Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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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 youeat?” 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 obligingly 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?”

“The ship that’s coming from Earth is a shuttle,” she told me, with just the slightest hint of resentment in her voice. “It has no cargo space, and only six cocoons. The ship from the outer system is much bigger, but the outer satellites produce their food in exactly the same way that we do, using artificial photosynthesis. We didn’t know that this problem would arise, and we’ll try to address it as best we can. We didn’t mean to cause you any distress.”

Having thought it over while she was speaking I pulled the plate back again and took another forkful. It still wasn’t good, but it was even less offensive than its predecessors.

“This fancy second skin you’ve fitted me with is already compensating, isn’t it?” I said. “All I have to do is keep shoveling the stuff in, and eventually I’ll get to like it.”

She didn’t seem certain. “Your internal technology is programmed to compensate for discomfort,” she admitted, “but not to substitute a positive reward. That would be dangerous.”

I nodded, to signify that I understood the distinction and the reasons for making it. One of the first uses to which experimental internal nanotech had been put was feeding the so-called pleasure areas in the hind brain. That way lay addiction, and severe distraction from the business of living. The systems that had been released on to the market in my day were supposed to be finely tuned to administer pain relief without blissing people out. The masters of PicoCon were firmly committed to the idea that people ought to earn their pleasures.

Even a dedicated rebel like me could see the sense in that. The only gratification worth having is the gratification of achievement, even if the achievement in question is the mere exercise of good taste.

I deduced, therefore, that I would get used to the food if I persisted, but I wouldn’t be forced to like it. I wondered how many other aspects of my second lifetime would be subject to the same principle. Perhaps I’d even get used to being a specimen in a zoo – but I certainly wasn’t going to learn to like it.

I ate a little more, but I really wasn’t hungry. I had other things on my mind.

“Can I take a look around now?” I asked my captor-in-chief. “Not through the picture-window – I’d like to look at Excelsior itself. The houses and the fields. The realwindows.”

“There are no real windows,” she told me. “Nor any fields. The artificial photosynthetic systems are like big black sails. There is a garden, but it’s sustained by artificial light. You’ll be able to see it tomorrow.”

There was no point in asking why I couldn’t see it today. I was still under close observation and they didn’t want to let me out of my cage just yet, not even for a stroll in the garden.

“How about a VE hood and access to your data banks?” I asked. “I’d like to read up on my history.”

“You only have to ask,” she said. Having seen the way she’d produced a dining table and a plateful of bad food I knew that shedidn’t even have to ask. She was IT-linked into a microworld-wide communication system that allowed her to issue commands and initiate semiautomatic responses almost unobtrusively – not just by forming the thought, I assumed, but certainly by means of carefully contrived subvocalizations. I didn’t have that kind of IT. I couldn’t give orders directly to the walls or the window – but if I spoke my requests aloud, someone would overhear, and decide whether or not to turn the request into a command.

I only had to ask, and anything within reason would be delivered to me…but I did have to ask, and anything my captors thought unreasonable would not be forthcoming. For the time being, the walls confining me would only produce an exit door for Davida Berenike Columella.

“I could be useful, you know,” I told her. “I was born two hundred years after Adam Zimmerman, from an artificial womb rather than a natural one, but I have a lot more in common with him than you do. By the same token, I have a lot more in common with you than he does. I could be a useful intermediary, if you let me. That might not be why you woke me up, but it’s a definite plus.”

Secretly, of course, I was hoping that it wasone of the reasons they’d woken me up – but I knew better than to take it for granted.

“Thank you for the offer,” she said.

For a moment she seemed almost human. I’d been brushed off in exactly that casual manner a hundred times before, though never by a nine-year-old. I knew that I’d have to try harder.

“I know how he’ll feel,” I told her, flatly. “You don’t. You think he’ll be grateful. You think you’ll be waking him up to tell him exactly what he always wanted to hear: that you can finally give him the emortality he craved. But I know how he’ll reallyfeel. That’s why I’ll be able to talk to him man to man. That’s why I’ll be the only one who can talk to him man to man.”

