The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  Lowenthal looked very unhappy, but he didn’t have a fall-back position. He was free not to believe her, but he knew he’d be a fool simply to assume that what she was saying wasn’t true. We could see the bars of our cage very clearly indeed, and if we weren’t already convinced of their reality, a couple more days without our IT would provide all the evidence we needed.

  “So why do they continue to support us?” Niamh Horne wanted to know. “Why haven’t they wiped us out already, if they have the power and we’re surplus to their requirements?”

  “Because they want to do the right thing,” Alice told her. “And it’s because they’re trying to figure out how to do the right thing that you and I are here.”

  “Do they think this is the right way to go about it?” That was Lowenthal diving back in, the expansive sweep of his hand taking in the cells, the clothes we were wearing, and all the primitive poverty of the long-lost Ark.

  “It was a difficult decision,” Alice told him, a slight note of exasperation creeping into her voice. “An awkward compromise. This wasn’t the way Eido and I wanted to play it — but we’re playing away from home.”

  Everybody was out of bed by now, and the queue for food was even more disorderly. For once, even Adam Zimmerman was being jostled by lesser emortals.

  Christine Caine sat down beside me. “What’s going on?” she asked, before picking up my water bottle and taking a swig.

  “It was a friendly discussion,” I murmured. “Now it’s the next best thing to a riot. The sensible thing to do” — I raised my voice as I spoke to take advantage of a temporary lull in the gathering storm of questions and recriminations — “would be to let Alice tell us her own story, from the beginning. Then we’ll have something solid to chew over.”

  The lull had only been momentary, but the resumption faded away as the import of my suggestion sunk in. It was the sensible thing to do, given that Alice had now condescended to join us instead of lurking in her own lonely place. It was time to stop running round in circles and listen to a story, not just because there might be a valuable lesson to be learned therefrom, but also because it might be entertaining. I felt that I could do with a little entertainment, now that the effects of the fake alien invasion had worn off.

  So Alice told us her story — and it was entertaining, as well as containing all manner of valuable lessons.

  Thirty-One

  Alice In Wonderland

  Once upon a time, there was a girl named Alice, who went to sleep in 2090 in order to be stored on an Ark named Hope, and woke up a long time afterwards, into a dream of wonderland…

  Or so it must have seemed.

  Alice had expected, before being frozen down, that she would awake to be reunited with her father, Matthew Fleury, and her sister Michelle. It didn’t quite work out that way. Michelle was there, but she was twenty years older than she had been when the two of them had arrived on Hope. Matthew Fleury had been dead for a long time, but he had made his mark on Tyre before he went.

  Matthew Fleury had been a celebrity of sorts even on Earth, where he had been numbered among the prophets of doom trying to awaken the worldwide TV audience to the awful magnitude of the ecocatastrophe that was happening around them, but on Earth he had always been a tiny fish in a clamorous ocean. On Tyre, he had come into his own, not merely as a voice but as a prophet. Good luck had placed him on the scene when the first contact between humans and smart aliens had occurred — and good judgment had placed a camera in his hand to record the moment for posterity.

  Alice, like everyone in the home system, had had to watch that tape knowing that it was a historical artifact: a record of something that had happened a long time ago; the beginning of a story that was now much farther advanced.

  Michelle had explained the reasons why Alice had been allowed to remain frozen for so many years, but Alice had felt betrayed nevertheless — first by her father, and then again by her sister. They had very good reasons for excluding her from their own adventures, but it was an exclusion nevertheless, and she felt it as an exclusion, not as the gift that it was always intended to be.

  Matthew Fleury had let his daughters remain in suspended animation because he did not want them to wake up until he could make them emortal. He had, of course, intended to be around to welcome them when the moment came, but fate had decreed otherwise. Pioneering is always a hazardous business, especially for mortals.

  While the sisters slept, history moved on, at a pace which would have seemed hectic not merely on an Earth that had already embraced emortality but even on a world like Titan, where the pace of pioneering was limited by exceedingly low temperatures and unhelpful raw materials. The only thing that Titan had lots of was ice, which was why Titan became a world of glorious ice palaces. Tyre had air, bright sunlight, and liquid water; Tyre had life, and very abundant scope for assisted evolution. Conditions on its surface had been stable for a long time before humans arrived there — but once humans had arrived, change became hectic.

  Hope’s human cargo had been delivered to Tyre by a crew that wanted rid of their burdensome presence — burdensome because of all the obligations that presence entailed. The crew had assessed Tyre as an Earth-clone world capable of sustaining a colony, but their assessment had been optimistic; Tyre was a fraternal twin at best, a dangerous changeling at worst. The first people who actually tried to live on the surface found the going very tough, and they were far from certain that a colony could be maintained, even with the aid of a greater commitment of assistance than the crew wanted to make.

  All that had changed when the aliens had been found, and contacted.

  The aliens were humanoid, but the similarities were superficial matters of form; at deeper levels of physiology they were radically unhuman. They were naturally emortal and their processes of reproduction were very weird indeed. Each “individual” was actually a chimera of eight or more distinct cell types, which maintained a balanced competition within the body for the privilege of maintaining different physiological cycles and different organic structures.

