The Omega Expedition Read online

  “Do the Secret Masters of Earth know you’ve woken me up?” I asked, trying not to sound too paranoid.

  “They have been kept fully informed of our plans and our progress, as a matter of courtesy,” the wonderful child assured me. “The United Nations of Earth will send a delegation to attend the awakening of Adam Zimmerman, as will the Outer System Confederation. If their deceleration patterns proceed according to plan, the ships carrying the delegations will both arrive within a hundred hours’ time.”

  “So you’re still going to wake Zimmerman, even though my memory is impaired?”

  “Yes. We shall continue to monitor your progress, and if we can find a way to help you recover your lost memories we’ll do it. If Adam Zimmerman suffers similar problems, we’ll counter them as best we can.”

  “How’s the second test subject doing?”

  “We hope to awaken the second subject in seven hours’ time. Everything has gone well so far, but her state of mind remains to be ascertained.”

  “Who is the other trial subject?” I asked, not really expecting to hear a name I knew.

  “A woman named Christine Caine,” was the reply I got.

  Like most of the other names which figure in this lostory, that one had a tale attached — one which bore a decidedly sinister significance.

  Four

  Bad Karma

  The single most astonishing aspect of my return to consciousness, a thousand years later than could ever have been expected, was that the one thing that tangibly astonished me during that first interview with the child-who-wasn’t-a-child was the sound of Christine Caine’s name. I’d just been informed that I’d missed out on a millennium of human history, including the advent of universal emortality and the temporary devastation of the Gaean ecosphere, and the news that actually threw me way off-balance was hearing that the other person appointed to share my fate — I didn’t, at that time, regard the legendary Adam Zimmerman as a partner in my fate — was the most notorious mass murderer of my parents’ lifetime.

  “You mean Christine Caine as in Bad Karma,” I said to Davida Berenike Columella, just in case the name had become fashionable after 2202.

  Davida seemed to have no idea what I was talking about, and her data feed obviously wasn’t helping. Apparently, it wasn’t just my record that had been erased.

  Again I was seized by the conviction that it had to be a joke. I’d almost given up hoping that it was all a VE drama, but the reference to the most notorious VE drama of my own era seemed too surreal to be anything but contrivance. Except that it wasn’t really a reference, from the viewpoint of Davida Berenike Columella. If appearances could be trusted, she had never heard of Bad Karma and knew no more about Christine Caine than she knew about me.

  I remembered the way that the seeming child had flinched when she realized that I was going to touch her. She’d had no idea who I was. Given that I’d been committed to prison a thousand years before, with the record of my crime obliterated, I might easily have been a mass murderer. As it happened, I wasn’t, although Davida couldn’t be entirely prepared to take my word for it.

  But Christine Caine really was a monster, by all accounts. She was also the subject of the most notorious illegal VE drama of all time — or had been, when “all time” had only extended as far as July 2202.

  Suddenly, I was forced to contemplate the exact terms of the “trial run” of which I was now a part.

  “You’ve tried to bring me back exactly as I was when I was put away,” I said, by way of clarification. “You wanted to be as certain as you can be that you could do a good job of restoration, because that’s what you hope to do with Adam Zimmerman. So you’ve also tried as hard as you can to put Christine Caine back together exactly as she was when she went into the freezer, right?”

  “That’s correct,” the wonderful child agreed.

  “And so far as I can tell,” I reported, “you’ve done a reasonably good job on me, save for a few recent memories. Not that I’d be consciously aware of any differences, I suppose, and I haven’t had time to check my other memories as closely as I might, and I really don’t quite feel like myself…but even so, I’m perfectly prepared to accept me as I am. In which case, you might want to take a few extra precautions with Christine Caine.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” I said. “For one thing, she was convicted of murdering thirteen people, ten of whom were her adoptive parents. For another, although opinions varied as to the exact nature and extent of her mental illness, nobody doubted that she was barking mad.”

  “Did you know her?” Davida Berenike Columella inquired, innocently.

  “Know her? Of course I didn’t know her. She was frozen down when I was four years old. But I was in the illicit VE business for a while and I knew all about Bad Karma. I suppose I even wished I’d made it, or had been capable of making it.”

  I could tell that Davida had known full well that Christine Caine had been frozen down in 2167, thirty-five years before me. That had been another little test, which I’d obviously passed. But I could tell, too, that she really didn’t have a clue what Bad Karma was. Classic of early VE or not, it was one work of art that hadn’t stood the test of time. It had been lost — or successfully suppressed.

  “Bad Karma was a VE drama,” I explained. “Underground stuff, shot circa twenty-one ninety-five. I used to make sex tapes and fight tapes in my youth, some of them far enough out on the edge to be bannable, but nothing like Bad Karma. The visuals were fairly crude — I could have improvised those easily enough without doing serious damage to any of the people that were supposedly carved up by the viewpoint character — but the sound track was something else. It was a whispered voice-over representing the stream-of-consciousness of the murderer whose eyes the user was supposedly seeing through.

