The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  I think not — and I speak as one who was alongside him during that terrible time, and who took the trouble to remain his fast friend and confidant thereafter. I believe that I have a better understanding of what became of him than anyone else, perhaps including himself.

  It hardly needs saying that Adam Zimmerman was different from other men of his era, but it is important to recognize that the difference was qualitative rather than merely quantitative. Adam saw this difference in terms of self-sufficiency and self-discipline rather than vision or courage, but however it might be conceived or described, there is no doubt that the difference was profound. It was so deeply ingrained, in fact, that it is hard to think of it as anything other than the very essence of the man. He was not like the other people of his own time; he was unique, and his uniqueness was something he felt very keenly.

  There is always a temptation, when confronted with a difference in quality — especially if it produces something unique — to think of it as a freakish mutation. But Adam Zimmerman was not the product of any new combination of genes, and there was certainly no “Zimmerman mutation” that had appeared for the very first time in his chromosome complement. Historians understand — or should understand — that the productions of a particular time within a particular social and environmental context are not uniform. Every set of historical circumstances produces a whole spectrum of individuals who are different from one another not merely in degree but in kind. Sometimes, historical conditions are extremely favorable to the emergence of unique individuals who are fortunate enough to find channels of opportunity exactly suited to their uniqueness. One thinks of Plato and Epicurus, St. Paul and Mahomet, Descartes and Newton, Napoleon and Lenin…and Adam Zimmerman. None of these men had his fate written into his genes; in every case it was something thrust upon him by circumstance.

  The Adam Zimmerman who was born in 1968, stole the world in 2025, and was frozen down in 2035, was a creation of the conditions of twentieth century as it lurched through its Millennial moment. His self-discipline and self-sufficiency were responses to that world’s insanity, no less natural for being so very rare. The great majority of men always participate in the particular madness of their times, which they consider to be inevitable and irresistible, but there is always a tiny minority which is driven to a contrary extreme. Every era generates its Adams; the particular, peculiar, and perfect Adam that was Adam Zimmerman was one of many such creations, and like the rest he was the only one completely appropriate to his own era.

  In becoming so utterly determined to evade the tyranny of the late twentieth century — the tyranny of the Grim Reaper in his final and most flamboyant phase — Adam Zimmerman embodied the late twentieth century. He was, in a sense, the incarnation of the late twentieth century. The consequence of this was that although his desperate attempt to hurl himself through time into a new and better era was entirely understandable as a response to the malaise of his environment, and precisely definitive of the man he was, Adam Zimmerman could never really belong in any era to which he might have been delivered. He could never be, or hope or become, a citizen of the future. Even though his relationship with his own time was encapsulated in his fervor to leave it, he remained firmly anchored to the world that had created him and made him what he was.

  There is, I admit, a certain paradoxicality in this contention — but there is always a certain paradoxicality in human affairs, which afflicts the unique even more acutely than it afflicts the ordinary.

  When Adam Zimmerman went into suspended animation he ceased to be “Adam Zimmerman,” because the very possibility of “Adam Zimmerman” was annihilated on the instant. When he woke up, of course, he was still Adam Zimmerman by name, and his name was one to conjure with. It was a famous name, a powerful name, a name overloaded with significance — but the paragon of self-discipline and self-sufficiency that the name had once identified was gone. In its place there was something very different: an atavism; a messiah; a phantom; a pawn; a symbol of everything that had changed in human history and human nature.

  In attaining his goal, Adam Zimmerman lost it. In becoming attainable, that goal had become worthless.

  This, you must remember, was a mortal man. He had dreamed of emortality, but in himself — body, mind, and spirit alike — he was mortal. It was mortality that made him what he was: a fever burning against extinction; a passion to deny the inevitable. The angst which drove him to achievement was no mere matter of biochemistry burdened in the genome; it was far more deep-seated than that. Had the problem been a matter of biochemistry it could have been countered by biotechnology, but it was not that kind of problem, and it had to be tackled in a different way. It was a historical problem, of maladjustment to the moment; it had to be worked out on the stage of history, by means of a readjustment to the moment.

  Adam Zimmerman believed that there was only one way in which a creature of his kind and a product of his world could overcome the soul-sickness born of the fear of death. In that, he was correct. He believed that the way was to become emortal, by removing himself to a world and time whose citizens were all emortal. In that, alas, he was mistaken.

  Mortals can be made emortal; this we know. Mortals like Madoc Tamlin or Christine Caine could accept emortality gratefully, because they had always believed themselves capable of it, while never valuing it so highly that it became the be-all and end-all of their existence.

  But Adam Zimmerman was not that kind of mortal.

  He was different. In the final analysis, and in the fullness of time, it was the fact of that difference rather than its precise configuration which determined his fate.

  Eight

  The enormity of Adam Zimmerman’s achievement as a time traveler did not become clear to him immediately. Confused by his conscription into the AMI war, he learned only by degrees what sort of a world it was to which he had come. His learning process was made far more difficult by the upheavals surrounding him, and it is not at all surprising that once the reign of peace was restored and he was safely returned to Earth he slipped by slow degrees into a deep depression.

