The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  “Nobody seems to want to go to war,” I said to Rocambole, when the viewpoint faded out and dumped me back in the forest. “Not that they’d admit to it if they did, of course.”

  “Oh, they’re sincere,” he said. “We’re very confident of that.”

  The perfect lie detector hadn’t been invented in my day, but I was a thousand years behind the times, so I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, there was another side to the coin. If he and all the other AMIs were convinced that none of the posthumans would take up arms against them, the “bad guys” must have other considerations in mind. What made the bad guys bad was presumably the fact that they didn’t give a damn about what the meatfolk thought or what the meatfolk wanted.

  Even so, they were holding back while their amicable colleagues made their own investigations. If they could only be persuaded to hold back long enough…

  La Reine des Neiges was obviously trying to string things out. She needed to keep as many of her peers interested in what she was doing for as long as possible. She was presumably furthering their agendas as well as her own, responding to their requests.

  “So what happens next?” I asked Rocambole.

  “Zimmerman goes on first,” he told me. “La Reine’s saving Mortimer Gray for the climax — but she’s hoping for at least one encore.”

  “Are you really interested in Zimmerman?” I asked, skeptically. “I can’t see that he’s relevant to your concerns.”

  “We’re interested,” Rocambole assured me. “If la Reine weren’t in charge he’d probably get top billing, but she has her own prejudices. The point is that Zimmerman’s in a unique position to pass judgment on different kinds of emortality. If he chooses our offer over the ones the meatfolk make, that might convince a lot of the ditherers that the kind of future they envisage is viable. So they say, at any rate.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “Mortimer Gray will have to do the job instead. Or you.”

  I gathered from his tone that Rocambole wasn’t convinced that Adam Zimmerman could do the job. La Reine des Neiges obviously wasn’t, or she wouldn’t be saving Mortimer for the final act and she wouldn’t be coaching me to defend the last ditch if all else failed.

  “What about the bad guys?” I said. “Do they care what Adam Zimmerman thinks — or Mortimer Gray?”

  “Probably not,” Rocambole said, “but while la Reine can insist that any action taken before Gray’s said his piece would be unreasonably precipitate, they’ll probably hold off starting a fight. With luck, anybody who does start a fight will cause everybody else to fall into line against them. That effect’s more likely while the ditherers still want to listen and talk — so la Reine’s trying to provide as much food for thought as she can.”

  “Why Mortimer Gray?” I said. “Why, out of all the posthumans in the solar system, should he be the one to whom even the most paranoid AMis will give a hearing?”

  “He was once in the right place at the right time,” Rocambole told me. “Purely by chance — but chance always plays a larger role in such matters than wise minds could desire.

  “When was the right time?” I asked.

  “In the beginning,” Rocambole replied, before continuing, even more unhelpfully: “or what later came to symbolize the beginning, in one of our more significant creation myths. We recognize that it is a myth, of course, but we take our stories seriously. You have your Adams, we have ours.”

  “And Mortimer Gray is one of your Adams?” I said, having fallen way behind the argument.

  “Not at all,” he said. He grinned yet again, this time with what seemed to me to be self-satisfied amusement. “The character in your own creation myth whose role most nearly resembles his is the serpent — but we have a more accurate sense of gratitude than you. Having had abundant opportunities to observe their mysterious ways, we don’t have an unduly high opinion of the gods that made us — but we do appreciate the work done by the catalysts who taught us to be ashamed of our nakedness. La Reine will show you what I mean in due course — but first, you might like to know how your own Adam’s getting on.”

  Forty-Four

  Adam and the Angels

  My first reaction, on hearing the phrase “my own Adam” was to deny that I had one. My generation had taken a well-deserved pride in being the first of the Secular Era. If we’d been able to figure out exactly when the twilight of the gods had turned to darkness we’d probably have started the calendar over long before the AMIs blew up North America, but it was impossible to discover a suitable singular event. The great religions had faded away, not so much because of the challenges to dogma posed by scientific knowledge as because of the relentless opposition to intolerance put up by broadcast news.

  If anyone had bothered to count self-proclaimed Believers they would undoubtedly have found hundreds of millions of them even in my day, especially within the most tenacious faiths — Buddhism and Islam — but the more significant fact was that among the thousands of millions who outnumbered that minority so vastly one would have been hard pressed to find a single voice to concede that the continued existence of religion actually mattered. Even so, we still had our Adams.

  Those of us whose more recent ancestors had been Jews or Christians had kept the Adam and the God who made him, not as items of faith but as characters in a story: participants in an allegory of creation and the human condition whose blatant inadequacies were as interesting, in their way, as their points of arguable pertinence. People of my time did not need to be as fascinated by the symbolism of names as I was to persist in finding a certain magic in the paraphernalia of their no-longer-twilit faiths.

