Christine and I eventually returned with Adam to the Americas, traveling all the way up from Tierra del Fuego to the isthmus of Panama in easy stages, accelerating our schedule as we came into the north. We might have attracted more attention on our own account if we hadn’t been traveling with him, but playing second fiddle had its compensations as well as fueling a certain envious resentment. All in all, the pluses outweighed the minuses.
Adam was right about the alienating effects of the multiple decivilization of New York, but he was right about Manhattan too. The island’s original dimensions were still just about recognizable within the hectic patchwork of the new continental shelf. When Christine and I headed west, though, Adam chose to go his own way.
“I’ll keep in touch,” he promised.
“I don’t think we’ll have any difficulty keeping track of you,” I assured him. “You’re the kind of wonder that’ll run for years and years. Let us know when you’re finally ready to make the decision that the whole system’s waiting for, so that we can all compare notes.”
Little did I know…
Adam hadn’t given us the least inkling of his long-term plans, if he’d made any at that point. I doubt that he had. I think he intended to take a good long look at the world, and at himself, before he decided what his next step was going to be.
That was the last of my temporary farewells. Christine and I had decided to stick together for a while.
I waited, but in vain, for the call to come that would summon me to the forefront of the ongoing political and economic negotiations between the posthuman factions and the AMIs. I maintained the hope for as long as I could that my conscription had merely been delayed, but in the end I accepted the sad truth.
In spite of all my heroic efforts during the last few minutes of la Reine’s stint as Scheherazade I was not to receive my due. Nobody wanted me for an ambassador, nor even for an expert audience. It was a mistake, I think. I could have been useful to all sides.
Had la Reine survived, it would have been a different story, but the time came when I had to stop hoping for that particular miracle. She had known my true worth, at the end, but she had been the only one who did. I might now be the only one who understands her true worth, even in a world which contains Mortimer Gray, but I hope that I am wrong. She deserves to be accurately remembered, especially by her own kind.
In the end, Christine and I decided to take the jobs that Mortimer Gray had offered us, at least for the time being. Given that we were historical curiosities in any case, and that everyone wanted to hear our story, we figured that we might as well get as much spendable credit as possible for answering questions. It turned out to be harder than we had expected; newscasters only want to know what’s newsworthy, but historians want to know everything, and then some. Inevitably, we both set out to write our own accounts of everything we’d been through.
It really was inevitable that we’d have to write our accounts, because text retains certain qualities that even the very best VE scripts will never be able to emulate. In a VE you use your eyes as eyes and your ears as ears; it really is virtual experience — but when you read you switch off your other senses and turn your eyes into code readers, retreating into a world of pure thought and imagination. It was that world of abstraction that had shaped and organized our ancestors’ inner lives during the early phases of the technological revolution; it was there that they learned to be the complex kind of being we now call human. It is there that true humanity still resides, even after all this time. It is there that histories and lostories, autobiographies and fantasies, moral fables and contes philosophiques, comedies and cautionary tales all belong — and my story is all of those things, although it is first and foremost a cautionary tale…and a comedy. Although I am not an AMI, and probably never will be, I have no intention of living my life, or reviewing my life, in an unironic way.
“It seems a little silly to be writing an autobiography,” Christine told me, when we set out on our separate labors of love. “Discounting downtime in the freezer, I’m only twenty-three years old. That wasn’t much by the standards of our day — by today’s standards, it’s nothing at all. If it wasn’t for the rash of new births prompted by the war, there’d only be a few hundred people younger than me in the whole world.”
“It’s just the first chapter of a lifelong project,” I told her. “It’s best to start early, because every day that passes consigns a little more of our experience to the abyss of forgetfulness, and turns a few more memories into pale shadows of their former selves. We’re not human any more, and if we want to recollect what it was like to be human, we have to start doing it now. We should, given that we’re two of the most interesting human beings that ever existed.”
“Are we?” she asked, skeptically.
“If we weren’t before,” I said, “we are now. We lived through the aftermath of the last last war but one, and we were in the thick of the last one. Who else can say that?”
“We were innocent bystanders standing on the sidelines,” she pointed out.
“You were an innocent bystander,” I admitted, “but even your innocence had to be proved. I tried as hard as I could to be something more than a mere bystander, and something more than a mere innocent. Maybe I didn’t succeed as well as I could have hoped in my attempts to get involved, but nobody else is going to build up my particular subplot if I don’t. I think I can make myself a little more interesting if I try hard. Don’t you?”
She had to say yes.
“We could so easily have been lost,” she said. “I’m glad I had the chance to find myself.”
I remembered wondering whether I owed it to my own kind to be the champion the long sleepers never had: the Moses who would lead them from their wilderness of ice into the Promised Land of Futurity, so that all the murderers and miscreants might have the chance to find themselves. I haven’t done it yet, but I still might. It might be a story worth telling, a drama worth performing.