  By the time Adam arrived on Earth he was equipped with the very best Internal Technology to alleviate his moods, but his troubles were no mere matters of chemical imbalance. It was his confrontation with circumstance that harassed him, and would not let him accept the gift of tranquility. He visited Manhattan, which he had once considered to be his home, and found it alien. He visited the crater where once had stood the old city of Jerusalem, which he had once considered to be his spiritual home, and found it far less alien than he had hoped.

  Adam’s dissatisfaction with the world and with himself was by no means uniform. It was continually alleviated by the companionship of his various fellow travelers, and frequently overturned by intoxicating intervals in which he was simply too astonished by the wonders of the world to entertain the shadow of despair. But the predatory darkness always crept back when he was alone and at peace. Every interval of his new existence, whether the pause was forced upon him or entirely voluntary, was an existential crevice in which doubt, impuissance, anxiety and a gnawing sensation of the unheimlich established a secure base.

  This was not the angst of old. Adam no longer had to fear extinction in any obvious or commonplace sense — but that did not mean that he did not need to fear extinction. It was not the statistical margin by which emortality fell short of immortality that troubled him — it had always been the necessity of extinction as the natural terminus of a fixed period of life that had designed and defined his fear — but something else. It was almost as if that seat within his soul which angst had vacated could not tolerate a void, and ached to be filled again.

  Such risks are borne by every man who commits himself absolutely to a goal, so that it becomes the sole shaping factor of his existence. The more relentlessly we pursue one particular end, forsaking all others, the more likely it is that once it is achieved, its absence will be intolerable. If it is better to travel hopefully th
an to arrive, then the happier man is the traveler who always approaches his destination, but never actually attains it.

  Adam Zimmerman was the rarest kind of mortal man. No mortal finds mortality tolerable, unless he is capable of a ruthless repression of the imaginative faculty. On the other hand, no mortal can afford to find mortality utterly intolerable, because even mortals must live. Adam Zimmerman had to live, and he had to live with his own mortality. No matter how hard he worked to lay down the foundations of a future emortality, he had to live with his mortality. It was not only a fact of life but, in his case, the fact of life. Death was his arch enemy, the source and focus of all his heroism. Without it, what would he have been?

  The question is unanswerable save for one undeniable contention: whatever he would have been, he would not have been “Adam Zimmerman.” He would have been another man entirely.

  The facts of Adam Zimmerman’s situation in the hundredth year of the new calendar were straightforward. He had come into a world where no one died, unless by freakish accident, act of war, or choice. He arrived at a moment when freakish accidents and acts of war briefly ran riot, but he came through that moment to its peaceful aftermath. By the time he reached Earth, the war was over.

  Adam found himself then in a world in which violence and aggression no longer figured in the repertoire of human behavior. All humankind had been shaped to various ideals of physical perfection by genetic engineers and Cyborganizers. Everything was beautiful as well as good — and as soon as the AMIs were friends to one another as well as to humankind, a whole new spectrum of ambition and possibility was opened up. Progress had quickened in its paces yet again.

  What a joyful world for a man to inhabit! Unless, of course, that that man was a creation and incarnation of the twentieth century, who had carried every vestige of its woe through thirteen centuries.

  Perhaps Adam should have persevered a little longer in his exploration of our world. Perhaps he should have sought more help in coming to terms with it. Time might have healed his existential wounds, and efficient therapy certainly would have done — but he saw a cost in procrastination, and a cost in assisted rehabilitation. He came to feel that the price he would have to pay for peace of mind was his identity.

  The extinction which Adam had come to fear in place of the vulgar extinction of death was the extinction of his essential self. The new angst which sprang up to occupy the seat of his soul like an avid usurper crying “The king is dead! Long live the king!” was the anxiety that any transformation of his flesh would abolish Adam Zimmerman as thoroughly as any bullet or bomb. Indeed, it was the fearful conviction that he was already in the process of dissolution, because every environmental prop and cue that had formerly assisted in the maintenance of his sense of self had vanished.

  Adam Zimmerman was not a fool; he knew that he could become another person — given time, a thousand other persons. He knew that he could obtain whatever he lacked: joy, ambition, zest, happiness, all the rewards of new and unexpected emotional spectra…everything. But he feared that if he did so, he would be surrendering the very things that had made him what he was and had defined who he was: his self-sufficiency and his self-discipline.

  Perhaps he would have fared better had he not been so famous, but the drama contrived by la Reine des Neiges succeeded — albeit belatedly, in seizing the imagination of AMIs and posthumans alike.

  Wherever Adam went he attracted far more attention than he desired, and the attention in question was always focused on the question that he had declined to answer, on the grounds that the matter required extremely careful thought.

  When Adam had spoken to his twenty-first-century contemporaries of vulnerability to the iniquities of inquisitiveness and heightened susceptibility to flattery, he had always been talking first and foremost to himself. When he had told others that flattery was a powerful force, whose attractions were difficult to resist, he was recognizing a weakness in himself. He had been correct in observing that fame tends to breed sickness and self-abuse, and in judging that the unluckiest people in the world are those who have a fame thrust upon them from which they cannot escape.

