The Omega Expedition (4 page)

Adam was tempted for a while to abandon his job as a consultant in corporate finance, on the grounds that there was something absurdly meaningless about the ceaseless juggling of figures. He was a very accomplished saltimbanque, to be sure, and he prided himself on the fact that no one could walk the tightrope that separated tax avoidance from tax evasion more surefootedly than he, but even the most creative exercises in bookkeeping seemed to exemplify the desperate absorption in the trivial that was one of the most obviously hollow of all the false solutions to the problem of being.

Although he had no talent at all for composition, Adam did play the guitar quite well — it was one of the few activities capable of relaxing him — and for a while he contemplated beginning a new career as a spaced-out folksinger. He imagined for a while that he might grow his hair long, wear a beard, and change his name to Adam X in order to symbolize the falseness of family as a conduit of intergenerational continuity. He decided soon enough, however, that such a career would be no less absurd than a career in corporate finance, and a good deal less profitable.

Sylvia applauded this particular decision heartily, but Adam’s
angst
became, in Sylvia’s eyes, a marital misdemeanor. She was eventually to divorce him on the grounds that he could not provide her with essential emotional support. “The trouble with you,” she said, on the day she finally left him, “is that you’re incapable of enjoying yourself.”

Sylvia never remarried and remained permanently childless, living comfortably on the alimony which Adam paid her until she died in 2019, but whether she escaped the ravages of her own
angst
remains unclear. Adam always claimed, with a hint of residual vindictiveness, that she died an alcohol-sodden wreck; although he was an unusually honest and serious man, all other surviving documents suggest that she lived a rich life, within the constraints of her time, and died as happily as anyone can who accepts the necessity.

Two

M
ere mortal though he was, by the time Adam Zimmerman was asked to compile a definitive account of his formative experiences he had forgotten many significant details. He could not recall when he had first become aware of the central thesis of Garrett Hardin’s essay on “The Tragedy of the Commons” or when he first read
Conquest of Death
by Alvin Silverstein. Given that he was only ten years old when the former item was first published, it seems likely that he must have run across it at a much later date, in one of its many reprintings. It is conceivable that he had read the latter item in 1979, when it first appeared — four years before his close encounter with Heidegger — but had not been in a position to anticipate the significance that its central concept would eventually come to assume within his thinking.

That central concept was, of course, emortality.

The word “emortality” is such a commonplace item of contemporary vocabulary that it is difficult to imagine a time before it was coined, but it was almost unknown in Adam Zimmerman’s day. The distinction between “immortality” — which implies an absolute immunity to death — and emortality did not seem worthwhile in an era when both were out of reach. Although a condition in which individuals were immune to disease and aging, and enjoyed a greatly enhanced capacity of bodily self-repair, was
imaginable
in the twentieth century, it was the stuff of fantastic fiction — a medium even more despised by the cultural elite of the day than the determinedly unadventurous naturalistic fiction that Adam Zimmerman considered futile. Silverstein was among the first mortals to propose, in all seriousness, that the scientific conquest of death might only be decades away, and that a term was therefore urgently required for the state of being in which human life
might
be extended indefinitely, although remaining permanently subject to the possibility of accidental or violent death.

Adam did recall that his interest in Silverstein’s thesis was, for a while, confused in his mind by another proposition, popularized by R. C. W. Ettinger, that the advancement of science might one day make it possible to revive some individuals who would be considered clinically dead by twentieth-century standards. Ettinger proposed in the 1960s that people then alive might be able to take advantage of such future progress if only their bodies could be preserved in a state immediately following the moment of death-as-currently-defined. The method of preservation he favored was, of course, freezing. By the time Adam was forty years old, a considerable number of people had made provision for themselves to take advantage of this potential opportunity by arranging to have their bodies frozen after death and maintained indefinitely in a cryogenic facility.

Adam could never convince himself that a death once suffered could actually be reversed, but he did interest himself in the possibility that humans who were frozen down while still alive might be resuscitated at a later date, in order to take advantage of the biotechnologies that would make emortality a reality. Within a year of his divorce, perhaps because Sylvia’s defection had cleared way the last obstacle to the focusing of all his mental resources, Adam had decided that the only possible escape from the ravages of
angst
was to place himself in suspended animation, avoiding death until his frozen body could be delivered into a world where the indefinite avoidance of death had become routine.

Adam recalled that when he mentioned this possibility to his ex-wife she laughed contemptuously, having left behind the loving state of mind that would have forbidden such indelicacy. That, for him, was final proof of the fact that she had never really understood him, and it served to harden his resolve implacably. Might that bitter laugh have changed the course of history? Probably not, given that Adam’s resolve was already firm enough — but it is heartening to think that good can sometimes be assisted, accelerated and amplified by malice. The world would be a much poorer place if it were not so.

By the time the twentieth century lurched to its inauspicious end, Adam had made his decision and formulated his plan. He was determined to avoid that tax on existence which his peers called death, and the means by which he would contrive the evasion was ice: not the kind of ice which spiced the upstate lakes in the depths of winter and suspended icicles from the ledges of the city, but the kind of ice that comprised comets and encased the satellites of distant planets; the kind of ice which could suspend all animation and preserve organic structure indefinitely.

Adam knew, of course, that neither the technology to accomplish this nor the legal apparatus to enable it was yet available, but he was an accountant by trade and vocation. He understood that the motor of technological progress was money, and that laws were made to control the poor while enabling the rich. There was a problem of timing to be solved, but that was all that was required to bring his ambitions to their consummation. He would need considerable wealth if he were to get the best of care during several centuries of inactivity, but the manipulation and redirection of wealth was his specialism and he was an accomplished practitioner of the economic arts.

