Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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She was full of surprises. First neoteny, now the Omega Point. I realized that she was testing me, in case I was stupid. I was here to soften her introduction to the all-but-unthinkable, and shewas trying the limits of myability to cope.

I should have laughed, but I didn’t. I thought hard, knowing that I had to get ahead of her if I were to maintain the advantage to which my years and my intellect entitled me.

After all, I thought, if I couldn’t even help my hosts deal with Christine Caine, what hope had I of persuading them that they needed me to deal with Adam Zimmerman?

Seven

The Omega Intelligence

Until Christine Caine mentioned the Omega Point, I hadn’t given very much thought to the question of when and where I might be if I wasn’t when and where I seemed to be. Once she had mentioned it, I realized that I’d taken it for granted that the more probable alternative was that I was much closer to home than I appeared to be. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that I might be much farther away.

The idea that someone was messing with my head had automatically translated itself into the idea that someone akin to the nanotech buccaneers of PicoCon was messing with my head, feeding me a weird science fiction script while I was still in my own historical backyard. The possibility remained, however, that instead of things really being less weird than they seemed, they might actually be even weirderthan they seemed.

The idea of the Omega Point had already gone through several different versions before I was born, but the basic proposition was that somewhen in the verydistant future the gradual spread of organic and inorganic intelligence throughout the universe would have produced some kind of cosmic mind. It was, I guess, an extrapolation of Voltaire’s remark that if God didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent Him.

The Omega Point was the point at which the Absent Creator would finally emerge from the evolutionary climax community of life and intelligence – at which point, philosophers desperate for a God-substitute were wont to claim, the Creator in question would naturally set out to do all the godly things that all the old imaginary gods had been prevented from doing by the inconvenience of their nonexistence. What else, after all, could the Omega Intelligence be interested in, except for omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence? And how else could it serve these ends but by recreating, reexamining, and correcting its own history – a process whose side-effects would inevitably include the resurrection of the entire human race, albeit virtually, and their situation in an appropriate kind of Heaven?

Personally, I had never believed a word of it, but I had lived in a world in which religions far less decorous had been clinging to existence like stubborn limpets, using any and every imaginative instrument to avoid recognizing their absurdity, redundancy, and incapacity to resist extinction.

The only thing fairly certain about the future evolution of intelligence, it had always seemed to me – if one assumed that intelligence had any future at all – was that something, somewhere, and somewhen, would tryto become an Omega Intelligence, or at least to pretend that it was one.

In which case, I thought, after talking to Christine Caine, it might be a mistake to think that the kind of illusion I was lost in was a kind I could easily understand.

If my second lease of life turned out to be a sham, generated by a clever combination of IT and some kind of body suit, its actual temporal location could as easily be long after 3263 as long before. And if I had no body at all, but was in fact the software reconstruction of what some artificial superintelligence thought human beings might have been like, my actual temporal location might be morelikely to be long after 3263 than before.

Christine Caine was right, though. Even if my current temporal location didturn out to be 3263, or year 99 of the newest New Era, and even if I did have my old body back again, only slightly worn away by more than a thousand years in a freezer, I was obviously capable of escaping the prison of time again and again and again. If I wasn’t at the Omega Point yet, I could legitimately regard myself as one step removed from square one, embarked upon the Omega Expedition.

In other words, although I might be temporarily locked in my room, I wasn’t locked into a particular era in the history of the universe. Nobody was. Emortality plus Suspended Animation equalled freedom. To be or not to be was no longer the only choice available to the children of humankind; the real choice now was when to be, or when to aim for.

Wait until Adam Zimmerman hears that one, I thought. When he put himself away, the only thing on his mind was not dying. Now, he’s going to have to come to terms with the next existential question but one. He’s going to have to decide what he’s going to do with his emortality.

And it wasn’t just Adam Zimmerman who had to do that, I realized.

Everybody did.

In the new world into which I’d now been delivered, everybody already had, although every single one of them was still entitled to further changes of mind. I hadn’t made any such choice. Nor had Christine Caine or Adam Zimmerman.

