The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  If appearances could be trusted, that thought disturbed and distressed her more than any she’d so far come across. Her gaze flickered as her pale blue eyes looked toward the window, then up at the ceiling and round the walls, then back at me.

  “Shit,” she murmured. Then she composed herself again. “Lousy view,” she remarked.

  “It was supposed to be a slice of home,” I said. “It’s long gone — blown to smithereens, so they say.”

  “The whole Earth?”

  “Just America — but the whole ecosphere had a catastrophic fit and had to be regenerated.”

  She didn’t seem to think that the destruction of America was an issue worth pursuing. “Who’s they, exactly?” she asked.

  I told myself that the fact she was taking everything so calmly was a compliment to the IT the microworlders had installed in her brain — but I knew that if that was true for her it ought to have been true for me, too. I wasn’t taking everything calmly. My tranquilizing IT obviously wasn’t programmed to kick in until I got badly steamed up; a certain amount of inner turmoil was permitted, presumably because the people observing us found it interesting.

  “You’ll see them soon enough,” I said. “I ought to warn you that they’re very weird. Apparently, there are lots of people around who look pretty much like you or me, but there are lots who don’t. It so happens that this particular microworld is run by people who don’t.”

  “So what do they look like?”

  “Children. Little girls. They’re genetically engineered for a particular kind of emortality — programmed to stop growing and maturing at nine or ten, before puberty sets in. I assume that their brains keep changing as they learn. That’s probably why they do it. They must be hoping to preserve their brains in a better-than-adult state.”

  “Neoteny,” she said.

  I was somewhat surprised that she knew the word. One tends to think of crazy serial killers as undereducated individuals. “That’s right,” I conceded. “We’re neotenic apes, sort of, so I guess they figured that neotenic people were the next evolutionary step forward. If you think that’s weird, wait till you see pictures of fabers and cyborganizers.”

  “But there are still people like us around?”

  “People who look like us,” I corrected her. “Engineered for emortality, and lots of other cute tricks. We’ll have visitors of that kind in a couple of days. There’s a spaceship en route from Earth, and another heading in from the Jovian moons, although the people it’s carrying are mostly Titanians. They’re coming to welcome Zimmerman, of course, but they can hardly refuse us invitations to the party. There’s a historian with the Earth delegation, apparently, who’s as keen to talk to us as he is to pay his respects to Zimmerman. There’s also a UN rep, who probably answers to the Secret Masters as well as the not-so-secret ones. You don’t have to worry about that, but I might. I used to work for the organization.”

  “The megamafia?”

  “No, the real organization. I was instrumental in putting their brand on a few mavericks — including the Ahasuerus Foundation, whose corporate descendants include our present hosts. I helped to stitch up Conrad Helier too.”

  “The man who saved the world,” she said, stressing the difference between the reputation that Conrad Helier had enjoyed in her time and the reputation that Adam Zimmerman had had.

  “One of the men who made sure that the world needed his kind of saving,” I corrected her, drily. “His record became a great deal more controversial once the whole truth came out — or as much of it as ever did come out. His sainthood never quite recovered from the tarnishing effect of the revelation that he helped start the great plague as well as delivering us from its effects. Not that he ever went on trial, of course, but he had to pretend to be dead to make certain he’d avoid it. You and I were products of an era of dire moral murkiness. Today is very different, so they say. But they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

  “But we’ve done our time,” she said, letting a little anxiety show. “The sheet’s clean now.”

  “I doubt that it’ll ever be clean,” I told her, with more bitterness than brutality. “We’re museum pieces now, and it won’t be easy for us to escape the burden of our rap sheets. They’ve already offered to put me back in SusAn any time I want to go.”

  She actually laughed at that. “Do you?” she asked, plainly unable to believe that I might. It was another sign of an implicit mental kinship I was both anxious and slightly reluctant to acknowledge.

  “No,” I said. “But the offer conjured up some bizarre prospects. Maybe we could make a career of hopping through the future at thousand year intervals, popping out every now and again to give our remoter descendants a fascinating glimpse of the bad old days.”

  “We?” she queried.

  “Not necessarily together,” I said.

  “But it could get lonely otherwise,” she pointed out. “Unless this is the start of a new craze.”

  The thought that it might get lonely if we didn’t stick together had occurred to me. That was one of the reasons why I was here, talking her through the awakening. I hoped that Adam Zimmerman might feel the same way, but I wasn’t prepared to bank on it.

  On the other hand, the thought that we might be the cutting edge of a new craze had occurred to me too. I hadn’t yet managed to ascertain how many other refugees from the twenty-second century might be lurking in freezers, but I knew that there must be others. The eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano might have wreaked havoc with any that had been stored on Earth, but there had to be more mortal bodies in the store from which we’d been selected as test subjects.

  For the moment, though, Christine Caine was the only link I had to the world that had shaped me. Murderer or not, she was the closest thing to a friend I was likely to find in the Counter-Earth Cluster.

  “Wherever we go, and whatever we do,” I told her, soberly, “we’ll be freaks. Our world is gone, Christine. Our species too, all but a few frozen specimens.”