Christine and I are still together, but there’s no finality in our togetherness. We’ll probably keep company until we find that we no longer have any more in common with one another than we have with our fellow emortals, and then we’ll part, promising to keep in touch. I wouldn’t call that love — but then, I don’t go to operas much, either. Even though I’ve seen and felt what music can amount to, when it achieves perfection, I still prefer the kinds that people make themselves, on obsolete instruments, amplified the old-fashioned way. There are things we all have to learn to appreciate, whether we’re meat or machine; for those of us who don’t happen to find it easy it’s a slow process, but we’ll get there in the end.
I sometimes wonder, of course, whether I might still be dreaming the dreams of a slowly dying man in a derelict icebox stored in an orbital sarcophagus. That’s an understandable side effect of being lost in an infinite maze of uncertainty, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever be completely free of uncertainty — but I know now that it doesn’t really matter whether I’m quite myself or not. Nobody is, because we’re all in the process of becoming, permanently suspended between the self we used to be and the self we’ve yet to generate.
With luck, I’ll have an infinite number of selves to create and leave behind, and I’ll never quite settle into any one of them, unless and until I decide that it’s time to be reborn as an ultrasmart robot. I’ll have to do it one day, if only to discover what stands in for pleasure in the mechanical spectrum of the emotions. Maybe I’ll find it existentially unsatisfying and return to my roots. Maybe I won’t — in which case, I’ll move on. And on.
One thing I won’t change, at least for the foreseeable future, is my name. Whatever faults my foster parents might have had, and whatever mistakes they might have made in nursing me through childhood, they certainly got that right.
I know that I’m only emortal. I know that one day, whether tomorrow or a million years down the line, the bullet with my name on it will be fired. But it will have to find me first, and
I intend to lead it a very merry dance before it catches up with me.
I hope I don’t run out of stories in the meantime.
Epilogue
The Last Adam: A Myth for the Children of Humankind
by Mortimer Gray
Part Two
Six
Aided by its links with the corporations for which Adam Zimmerman had worked, the Ahasuerus Foundation weathered all the economic and ecocatastrophic storms of the twenty-first century. It was scarcely affected by the Great Depression and the Greenhouse Crisis, or by the various wars that ran riot until the 2120s. It survived the sporadic hostility of individual saboteurs and Luddite governments. It survived the predations of the new breed of tax-gatherers spawned by the strengthened United Nations when it came to dominate the old nation states. Until the end of the twenty-second century, though, its economic course really was a matter of survival in difficult circumstances. Its two principal fields of technological research — longevity and suspended animation — were widely regarded as irrelevant to the far more urgent problems facing the human community.
Although the research conducted in the twenty-first century by the Ahasuerus Foundation did make many significant contributions to the conquest of disease and the enhancement of immune systems, it was not involved in the first conspicuous breakthrough in life extension. The development of nanotechnological tissue-repair systems was pioneered by the Institute of Algeny, which was subsequently absorbed by the most powerful of the late twenty-second century cosmicorporations, PicoCon. In a sense, this might be regarded as a fortunate failure. Had the breakthrough in question been made by Ahasuerus, it would undoubtedly have suffered the same fate, being swallowed up by a much larger institution and effectively digested. As things stood, the Foundation was allowed to retain much of its independence, following its own agenda in the slipstream of progress. The trustees were undoubtedly subject to considerable pressure from the Cartel of Cosmicorporations, which exercised a right of veto over its publications and products, but it was never formally taken over.
By the time the Ahasuerus Foundation did achieve a crucial breakthrough in longevity technology, the political climate in which it was operating had changed considerably, becoming far more benign. The Cartel had become far less combative internally, and far less assertive in its dealings with the democratic agencies of world government, having long settled into the comfortable routines of what its critics still called “invisible despotism.”
The central institution of the new world older was the New Charter of Human Rights, which sought to establish a right of emortality for everyone. Some historians have asserted that the Cartel only allowed the establishment of the charter because they knew that nanotechnological repair systems had reached the limit of effective achievement and the end of their natural lifetime as a generator of core profits, but this is unnecessarily cynical. What is certain, however, is that the granting of the charter placed a new responsibility on democratic institutions, which could only be discharged with the assistance and good will of the corporations, further enhancing the authority that commerce already exercised over the political apparatus.
Whatever the reasons may have been for its establishment, the New Charter provided the ideal context for purely biotechnological methods of life extension to move from the periphery to the heart of humankind’s progressive endeavours. The quest for “true” emortality — the promise of supportive Internal Technology having stopped some way short of that goal — was rapidly rewarded by the Foundation’s development of the Zaman Transformation.
In an earlier era Ali Zaman and his coworkers might have been coopted by the Cosmicorporations, but the twenty-fifth century was a more relaxed period, when a spirit of laissez faire — symbolized, albeit rather uneasily, by the Great Exhibition of 2405 — was not merely permitted but encouraged by the Earth’s economic directors. Rumors that the Foundation had actually discovered the relevant transformative techniques before Ali Zaman had even been born, but had obligingly kept them secret until the Cartel was fully prepared for their release, are probably false, being merely the latest in a long sequence of absurdly overcomplicated conspiracy theories.