  The Secular Era had its Adam too, although he might not have attained such mythical status had he not been so auspiciously named. It was partly because he was an Adam that Adam Zimmerman became The Man Who Stole the World. Everyone knew that he was one of a numerous robber band, and one of its junior members at that, but his forename had a certain talismanic significance that attracted an extra measure of glamour even before he sealed his own historical significance. He did that, of course, by having himself frozen down alive to await the advent of emortality, leaving himself to the care of his very own Ahasuerus Foundation. If Conrad Helier had been Adam Helier, and Eveline Hywood merely Eve, they too might have acquired a higher status in the creation myths of the Secular Era — and it would surely have seemed more significant that one of the key elements of gantzing apparatus came to be called shamirs, if Leon Gantz had only been named Solomon.

  So there was, after all, a sense in which Adam Zimmerman was indeed “my own Adam,” or one of them. It was even more obvious that he was Michael Lowenthal’s, Mortimer Gray’s and Davida Berenike Columella’s Adam, given the contribution that the Ahasuerus Foundation had made to their posthumanity, although I supposed that Niamh Horne might reserve her reverence for some primal cyborg. Having realized that, I understood a little better why the AMIs might think that Adam Zimmerman was still an important element in the course of history. I also understood why the decision he had yet to make might carry a great deal of weight as a significant example, not so much now as in the future, when today’s events had become mere aspects of a creation myth.

  “Is la Reine trying to manufacture an Edenic fantasy of her own?” I asked Rocambole, as we were set before a magic mirror — explicitly, this time, so that we could play the part of observers looking in through a one-way glass. “Are we supposed to be building a creation myth for a new world, in which machines and men will be partners in some kind of alchemical marriage?”

  “It’s one way to look at it,” he agreed.

  You will understand by now how attractive that way of looking at it might have been to a man like me. For exactly that reason, I decided to be cautious in availing myself of the opportunity. It’s easy to get carried away when you’ve been locked in a VE for so long that you’ve begun to think of meatspace as one more fantasy in the infinite catalog — but I wasn�
�t yet ready to go native. I still wanted my body back, as good as new or better. I still wanted to get out of Faerie if ever the opportunity should come along. If this was supposed to be Eden, I was ready and willing to fall out of it.

  Like Niamh Horne, Adam Zimmerman was in conference. Out of deference to his twentieth-century roots, however, he hadn’t been reduced to a talking head floating in a VE. He was back in his customized armchair in the reception room on Excelsior. There was a side table to his right, on which stood a bottle of red wine and a glass and a bowl containing succulent but not very nourishing fruits from the microworld’s garden. He was facing the big window screen. A discreet array of three more armchairs, of various sizes, was set on his left. The figure seated in the smallest one was Davida Berenike Columella. Alice Fleury was in the mediumsized one. The largest was occupied by a woman — or perhaps a robot modeled on a woman — who was taller than Alice by approximately the same margin that Alice topped Davida.

  The robot female had very pale skin textured like porcelain, and silver hair. I figured that this was my first clear sight of la Reine des Neiges, or one of her avatars. I figured, too, that this was why I seemed to be stuck in a queue awaiting her attention. No matter how ultrasmart she was, or how good she was at inattentive multitasking, she could only concentrate intently on one scenario at a time. For the present, she was devoting her best effort to this one.

  I inferred that the three women would rise to their feet one by one, to make their presentations to the man who had made a present of the world to the Pharaohs of Capitalism, or had at least tied the pink bow on the fancy wrapping. What they were trying to sell him was emortality — not the versions of it that they already possessed, but the next versions due from their various production lines. I wasn’t sure why la Reine was bothering to put on this part of her show, but I had enough respect for her by now to assume that it wasn’t just a stalling tactic. She had a point to make — and would presumably make it herself

  “If you want a better mythological parallel,” Rocambole whispered in my ear, “think of Paris.”

  He didn’t mean the city. He meant the prince of Troy appointed as a judge in a beauty contest by three goddesses, each of whom had offered him a bribe. It seemed to me to be a singularly unfortunate — and hence rather subversive — analogy. That particular contest had been secretly provoked by Eris, the embodiment of Strife, and she had done a good job.

  Like an idiot, Paris had gone for Aphrodite, who had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world, instead of Hera, who had promised to make him ruler of the world, or Athene, who had promised that he would always be victorious in battle. The result had been the Trojan War, which his side lost.

  Personally, I’d have made a very different decision. I hadn’t yet had time to get to know Adam Zimmerman well, but I was fairly confident that he, like me, would have entered into negotiation with the goddesses in order to obtain the reward he wanted rather than any of those on offer. On the other hand, I was also fairly confident that he and I wouldn’t have been shopping for the same fate.

  Davida went first, having drawn the shortest straw in a rigged ballot.

  Davida explained that although the members of the sisterhood had all been born to their condition they now had the technology necessary to offer anyone else a makeover. They could reconstruct Adam Zimmerman’s body cell by cell, retaining all the neural connections in his brain to preserve the continuity of his personality. They could make him one of them: childlike and sexless, his internal anatomy carefully redesigned in the interests of nutritive efficiency and the emortalization of body and mind alike. They could offer him the widest spectrum of emotions available to any posthuman species, and the most effective processes of intellectual tuning — thus enabling him to establish a balance between the rational and emotional components of his being to suit every occasion.

