The Omega Expedition (10 page)

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

T
he 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 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
real
windows.”

“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
she
didn’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
was
one 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
really
feel. 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

I
was 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
me
inside 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.