It could not have been easy to weigh all these things accurately, but years of devotion to the juggling of figures had honed Adam’s calculative skills to near-perfection. He eventually decided that he needed to be frozen down before he reached the age of eighty, and that seventy would be preferable, so he set a preliminary target date for his entry into suspended animation of 2028, extendable to 2038 if all went well enough in the interim.

For safety’s sake, he calculated, it would be necessary to leave at least a billion dollars to the organization entrusted with his preservation. It would, however, be convenient if he could raise twice or three times as much in the shorter term, in order to make sure that research in cryogenics was properly funded. It would be helpful, too, to have a couple of billion dollars to spare when the time came, in order to give an appropriate boost to the technologies of emortality that would facilitate his return.

He decided that he needed to make his first billion by 2010, his second by 2020, and however many more he could contrive in the remaining eight to eighteen years of activity. In the meantime, he had to make every effort to remain perfectly healthy.

Adam had never smoked and had always been a very moderate drinker — he indulged in the occasional glass of red wine but never touched spirits — so the only additional effort he required was to exert a greater discipline over his diet and dedicate at least one hour a day to the exercise machines in his private gym. He decided that the only other hazard which stood in the way of achieving his targets was the possibility that he might have to endure another divorce, but that was an easy hurdle to avoid by the simple expedient of refusing to marry again.

He contemplated remaining celibate for the remainder of his days, but having studied Jacques Bertillon’s data regarding sexual activity and death-risk he decided that keeping a string of mistresses was a justifiable expenditure. For this role he was careful to select unusually docile and rational young women, whose looks were only slightly better than average and whose appetites were as moderate as his own.

Three

I
f I might be permitted a brief historical interpolation here, it may be worth my pointing out that there were several ways in which an ambitious corporate accountant could plan to make a billion dollars in the early years of the twenty-first century. Global Capitalism was newly entered into its Age of Heroes, and those heroes had already reduced national governments to the status of mere instruments. The only significant ideological opposition to the dominance of capitalism during the twentieth century had been provided by Marxist socialism, but the governments which pretended to operate on that basis had been thinly disguised oligarchies or autocracies, all of which had either collapsed or embarked upon programs of accommodation by 2000.

Ironically, the Marxist economic analyses which had avidly anticipated the collapse and supersession of capitalism had been largely correct in anticipating the phases that the system would pass through as it approached that final crisis. Capital had indeed been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, while the vast majority of the laborers producing its material goods remained direly impoverished. The inherent revolutionary potential of this situation had, however, been conclusively defused by the clever use of new technologies of production and communication. Mechanical production not only robbed laborers of much of their potential disputative power but also helped to supply the direly impoverished masses with goods that they could never have produced themselves. Mass communication allowed the avarice and envy that had always been the twin motors of human progress to be manipulated in a subtler, cleverer, and more intense fashion than ever before.

With the aid of hindsight, we can now see an apparent inevitability in the fact that the final victory of Global Capitalism took the form of a Cartel of Cosmicorporations, which put an end once and for all to the Era of Competition. We can see, too, that the Universal Cartel did not arrive a day too soon, if it was indeed the only practical solution to the Tragedy of the Commons. Many historians, having taken this for granted, have regretted that some such cartel did not emerge a hundred years earlier, while the big corporations had not yet become entitled to such prefixes as mega-and cosmi-. In another place, or another history, some other solution might have been found which did better service to the glorious traditional ideals of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, but in our world no such solution ever succeeded in making itself credible.

The twentieth century was an era of unprecedented economic growth, based on unprecedented population growth. Production and consumption increased hand in hand, and their increase was exponential. This could not continue indefinitely, because the toll that it was taking on the Earth’s ecosphere could not be sustained. The twenty-first century was bound to see a qualitative change in the pattern, and the momentum of the system ensured that it would begin with a catastrophic Crash. The only issue in doubt was whether the crisis could be moderated in such a way that the world economy could regain a more-or-less stable and sustainable equilibrium, or whether the Crash would be so destructive that a centuries-long period of recovery would be necessary — after which the problem would inevitably recur, and keep on recurring until a sustainable equilibrium could be reached.

Ecology was an infant discipline in the twentieth century, and its interrelationships with economics were poorly understood by the great majority of practitioners in either field. The fusion of the two disciplines pioneered by Garrett Hardin had yet to win wide acceptance at the beginning of the twenty-first century, partly because there were few individuals or corporations who had anything substantial to gain from accepting it. Men were mortal then, and few had sufficient imagination even to anticipate the changes and challenges they would have to face within a limited lifetime. From its earliest embryonic days, however, the Universal Cartel had every reason to take aboard the crucial lesson set out in the most significant scientific parable of the twentieth century, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Nobody now remembers who coined the term “Hardinist Cabal” — it was not Adam Zimmerman — but it was a notion whose time had certainly come.

As soon as its formation was begun, the Universal Cartel had no alternative but to accept as its primary purpose and objective the management and control of the inevitable ecocatastrophic Crash, with a view to steering its course to the only imaginable healthy outcome. Among the many advisers and consultants hired to help them organize and discipline the world economy, Adam Zimmerman was one whose understanding of that necessity, and the means to attain it, stood out very conspicuously. He was, therefore, in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to further their strategy and his own, in near-perfect harmony.