That, I thought, had to be one of the things in which the invisible monitors observing our every word and action were most interested. For one reason or another, if only out of simple curiosity, they might even careabout the decisions we would make.

Eight

Lilith

Maybe you could go all the way to the Omega Point,” I said to Christine Caine, carefully steering our collaborative flight of fancy down to Earth – or at least to Excelsior. “Maybe it’s the only tourist trip worth taking, if we’re condemned to be eternal tourists. Unfortunately I doubt that SusAn technology is perfectible. It might take ten or a hundred reps, but the time would surely come when we’d turn into deep-frozen dead meat. I don’t know the percentages, but the sisterhood could probably hazard a guess. My bet is that the vast majority of the people frozen down before and after us didn’t even make it this far – and I’m not just talking about the ones who got out on their due release dates, or the ones who melted during accidental power cuts, earthquakes, and supervolcanic eruptions.

“We’re realfreaks, Christine. Thousand-to-one shots. Maybe million-to-one shots. Adam Zimmerman got here because every possible effort was extended to make sure that he did; we just happened to survive the great freezer lottery. My guess is that everybody who embarks on that kind of Omega Expedition is bound to die long before they reach their destination.”

But what about the other kinds?I added, purely for my own consideration.

Christine Caine got to her feet then, balancing herself in a deliberate fashion. It didn’t take her long to build up the confidence required to walk – and once she’d walked around the room, trailing her fingers along the seemingly featureless walls, she didn’t waste any time before taking the next step. She threw herself forward into a somersault, and when she landed on her feet she threw herself into another, glorying in the lift and the slowness of the arc.

Then she came unstuck, and collapsed in an ungainly heap. She laughed, as if the fall had given her almost as much pleasure as the safely completed somersaults.

“Trust your clever IT,” I told her, knowing that I had no reason to feel envious but not quite succeeding in controlling my resentment at the way she was coping with her unexpected situation. “It’ll adjust your reflexes to the three-quarters Earth-gravity if you let it. Just don’t try to think too hard about what you’re doing.”

“This isn’t a VE,” she said, smugly. “I’m no sim. I’m alive – and I’m out.”

“And you’re still a homicidal maniac,” I was unable to prevent myself adding: “albeit a harmless one. They’ve rigged internal censors to stop you doing anything nasty, but the whole point of the trial run was to put you back together exactly the way you were.”

She didn’t like that at all, but she seemed more hurt than angry. “You don’t know shit about the way I was,” she retorted.

I repented my recklessness. “No, I don’t,” I admitted. “In fact, I may have entirely the wrong idea about it. If I remember correctly, you gave the police half a dozen contradictory explanations of what you did – but only one stuck fast. There was a VE tape about your case. Everybody my age hooked into it. It was pure fiction, but it colored everybody’s understanding.”

That made her pause for thought. “Some sort of psychoanalysis?” she asked.

“Not exactly. A reconstruction of your murders, putting the user into your viewpoint. There was a whispered voice-over that passed itself off as your internal stream-of-consciousness. It was called Bad Karma.”

“Why?” I wasn’t sure to what extent she was offended by the whole idea, as opposed to the mere title.

“Because it tried to explain what you’d done in terms of camouflage: hiding your true self within a series of alternative personalities, all of which masqueraded as invaders from the past. According to the script, the multiple personalities locked you into what the writer called a karmic ritual: the reenactment of an event so unbearable that you had tried to distance it from your present self by projecting it into a hypothetical pattern of eternal recurrence.”

She stared at me as if I were the one that might be mad. “It was fiction,” I added. “Pornography, of a sort.”

“I want to see it,” she said. She was no longer in a laughing mood, but I couldn’t tell what sort of a mood had taken its place. She was fearful, but in an odd way. There was something in her reaction to the memory of her crimes with which my empathetic imagination couldn’t get to grips.

“They don’t have it,” I told her. “Not here, at any rate. The sisters reckon that a few copies might have been exported from Earth before the last ecocatastrophe, but they don’t know if it was ever adapted to run on modern equipment. Gray – the historian from Earth – might be able to locate one, if anyone can.”