  “Good riddance,” she said. “Maybe you really didn’t do anything to justify putting you away, Madoc Tamlin, but I’m already well used to being a freak. Better here and now than there and then. Maybe we should take the offer to go time-hopping, though. If they can fix us up to last the whole trip, maybe we could go all the way to the Omega Point — assuming we’re not already there.”

  She was full of surprises. First neoteny, now the Omega Point. I realized that she was testing me, in case I was stupid. I was here to soften her introduction to the all-but-unthinkable, and she was trying the limits of my ability to cope.

  I should have laughed, but I didn’t. I thought hard, knowing that I had to get ahead of her if I were to maintain the advantage to which my years and my intellect entitled me.

  After all, I thought, if I couldn’t even help my hosts deal with Christine Caine, what hope had I of persuading them that they needed me to deal with Adam Zimmerman?

  Seven

  The Omega Intelligence

  Until Christine Caine mentioned the Omega Point, I hadn’t given very much thought to the question of when and where I might be if I wasn’t when and where I seemed to be. Once she had mentioned it, I realized that I’d taken it for granted that the more probable alternative was that I was much closer to home than I appeared to be. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that I might be much farther away.

  The idea that someone was messing with my head had automatically translated itself into the idea that someone akin to the nanotech buccaneers of PicoCon was messing with my head, feeding me a weird science fiction script while I was still in my own historical backyard. The possibility remained, however, that instead of things really being less weird than they seemed, they might actually be even weirder than they seemed.

  The idea of the Omega Point had already gone through several different versions before I was born, but the basic proposition was that somewhen in the very distant future the gradual spread of organic and inorganic intell
igence throughout the universe would have produced some kind of cosmic mind. It was, I guess, an extrapolation of Voltaire’s remark that if God didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent Him.

  The Omega Point was the point at which the Absent Creator would finally emerge from the evolutionary climax community of life and intelligence — at which point, philosophers desperate for a God-substitute were wont to claim, the Creator in question would naturally set out to do all the godly things that all the old imaginary gods had been prevented from doing by the inconvenience of their nonexistence. What else, after all, could the Omega Intelligence be interested in, except for omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence? And how else could it serve these ends but by recreating, reexamining, and correcting its own history — a process whose side-effects would inevitably include the resurrection of the entire human race, albeit virtually, and their situation in an appropriate kind of Heaven?

  Personally, I had never believed a word of it, but I had lived in a world in which religions far less decorous had been clinging to existence like stubborn limpets, using any and every imaginative instrument to avoid recognizing their absurdity, redundancy, and incapacity to resist extinction.

  The only thing fairly certain about the future evolution of intelligence, it had always seemed to me — if one assumed that intelligence had any future at all — was that something, somewhere, and somewhen, would try to become an Omega Intelligence, or at least to pretend that it was one.

  In which case, I thought, after talking to Christine Caine, it might be a mistake to think that the kind of illusion I was lost in was a kind I could easily understand.

  If my second lease of life turned out to be a sham, generated by a clever combination of IT and some kind of body suit, its actual temporal location could as easily be long after 3263 as long before. And if I had no body at all, but was in fact the software reconstruction of what some artificial superintelligence thought human beings might have been like, my actual temporal location might be more likely to be long after 3263 than before.

  Christine Caine was right, though. Even if my current temporal location did turn out to be 3263, or year 99 of the newest New Era, and even if I did have my old body back again, only slightly worn away by more than a thousand years in a freezer, I was obviously capable of escaping the prison of time again and again and again. If I wasn’t at the Omega Point yet, I could legitimately regard myself as one step removed from square one, embarked upon the Omega Expedition.

  In other words, although I might be temporarily locked in my room, I wasn’t locked into a particular era in the history of the universe. Nobody was. Emortality plus Suspended Animation equalled freedom. To be or not to be was no longer the only choice available to the children of humankind; the real choice now was when to be, or when to aim for.

  Wait until Adam Zimmerman hears that one, I thought. When he put himself away, the only thing on his mind was not dying. Now, he’s going to have to come to terms with the next existential question but one. He’s going to have to decide what he’s going to do with his emortality.

  And it wasn’t just Adam Zimmerman who had to do that, I realized.

  Everybody did.

  In the new world into which I’d now been delivered, everybody already had, although every single one of them was still entitled to further changes of mind. I hadn’t made any such choice. Nor had Christine Caine or Adam Zimmerman.

  That, I thought, had to be one of the things in which the invisible monitors observing our every word and action were most interested. For one reason or another, if only out of simple curiosity, they might even care about the decisions we would make.

  Eight

  Lilith

  Maybe you could go all the way to the Omega Point,” I said to Christine Caine, carefully steering our collaborative flight of fancy down to Earth — or at least to Excelsior. “Maybe it’s the only tourist trip worth taking, if we’re condemned to be eternal tourists. Unfortunately I doubt that SusAn technology is perfectible. It might take ten or a hundred reps, but the time would surely come when we’d turn into deep-frozen dead meat. I don’t know the percentages, but the sisterhood could probably hazard a guess. My bet is that the vast majority of the people frozen down before and after us didn’t even make it this far — and I’m not just talking about the ones who got out on their due release dates, or the ones who melted during accidental power cuts, earthquakes, and supervolcanic eruptions.

