The Omega Expedition

Adam never had to endure a serious illness. He survived two major road traffic accidents and three assassination attempts without accumulating a single scar. Even so, he considered it prudent not to use up the entirety of the extension of his first Earthly existence that he had generously given himself should he continue in good health.

On 1 April 2035 Adam Zimmerman became the one hundredth human to be frozen down while still in the full bloom of health, using the most sophisticated SusAn technique then available. No one now knows what happened to his ninety-nine predecessors, although we may assume that those who were not revived long before him must have met with accidents of one kind or another. The people of our own day have every reason to be grateful for the combination of good fortune and tender care which brought him safely across the ages, even if the circumstances surrounding his revival did not develop as anyone had pla

Being and Time:

A Cautionary Tale for

the Children of Humankind

by Madoc Tamlin

Part One

When I Woke Up

One

My Name and Nature

My name is Madoc Tamlin.

Like many a man born in 2163, I know nothing at all of my biological ancestry. The six foster parents who raised me refused to make any enquiry as to the ultimate origins of the sperm and egg that were extracted from a donor bank in Los Angeles, California, then combined in vitroto produce the egg which they caused to be implanted in a Helier womb.

How, then did they come by my name?

Because they never offered me any other account, I can only suppose that they simply liked the sound of it. My admittedly vague memories of them suggest that it is highly unlikely that any of them had ever heard of either of the legendary antecedents described herein, and I am quite sure that they were not trying to influence my destiny in any way by attaching the names to me. Perhaps that is as well, given that they failed to influence my destiny in all the ways that they did try.

I was a disappointment to my parents, of course, as they were to one another; they belonged to the very first generation of aggregate households, and they made more than their fair share of the mistakes of inexperience to which all pioneers are inevitably prone — as did I.

What follows, then, is a record of hazard, whimsy, and coincidence — but in the absence of a biological heritage, it is the only ancestry I have and the only one I have ever needed. Names fascinated me in my youth and they fascinate me now. The significance of their back-stories may be accidental and artificial, but is no less powerful for that. I understand the crucial role that coincidence plays in attaching those back-stories to people and other creatures, like the tails of ragged cloth that are pi

Madoc, it seems, was a fictitious Welsh prince of the twelfth century, the youngest son of Owen Gwyneth. His claim to enduring fame was that he was said to have crossed the Atlantic and discovered the continent that later became the Americas in 1170 or thereabouts. He was the subject of a poem pe

First names are, however, less important than surnames.

Tamlin, more usually rendered Tam Lin or Tamlane, was the central character of a ballad so old that it ca

The idea that human children might be stolen by the fairies, and taken to a land where time passes far more slowly than it does on earth, was a common one in superstitious days. The idea was compounded, rather paradoxically, out of hope and fear: the hope of immortality and eternal youth; the fear of becoming alien and inhuman.

The time into which I was born was, by contrast, an era of antisuperstition and exotic manufacture, in which all children were told that they had every chance of becoming emortal, returning to the full flower of young adulthood again and again and again. We had not entirely given up our anxieties, because we knew about the Miller Effect and had conceived the idea of “robotization,” but we were bold pioneers and we put our fears aside.

Even so, my world bore certain significant similarities to the world of medieval legend, which helped pave the way for new Tam Lins.

I could have changed the name my foster parents gave me, but I never wanted to. I accepted it as my own, and something precious. I know now that I was right to do so.

The Faerie of my first youth was the world of PicoCon and OmicronA, pioneers and manufacturers of nanotechnology. These friendly rivals sold to my peers the successive generations of Internal Technology that were supposed to constitute the escalator to emortality. That Faerie had no queen, but it did have a dictator of sorts: a shadowy committee known only by a rich assortment of nicknames, including the I

It helped, too, that I arrived in a world where all names were chosen, some more carefully than others. Those chosen names imprinted their back-stories on the pattern of events with a force and irony that could only be appreciated by someone as fascinated by names as I was — or so I believe. That is why I am telling you this story. The people who have asked me to do it have asked for a history, but it is not that. It has always seemed to me that stories which pass themselves off as histories ought to be conscientiously “hi” — lofty, distant, and imperious — while my character and profile have always been obstinately “lo,” working from beneath rather than above, craftily rather than authoritatively.

I am, therefore, happy to leave the history of our adventure to the expert pen of my good friend Mortimer Gray; my own account is nothing but a lostory, more comedy than drama, more cautionary tale than epic. Others will doubtless offer their own accounts of the events of the Last of the Final Wars, many of whom were fortunate enough — or unfortunate enough — to be far closer to the action than I was, but I dare to hope that my poor lostory might cut more deeply than its rivals to the bone and marrow of the tale.