“But you saw it.”

“A long time ago…that is, a long time before I was put away. My memory of it is vague. I was more interested in the technical production than the story – I was in the business at the time. Fight tapes, sex tapes…but nothing like Bad Karma. The business had already moved on by the time I was frozen down. The technics were evolving at an incredible pace, thanks to nanotech enhancements. Bad Karmamust have become a museum piece long before the end of the twenty-third century. It was probably lost more than five hundred years ago.”

“That’s bullshit,” she said. “All VE tapes were routinely upgraded to take aboard new developments. I saw six different updates of The Snow Queenwhen I was a kid, and four of Peter Pan.”

The Snow Queenand Peter Panwere classic VE tapes made for children. The twenty-second-century versions Christine was referring to had been modeled on much earlier webware, but dozens of writers over the course of half a century had added more and more code to them, building up the backgrounds and making the special effects more elaborate. Even Damon had done a little hackwork on The Snow Queenat one time.

“It’s not the same thing,” I told her. “The hoods you and I used got better and better, but the basic design and coding routines remained the same. Those technics were already reaching their limit when I got out of the business. The next generation of hoods was about to restart from scratch, using an entirely different set of electronic substrates. They might have remade The Snow Queenyet again after I was put away, but if they did they’d have had to do it from the bottom up rather than continuing the series of add-ons. More likely it was filed away, replaced with some new favorite specifically designed to show what the new technics could do. When Bad Karmawas made your case was still relatively fresh in the older generation’s memory, but it couldn’t have stayed that way. We were supposed to be living in the New Utopia, but there was no shortage of killers around. Compared with the Eliminators you were old news – and Davida assures me that there were plenty more to come.”

“Who’s Davida?” It was a stall, to give her time to think.

“She was sitting where I am when I woke up where you are. Davida Berenike Columella. Here on Excelsior, they seem to have done away with surnames. Maybe we should have done that ourselves, as soon as Helier wombs wrested the burdens and privileges of reproduction from the nuclear family.”

“Caine can pass for a given name,” she observed, sardonically. “Only too well.”

“Tamlin too,” I told her. “But maybe not Zimmerman. That comes with heritage attached.”

She looked around again. “So this is a holding cell, right?” she said. “Do we have to share it, or can I get one of my own?”

“It’s not a cell, exactly,” I reassured her. “The sisterhood assures me that we’ll have freedom of movement when their preliminary observations are complete. They want us to remain here for the time being, but we have our own spaces. Mine’s on the other side of that wall over there – if you want a connecting door to open all you have to do is ask. In the meantime, we can go anywhere we want in virtual space.”

“I don’t see any hoods, let alone a bodysuit.”

“The walls are a lot cleverer than they look. The sisters haven’t rigged them for direct speech activation, but the people listening in will facilitate any requests we care to make – within reason. If you want a bed, or a fully laden dining table, or an immersion suit, you only have to say so. The food’s lousy, but it’s edible and your IT will take away the nasty taste if you persist with it. You can summon up a screen and talk to any kind of sim you care to nominate.”

She pounced on that one. “But you’re not a sim,” she was quick to say. “You’re real meat.”

“I’m prepared to accept the working hypothesis that I’m real meat,” I said, wryly. “Davida too. Apparently, we’re in something called the Counter-Earth Cluster, which means that information from Earth has to be bounced halfway around the orbit, with an uncomfortably long time delay. I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that the real reason the sisterhood can’t get near immediate and unlimited access to Earth’s datastores is that the good folks on Earth won’t give it to them. Ditto the outer system. If there ever was an age of free and unlimited access between our time and now, it’s over. But we’re used to that, aren’t we? We come from a world where people who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for information had to steal it, and where people who could manufacture and manage false information could make a good living secreting it into the system for the dubious benefit of the paying customers.”

“That’s what you were put away for?” she guessed.

“Perhaps. IfI was put away. Even if I was, I should have been out in seven years. Ten at most.”

“And now you’re a time-tourist with a one-way open ticket. Count your blessings, Mr Tamlin.”