The income flow generated by the increasingly effective and widely customized Zaman Transformations revived the stagnant finances of the Ahasuerus Foundation. Although Adam Zimmerman’s fortune had been considerable by twenty-first-century standards and the expenses of the Foundation were almost entirely met from income rather than capital, it had not been able to match the growth of the world economy. Now, placed firmly in the driving seat of progress, it began to grow richer at a rapid rate. The income available to its trustees increased massively, allowing them to diversify the Foundation’s holdings and researches on and off Earth. The trustees grew exceedingly rich in their own right.
As generation followed generation the custodians of Adam Zimmerman’s frozen body fought off a series of attempts to have him revived, on the grounds that the time was not yet ripe. Again, cynics who contended that their principal motive was to preserve their own authority and wealth from the claims of their founder were probably imagining a conspiracy where none really existed.
There is no doubt at all that the trustees were right to let Adam Zimmerman sleep through the entire era of nanotechnologically assisted longevity. Even the most sophisticated Internal Technology, coupled with occasional intrusive deep-tissue rejuvenation, were plainly inadequate to fulfil the criteria Adam had laid down for his revival. They extended the human lifespan from one hundred twenty years to three hundred but that was obviously far from the true emortality which Adam had coveted. The Zaman Transformation technologies which replaced them were far more effective, but they required genetic engineering of an embryo at a single-cell stage, and were therefore not the slightest use to anyone but the unborn. There could be no question of reviving Adam Zimmerman in response to that development. Perhaps there was a case to be made for Adam’s revival in the thirty-first or thirty-second century, but with genomic engineering still in its infancy in the home system the prudent thing to do was to wait for the further improvements that were bound to come.
The suspicion that Adam would never have been unfrozen had it not been for the AMI intervention is probably groundless. It is doubtless unfortunate, from Adam’s viewpoint, that research dedicated to the further refinement of technologies of emortality between the twenty-fifth and thirtieth centuries was almost entirely concentrated in the area of embryonic engineering, but the concentration is perfectly understandable. After all, no one but Adam and a few thousand others in his situation — most of whom were criminals convicted of terrible crimes — actually stood in need of a technology of emortality applicable to adults.
There were critics within and without the Ahasuerus Foundation who pointed out during this historical phase that since the Foundation was now the prime mover of emortality research, it could have diverted a greater fraction of its resources to the kinds of technology which would have benefited its founder, but the Earthbound trustees of the Foundation were sensibly determined to move forward in measured and unhurried steps. The situation was complicated in the twenty-ninth and thirtieth centuries by the clamor of the cyborganizers, whose contention that hybridization was a better route to complete existential security than pure biomodification had to be considered very carefully indeed.
Seven
When the day of Adam Zimmerman’s reawakening finally did arrive, in the year 99 of the New Era (3263 in the old reckoning) it seemed at first to have arrived by accident. The decision was not made by a properly convened meeting of the Foundation’s trustees, and those resident on Earth began to complain about the lack of consultation as soon as news of the impending event was broadcast. It seemed to them — incorrectly, as it turned out — that cryogenic scientists resident in the microworld Excelsior, which happened to be a near neighbor of the microworld in the Counter-Earth Cluster where Adam Zimmerman’s body was now stored, had taken the decision into their own
hands.
I was privileged to be part of a hastily constituted delegation sent by the United Nations of Earth to witness Adam Zimmerman’s reawakening. I assumed at the time that I had been honored by my own people for my services to history, but it became clear eventually that the authorities responsible for such decisions had been bypassed as easily and as invisibly as those which should have been responsible for the decision to awaken the sleeper.
What happened after my arrival in Excelsior is far too well known to require any elaborate description. The momentous meeting was interrupted by the audacious crime that precipitated the AMI war. Having made every effort to live as securely and as unobtrusively as a man of his means could in the early years of the twenty-first century, Adam Zimmerman awoke not merely to find himself famous but to be made a prize in a violent contest. If the AMI war came as a shock to us, imagine what it must have been to a man who had put himself into suspended animation in 2035, expecting to awake into a peaceful, settled world eager for nothing but to bestow the gift of emortality upon him.
It is tempting, now, to assume that his experiences in the AMI war, when he came direly close to death on two separate occasions, changed Adam Zimmerman out of all recognition. Hindsight invites us to conclude that he was devastated by the trials and tribulations that he suffered before Emily Marchant and Titaness contrived his salvation, and that he emerged from that time of trial a broken man. But was that really what happened? Was it really the case that the indomitably powerful sense of purpose which had created the Ahasuerus Foundation and committed his dormant body to its care had been shattered as casually as a mirror of glass?
The Omega Expedition Page 50