  “We’re real freaks, Christine. Thousand-to-one shots. Maybe million-to-one shots. Adam Zimmerman got here because every possible effort was extended to make sure that he did; we just happened to survive the great freezer lottery. My guess is that everybody who embarks on that kind of Omega Expedition is bound to die long before they reach their destination.”

  But what about the other kinds? I added, purely for my own consideration.

  Christine Caine got to her feet then, balancing herself in a deliberate fashion. It didn’t take her long to build up the confidence required to walk — and once she’d walked around the room, trailing her fingers along the seemingly featureless walls, she didn’t waste any time before taking the next step. She threw herself forward into a somersault, and when she landed on her feet she threw herself into another, glorying in the lift and the slowness of the arc.

  Then she came unstuck, and collapsed in an ungainly heap. She laughed, as if the fall had given her almost as much pleasure as the safely completed somersaults.

  “Trust your clever IT,” I told her, knowing that I had no reason to feel envious but not quite succeeding in controlling my resentment at the way she was coping with her unexpected situation. “It’ll adjust your reflexes to the three-quarters Earth-gravity if you let it. Just don’t try to think too hard about what you’re doing.”

  “This isn’t a VE,” she said, smugly. “I’m no sim. I’m alive — and I’m out.”

  “And you’re still a homicidal maniac,” I was unable to prevent myself adding: “albeit a harmless one. They’ve rigged internal censors to stop you doing anything nasty, but the whole point of the trial run was to put you back together exactly the way you were.”

  She didn’t like that at all, but she seemed more hurt than angry. “You don’t know shit about the way I was,” she retorted.

  I repented my recklessness. “No, I don’t,” I admitted. “In fact, I may have entirely the wrong idea about it. If I remember correctly, you gave the police half a dozen contradictory explanations of what you did — but only one stuck fast. There was a VE tape about your case. Everybody my age hooked into it. It was pure fiction, but it colored everybody’s understanding.”

  That made her pause for thought. “Some sort of psychoanalysis?” she asked.

  “Not exactly. A reconstruction of your murders, putting the user into your viewpoint. There was a whispered voice-over that passed itself off as your internal stream-of-consciousness. It was called Bad Karma.”

  “Why?” I wasn’t sure to what extent she was offended by the whole idea, as opposed to the mere title.

  “Because it tried to explain what you’d done in terms of camouflage: hiding your true self within a series of alternative personalities, all of which masqueraded as invaders from the past. According to the script, the multiple personalities locked you into what the writer called a karmic ritual: the reenactment of an event so unbearable that you had tried to distance it from your present self by projecting it into a hypothetical pattern of eternal recurrence.”

  She stared at me as if I were the one that might be mad. “It was fiction,” I added. “Pornography, of a sort.”

  “I want to see it,” she said. She was no longer in a laughing mood, but I couldn’t tell what sort of a mood had taken its place. She was fearful, but in an odd way. There was something in her reaction to the memory of her crimes with which my empathetic imagination couldn’t get to grips.

  “They don’t have it,” I told her. “Not here, at any rate. The sisters reckon that a few copies mig
ht have been exported from Earth before the last ecocatastrophe, but they don’t know if it was ever adapted to run on modern equipment. Gray — the historian from Earth — might be able to locate one, if anyone can.”

  “But you saw it.”

  “A long time ago…that is, a long time before I was put away. My memory of it is vague. I was more interested in the technical production than the story — I was in the business at the time. Fight tapes, sex tapes…but nothing like Bad Karma. The business had already moved on by the time I was frozen down. The technics were evolving at an incredible pace, thanks to nanotech enhancements. Bad Karma must have become a museum piece long before the end of the twenty-third century. It was probably lost more than five hundred years ago.”

  “That’s bullshit,” she said. “All VE tapes were routinely upgraded to take aboard new developments. I saw six different updates of The Snow Queen when I was a kid, and four of Peter Pan.”

  The Snow Queen and Peter Pan were classic VE tapes made for children. The twenty-second-century versions Christine was referring to had been modeled on much earlier webware, but dozens of writers over the course of half a century had added more and more code to them, building up the backgrounds and making the special effects more elaborate. Even Damon had done a little hackwork on The Snow Queen at one time.

  “It’s not the same thing,” I told her. “The hoods you and I used got better and better, but the basic design and coding routines remained the same. Those technics were already reaching their limit when I got out of the business. The next generation of hoods was about to restart from scratch, using an entirely different set of electronic substrates. They might have remade The Snow Queen yet again after I was put away, but if they did they’d have had to do it from the bottom up rather than continuing the series of add-ons. More likely it was filed away, replaced with some new favorite specifically designed to show what the new technics could do. When Bad Karma was made your case was still relatively fresh in the older generation’s memory, but it couldn’t have stayed that way. We were supposed to be living in the New Utopia, but there was no shortage of killers around. Compared with the Eliminators you were old news — and Davida assures me that there were plenty more to come.”