“You can call me Madoc. I’m trying to count my blessings. It’s not as easy as you might think.”

She raised her right hand, made a fist, and elevated the right forefinger. “One,” she said, defiantly. She meant the blessing that she was here, alive and out. “Oh look – we’re ahead of the game already. How many more do you need?”

“I’m still trying to figure that out,” I told her, stubbornly. “When I have the total, I’ll weigh it against the downside.”

“There’s no downside in what you’ve said so far,” she judged, accurately enough. “The downside would have been not waking up at all. If appearances can be trusted, we’re past that. It’s a new start, Madoc. All profit. You shouldn’t complain about the cards you’ve been dealt, when the wonder is that there’s been a fresh deal at all. If you’re unhappy with the company at the table…well, who else was there to choose from? When you said allmy body cavities, you did mean that…well, of course you did. Am I a virgin again, or is that too much to ask?”

She was putting on an act again, making believe that she was the kind of person who murdered people for fun. It rang completely false. Whatever her motive had been, I thought, she seemed exceedingly uncomfortable with it – but how, in that case, had she racked up thirteen victims?

“I think we’re pretty much the way we were when we folded our last hands,” I told her, not trying very hard to enter into the spirit that she was trying to import into the conversation. “We’re experimental specimens, remember.”

“Adam Zimmerman never heard of me,” she observed. “He never saw your slanderous tape. He doesn’t know me from…Eve.”

That made me laugh. It wasn’t uproarious, but it the first honest laugh I’d contrived in a thousand years and I was surprised by the lift it gave me. It was a very feeble and very obvious joke, but it showed that she understood something of the magic of names.

“Before Eve there was Lilith,” I murmured. I was talking to myself, but she heard me.

“I saw that one too,” she said, sourly.

It took me a moment or two to figure out that she must be referring to yet another VE tape – not a kiddies’ classic, this time. She knew about Lilith the demon, Lilith the baby killer, so she knew that I wasn’t being nice, or funny.

“Somehow,” I said, hopeful of saving the situation, “I don’t think finding a mate will be the first thing on Adam’s agenda. He’ll be the most famous man in the solar system: the hottest news since the supervolcano blew North America to Kingdom Come. The Messiah from the twenty-first…hell, he must have been born in the twentiethcentury. He may be an animal in the zoo for a while, but they’ll move Heaven and Earth to rehabilitate him. I’m not so sure they’ll make as much effort for us, even if a little of his celebrity rubs off on us.”

“On the other hand,” said Christine Caine, the most notorious mass murderer in the galaxy, “if he were to die…”

Her tone made it obvious to methat she was joking, in much the same blackly comic vein as my crack about Lilith. If she meant anything by it at all, she meant that just because we’d been successfully revived, there was no guarantee that Adam Zimmerman could be. He, after all, had been forced to employ SusAn equipment of a considerably more primitive kind than ours, at least for the first phase of his long journey. She must have known, though, that what would be obvious to me might not be as obvious to all the other listening ears, and that it was just about the least diplomatic thing she could possibly have said.

That had to be at least part of the reason why she said it, given that she was still putting on her act – but I wished she hadn’t.

I wished she hadn’t because I knew full well that there was no one in Excelsior, and perhaps no one in the entire solar system, who wouldn’t think of Christine Caine and Madoc Tamlin as two of a potentially despicable kind.

Nine

You Can’t go Home Again

Where do you go to first, when you’re a thousand years away from the world you grew up in but VE simulations of every environment in the solar system – and quite a few beyond it – are available to you?

You try to go home, of course. Not to find it, because you know full well that you won’t, but to prove to yourself that it no longer exists, and that something else has taken its place.

In Peter Pan, one of those ancient VE adventures that Christine Caine had undertaken several times before she became a full-time mass murderer, there’s a scene in which the eponymous character – one of three elective protagonists, if my memory serves me right – flies back to the nursery from which he had fled years before. He finds the window locked, and when he looks through it he sees his mother nursing a new baby son: a replacement who seems far more contented and far more appreciative of his circumstances than he ever was. The implication is that, unlike Peter, the new kid will one day achieve the adulthood that his predecessor was determined to avoid. On the other hand – although most members of the target audience probably didn’t think that far ahead – the new kid might end up a lost boy too, with nowhere to go but Neverland.