She didn’t bother throwing Christine Caine’s name into the ring. She was too busy worrying about the possibility that I might be right.

“How will he feel?” she asked, without even bothering to add a qualification reminding me that my guess could only be a guess. I knew that I had to be succinct as well as confident, provocative as well as plausible.

“Betrayed,” I said, and left it at that.

I assumed that if she could figure out what I meant, she’d probably be able to understand why she might need me. If she couldn’t, then she would definitely need me, whether she understood why or not.

Six

Welcome to the Future

Iwas fairly certain that Christine Caine wouldn’t want to wake up in a sterile room with a window looking out on a star-filled universe. I suggested to Davida Berenike Columella that she and her sisters might like to let Christine wake up in Excelsior’s Edenic garden, bathing in the complex glory of fake sunlight, but they wouldn’t hear of it. They wanted her inside.

Presumably they still wanted meinside too, although they were too polite to say so in so many words. They wanted to take their time about exposing their world to the untender gaze of two supercriminals from the legendary past.

Their idea of compromise was to let me choose the scenic tape that the virtual window would display.

If I’d had the chance to do some serious research before the sisterhood offered me that choice I might have picked the finest ice palaces on Titan, or the AI metropolis on Ganymede, or perhaps a purple forest on the world that home-system people still called Ararat because that was the first name reported back to them – but I knew nothing, as yet, of wonders like that. A little taste of home seemed to be the better bet.

I asked for the oldest pre-holocaust footage they had of Yellowstone. Christine had been a city girl, but she must have used a VE hood as much as – or maybe more than – her peers. I thought she might look longingly at trees, wildlife, and geysers.

I was wrong, but it didn’t matter.

I watched two of Davida’s sisters – they seemedlike sisters, and I hadn’t yet figured out the questions I needed to ask about their real nature – arranging Christine Caine’s sleeping body on the chair just as they must have arranged mine. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that they must have built the chairs specifically to contain us, fitting them to our exaggerated size. To them, we were giants. Christine was no more than one metre sixty, but if she’d been able to stand upright she’d have towered over her handlers to the same extent that I’d have towered over her. To me, ignorant as I still was, she seemed to be not so very unlike them, but to them she must have seemed utterly alien.

I had no idea exactly how mad she’d be, but that was because I couldn’t get the idea of that wretched VE tape out of my head. If I’d thought about it sensibly, I’d have realized that nobody could commit thirteen murders over a period of years without being able to put up an exceedingly good impression of total normality in between. The walls of her world hadn’t been quite as full of eyes and ears as the walls of mine, and she’d moved around a great deal, but she couldn’t have done what she had done without an exceptional talent for seeming utterly harmless.

That was what I ought to have expected, but I didn’t. I wasn’t quite myself yet; I wasn’t even sure that I wasmyself.

At the very least, I expected Christine Caine to freak out when she found out what was what. Arrogant idiot that I was, I couldn’t believe that anyone else could react nearly as well as me to the discovery that they’d been locked in a freezer for more than a thousand years.

I was wrong about that too – but Christine did have the advantage of remembering her trial and conviction. Her memory hadn’t suffered any side effects at all.

She spent a little longer looking around than I had. She inspected her new suitskin very carefully indeed. It was pale blue, with false cuffs and boots similar to mine, although the sisterhood had stopped short of providing a matching codpiece.

The suit would have looked better on her if she hadn’t been so thin. She was so emaciated that the surface of the clinging fabric was pockmarked by all manner of bony lumps. She would grow into it, I figured, but it would take time. She was a pretty young woman, seemingly very frail: a picture of innocence. If I hadn’t known the reason for her confinement, I’d have felt even more tender and protective toward her than I did. As things were, I had to remind myself that this was the closest thing to a contemporary I had, and the closest thing to a natural ally.

She touched her lips, then ran her fingers through her straggly blond hair, pulling a few strands forward so that she could examine the color and texture. She didn’t approve of what she found, but she didn’t seem surprised or offended. Then she made as if to stand up, but changed her mind, presumably undone by the discovery that her weight wasn’t quite right.