  “The improvised thought-track provided a theory of sorts as to why Christine Caine had committed the murders. It was partly based on one of several conflicting statements she’d given to the police and various psychiatric examiners after her arrest, but mainly improvised. In those days, even visuals were considered a potentially dangerous medium of consumer/perpetrator identification, but that thought-track kicked off a real moral panic.

  “Rumor had it that sensitive users — especially kids — might be taken over by the thought-track, driven mad, and led to commit copycat crimes. The rumors were probably started by the guys who made the tape, for marketing purposes, but they proved a little too effective. There were copycat crimes, for which the VE might have been partly responsible — but you probably know better than I do how crazy those times were. Christine Caine can’t know anything about the VE tape, of course, and she might be a very different person from the one represented in the thought-track — but she did do the murders. If you’ve put her back together exactly as she was when she went into SusAn, you’ve reconstructed a crazy serial killer.”

  Davida Berenike Columella didn’t seem to be as frightened by this news as she had been of my casual gesture, but I was physically present and Christine Caine wasn’t.

  “She won’t be able to harm anyone,” the wonderful child told me.

  If that remark was supposed to be reassuring, it missed by a mile. I guessed immediately that if Christine Caine wasn’t going to be able to hurt anyone when they woke her up — and it seemed that nothing I’d said had troubled that assumption — then neither could I. Which meant that they hadn’t, after all, put me together exactly as I’d been before. They’d taken precautions.

  “You’re installing some kind of IT in her head,” I guessed, still talking about Christine Caine because I didn’t want to talk about myself. “Something that will stop her if she runs amok.”

  “We can do that,” the wonderful child confirmed, ambiguously.

  That was when I saw — clearly, I thought — that Christine Caine would be resuming her life as an animal in a zoo: a specimen to be observed, and wondered at. And I understood, too, that I had just contributed to th
at fate by robbing her of her last hope of not being recognized for what she was, and her last hope of being able to make a new start.

  I didn’t know exactly how old Christine Caine had been when they’d put her away, but I knew that she wasn’t much more than twenty. In terms of elapsed time, I was no more than twice her age; Davida Berenike Columella was ten times as old, although she looked no more than nine.

  From the viewpoint of those who had brought us back into the world, I realized, Christine Caine and I were alike, no matter how slight my unknown crimes might have been compared to hers. Whatever they had done to her, and whatever they intended to do to her in future, they must have done and would also do to me. I too was a creature in a zoo: a representative of an extinct species, resurrected by ingenuity into a world of which I knew nothing.

  I knew, because I had had dealings with the Ahasuerus Foundation a thousand years before, that the people of Excelsior were bringing Adam Zimmerman back because they intended to make him emortal. Even to Rachel Trehaine, in the 2190s, Adam Zimmerman had been a great hero, one of the founders of the modern world order. The Hardinist Cabal, or whatever rump of it still remained, could hardly help thinking of him in much the same light, given that he had played such a vital role in the economic coup that had launched their inexorable climb to world domination. This world presumably had a place ready made for Adam Zimmerman — if not a throne, a pedestal. But what did it have for Christine Caine, or for me?

  I concluded then that whatever debt of gratitude I owed Davida Berenike Columella and her people for bringing me back to life, they were not my friends. It was not a happy thought, but it was not a crushing discovery either.

  I had always prided myself on being tough, on being able to adapt myself to adverse circumstance. I knew that I could be tough now. I knew that I could be tougher than I had ever been before, because I — unlike Damon Hart, it seemed — had managed to keep my place on that imaginary escalator while everyone else I ever knew had lost their footing.

  If all this was real, then I really had ridden the tide of opportunity into a world where emortality was for everyone, or almost everyone — including, I hoped, the animals in the zoo. I knew that I might have to be careful, and clever, and cunning, but I had been all those things before — and the people of Excelsior seemed to have put me back together very nearly as I had been before.

  If there’s a game to be played here, I thought, whether in reality or a VE drama, then it has to be won. I understood that from the very start. I had understood it all my life, and I could see no reason to change my mind, no matter what miracles had transformed the world during the millennium I had lost, while I was away with the Fays.

  “If you’re really going to wake Christine Caine tomorrow,” I said, by way of making my first real move in the game, “I think you’d better let me do the talking. I’m the only one who might be able to make her understand — at least to the extent that I can understand.”

  “Thank you for the offer,” said the wonderful child. “We’ll certainly consider it.”

  It was her manner more than her choice of words that belatedly tipped me off to the fact that the kind of English she was talking wasn’t her first language, even though it might be a variety thereof. I realized that she might well have learned it in order to talk to me — or to the heroic Adam she considered the true creator of her world.

  I knew better than to offer to be the first to talk to him, and told myself that he would probably have far less need of my intercession than poor Christine Caine.

  I’m less confident of that judgment today than I was then, but I’m less confident of many things now than I was then. That’s one of the effects of growing ever older, if you do it properly.

  Five

  The Staff of Life

  The food was awful. It even looked awful, but I managed to keep my hopes up for a few moments longer by telling myself that appearances could be deceptive. Once I had taken the first mouthful, though, there was no further room for optimism.

