The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  “Who’s Davida?” It was a stall, to give her time to think.

  “She was sitting where I am when I woke up where you are. Davida Berenike Columella. Here on Excelsior, they seem to have done away with surnames. Maybe we should have done that ourselves, as soon as Helier wombs wrested the burdens and privileges of reproduction from the nuclear family.”

  “Caine can pass for a given name,” she observed, sardonically. “Only too well.”

  “Tamlin too,” I told her. “But maybe not Zimmerman. That comes with heritage attached.”

  She looked around again. “So this is a holding cell, right?” she said. “Do we have to share it, or can I get one of my own?”

  “It’s not a cell, exactly,” I reassured her. “The sisterhood assures me that we’ll have freedom of movement when their preliminary observations are complete. They want us to remain here for the time being, but we have our own spaces. Mine’s on the other side of that wall over there — if you want a connecting door to open all you have to do is ask. In the meantime, we can go anywhere we want in virtual space.”

  “I don’t see any hoods, let alone a bodysuit.”

  “The walls are a lot cleverer than they look. The sisters haven’t rigged them for direct speech activation, but the people listening in will facilitate any requests we care to make — within reason. If you want a bed, or a fully laden dining table, or an immersion suit, you only have to say so. The food’s lousy, but it’s edible and your IT will take away the nasty taste if you persist with it. You can summon up a screen and talk to any kind of sim you care to nominate.”

  She pounced on that one. “But you’re not a sim,” she was quick to say. “You’re real meat.”

  “I’m prepared to accept the working hypothesis that I’m real meat,” I said, wryly. “Davida too. Apparently, we’re in something called the Counter-Earth Cluster, which means that information from Earth has to be bounced halfway around the orbit, with an uncomfortably long time delay. I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that the real reason the sisterhood can’t get near immediate and unlimited access to Earth’s datastores is that the good folks on Earth won’t give it to them. Ditto the outer system. If there ever was an age of free and unlimited access between our time and now, it’s over. But we’re used to that, aren’t we? We come from a world where people who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for information had to steal it, and where people who could manufacture and manage false information could make a good living secreting it into the system for the dubious benefit of the paying customers.”

  “That’s what you were put away for?” she guessed.

  “Perhaps. If I was put away. Even if I was, I should have been out in seven years. Ten at most.”

  “And now you’re a time-tourist with a one-way open ticket. Count your blessings, Mr Tamlin.”

  “You can call me Madoc. I’m trying to count my blessings. It’s not as easy as you might think.”

  She raised her right hand, made a fist, and elevated the right forefinger. “One,” she said, defiantly. She meant the blessing that she was here, alive and out. “Oh look — we’re ahead of the game already. How many more do you need?”

  “I’m still trying to figure that out,” I told her, stubbornly. “When I have the total, I’ll weigh it against the downside.”

  “There’s no downside in what you’ve said so far,” she judged, accurately enough. “The downside would have been not waking up at all. If appearances can be trusted, we’re past that. It’s a new start, Madoc. All profit. You shouldn’t complain about the cards you’ve been dealt, when the wonder is that there’s been a fresh deal at all. If you’re unhappy with the company at the table…well, who else was there to choose from? When you said all my body cavities, you did mean that…well, of course you did. Am I a virgin again, or is that too much to ask?”

  She was putting on an act again, making believe that she was the kind of person who murdered people for fun. It rang completely false. Whatever her motive had been, I thought, she seemed exceedingly uncomfortable with it — but how, in that case, had she racked up thirteen victims?

  “I think we’re pretty much the way we were when we folded our last hands,” I told her, not trying very hard to enter into the spirit that she was trying to import into the conversation. “We’re experimental specimens, remember.”

  “Adam Zimmerman never heard of me,” she observed. “He never saw your slanderous tape. He doesn’t know me from…Eve.”

  That made me laugh. It wasn’t uproarious, but it the first honest laugh I’d contrived in a thousand years and I was surprised by the lift it gave me. It was a very feeble and very obvious joke, but it showed that she understood something of the magic of names.

  “Before Eve there was Lilith,” I murmured. I was talking to myself, but she heard me.

  “I saw that one too,” she said, sourly.

  It took me a moment or two to figure out that she must be referring to yet another VE tape — not a kiddies’ classic, this time. She knew about Lilith the demon, Lilith the baby killer, so she knew that I wasn’t being nice, or funny.

  “Somehow,” I said, hopeful of saving the situation, “I don’t think finding a mate will be the first thing on Adam’s agenda. He’ll be the most famous man in the solar system: the hottest news since the supervolcano blew North America to Kingdom Come. The Messiah from the twenty-first…hell, he must have been born in the twentieth century. He may be an animal in the zoo for a while, but they’ll move Heaven and Earth to rehabilitate him. I’m not so sure they’ll make as much effort for us, even if a little of his celebrity rubs off on us.”

