The Omega Expedition (13 page)

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

The Snow Queen
and
Peter Pan
were 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 Queen
at 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 Queen
yet 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 Karma
was 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.
If
I 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
all
my 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
twentieth
century. 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
me
that 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

W
here 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.