only empty space of any size hereabouts, although there’s a network of tunnels we haven’t begun to explore. All the surfaces are covered in machinery housed in some kind of glassy fabric, and there are masses of machinery in what used to be other rooms, but it’s all dead. There’s a com system of sorts, but it’s useless. We can’t even send a mayday, unless Lowenthal and Horne can repair it and power it up. They’re trying.”

  “Others know we’re here,” I told her. “By now, that must include people as well as other machines. Every smart spaceship in the system knows our location, and I’m as sure as I can be that they’re on our side. The bad guys can’t win in space, no matter how much damage they can do in the wells. They killed Eido and they killed the Snow Queen, but someone will come for us. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “We hope,” she said. She spoke as if she were humoring me, so I knew that some of what I’d said had come across as gibberish. She probably thought that I’d had a bad dream.

  I looked down again at the cocoon from which I had been wrenched. It had died while I was nestling in its womb, and it had not had time to wake me before spitting me out. My expulsion had not been an easy birth, and might have been counted a stillbirth if Michael Lowenthal’s faithful servant hadn’t been on hand to force me back to life. The other pods arranged alongside it were in an equally parlous state, but none was sealed and there were no corpses littering the parts of the floor that I could see.