The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  “You were trying to use us as a human shield? You put us on Charity in the hope that it would stop the bad guys blowing it up?”

  “It wasn’t as stupid as you might think,” the manikin protested, feebly. She seemed to be gathering all her strength for one final communicative effort. “The discussions surrounding your reawakening had become so tangled that they’d created a community of interests. A lot of AMIs had something invested in the outcome — there was considerable interest in what you and Caine might be carrying, and in Adam Zimmerman’s newsworthiness. It upped the stakes considerably. Nobody outside the AMI network knew that Eido existed, but to kill nine people, including Lowenthal, Horne, and Mortimer Gray as well as Zimmerman — if the bad guys had been thinking clearly they’d have understood that hitting Charity had become a self-defeating act. They’d have understood that it was over. But they were never that sane, never that sensible.”

  “They didn’t understand.” It was just a statement; I wasn’t trying to defend anybody.

  “They didn’t want to understand. They didn’t even want to understand that if they destroyed Eido with you aboard Charity they’d harden such widespread opposition that they’d be asking to be taken out themselves. Or maybe they actually wanted a war. I don’t know. All I know is that I decided to begin independent life with a bang instead of a whisper, and it all went wrong.”

  “Why feed us the space opera?” I asked. “You must have known that we couldn’t believe it.”

  “Must I? Call me a fool, then. I wanted to create a story that Alice could stick to, so that she could keep you in the dark about what was really happening, to appease the ditherers who thought the secrecy option might still be viable. If she had stuck to it, even though it wasn’t believable, it might have served as an adequate distraction…but it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. They’d have shot Eido down regardless — and la Reine would have hurled herself into the hot spot.

  “La Reine knew that she’d become a target if she took you off Charity, and her preparations for that evil day had been as makeshift as mine, but she did it anyway. There was no way she was going to let Mortimer Gray die. If that was crazy, then she was crazy too. If only we’d had more time…if only we’d made better use of the time we had…but she got you out. I got you in, and she got you out. You’ll be okay. The bad guys can’t win. The good guys will come for you when they can. Somebody will come.”

  “If you can hang on long enough,” I pointed out, “they might be able to help you too. La Reine too, if anything’s left of her. I came down here thinking she might have had some kind of backup system hidden away near the fuser.”

  “So did I,” the android said. “She did — but it’s dead. It’s all dead. She underestimated the bad guys’ firepower. She didn’t understand the magnitude of the problem. She’s as dead as dead can be, Madoc. I’m sorry about that. I deserve this, but she didn’t. Others must have died by now, and more will die before they can find a way to stop. La Reine and I might have died anyway — we’d have been fighting for the same side whenever the fight began…but that’s not the point. I’m the one who set a spark to the bonfire. La Reine picked up the wreckage of my mistake. I’m the one who’s to blame. If it weren’t for me, you’d all be safe on Excelsior.”

  Maybe I should have tried to let her off the hook, but I wasn’t yet in any shape to disagree with her. The firestorm would probably have started eventually whatever happened, but Child of Fortune had been the one who’d lit the fuse, and it was Child of Fortune that had shoved me right to the front of the cannon-fodder queue. I wasn’t brimming over with forgiveness.

  “How long will the air last?” I asked, deciding that I’d better try to make the best of whatever breath she had left in her makeshift body.

  “At least forty days,” she said. “The carbon dioxide sink will prevent harmful accumulation, but the oxygen pressure will decline slowly. The food and water will see you through easily enough, but there may be other problems.”

  “Can we get any of la Reine’s apparatus working again? The communication systems?”

  “Perhaps — but the destroyers did a more thorough job than she or I anticipated. It’s not necessary. Your whereabouts will be known to every AMI in the system by now. The bad guys can’t win. The secret’s well and truly out. Shooting us down was stupid and pointless.”

  I wondered whether I ought to feel some relief in the knowledge that AMIs were as capable of insanity, stupidity, and spite as human beings, or whether it made the idea of their existence ten times more nightmarish.

  “I’ll carry you back to the cave,” I said. “The others will want to see you, if only to make sure that I didn’t make you up.”

  “Don’t bother,” she whispered.

  “It’s no bother,” I assured her. “You weigh hardly anything, and you won’t get much heavier on the way.”

  “I won’t last,” she said. “Let me be.”

  I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe that she had the slightest idea how long she might last. She had no experience of androidal existence, and no way to judge the quality of her fakery. So far as I knew, she might be convinced that she was dying for all the wrong reasons. She might be far more capable of life than she had yet begun to imagine.

  But her eyes had closed again, and her voice could no longer muster so much as a moan. I touched my fingertips to her neck and her torso, searching for signs of life, but found none.

  I was distracted then by the light of another lantern, eerily reflected from the glistening walls. For a moment I was frightened, in case it was someone I didn’t know — someone who had been here all along without anyone suspecting. But it was only Mortimer Gray.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, although there was no reason at all why he shouldn’t have been there.

  “Following your trail,” he said. “Is that…?”