I knew all that before I asked to see the Earth.

I thought I was sufficiently detached, and sufficiently adult, to be prepared for anything.

I had expected the hood I’d called for to grow out of the back of my armchair but it didn’t. It materialized from the room’s ceiling. It was nothing like the clumsy devices I’d used in my own time, being slightly reminiscent of a cobweb drifting down on the end of a thread of spidersilk. When it settled over my head it was hardly tangible; I didn’t even feel it on the surfaces of my eyeballs – which was actually the surface of the part of my suitskin overlying my own conjunctiva.

I could move my head easily in any direction, but I was no longer looking out into my cell. The “place” I was in was recognizable as a VE holding pattern, but there were no menus written in blood-red upon its walls, waiting to be pointed at by my index finger. All my oral requests had to be fed through an invisible listener hooked into Excelsior’s nervous system.

First I asked for a live feed from an orbiting satellite, so I could look down on my homeworld from above.

There was a time delay of several minutes while the signal made its way across the hundred-and-eighty-six-million-mile gap, taking a dogleg route to avoid the sun, but it was still “live,” relatively speaking.

There was a lot of cloud, but not so much that I couldn’t see that the colors were all wrong. There was way too much green, in all the wrong places, and too much black everywhere else. The outlines were wrong too.

I asked to look at an inset map, but the request wasn’t specific enough; I got one with a crazy projection.

It took me a few minutes to figure out that the center of the flower-shaped design at which I was staring was the south pole. The equator was the ring drawn around the mid points of the “petals.”

I still couldn’t connect the landmasses to their “originals.” I was out of my depth, floundering in uncertainty.

I had expected that the outlines of the continents might have changed slightly, but not to anything like the extent that they had. New islands had been raised from the seabed even in my day, but I’d expected to be able to see the fundamental shapes of Australia, Africa, and the Americas, the open expanses of the Pacific and the South Atlantic and the vast clotted mass of Eurasia.

They were all gone; coastlines had obviously become negotiable, and continental shelves prime development sites.

I figured out, eventually, that the differences were mainly a matter of three new continents having been constructed and some of the older ones split by artificial straits, but so many coastlines had been amended – sometimes drastically – that the shapes I knew had simply been obliterated.

When I asked for a new inset of a 3-D globe pivoted at the poles it became a little easier to see what had been what, and to reassure myself that the Continental Engineers hadn’t actually won control of continental drift, but it was an alien world just the same.

I asked to be connected to a series of ground-level feeds.

Given that a mere ninety-nine years had elapsed since the planet had been shrouded in volcanic ash I expected to find the remains of North America in a bad way. Even if the atmosphere had cleared within a decade, I reasoned, ecosystemic recovery must be at a very early stage. I expected an underpopulated wilderness still struggling to establish itself, but that wasn’t what I found.

I found a riot of exotic gardens, and a hundred brand-new cities, all competing to outdo one another in the craziness of their architecture. There were towers sculpted out of all manner of gemlike stones; sprawling multichambered branching growths like thousand-year-old trees; walls of metal and roofs of glass; piazzas lined with all kinds of synthetic hide; roadways of smart fabric; and much more.

It was an unholy mess, but it certainly wasn’t a wilderness and it was anything but underpopulated.

The Los Angeles in which I had grown up had been in recovery from its own ecocatastrophe, and I’d always thought of it as a living monument to the efficiency and capability of gantzing nanotech. Maybe it had been, by the standards of its own century, but history had moved on and technology had undergone a thousand years of further progress.

As I settled my virtual self into an artificial eye gazing out upon the streets of the city nearest to the now-drowned coordinates that LA had once occupied I saw that it wasn’t just VE tech that had undergone more than one phase-shift. I had to suppose that the buildings I was staring at had been raised by a process analogous to gantzing, but they certainly hadn’t been aggregated out of commonplace materials or embellished with the synthetic cellulose, lignin, and chitin derivatives that had surrounded me in my former incarnation. Here, once-precious stones and once-precious metals seemed to be everyday building materials, and they were augmented by all manner of fancy organics.