  Davida Berenike Columella was watching me closely, but she wasn’t partaking herself. I knew that I was still being tested, but I wasn’t sure how to pass this one. I wanted to be polite, but I didn’t want to give her the wrong impression, so I lifted a second forkful thoughtfully, hoping that it wouldn’t be quite as bad.

  It wasn’t. The stuff was edible, and the first bolus hadn’t set off an emetic reaction in my stomach, so I had to figure that it wouldn’t do me any real harm — but I’d have felt better if I’d known which bit of my tongue was adapting to the taste. I couldn’t take any comfort from the notion that the extra layer of skin that extended into my mouth from my smartsuit might include among its duties the responsibility to conceal the fact that I was eating crap.

  While I chewed I made a careful study of the food on the plastic plate. The rice was a peculiar shade of yellow, but practically all genemod rice had been a peculiar shade of yellow in my day, so that wasn’t surprising. Anyway, the worst thing about the rice was that it was bland to the point of tastelessness. It was the sliced vegetables that seemed to be seriously nasty, but I couldn’t work out whether it was the things faintly resembling peppers or the bits with the slightly woody texture that were the worst offenders. The muddy brown sauce was definitely off, but there wasn’t a great deal of that and it was mostly round the edges, so there hadn’t been much of it on either of the forkfuls I’d taken in.

  I looked up again at the impossible child, and met her gaze squarely. Other possibilities were occurring to me now.

  “You made this especially for me, didn’t you?” I said.

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “Using a thousand-year-old recipe and ingredients nobody’s grown as food plants for centuries?”

  “It was the best approximation we could contrive,” she told me, apologetically. She’d caught on to the fact that I didn’t like it.

  “So why didn’t you just give me whatever you eat?” I wanted to know.

  “We have different nutritional requirements,” she told me.

  I took this guarded observation to mean that she was genetically engineered not to require vitamins and all the other quirky compounds that real humans had to include in their diet. The implication was that everything I thought of as real food had gone out of fashion centuries ago. In my own day, it had been the world’s poor — who were still exceedingly numerous — who had the dubious privilege of existing on whole-diet “mannas” compounded by machines to supply exactly that combination of amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates, and trace elements that a human body required to keep it going. Now, apparently, such contrivances were the staff of posthuman life. What else, I wondered, had the aged children of Excelsior given up? If they didn’t get their kicks from food, or wine, or sex…

  “Did you, by any chance, take the trouble to manufacture any liquor for us?” I asked. “Adam Zimmerman’s probably going to expect champagne and cognac when he wakes up, but I could be content with a decent bourbon.”

  “Adam Zimmerman only drank red wine,” she informed me.

  “I’ll take that as a no, then,” I said. Tired of being polite, I pushed the plate away, although the effect of the gesture was ruined by the lack of available space on the flat ledge that the smart wall had extruded to serve as a dining table.

  I ran my fingers over the surface of the wall, speculatively. “How clever is this stuff?” I asked.

  “Not very,” was the unhelpful reply — but Davida repented of her surliness almost immediately. “It can mold itself to any purpose you might require,” she said. “If you need a cocoon in which to sleep, or to immerse yourself in VE…although you’ll probably find a hood appropriate to most purposes.”

  “Not exactly a utility mist, then.” I said.

  She didn’t recognise the term, so I elaborated. “PicoCon’s bolder admen used to look forward to a day when all the matter in the world except for humans would consist of a gray fog of nanomachines that would obliging
ly manufacture anything its masters desired, according to their command. At that point in future history the distinction between reality and Virtual Experience was expected to break down, because reality itself would be programmable. You don’t seem to have gone quite that far.”

  “No,” she admitted. “There’s a sense in which the whole microworld is a single machine, of course, but most of its components are as functionally independent as the cells in your body, and as limited in their scope. Walls do what walls are equipped to do.”

  “So there’s no central intelligence — no Microworld Mastermind?”

  “There’s a hierarchy of managing AIs, culminating in a master supervisor, but there’s no central ego. The AIs aren’t authentically intelligent, individually or collectively. They don’t have self-conscious minds in the sense that you and I do.”

  The silvery “artificial geniuses” of my day had seemed very smart to their users, and everyone had had an opinion as to whether they would one day make the evolutionary transition to self-consciousness and personality, but the real geniuses making and programming them had always assured us that it couldn’t and wouldn’t happen. Apparently, they’d been right. Excelsior might have a brain the size of a small planet, but if Davida could be believed it wasn’t home to a person.

  “You might try something simpler,” I suggested, nodding toward the uneaten food. “Manna will do. There’s no need to try to make it more interesting. The culinary art is a lot more difficult than mere recipes imply.”

  “I’m sorry,” Davida said, plaintively. “We’ll try to produce something more to your liking.”

  “But not for my benefit,” I guessed, wryly. “This was another trial run, wasn’t it? You wouldn’t want Adam Zimmerman to react this way to his welcoming banquet, would you? I suppose you’ll want to let me try out a few more experimental meals before you set the menu for the big celebration. Or is the ship from Earth bringing supplies fit for a thousand-year-old messiah? Did you think to ask the UN to send a chef as well as an ambassador?”