  “On the other hand,” said Christine Caine, the most notorious mass murderer in the galaxy, “if he were to die…”

  Her tone made it obvious to me that she was joking, in much the same blackly comic vein as my crack about Lilith. If she meant anything by it at all, she meant that just because we’d been successfully revived, there was no guarantee that Adam Zimmerman could be. He, after all, had been forced to employ SusAn equipment of a considerably more primitive kind than ours, at least for the first phase of his long journey. She must have known, though, that what would be obvious to me might not be as obvious to all the other listening ears, and that it was just about the least diplomatic thing she could possibly have said.

  That had to be at least part of the reason why she said it, given that she was still putting on her act — but I wished she hadn’t.

  I wished she hadn’t because I knew full well that there was no one in Excelsior, and perhaps no one in the entire solar system, who wouldn’t think of Christine Caine and Madoc Tamlin as two of a potentially despicable kind.

  Nine

  You Can’t go Home Again

  Where do you go to first, when you’re a thousand years away from the world you grew up in but VE simulations of every environment in the solar system — and quite a few beyond it — are available to you?

  You try to go home, of course. Not to find it, because you know full well that you won’t, but to prove to yourself that it no longer exists, and that something else has taken its place.

  In Peter Pan, one of those ancient VE adventures that Christine Caine had undertaken several times before she became a full-time mass murderer, there’s a scene in which the eponymous character — one of three elective protagonists, if my memory serves me right — flies back to the nursery from which he had fled years before. He finds the window locked, and when he looks through it he sees his mother nursing a new baby son: a replacement who seems far more contented and far more appreciative of his circumstances than he ever was. The implication is that, unlike Peter, the new kid will one day achieve the adulthood that his predecessor was determined to avoid. On the other hand — although most members of the target audience probably didn’t think that far ahead — the new kid might end up a lost boy too, with nowhere to go but Neverland.

  I knew all that before I asked to see the Earth.

  I thought I was sufficient
ly detached, and sufficiently adult, to be prepared for anything.

  I had expected the hood I’d called for to grow out of the back of my armchair but it didn’t. It materialized from the room’s ceiling. It was nothing like the clumsy devices I’d used in my own time, being slightly reminiscent of a cobweb drifting down on the end of a thread of spidersilk. When it settled over my head it was hardly tangible; I didn’t even feel it on the surfaces of my eyeballs — which was actually the surface of the part of my suitskin overlying my own conjunctiva.

  I could move my head easily in any direction, but I was no longer looking out into my cell. The “place” I was in was recognizable as a VE holding pattern, but there were no menus written in blood-red upon its walls, waiting to be pointed at by my index finger. All my oral requests had to be fed through an invisible listener hooked into Excelsior’s nervous system.

  First I asked for a live feed from an orbiting satellite, so I could look down on my homeworld from above.

  There was a time delay of several minutes while the signal made its way across the hundred-and-eighty-six-million-mile gap, taking a dogleg route to avoid the sun, but it was still “live,” relatively speaking.

  There was a lot of cloud, but not so much that I couldn’t see that the colors were all wrong. There was way too much green, in all the wrong places, and too much black everywhere else. The outlines were wrong too.

  I asked to look at an inset map, but the request wasn’t specific enough; I got one with a crazy projection.

  It took me a few minutes to figure out that the center of the flower-shaped design at which I was staring was the south pole. The equator was the ring drawn around the mid points of the “petals.”

  I still couldn’t connect the landmasses to their “originals.” I was out of my depth, floundering in uncertainty.

  I had expected that the outlines of the continents might have changed slightly, but not to anything like the extent that they had. New islands had been raised from the seabed even in my day, but I’d expected to be able to see the fundamental shapes of Australia, Africa, and the Americas, the open expanses of the Pacific and the South Atlantic and the vast clotted mass of Eurasia.

  They were all gone; coastlines had obviously become negotiable, and continental shelves prime development sites.

  I figured out, eventually, that the differences were mainly a matter of three new continents having been constructed and some of the older ones split by artificial straits, but so many coastlines had been amended — sometimes drastically — that the shapes I knew had simply been obliterated.

  When I asked for a new inset of a 3-D globe pivoted at the poles it became a little easier to see what had been what, and to reassure myself that the Continental Engineers hadn’t actually won control of continental drift, but it was an alien world just the same.

  I asked to be connected to a series of ground-level feeds.

  Given that a mere ninety-nine years had elapsed since the planet had been shrouded in volcanic ash I expected to find the remains of North America in a bad way. Even if the atmosphere had cleared within a decade, I reasoned, ecosystemic recovery must be at a very early stage. I expected an underpopulated wilderness still struggling to establish itself, but that wasn’t what I found.

  I found a riot of exotic gardens, and a hundred brand-new cities, all competing to outdo one another in the craziness of their architecture. There were towers sculpted out of all manner of gemlike stones; sprawling multichambered branching growths like thousand-year-old trees; walls of metal and roofs of glass; piazzas lined with all kinds of synthetic hide; roadways of smart fabric; and much more.

  It was an unholy mess, but it certainly wasn’t a wilderness and it was anything but underpopulated.