She contented herself with looking me up and down very carefully. I wondered how sinister I seemed, dressed all in black, and wondered whether I might be handsome enough to be mistaken for the Prince of Darkness.

Fortunately, she must have rejected the hypothesis that she was in Hell without entertaining it for more than a moment. Her first words were: “I hope this thing has a hole I can shit through.” The word rang utterly false. She was trying to sound confident and assertive, but she couldn’t make the pretence work.

“It doesn’t need one,” I told her, having had time to investigate that particular matter. “It’s an authentic second skin. It lines your gut from mouth to anus, and your other bodily cavities too. The food goes through just as it used to. Fashions have moved on since our day.”

“Our day?” she queried, exactly as I’d intended her to.

“I’m like you,” I said, a trifle overgenerously. Her eyes narrowed slightly, but she didn’t say anything. I assumed that she was wary of reading the statement the wrong way. “I woke up yesterday,” I added, helpfully. “We’ve been away a long time.”

“How long?”

I told her, expecting astonishment.

When she laughed I thought, at first, that she was hysterical. She wasn’t. She was amused. I knew that she was probably in denial, just as I had been, because she probably felt even less like her old self than I had, but she wasn’t letting it get on top of her. She was playing along, just as I had – but she was better able to laugh than I had been.

“I guess I’m the record holder,” she said, having taken the figures aboard with sufficient mental composition to note the difference between them. “I always figured that I would be.”

“Not for long,” I told her, slightly piqued by her composure. “They’ll be bringing Adam Zimmerman back in a couple of days, just as soon as they’re convinced that you and I are as well as can be expected. He’s been away longer than either of us.”

“Why? What did he do?”

“You never heard of Adam Zimmerman?” I countered, sighting the intellectual high ground.

It only required a moment’s thought. “The man who stole the world,” she recalled. “I didn’t realize they’d prosecuted him for that.”

“They didn’t,” I told her. “He only helped the corpsmen run the scam in order to get enough cash to make sure he’d be taken care of once he was frozen down. He was a volunteer. He didn’t want to die, so he decided to take a short cut to a world where everyone could live forever. He was the first, I think.”

“Good for him,” she said. Then she paused for further thought.

“This is all fake, isn’t it?” she said, eventually. “It’s just a clever VE. I’m in therapy, aren’t I? This is some weird rehab program.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You don’t thinkso?”

“If it’s a VE, they’re trying to fool both of us. I’m not certain that it isn’t – but I do know that we have to work on the assumption that it’s real. I’m Madoc Tamlin, by the way.”

“So what did youdo, Madoc Tamlin?”

“I can’t remember how or why I got put away,” I told her.

That wiped the last vestiges of her smile away. She was obviously able to remember exactly how and why she’d been put away. She seemed more frightened than angry, but there was a peculiar quality to her fear that I couldn’t fathom.

“Lucky you,” she whispered. I got the impression that she didn’t believe in my convenient lapse of memory.

“It doesn’t seem lucky to me,” I told her. “If I really did do something that pissed someone off enough to put me away for a thousand years, I’d rather like to know what it was. As things are, I can only wonder whether someone was so afraid that I knew something that could hurt him that he worked hard to prevent my release, or whether I was simply forgotten.”

“It’s still lucky,” she assured me.

I knew that she was probably right. It had taken me some time to get my head around the idea that being forgotten for so long might have been a lucky break, whether my initial condemnation had been deliberate or accidental, but I could see by now how she might take the view that we’d both been luckier than we could ever have deserved.

But I still felt betrayed: by time, by circumstance, by my friends.

“It’s too soon to tell how well off we are,” I told her. “They didn’t bring us back in order to shower gifts upon us. We’re just the trial runs, to make sure that they can bring thousand-year-old corpsicles back with their minds more or less intact. Once we’ve convinced them that we’re as well as can be expected, we’ll be redundant. They may have certain reservations about welcoming us into the company of the emortals.”

“Why?” she asked, warily. She didn’t know that I knew who she was, and she was prepared to hope that I might not.