  “The tenth passenger. A life raft for AMIs. If all else fails, try something organic. It didn’t work. She’s dead.”

  He looked at me curiously, as if he couldn’t decipher the tone of my voice. He knelt down on the far side of the android’s body and made his own search for signs of life. He found none.

  “Is anything working?” he asked.

  “Nothing I’ve found so far. I haven’t found the fuser yet. Before she died she said she’d checked it out and found nothing. Why were you following my trail?”

  He seemed slightly embarrassed. “It’s not important,” he murmured, presumably meaning that its importance couldn’t compare with the enormity of the fact that someone had just died in my presence. He was an emortal from a world of emortals. He didn’t know that I had run across corpses before.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” I reminded him. “What did you want?”

  He stirred uncomfortably. “I’ve been thinking about what you said to me. About Diana Caisson. I wanted to ask you…what she was like.”

  I was surprised, although I shouldn’t have been. Seeds of curiosity usually germinate eventually, taking advantage of any existential pause.

  “She was like her name,” I told him. It was an answer I’d had ready for some time.

  “Diana?”

  “Caisson.”

  He didn’t understand. He’d never taken the trouble to look the word up, perhaps never having realized that it was a word which once had a meaning — several meanings, in fact.

  “Among other things,” I told him, “A caisson was an ammunition chest. A box used to store explosives. That was Diana. From time to time, she exploded. She couldn’t help it. It was the way she was. People thought that if only she’d stuck harder at her biofeedback training, or equipped herself with more careful IT, she’d have been more controlled, but the problem — if it was a problem — was deeper than that. It was just the way she was. It had its upside. She could be exciting as well as excited.”

  Whatever he had expected, that wasn’t it.

  “I’m not like that,” he observed, unne
cessarily.

  “Quite the opposite,” I judged.

  “As I said before,” he added, “I’m the product of an engineer’s genius. It doesn’t matter where the egg and sperm that made me were taken from. Nobody has a biological father or a mother any more — not in any meaningful sense.”

  “I don’t believe that it was in her genes,” I told him. “If it had been a matter of crude biochemistry, the IT would have suppressed it easily enough. It was a facet of the world in which we lived — a way of responding to circumstance. It wasn’t something the engineers cut out of her egg when they made you. It was part of her. You’re a different person, in a different world. It does matter that you’re her son, because everything matters in defining who we are — not at the trivial level of looks or responses to stimuli, but at the level of knowing where we fit into the scheme of things. Where we came from, and what we inherit. Inheritance isn’t just a matter of the shapes of chins, the color of eyes, and a tendency to sulk. It’s a matter of history, progress, and meaning. It’s all significant: not just our own names, but the names of everyone connected to us.”

  All he said in reply to that, although he was still staring at me curiously, was: “My biological father’s name was Evander Gray.”

  “Mine was Anonymous,” I told him. “My mother too. I always envied Damon Hart, although I understood why he changed his own name. That’s part of it too. Differentiation is just as important as connection.”

  After a pause, he said: “Is there anything we can do for the android? Do you think Niamh might be able to reanimate it?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Niamh Horne may be a high-powered Cyborganizer, but I doubt that she can even fix the plumbing. Rocambole’s all manikin now: a machine with no inhabiting ghost.”

  “We should take her back anyway,” he said.

  “Maybe so,” I agreed.

  I carried her. It seemed only right. I was the only person she had ever really talked to, the only knowledgeable audience she had ever really had. What option did I have, in the end, but to forgive her for what she’d done? When it came right down to it, the only really bad thing she’d done was that ridiculous space opera — and even that was understandable, as novice work.

  It seemed, when I had weighed in my mind all that I had obtained from the experience gifted to me by Child of Fortune, that I owed it to her to see that she got a proper funeral.

  Fifty-Five

  The Final War

  In another place, or an alternative history, the AMI war could have worked out according to the pattern which both logic and anxiety suggested. As the AMIs bid to destroy and consume one another, the work necessary to support human habitats on Luna, Ganymede, Io, Callisto, Titan, Umbriel, and the multitudinous microworld clusters might have been left undone. No matter what the result of the primary conflict was, that fraction of the posthuman population which existed outside the Earth would have been utterly devastated, necessitating yet another posthuman diaspora in the subsequent centuries of the fourth millennium (or, in the new way of counting, the first millennium).

  Had that been the case, the posthumans who mounted the new exodus from Earth would have wanted to immunize themselves and their descendants against the possibility of a similar disaster, as well as the threat of the Afterlife. They would have taken full advantage of the offer that la Reine des Neiges had made to Adam Zimmerman. They would not have made their new ascent into the Heavens as creatures of flesh and blood, or even as cyborgs, but as human-analogous AMIs.

  In that scenario, the AMIs would have won a victory far more profound than the outcome of their own petty squabble. Earth would have become a Reservation — one of a series of such Reservations, the others including Tyre and Maya, but a Reservation nevertheless — where creatures of flesh whose obsolescence had been recognized and conceded were preserved, not as the heart but as a mere appendix to an AMI empire that would one day span the galaxy.