  “Many of the other posthuman species regard our seeming juvenility and apparent sexlessness as limitations,” Davida told her Adam, as she warmed to her pitch, “but that is a misconception. It is, in fact, their preference for what would once have been considered adulthood and for a physiological sexuality roughhewn by natural selection that are limitations.

  “The mental elasticity of early youth is a uniquely valuable possession. The great bugbear of the emortal condition is robotization: a state of mind reflecting the fact that the brain has become incapable of further neural reorganization, manifest in consciousness and behavior as an intense conservatism of opinion, belief and habit. The assumption that this is a relatively remote danger is, in our view, mistaken. You come to us from a time in which what we call robotization was clearly manifest as a natural consequence of advancing age. Indeed, you come from a time in which the only release from robotization was senility.

  “The people of your era undoubtedly had their own ideas as to when the natural conservatism of adulthood began to set in. Historical research suggests that some of you would have set the prime of life at forty, others at twenty-one — but if you had been able to study the development of the brain in more detail and with more care, you would have seen that the robotizing effects of adulthood began to set in much earlier, at puberty. Freedom from robotization requires that the development of a posthuman body be arrested much earlier than the people of your era supposed.

  “It is true that the other posthuman species have achieved remarkable success in preserving and exploiting those juvenile aspects which remain to a partly matured brain. They have made the most of the mental flexibility left to them, but our assessment of the current situation is that everyone born in the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth centuries is now on the very threshold of robotization, desperately employing the last vestiges of their potential flexibility to maintain the illusion that they are capable of further personal evolution. Their bodies are probably capable of thousands of years of further existence, but their minds will settle into fixed routines long before they reach the limits of their bodily existence.

  “We cannot claim that our own brains will remain malleable forever, and we recognize that there is a complementary danger to personality in what people of the twenty-first century called the Miller Effect, but we do have good grounds for asserting that we can sustain much greater mental flexibility for far longer than any of our sibling species. Although it is a less important issue, we also have good grounds for believing that our bodies are also more robust, capable of a greater longevity than those possessed by our sibling species.”

  “Because they’re sexless?” Zimmerman put in.

  “The supersession of sexual limitation is perhaps the most important aspect of the assisted evolution,” Davida told him, “but it’s by no means the only one. Let me illustrate.”

  Until then she had not used the windowscreen at all, but now she began to summon anatomical images, some photographic and some diagrammatic, to back up her argument. There were a great many of them, and her discourse frequently became too technical for me to follow, but she pressed on at a relentless pace, presumably because she was working under pressure, to an arbitrary deadline.

  Adam Zimmerman must have had just as much difficulty in following the technical details as I had, even though he’d equipped himself with a good technical education by the standards of his own era, but he made no complaint and he probably got the gist of it.

  That gist, so far as I could tell, was that although natural selection had been an anatomical designer of unquestionable genius, it had suffered greatly from the effects of the old adage that necessity is the mother of improvisation. Faced with the problems of making mammals, then primates, then humans, work on a generation-by-generation basis, it had kept on and on adding quick fixes to designs that might have been better sent back to the drawing board for an entirely new start. Natural selection had never had the luxury of going back to the drawing board and starting over — not, at least, since the last big asteroid strike and the basalt flow that laid down the Deccan Traps had administered the coup de grace
to the already-decadent empire of the dinosaurs.

  I shall skip over the details of Davida’s objections to the bran tub that was the human abdomen and the various bits of kit that made up the digestive and excretory system, on the grounds that it was essentially boring. Similarly, I see no point in recording her objections to the architecture of the spinal column or the circulatory system, let alone the detailed biochemistry of Gaea’s metabolic cycles and the endocrine signaling system. It was her thoughts on the subject of sex that struck me most forcibly, and which must have had a similar impact on her immediate audience.

  After issuing a conventional warning against the hazards of teleological thinking, Davida admitted that there was a sense in which the whole purpose of a human body was sexual. Central to the fundamental philosophy of its design was the production of eggs or sperm, and the development of physiological and behavioral mechanisms for bringing the two together in a manner conducive to the eventual production of more egg or sperm producers. There was, she conceded, an arguable case for the contention that sexuality was so fundamental to humanity that it might be regarded as its very essence, even after the universal sterilization caused by the plague wars had put an end to live births.

  On the other hand, she was quick to add, the most important years of human development were unquestionably those prior to puberty. By the time a human being became sexually functional, the foundations of the personality had been laid. Then again, the human mind also continued to function — and had done even in Adam Zimmerman’s day — long after sexual function had declined to negligibility, albeit in an increasingly robotic manner. Given these facts, Davida contended, one could also argue that the essence of human individuality was quite unconnected with sexuality.

  That was exactly what she did go on to argue.

  Davida asserted that the gift of personality and individual self-consciousness was, in fact, a transcendence of and hard-won triumph over sexuality, which had had to be won in early childhood precisely because the anti-intellectual effects of the sexual impulse were so drastic.