“Because you were a murderer, Miss Caine,” I said, as gently as I could, “And they’ve probably assumed that I must have been one too.”

“I was found guilty but insane,” she informed me, stiffly. Then she took another pause for thought before saying: “We’re a thousand years down the line. If they can cure death, surely they can sort out a few lousy bugs in the meatware. Their infotech must be foolproof by now. What did you say your name was?”

“Madoc Tamlin.”

She shrugged her bony shoulders, but she’d already worked out that she couldn’t possibly have heard of me. “I’m Christine Caine, as you seem to know,” she said. The way she looked at me suggested that she wasn’t entirelysure that I could be familiar with her case, even though I knew her name and what she’d been put away for.

“I know who you are,” I said, but was quick to add: “I’m probably the only one who knows much more than your name, though. The people who brought us back claim to have lost the relevant records.”

“Do you think they’re lying?” she was quick to ask.

“I don’t know what to think. I’m not even sure that we’re what they say we are. Even if we’re in meatspace rather than some super-tricky VE, we might still be sims of some kind.”

“That’s a little paranoid, isn’t it?” she observed, pitching her voice so that the word paranoidsounded more compliment than insult. “I have this creepy feeling that you might be right, though. I don’t feel like myself.”

“Neither do I,” I admitted. “Maybe that’s just because we’ve been kitted out with these weird suitskins and internal nanotech that’s ten generations ahead of anything we could have had in our day. On the other hand, it might be because we’re sims or androids: AIs programmed to believe that we’re people who died a thousand years ago.”

“Why would anyone want to make sims of people who died a thousand years ago?” she asked. I could see that she was working on the problem herself, but I was slightly surprised by the ease of her assumption that if we weren’t who we thought we were then the people we thought we were must be dead.

“Maybe they’re interested in the outlaws of olden times,” I suggested, wondering what Davida and her sisters thought of the direction the conversation was taking. “Maybe they want to know what made us tick.”

“I didn’t tick,” she said, her tone becoming oddly distant. “If I’d been ticking, I’d have blown up – or run down. Not a bomb and not a clock, let alone a pacemaker. Silent but deadly. So they said.”

Not so silent, I thought, once people started hooking into Bad Karma.

“Either way,” I said, “it might be wise not to take anything for granted. I think they’ll want to take a good long look at us anyway. Whatever we may think of ourselves, to them we’re the next best thing to reanimated Neanderthals. Adam Zimmerman has his sainthood to keep him warm, but we don’t. Quite the reverse, in fact. We might have to handle our situation very carefully – and it won’t be easy.”

“Are we being watched?” she wanted to know.

“All the time,” I assured her. “Monitored inside and out. So far as I know, they can’t overhear our private thoughts, but nothing else is secret.”

If appearances could be trusted, that thought disturbed and distressed her more than any she’d so far come across. Her gaze flickered as her pale blue eyes looked toward the window, then up at the ceiling and round the walls, then back at me.

“Shit,” she murmured. Then she composed herself again. “Lousy view,” she remarked.

“It was supposed to be a slice of home,” I said. “It’s long gone – blown to smithereens, so they say.”

“The whole Earth?”

“Just America – but the whole ecosphere had a catastrophic fit and had to be regenerated.”

She didn’t seem to think that the destruction of America was an issue worth pursuing. “Who’s they, exactly?” she asked.

I told myself that the fact she was taking everything so calmly was a compliment to the IT the microworlders had installed in her brain – but I knew that if that was true for her it ought to have been true for me, too. I wasn’t taking everything calmly. My tranquilizing IT obviously wasn’t programmed to kick in until I got badly steamed up; a certain amount of inner turmoil was permitted, presumably because the people observing us found it interesting.

“You’ll see them soon enough,” I said. “I ought to warn you that they’re very weird. Apparently, there are lots of people around who look pretty much like you or me, but there are lots who don’t. It so happens that this particular microworld is run by people who don’t.”

“So what dothey look like?”