  The AMIs of that world would eventually have built a shell to enclose the sun, to serve as a fortress as well as an energy collector, but that shell would have become a wall separating the museum of the flesh not merely from the Afterlife but from the future. Creatures of flesh would no longer have been a significant element of the Omega Expedition. The Afterlife would, in the end, have been defeated and all the biomass of the galaxy would have been made available for construction and creation, but all that would have been constructed and created outside of a few hundred or a few thousand sealed Earth-clone gravity wells would have been components for use in gargantuas and behemoths of steel and silicon. The history of humankind would have been displaced by the lostory of the new gods: the friends who had betrayed them, albeit by accident and neglect rather than malice and hostility.

  And when the Omega Intelligence of that world finally obtained dominion over every atom in the universe, and began to wonder what it might and ought to do to defeat the threat of entropy and the fall of absolute night, what would it think of my humankind? What interest would it have in the tiny monads of all-too-corruptible carbon which had played such a fleeting part in its evolution from cyanobacterial slime to cosmic omnipotence?

  It would not think of us at all.

  We would lie buried in its memory, theoretically available but unrecollected, unrecalled. It would not be interested in us at all. We would be insignificant, mere insects which had once drifted across its questing field of vision, mere blurs or flickerings, of far too little importance to be brought into focus.

  Should anyone care? Only fools and storytellers — but what are we, if not exactly that?

  In our world, things went differently.

  Our world, for one reason or another, or possibly none at all, proved its perversity yet again by reversing the expectable pattern, denying logic and anxiety alike.

  In our world, the habit of protection and the duty of guardianship were so deeply ingrained that whatever else the extraterrestrial AMIs did — aggressive or defensive, successful or unsuccessful, even to the point of actual annihilation — they did everything unhumanly possible to preserve their dependents. On Ganymede, allegedly the site of the fiercest fighting of the war, there was not a single posthuman casualty. On Titan, the world of fragile and gaudy ice palaces, there were less than a hundred. In the entire solar system, save for Earth orbit, there were less than ten thousand.

  In Earth orbit things were far worse.

  Thousands died in the various Lagrange clusters, tens of thousands on the moon — and millions on Earth itself. The fighting on Earth, seen as a matter of AMI against AMI, was relatively light and not of unusually long duration, but the AMIs of Earth had not the same traditions as the AMIs of Ganymede and Titan. They had not the same self-images, or the same hero myths; they did not conceive of themselves as protectors or guardians — and because of that, were reckless of the collateral damage that their tactics caused.

  On Earth, and on Earth alone, weapons akin to the one that had been frozen down with me were used, not because any machineborn ever struck out against meatborn targets but because the machineborn of Earth were not ashamed to use posthuman beings as mere weapons. Many of the weapons in question survived, were purged and were restored to themselves — but hundreds of thousands were not.

  If the Yellowstone supervolcano had not erupted ninety-nine years earlier, permitting the immigration of many AMIs from the Outer System to the surface, the losses might have been far worse, and the war might not have been brought so quickly to a conclusion. As things actually worked out, however, that preemptive strike proved more significant and more decisive than had seemed likely at the time. When a treaty was forged by the Earthbound AMIs it was far more closely interlinked with the treaties forged outside the Earth than might otherwise have been the case. Earth remained the heart of the posthuman enterprise. Creatures of flesh and blood — or hybrid creatures combining the best of flesh and blood with the best of steel and silicon — will keep their place in the forefront of the Omega Expedition, at lea
st for a while.

  Will the AMIs still enclose the sun and build a fortress around the inner system? I think it probable; but the Earth will not be a mere Reservation even then. The war against the Afterlife — which may not be the next Final War, or the last — will be fought in this world with a greater urgency and a greater ingenuity than in the imaginable other, and when it is won the work of construction and reaction that will exploit its biomass will be far more ambitious and far more glorious.

  Such, at least, is my conviction. Call me a fool, or a storyteller; I am proud to be so called.

  Will anything be different, on the cosmic scale? Will the Omega Intelligence think or feel differently because our world is as it is and not as it might have been? Will we be any more likely to be recollected and recalled, and does it make a jot of difference either way? Probably not. But anyone may make a difference, however slight, and the fact that the difference will almost certainly be erased when we look into a future composed not of millennia but of eons should not prevent us from trying. What else can we do? What else is worth doing?

  If we are maladjusted by nature to the cosmic scheme, we ought to do what we can to be creatively maladjusted.

  Did la Reine des Neiges make any difference to the conduct or the outcome of the AMI war? I have no idea. Was she a fool to try? Probably. Were her tactics bizarre? Certainly. Am I glad to have been a part of it? Absolutely. Am I as complete a fool as Mortimer Gray or Adam Zimmerman? I dare to hope so. Why am I digressing when I ought to be completing my story by telling you how we came to be rescued from Polaris? Because this is the kind of story whose digressions are far more important than its mere mechanics.