  The Los Angeles in which I had grown up had been in recovery from its own ecocatastrophe, and I’d always thought of it as a living monument to the efficiency and capability of gantzing nanotech. Maybe it had been, by the standards of its own century, but history had moved on and technology had undergone a thousand years of further progress.

  As I settled my virtual self into an artificial eye gazing out upon the streets of the city nearest to the now-drowned coordinates that LA had once occupied I saw that it wasn’t just VE tech that had undergone more than one phase-shift. I had to suppose that the buildings I was staring at had been raised by a process analogous to gantzing, but they certainly hadn’t been aggregated out of commonplace materials or embellished with the synthetic cellulose, lignin, and chitin derivatives that had surrounded me in my former incarnation. Here, once-precious stones and once-precious metals seemed to be everyday building materials, and they were augmented by all manner of fancy organics.

  When I asked, a whispering voice told me that there were more than a hundred different kinds of “incorruptible” organic construction materials on display, as well as inorganic crystallines.

  My informant wasn’t a human voice — it was a machine whose responses were filtered through a sim of some sort — but that didn’t mean that the member of the sisterhood commissioned to monitor me had packed up her kit and gone home. My questions were still being mediated by actual listeners, even though I was getting the answers direct from the data bank.

  “They were experimenting with dextrorotatory proteins in my day,” I said. “There was the stuff Damon’s father and foster mother invented as well: para-DNA, they called it. Damon told me that PicoCon had big plans for that, once he and Conrad had sold out to them. Are those the kinds of things I’m looking at?”

  The mechanical voice informed me that dextrorotatory organics had become effectively obsolete once they had begun spinning off dextrorotatory viruses and nanobacteria. The artificial genomic system designed by Conrad Helier and Eveline Hywood had proved to be much more versatile, and its derivatives were still used in a wide range of nanomachines — especially gantzing systems — but more complicated genomic systems devised for use in extreme environments had proved more generally useful when reimported to Earth.

  I was assured that the next generation of technologies would be even more versatile, having taken aboard key features of the natural systems evolved on the colonized worlds of Ararat and Maya.

  “And I guess you can make all the gold you want from lead,” I suggested. “Everybody’s an alchemist now.”

  The humorless voice told me that transmutation wasn’t routinely practiced on Earth because there was no economic imperative. So I asked where it was routinely practiced, and was told that Ganymede, Io, and Umbriel were the principal research and development centers.

  I had to put in a prompt to get more data, but I elicited an admission that transmutation research was “controversial,” because fusion-generated transmutation was the technological basis of “macroconstruction.”

  A demand for further elaboration brought the revelation that a majority of the Earthbound was currently opposed to all kinds of macroconstructional development, and that “the major outer system factions” were divided even as to the most rudimentary aspects of their various development plans.

  I looked around at the fanciful buildings that surrounded my viewpoint, knowing that they could not possibly be what the voice meant by “macroconstruction.” Given that the people of Earth seemed perfectly happy to design and build new continents, and to make drastic amendments to the outlines of the existing ones, I knew that the voice had to be talking about at least one further order of magnitude.

  Davida had already told me that there were a dozen microworlds in the Counter-Earth Cluster, two hundred more scattered around the orbit, and a further two hundred located in Luna’s orbit around the Earth. I figured that the voice had to be talking about building much bigger things than that, perhaps in pursuit of the visionary quest of the type-2 crusaders who wanted to build a shell around the sun so that none of its energy output would go to waste. If so, there were only two likely sources of raw material: Jupiter and Saturn.

  “You can’t build new planets out of hydr
ogen, ammonia, and methane,” I said. “Transmuting the stuff of gas giants must be a step beyond mere alchemy.”

  The voice wasn’t programmed to praise my deductive skills. It reported, with a laconic ease that the sloth-animated sims of my own era had never quite mastered, that many people resident in Earth orbit became a trifle nervous at the mere mention of “domesticated supernoval reactions.”

  That seemed to me to be a nice idea, all the nicer because it was so casually oxymoronic. I probed, and the story filtered out in dribs and drabs. In the meantime, the people of the city born yet again from the ashes of the City of Angels went about their daily business, quite oblivious to the fact that they were being watched by a time-tourist from the twenty-second century.

  Would they have cared if they’d known? Would anyone have stopped to wave at the camera? I’d have liked to think that someone would, but I couldn’t be sure. All but a few of them looked like ordinary human beings, but none of them were. Their thoughts, opinions, hopes, and values were probably far more different from mine than their bodies.

  “There seem to be a lot of people about,” I observed, falling into a fairly relaxed conversational mode even though I knew I was talking to a machine while being dutifully over-seen by a gaggle of two-hundred-year-old prepuberal posthumans. “How was the world repopulated so rapidly after the Yellowstone eruption?”

  “Two million, one hundred and thirty-three thousand, seven hundred and eighty-seven people were killed by the great North American Basalt Flow,” I was told. “The deficit was made up within thirty years. Sixty-one percent of the replacements were new births, thirty-nine percent returnees. Forty percent of the returnees came from the moon…”