The Omega Expedition (5 page)

Four

A
dam was not in the least surprised that he became known, in the years before he absented himself from the twenty-first century, as “the man who stole the world.” He did not resent the appellation; indeed, he was very proud of it.

“The world had to be stolen,” he told me, by way of explanation. “In exactly the same way that the ancient commons of England needed enclosure and usurpation, so the entire surface of the Earth had to be enclosed within tight bonds of ownership, in order that its resources and productivity might be sensibly controlled.”

“Was there no other way?” I asked.

“None,” he said, adamantly. “The users of the land could not be allowed to continue exploiting it competitively, each to his individual advantage, and they certainly could not be trusted to exercise restraint within the framework of any voluntary agreement. A firm ruling hand was necessary. The long-term needs of the Commonweal had to be substituted for the short-term ambitions of individual greed. Political communism had attempted to do that, but it had failed in spectacular fashion to contain or constrain the urgings of envy and avarice.”

“Was there no intermediate course that might have been plotted between the two extremes?”

“No. The objective could only be attained by an approach from a diametrically opposite direction. Consumer demand could only be controlled by its makers and organizers; social and technological progress could only be subjected to managerial control by people who understood management theory as well as scientific theory. Whatever moral reservations the people of my era may have had as to capitalism’s disregard for social justice and equality of opportunity, the greater need had to be served.

“Big business already ruled the world — the only question was whether it could get its act together in time to do the job properly. The world’s property was distributed far too widely and indiscriminately, but most of the people who had pocketed it were living on the economic edge, waiting negligently to be pushed over. The people who knew what they were doing, and what still needed to be done, already had the lion’s share of the wealth
and
control of the markets. They were the people who had to steal the rest, because they were the people who could.

“The people who were destined to own the world were already well on the way to that goal in 2000, but they needed to accelerate the process if they were to complete the grab while the world was still worth stealing. I helped them obtain that extra boost. It was simple enough — the 1929 example was in all the textbooks, offering the definitive model. Engineer a big bubble followed by a big burst, then send the carpetbaggers in; repeat until the process is complete.”

Adam was, of course, being unduly modest. The principle might have been simple, but the execution of the series of financial coups that began in 2010 and reached its climax in 2025 was anything but easy. It required an awesomely detailed understanding of the constitution and behavior of the world’s markets. Adam’s reference to “the 1929 example” was, of course, slightly disingenuous, because the key to the manipulation of twenty-first-century markets was an intimate knowledge of the computer systems that were handling the bulk of trading. Although they would not have qualified as artificial intelligences by today’s standards, the systems in question were experts of a sort. They could outperform humans in all the circumstances of which their programmers had taken account, but were also capable, in certain extraordinary and unanticipated circumstances, of almost incredible stupidity.

What Adam Zimmerman contributed to the Universal Cartel’s Hardinist property grab was the knowledge of exactly how to bring about the extraordinary circumstances that would cause the computerized trading systems to trash the world’s markets, and exactly how to take advantage of the ensuing chaos.

Contrary to popular belief, the Earth was not won on a single day on 20 March 2025, but it
was
lost on that day. When the second day of the new spring dawned, the way was clear and the pattern of acquisitions had become inexorable. The world woke up in the secure grip of an association of megacorporations whose chief executives formed the tightly knit conspiracy that soon became known by such journalistic catchphrases as the Secret Masters, the Inner Circle, and the Invisible Hand. The actual agents of the coup were more than content to remain hidden behind such euphemisms, while allowing their humbler instruments to bear the burden of personal notoriety. Adam Zimmerman was not, in any
literal
sense, “the man who stole the world,” but he was certainly in the forefront of the great heist. He organized the shock troops which led the rapid-fire asset-stripping raids that bankrupted whole nations and cornered every significant commodity whose futures were dealt. Like any true hero, he did not act for himself but for the captains of Global Capitalism, and hence for the world as a whole — but he did take a perfectly reasonable commission on every deal he made.

By 2010 Adam had already made his first billion dollars and had laid the groundwork for the Ahasuerus Foundation. By 2020 he had made his second billion, and the Ahasuerus Foundation was becoming a significant force in longevity research and the commercial development of suspended-animation technology. In the spring of 2025 he made five billion dollars more, and the Ahasuerus Foundation became the leading institution in both its fields of sponsorship.

Although his part in these transactions made him one of the wealthiest men in the world, Adam remained scrupulously unassuming in dress and manner. His legion of aides and assistants thought him rather shy, and they were as grateful for his unfailing politeness as they were for his measured generosity. The only slight resentment that his employees harbored was against his habit of lecturing them on the necessity of self-discipline, the virtues of thrift, the dangers of hedonism, and other related topics. They valued the truths that were invariably to be found in these homilies, but were inclined to think the lectures themselves a trifle pompous.

Despite his nickname and the notoriety it reflected, Adam did not like to expose himself to the public gaze, and he became increasingly reclusive as the twenty-first century wore on. One of his favorite sermons, in fact, was a warning against the seductiveness of fame.

“Fame,” Adam would sternly advise his closer acquaintances, “is essentially a matter of attracting attention, and attention is always fatal to men who make their living by dipping into other people’s pockets. People like ourselves should make every effort to avoid being
interesting
; it not only renders one vulnerable to the iniquities of inquisitiveness, but makes one susceptible to flattery. Flattery is a powerful force, and its attractions can be difficult to resist. One must constantly remind oneself that fame is one of the most awful reminders of one’s own mortality. The masses are always hungry for misfortune and disaster, and they love to revel in the tragedy and grief which attend the sufferings of their idols. The public invents celebrities mainly in order to revel in their decay and extinction, and fame always breeds sickness and self-abuse. The unluckiest men in the world are those who have a fame thrust upon them from which they cannot escape.”