When I asked, a whispering voice told me that there were more than a hundred different kinds of “incorruptible” organic construction materials on display, as well as inorganic crystallines.

My informant wasn’t a human voice – it was a machine whose responses were filtered through a sim of some sort – but that didn’t mean that the member of the sisterhood commissioned to monitor me had packed up her kit and gone home. My questions were still being mediated by actual listeners, even though I was getting the answers direct from the data bank.

“They were experimenting with dextrorotatory proteins in my day,” I said. “There was the stuff Damon’s father and foster mother invented as well: para-DNA, they called it. Damon told me that PicoCon had big plans for that, once he and Conrad had sold out to them. Are those the kinds of things I’m looking at?”

The mechanical voice informed me that dextrorotatory organics had become effectively obsolete once they had begun spinning off dextrorotatory viruses and nanobacteria. The artificial genomic system designed by Conrad Helier and Eveline Hywood had proved to be much more versatile, and its derivatives were still used in a wide range of nanomachines – especially gantzing systems – but more complicated genomic systems devised for use in extreme environments had proved more generally useful when reimported to Earth.

I was assured that the next generation of technologies would be even more versatile, having taken aboard key features of the natural systems evolved on the colonized worlds of Ararat and Maya.

“And I guess you can make all the gold you want from lead,” I suggested. “Everybody’s an alchemist now.”

The humorless voice told me that transmutation wasn’t routinely practiced on Earth because there was no economic imperative. So I asked where it wasroutinely practiced, and was told that Ganymede, Io, and Umbriel were the principal research and development centers.

I had to put in a prompt to get more data, but I elicited an admission that transmutation research was “controversial,” because fusion-generated transmutation was the technological basis of “macroconstruction.”

A demand for further elaboration brought the revelation that a majority of the Earthbound was currently opposed to all kinds of macroconstructional development, and that “the major outer system factions” were divided even as to the most rudimentary aspects of their various development plans.

I looked around at the fanciful buildings that surrounded my viewpoint, knowing that they could not possibly be what the voice meant by “macroconstruction.” Given that the people of Earth seemed perfectly happy to design and build new continents, and to make drastic amendments to the outlines of the existing ones, I knew that the voice had to be talking about at least one further order of magnitude.

Davida had already told me that there were a dozen microworlds in the Counter-Earth Cluster, two hundred more scattered around the orbit, and a further two hundred located in Luna’s orbit around the Earth. I figured that the voice had to be talking about building much bigger things than that, perhaps in pursuit of the visionary quest of the type-2 crusaders who wanted to build a shell around the sun so that none of its energy output would go to waste. If so, there were only two likely sources of raw material: Jupiter and Saturn.

“You can’t build new planets out of hydrogen, ammonia, and methane,” I said. “Transmuting the stuff of gas giants must be a step beyond mere alchemy.”

The voice wasn’t programmed to praise my deductive skills. It reported, with a laconic ease that the sloth-animated sims of my own era had never quite mastered, that many people resident in Earth orbit became a trifle nervous at the mere mention of “domesticated supernoval reactions.”

That seemed to me to be a nice idea, all the nicer because it was so casually oxymoronic. I probed, and the story filtered out in dribs and drabs. In the meantime, the people of the city born yet again from the ashes of the City of Angels went about their daily business, quite oblivious to the fact that they were being watched by a time-tourist from the twenty-second century.

Would they have cared if they’d known? Would anyone have stopped to wave at the camera? I’d have liked to think that someone would, but I couldn’t be sure. All but a few of them looked like ordinary human beings, but none of them were. Their thoughts, opinions, hopes, and values were probably far more different from mine than their bodies.

“There seem to be a lot of people about,” I observed, falling into a fairly relaxed conversational mode even though I knew I was talking to a machine while being dutifully over-seen by a gaggle of two-hundred-year-old prepuberal posthumans. “How was the world repopulated so rapidly after the Yellowstone eruption?”