The Omega Expedition

“Did the Hardinist Cabal still own the planet when it happened?” I asked.

She didn’t procrastinate over the precise significance of the term, although she took the trouble to substitute one of her own. “The people who styled themselves Stewards of the Earth had already lost some of their former power and influence,” she reported, “and the fact that the planet’s balance of trade with the outer system was in irredeemable deficit implied that their decline was irreversible. They probably remain privately convinced that the eruption was sabotage directed at them, perhaps by Earthbound rebels and perhaps by outer system radicals, although their public position is that it was an unfortunate accident. Certain other factions have suggested that the Stewards were the responsible party, and that the effective destruction of the ecosphere enabled them to reestablish a local economic hegemony that they would soon have lost. That seems unlikely, given that the disaster brought about a dramatic increase in imports from the outer system.”

“Do the Secret Masters of Earth know you’ve woken me up?” I asked, trying not to sound too paranoid.

“They have been kept fully informed of our plans and our progress, as a matter of courtesy,” the wonderful child assured me. “The United Nations of Earth will send a delegation to attend the awakening of Adam Zimmerman, as will the Outer System Confederation. If their deceleration patterns proceed according to plan, the ships carrying the delegations will both arrive within a hundred hours’ time.”

“So you’re still going to wake Zimmerman, even though my memory is impaired?”

“Yes. We shall continue to monitor your progress, and if we can find a way to help you recover your lost memories we’ll do it. If Adam Zimmerman suffers similar problems, we’ll counter them as best we can.”

“How’s the second test subject doing?”

“We hope to awaken the second subject in seven hours’ time. Everything has gone well so far, but her state of mind remains to be ascertained.”

“Who is the other trial subject?” I asked, not really expecting to hear a name I knew.

“A woman named Christine Caine,” was the reply I got.

Like most of the other names which figure in this lostory, that one had a tale attached — one which bore a decidedly sinister significance.

Four

Bad Karma

The single most astonishing aspect of my return to consciousness, a thousand years later than could ever have been expected, was that the one thing that tangibly astonished me during that first interview with the child-who-wasn’t-a-child was the sound of Christine Caine’s name. I’d just been informed that I’d missed out on a mille

“You mean Christine Caine as in Bad Karma,” I said to Davida Berenike Columella, just in case the name had become fashionable after 2202.

Davida seemed to have no idea what I was talking about, and her data feed obviously wasn’t helping. Apparently, it wasn’t just my record that had been erased.

Again I was seized by the conviction that it had to be a joke. I’d almost given up hoping that it was all a VE drama, but the reference to the most notorious VE drama of my own era seemed too surreal to be anything but contrivance. Except that it wasn’t really a reference, from the viewpoint of Davida Berenike Columella. If appearances could be trusted, she had never heard of Bad Karmaand knew no more about Christine Caine than she knew about me.

I remembered the way that the seeming child had flinched when she realized that I was going to touch her. She’d had no idea who I was. Given that I’d been committed to prison a thousand years before, with the record of my crime obliterated, I might easily have been a mass murderer. As it happened, I wasn’t, although Davida couldn’t be entirelyprepared to take my word for it.

But Christine Caine really was a monster, by all accounts. She was also the subject of the most notorious illegal VE drama of all time — or had been, when “all time” had only extended as far as July 2202.

Suddenly, I was forced to contemplate the exact terms of the “trial run” of which I was now a part.

“You’ve tried to bring me back exactly as I was when I was put away,” I said, by way of clarification. “You wanted to be as certain as you can be that you could do a good job of restoration, because that’s what you hope to do with Adam Zimmerman. So you’ve also tried as hard as you can to put Christine Caine back together exactly as she was when she went into the freezer, right?”

“That’s correct,” the wonderful child agreed.

“And so far as I can tell,” I reported, “you’ve done a reasonably good job on me, save for a few recent memories. Not that I’d be consciously aware of any differences, I suppose, and I haven’t had time to check my other memories as closely as I might, and I really don’tquite feel like myself…but even so, I’m perfectly prepared to accept me as I am. In which case, you might want to take a few extra precautions with Christine Caine.”

“Why?”

“Well,” I said. “For one thing, she was convicted of murdering thirteen people, ten of whom were her adoptive parents. For another, although opinions varied as to the exact nature and extent of her mental illness, nobody doubted that she was barking mad.”

“Did you know her?” Davida Berenike Columella inquired, i

“ Knowher? Of course I didn’t knowher. She was frozen down when I was four years old. But I was in the illicit VE business for a while and I knew all about Bad Karma. I suppose I even wished I’d made it, or had been capable of making it.”

I could tell that Davida had known full well that Christine Caine had been frozen down in 2167, thirty-five years before me. That had been another little test, which I’d obviously passed. But I could tell, too, that she really didn’t have a clue what Bad Karmawas. Classic of early VE or not, it was one work of art that hadn’t stood the test of time. It had been lost — or successfully suppressed.

“ Bad Karmawas a VE drama,” I explained. “Underground stuff, shot circatwenty-one ninety-five. I used to make sex tapes and fight tapes in my youth, some of them far enough out on the edge to be ba

“The improvised thought-track provided a theory of sorts as to why Christine Caine had committed the murders. It was partly based on one of several conflicting statements she’d given to the police and various psychiatric examiners after her arrest, but mainly improvised. In those days, even visuals were considered a potentially dangerous medium of consumer/perpetrator identification, but that thought-track kicked off a real moral panic.

“Rumor had it that sensitive users — especially kids — might be taken over by the thought-track, driven mad, and led to commit copycat crimes. The rumors were probably started by the guys who made the tape, for marketing purposes, but they proved a little too effective. There werecopycat crimes, for which the VE mighthave been partly responsible — but you probably know better than I do how crazy those times were. Christine Caine can’t know anything about the VE tape, of course, and she might be a very different person from the one represented in the thought-track — but she did do the murders. If you’ve put her back together exactly as she was when she went into SusAn, you’ve reconstructed a crazy serial killer.”