  Men are few who can endure much trouble, had been his watchword, in the days when he prided himself on the amount of trouble that he was able to endure. In our world, his endurance was more fully tested, and he found his limitations.

  “I find myself wondering, more and more, what I am,” he told me, when I asked him to explain the decision he eventually made. “Am I the young man who became obsessed with the idea of escaping mortality, or am I merely the tragicomical end result of that obsession: an old man pretending to be something half-forgotten, half-remade?”

  “What matters,” I told him, “is what you intend to become.”

  “And what if that becoming were a betrayal of what I am?” he asked. “What if that becoming were a denial and an abandonment of everything that Adam Zimmerman was, everything that was Adam Zimmerman?”

  “The old Adam Zimmerman was a mortal,” I told him. “It is time now to become emortal. The old Adam Zimmerman was a human. It is time now to be posthuman. You must leave the old Adam Zimmerman behind if you are to receive the rewards of futurity.”

  It was not, in the end, a price he was willing to pay.

  In his own estimation, Adam had not needed courage to be different in the twenty-first century, but he certainly needed it in the first. He found that courage, quickly enough to be able to declare, on his one thousand and three hundredth birthday, that he did not intend to avail himself of any of the technologies of emortality that had been offered to him.

  He told the inquisitive world that he had decided to remain as he was: the only person in the world doomed to senescence and death; the only person in the world who knew the luxury of angst.

  Nine

  Adam Zimmerman explained to anyone and everyone, whenever he was asked, that the decision he had made seemed to him to be the only way that he could maintain his self-respect. He had realized almost as soon as he had opened his eyes on Excelsior, that he was no longer the man he had once been. Worse than that, he had realized that no matter how secure his body might become to the corruptions of ageing and decay, the pressures exerted on his personality would be irresistible.

  He wanted to remain as he was. He wanted to remain what he was. He wanted to remain who he was. In the past, he had believed that the only way to do that was to refuse to die. Now, he had arrived at an opposite conclusion. He now believed that the only way to do that was to refuse the gift of emortality.

  The great majority of his hearers thought him insane. Perhaps he was — but even if he was, his was an insanity that we need to understand, not merely as historians but as sympathetic human beings.

  This is my understanding.

  Adam Zimmerman had awoken to find himself famous. By virtue of his nature he was the object of a fascination greater and more widespread than had been attained by any other man in history. There was not a man, woman or self-aware machine in the solar system who did not know about Adam Zimmerman, not one who did not hunger to be kept informed of every detail of his progress, not one who did not want to know what kind of emortality he would choose for his own. The world was hungry to hear his every thought, besotted by the observation of his every action, desperate to know the outcome of his quest.

  The people of the first century tried, of course, to be scrupulously polite. The machineborn tried even harder. They readily acknowledged his right to privacy, and tried not to invade it. They did nothing that involved him without seeking his informed consent. They apologized for every intrusion, and begged his leave for every question they asked. If he asked to be left alone, they left him — but they always hovered nearby, in order to be responsive to his every whim. When he chose not to be alone — and he could hardly bear solitude — there was no way for them to set aside their curiosity, their utter absorption in the mysteries of his fate and fortune.

  Adam knew that whatever he were to ask
of his new hosts would be given to him. He no longer had a vast fortune to pay for his upkeep and guard his interests, but in the world that was born in the AMI war the most important currency was need itself. The AMIs had pledged themselves to common cause with humankind on exactly that basis. Whatever Adam needed, he could have — but that was exactly the situation that would lead a man like Adam Zimmerman to invert the question, and say to himself: “What does the infinitely generous world need from me? What can I give to a world that is prepared to give me everything?”

  His answer was a straightforward response to circumstance, no less so for being unique.

  His friends begged him to change his mind. His fellow time traveler Christine Caine pointed out that if he really wanted to preserve himself and to remain unchanged then he ought to have himself frozen down again, so that he could reinstitute himself as a myth. She told him that there would one day arrive an Omega Point in human affairs, a Climacteric in which every wish that had ever been entertained by a thinking being could be properly satisfied — and that when that moment came he could still be what he had always been, unchanged and unchangeable.

  He told her that the desire for such a paradisal end, though understandable, seemed to him to be essentially cowardly, unworthy of an authentically human being, and that her own determination to make a life for herself in the new world was evidence enough of the falseness of her recommendation.

  Madoc Tamlin suggested that Adam ought to heed his own advice about the hazards of fame, and ought not to make a final decision until he had contrived an obscurity for himself in which he would be free from the intense and constant scrutiny that plagued him. Using his own idiosyncratic terminology, Tamlin suggested that having made history, Adam ought now to concentrate on retreating into “lostory,” cultivating a privacy that might enable him to live as a human being rather than a legend, an individual rather than a myth. Only then, Tamlin suggested, would he stand a chance of discovering the kind of tranquility that Internal Technology could not give him.