These were wise words. I could have judged them wise even from my own very limited experience of the fame I gained as the author of the definitive
History of Death
and the pioneer of emortal spiritual autobiography, but Adam Zimmerman provided a far more telling example himself. While he remained hidden from the world he was able to retain the status of a mere shadow on the page of history, an elusive myth — but the longer he remained in his chrysalis of ice the more certain it became that he would wake to find himself famous, with disastrous effect.

Five

A
dam Zimmerman’s speeches warning against the hazards of fame and sermons on the benefits of thrift were sometimes taken by those who did not know him well as evidence of cynicism. Here was a man, his critics argued, who was notorious throughout the world as the greatest thief in history, who poured the billions of dollars that he stole into esoteric scientific and technological research. In contrast to the great philanthropists of Classical Capitalism, who had endowed universities, art galleries, and museums for the betterment of their humbler fellows, Adam Zimmerman seemed to care for nothing but the preservation of his own self, desiring only to become “immortal” in the crudest imaginable sense of the word.

What fools those mortals were!

“It is difficult for those who can see to imagine the plight of those who are blind,” Adam told me, when we discussed his treatment in histories other than my own, “but it ought to be impossible for any reasonable person of
your
day to entertain an atom of sympathy for my critics. It should have been obvious, even to my contemporaries, that I was the ultimate incarnation of the underlying philosophy of capitalism, as first set out in Bernard de Mandeville’s
The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Public Benefits
— but I suppose we ought to be generous and remember that Mandeville’s writings were also misconstrued in their day, and prosecuted for the offense they offered to Puritan ideals.

I asked Adam whether he had had the remotest inkling, in the early twenty-first century, of the difference that his actions would ultimately make to the general human condition.

“Yes,” he said, unequivocally. “I knew perfectly well, from the very beginning, that emortality would become the privilege of all humankind — or, at any rate, all but the very poorest members of society. Some of the more shortsighted members of the Cartel were inclined for a while to think of it as something that ought to be reserved for the ultimate elite, but I tried to persuade them that it would be as unwise as it would be impossible to monopolise longevity. The whole point of their enterprise was to achieve economic stability, and there could be no other permanent guarantee of stability than universal, or near-universal, emortality. Before I was frozen down I advised them to make every effort to persuade their customers that emortality was imminent, that nothing was required for its attainment but loyalty and patience, and that once it was commercially available they should err on the side of generosity rather than play the miser.”

“Are you surprised,” I asked him, “that so very few of them followed your own example and put themselves into suspended animation to await the fulfilment of that promise?”

“Had you asked me in 2035 how many would follow my example,” he said, after a pause for thought, “I would have guessed that every rational man who had the means would do so. But I think I can understand why the actual figure was so low. The men to whom I acted as adviser were not of my kind. They were hungry for power, and they loved to exercise authority. They were, of course, ambitious to be the saviors of the ecosphere, but they did not want power because they wanted to save the world — they wanted to save the world because that was the best way to prove that they were powerful.

“The men for whom I stole the world had the same deep-rooted fear of death and annihilation that I had, but they had never brought it to clear consciousness in the manner that I was fortunate enough to achieve. Their coping strategy was a different one, requiring a fierce avidity to seize the moment, and to lose themselves in the opportunities of the moment. They were, above all else,
successful
men, and their success extended to the repression of their death anxiety. They did not have the strength of mind or the force of will to let go of what they had and what they were about, until it was too late. They could be honest in their dealings with their fellow men when the situation demanded it — as it occasionally did — but they were incapable of being honest with themselves. They thought themselves extraordinary men, but their insensitivity to the fact of their own mortality was pathetically ordinary.”

“It seems to have been surprisingly easy for people of your era to persuade themselves that they did not want to live forever,” I observed. He had not yet had the opportunity to read
The History of Death
, and did not know the extent of my own speculations or the nature of my own conclusions in regard to that matter.

“Not at all,” he said, decisively. “If they had had to persuade themselves, they would have been quite unable to do it. The point was that they did not have to persuade themselves because they had already made up their minds to ignore the question, never raising it except in jest. They dismissed the prospect of emortality as an absurdity unworthy of their contemplation, and laughed at anyone who challenged them. When I was young, I thought them fools, and cowardly fools too — but as I grew older, I became more tolerant of their willful blindness, and even tried to help them see the truth.

“They were not really fools, or cowards; they were merely victims of a kind of mental illness, an existential malaise. Even those who understood that aging was merely one more disease — awaiting nothing but a full understanding of its nature to be treatable, and ultimately curable — mostly fell victim to the mental symptoms of their sickness. They lived in a world saturated with death, and could not find the strength of mind to make themselves exceptions to such a universal rule.”

“But you were brave enough to be different,” I observed.

“I wouldn’t call it brave,” he told me. “Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t take courage merely to be different. Most people who are different attain that condition by simple failure. It does, however, require unusual dedication to be
constructively
different. Most men are handicapped by difference, hobbled by alienation from the company and concerns of their fellow men. To be empowered by difference requires ruthless self-sufficiency and self-discipline. Any man of my era could have done what I did had he taken the trouble, but men are few who can endure much trouble.”

Men are few who can endure much trouble
.