“Children. Little girls. They’re genetically engineered for a particular kind of emortality – programmed to stop growing and maturing at nine or ten, before puberty sets in. I assume that their brains keep changing as they learn. That’s probably why they do it. They must be hoping to preserve their brains in a better-than-adult state.”

“Neoteny,” she said.

I was somewhat surprised that she knew the word. One tends to think of crazy serial killers as undereducated individuals. “That’s right,” I conceded. “We’re neotenic apes, sort of, so I guess they figured that neotenic people were the next evolutionary step forward. If you think that’s weird, wait till you see pictures of fabers and cyborganizers.”

“But there are still people like us around?”

“People who look like us,” I corrected her. “Engineered for emortality, and lots of other cute tricks. We’ll have visitors of that kind in a couple of days. There’s a spaceship en route from Earth, and another heading in from the Jovian moons, although the people it’s carrying are mostly Titanians. They’re coming to welcome Zimmerman, of course, but they can hardly refuse us invitations to the party. There’s a historian with the Earth delegation, apparently, who’s as keen to talk to us as he is to pay his respects to Zimmerman. There’s also a UN rep, who probably answers to the Secret Masters as well as the not-so-secret ones. You don’t have to worry about that, but I might. I used to work for the organization.”

“The megamafia?”

“No, the realorganization. I was instrumental in putting their brand on a few mavericks – including the Ahasuerus Foundation, whose corporate descendants include our present hosts. I helped to stitch up Conrad Helier too.”

“The man who savedthe world,” she said, stressing the difference between the reputation that Conrad Helier had enjoyed in her time and the reputation that Adam Zimmerman had had.

“One of the men who made sure that the world needed his kind of saving,” I corrected her, drily. “His record became a great deal more controversial once the whole truth came out – or as much of it as ever did come out. His sainthood never quite recovered from the tarnishing effect of the revelation that he helped start the great plague as well as delivering us from its effects. Not that he ever went on trial, of course, but he had to pretend to be dead to make certain he’d avoid it. You and I were products of an era of dire moral murkiness. Today is very different, so they say. But they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

“But we’ve done our time,” she said, letting a little anxiety show. “The sheet’s clean now.”

“I doubt that it’ll ever be clean,” I told her, with more bitterness than brutality. “We’re museum pieces now, and it won’t be easy for us to escape the burden of our rap sheets. They’ve already offered to put me back in SusAn any time I want to go.”

She actually laughed at that. “Do you?” she asked, plainly unable to believe that I might. It was another sign of an implicit mental kinship I was both anxious and slightly reluctant to acknowledge.

“No,” I said. “But the offer conjured up some bizarre prospects. Maybe we could make a career of hopping through the future at thousand year intervals, popping out every now and again to give our remoter descendants a fascinating glimpse of the bad old days.”

“We?” she queried.

“Not necessarily together,” I said.

“But it could get lonely otherwise,” she pointed out. “Unless this is the start of a new craze.”

The thought that it might get lonely if we didn’t stick together had occurred to me. That was one of the reasons why I was here, talking her through the awakening. I hoped that Adam Zimmerman might feel the same way, but I wasn’t prepared to bank on it.

On the other hand, the thought that we might be the cutting edge of a new craze had occurred to me too. I hadn’t yet managed to ascertain how many other refugees from the twenty-second century might be lurking in freezers, but I knew that there must be others. The eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano might have wreaked havoc with any that had been stored on Earth, but there had to be more mortal bodies in the store from which we’d been selected as test subjects.

For the moment, though, Christine Caine was the only link I had to the world that had shaped me. Murderer or not, she was the closest thing to a friend I was likely to find in the Counter-Earth Cluster.

“Wherever we go, and whatever we do,” I told her, soberly, “we’ll be freaks. Our world is gone, Christine. Our species too, all but a few frozen specimens.”

“Good riddance,” she said. “Maybe you really didn’t do anything to justify putting you away, Madoc Tamlin, but I’m already well used to being a freak. Better here and now than there and then. Maybe we should take the offer to go time-hopping, though. If they can fix us up to last the whole trip, maybe we could go all the way to the Omega Point – assuming we’re not already there.”