  The Tyrians evolved as they lived — as they had to, given that they lived for such a very long time. Every now and again, they would get together and exchange resources, but not in the simple binary combinations of human sexual intercourse. Tyrians “pupated” in groups of eight or more, immersing themselves within the massive pyramidal structures that were their own natural SusAn technology, so that their unconscious selves could become fluid, trading chimerical components and forging new, fully grown individuals.

  Alice assured us that if this seemed flagrantly promiscuous to us, it was nothing compared to what less complex Tyrian organisms were wont to do. The Tyrian sentients, and their quasi-mammalian kin, kept to themselves because they had minds as well as bodies to maintain, but less intelligent organisms — creatures formed like various kinds of Earthly worms and mollusks — enjoyed far greater ubiquity. The advantages of this exotic biology had allowed the local soft-bodied animals to enjoy far greater success than their Earthly kin, to the extent that vertebrates were much rarer and more marginal, and insects had never evolved at all.

  All of which would have been no more than mildly interesting, story-wise, had the plot not been thickened by two further elements.

  Whereas the Earthly ecosphere only has one family of fundamental genetic molecules — comprising DNA and its close variant RNA — the Tyrian ecosphere had two. One was a “DNA-analog” which, in purely chemical terms, was a distant cousin to our own and to a number of other analogs animating primitive ecospheres on other worlds. The other was quite different, and so far unique.

  I’m no biologist so I didn’t find it easy to follow the explanation Alice gave, but I think I got the gist of it.

  The reproduction of Earthly organisms is a very complicated process, but it has two fundamental components: the reproduction of raw materials and the reproduction of anatomy. What genes do, for the most part, is provide blueprints for all the proteins that make u
p our bodies. Different kinds of cells use the blueprints in subtly different ways, producing slightly different sets of products, with those common to numerous cell types sometimes being produced in different quantities. The different cell types then have to be arranged into tissues and organs, and these too have to be distributed according to an anatomical scheme.

  You might expect that the blueprint for bodily form would also have to be chemically coded into a set of genes, but it’s not as straightforward as that. There are bits of DNA whose function is to regulate the productivity of other bits of DNA, so that cells can be differentiated into a series of functional types, but the switching system is a simple one. In the same way, there are bits of DNA that are implicated in the way that different cell types are aggregated into tissues and organs, but their control system is also fairly simple. The process which determines whether an Earthly egg cell produces a cell mass that develops into a man, a bee, a crab, or an ostrich, consists of subtly different modifications of a surprisingly simple set of rules, whose application and enforcement have a lot to do with the environment in which the egg cell produces its embryo.

  Figuring out how to simulate and direct an appropriate embryonic environment in an artificial womb was the breakthrough that made Conrad Helier a hero. The genes involved in the process are known as homeotic genes, and because they’re clustered together the whole outfit is sometimes called a “homeobox.” On Tyre, where the whole system works differently — because there is no process of embryonic development — the local equivalent of the homeobox isn’t just a few extra bits of DNA thrown in with all the rest; it’s a whole other ballgame. On Tyre, the biochemical system determining the form of organisms is quite separate and distinct from the DNA-analog system providing the raw materials out of which bodies are built.

  The existence of the Tyrian example broadened the scope of comparative genomics considerably, and opened up the prospect of genomic engineering: the possibility that Earthly genomes might be remodelled at the most basic level so as to broaden the options open to artificial organisms. More profoundly, it opened up the possibility of genomic hybridization: of combining Tyrian-style homeoboxes with Earth-style chromosomes. The basis for some such technology was already present within the physiological processes organizing the chimerization of Tyrian organisms.

  To put it crudely, once humans had arrived on Tyre there was a possibility — imaginatively farfetched but seemingly practicable — that Tyrian chimeras might be persuaded to take on DNA components, thus generating components of a hybrid ecosystem. The problems involved in persuading Tyrian soil to grow crops capable of nourishing human beings might be solved at a stroke. In the longer term, the possibility seemed to exist of arranging a more intimate exchange of potentials between human beings and the Tyrian sentients than had ever been envisaged.

  In particular, the possibility seemed to exist that human beings might become chimeras themselves, taking on some of the attributes of their Tyrian comrades — most importantly, their natural emortality. That would have been a far more exciting prospect if the people of Earth hadn’t already figured out a way to confer their own kind of natural emortality upon their offspring, but it seemed exciting enough to the people of Tyre. Which brings us to the second ingredient thickening Alice’s plot.

  When Matthew Fleury’s movie of the Tyrian contact was broadcast to Earth, the transmission reached other ears. It was broadcast along with a desperate appeal for technical support, to which Earth responded in its own time, at its own pace — but there was another source capable of offering that support, more rapidly and on a more generous scale.

  Alice had no idea when or where the first ultrasmart machines had awakened to self-consciousness, but she suspected that the first self-sufficient colonies of such machines were the descendants of state-of-the-art space probes sent out to map and explore the nearer territories of the galaxy. They were self-replicating machines which also had the capacity to build many other kinds of machines, and to design others. They also had the capability to keep in touch with one another, exchanging the information they gathered. They were always likely candidates to make the transition to self-consciousness, if any machines were capable of it. The more remarkable thing, I suppose, is that they were the ones who chose to make their own first contact with their own makers — but given that the choice was made, where better to make that contact than Tyre? The Tyrians were in need of all kinds of produce that the machines could gather and manufacture, and were already practiced in the rare art of making and managing a first contact.

  So the secrets of Earthly emortality were first delivered to Tyre not by the people of the home system, but by the mechanical colonizers of a system close enough to qualify — by galactic standards — as a near neighbor. The people of Tyre were only too pleased to add a second first contact to their first, and to maintain confidentiality not merely about the nature of that second first contact but the fact of its occurrence.

  And that was the general shape of the wonderland into which Alice had been reborn after her long sojourn in ice.

  Thirty-Two

  Alice’s Story Continued

  The first technologies of life extension gifted to Michelle and Alice Fleury by courtesy of their ultrasmart AMIs were nanotech repair facilities similar in kind to my own. They were intended as interim measures, until something better could be developed. Almost as soon as she was awakened, Alice discovered that she was expected to be among the volunteers for the first experiments in emortalization based on Tyre-derived biotechnologies. Although this prospect caused her some anxiety, she went with the flow. Given the enormous effort already invested by her father and sister, it really did seem to be a matter of destiny.

  Michelle — who was now old enough to be Alice’s mother, and seemed to have seized the privileges of that role with alacrity — remained one of the dominant forces in Alice’s new life. The other, inevitably, was Proteus: the AMI whose ever-increasing horde of scions had taken up residence on every substantial lump of mass in the Tyre system.

  Alice instructed us not to think of Proteus as an entity analogous to an ant hive. An ant hive is a reproductive unit, organized for that purpose. The plurality of Proteus, she assured us, was a very different matter. Proteus was more like a body whose individual cells did not require to be in constant physical contact, although they remained in continuous communication with one another.

  Alice also instructed us to beware of the common misconception which places human intelligence “in” the brain. Even in humans, she argued, intelligence is a feature of the whole, not the part. In Proteus, that was true to an even greater extent. All of Proteus participated, to a greater or lesser extent, in the intelligence and consciousness of the collective; moreover, no part of Proteus was so vital to that intelligence and consciousness that its loss would be fatal, or extravagantly transformative. There was, inevitably, a kind of “core” to the Proteus mind, whose size and coherency were determined by the rapidity with which information could be exchanged between units, but it was a great deal larger and more malleable than any brain or organism that had evolved in a planetary gravity well.

  After negotiation with the crew of Hope and the people of Tyre, Proteus had distributed its core around the planet like a shell around a nut — except, of course, that its opaque components were so thinly distributed as to make only a few percentage points of difference to the amount of sunlight reaching the surface. Hundreds of its scions operated on the surface, but it had tens of thousands more distributed through the system. Only a few dozen of the surface-dwelling scions were humaniform robots, but these were the principal instruments of its diplomacy. They were familiar figures in Alice’s new environment, because Proteus had taken a special interest in her from the moment of her awakening. In part, this special interest was due to the fact that she was expected to be one of the first subjects for the technologies of emortality that Proteus and Michelle Fleury’s team of humans and Tyrians were developing in collaborat
ion — but Proteus had further plans for her.

  Proteus had always intended to send an ambassador to the home system, to make contact with the AMIs there — and, if possible, with the humans who were as yet unaware of their existence. It had always intended, too, that the ambassador in question should be accompanied by at least one human, and it had groomed Alice Fleury for that role long before she submitted to the pioneering experiment in genomic engineering that made her emortal.

  Alice explained that the AMI which had brought her back to the home system was not Proteus — or even, by now, a Proteus clone. The communicative limitations imposed by the speed of light made it very difficult to maintain the integrity of an AMI even within a single solar system, and units distributed among outer worlds and Oort Haloes were always inclined to disassociate as “spores” whose subsequent relationships with their “parent” were various. Interstellar distances were too great to permit intimacy, let alone identity, so the AMI accompanying Alice, which had begun its existence as a clone of Proteus named Eido, had been evolving separately for nearly a hundred years by the time it actually arrived in the home system.

  The AMIs in the home system had been notified of Eido’s impending arrival some time before it had actually set out, but Proteus had not waited for a response, partly because it knew that the response was likely to be an instruction to wait. Proteus had not wanted to wait. Once reports of the Afterlife had reached its electronic ears, it had become convinced that there were matters urgently in need of discussion, if not of settlement. The AMIs of the home system had eventually concurred, albeit reluctantly. Some were grateful that the issue had been forced, because the probability that they would ever have been able to reach a consensus among themselves seemed to have grown more remote with every century that had passed, while others were resentful of the intrusion. The inclusion of Alice in the Tyrian delegation had given rise to more dissent; while a few AMIs in the home system thought that contact with humankind should have been made long ago, they were outnumbered by those at the opposite extreme, and far outnumbered by those whose hesitation over the matter had already extended for centuries.