The Omega Expedition

“You don’t thinkso?”

“If it’s a VE, they’re trying to fool both of us. I’m not certain that it isn’t — but I do know that we have to work on the assumption that it’s real. I’m Madoc Tamlin, by the way.”

“So what did youdo, Madoc Tamlin?”

“I can’t remember how or why I got put away,” I told her.

That wiped the last vestiges of her smile away. She was obviously able to remember exactly how and why she’d been put away. She seemed more frightened than angry, but there was a peculiar quality to her fear that I couldn’t fathom.

“Lucky you,” she whispered. I got the impression that she didn’t believe in my convenient lapse of memory.

“It doesn’t seem lucky to me,” I told her. “If I really did do something that pissed someone off enough to put me away for a thousand years, I’d rather like to know what it was. As things are, I can only wonder whether someone was so afraid that I knew something that could hurt him that he worked hard to prevent my release, or whether I was simply forgotten.”

“It’s still lucky,” she assured me.

I knew that she was probably right. It had taken me some time to get my head around the idea that being forgotten for so long might have been a lucky break, whether my initial condemnation had been deliberate or accidental, but I could see by now how she might take the view that we’d both been luckier than we could ever have deserved.

But I still felt betrayed: by time, by circumstance, by my friends.

“It’s too soon to tell how well off we are,” I told her. “They didn’t bring us back in order to shower gifts upon us. We’re just the trial runs, to make sure that they can bring thousand-year-old corpsicles back with their minds more or less intact. Once we’ve convinced them that we’re as well as can be expected, we’ll be redundant. They may have certain reservations about welcoming us into the company of the emortals.”

“Why?” she asked, warily. She didn’t know that I knew who she was, and she was prepared to hope that I might not.

“Because you were a murderer, Miss Caine,” I said, as gently as I could, “And they’ve probably assumed that I must have been one too.”

“I was found guilty but insane,” she informed me, stiffly. Then she took another pause for thought before saying: “We’re a thousand years down the line. If they can cure death, surely they can sort out a few lousy bugs in the meatware. Their infotech must be foolproof by now. What did you say your name was?”

“Madoc Tamlin.”

She shrugged her bony shoulders, but she’d already worked out that she couldn’t possibly have heard of me. “I’m Christine Caine, as you seem to know,” she said. The way she looked at me suggested that she wasn’t entirelysure that I could be familiar with her case, even though I knew her name and what she’d been put away for.

“I know who you are,” I said, but was quick to add: “I’m probably the only one who knows much more than your name, though. The people who brought us back claim to have lost the relevant records.”

“Do you think they’re lying?” she was quick to ask.

“I don’t know what to think. I’m not even sure that we’re what they say we are. Even if we’re in meatspace rather than some super-tricky VE, we might still be sims of some kind.”

“That’s a little paranoid, isn’t it?” she observed, pitching her voice so that the word paranoidsounded more compliment than insult. “I have this creepy feeling that you might be right, though. I don’t feel like myself.”

“Neither do I,” I admitted. “Maybe that’s just because we’ve been kitted out with these weird suitskins and internal nanotech that’s ten generations ahead of anything we could have had in our day. On the other hand, it might be because we’re sims or androids: AIs programmed to believe that we’re people who died a thousand years ago.”

“Why would anyone want to make sims of people who died a thousand years ago?” she asked. I could see that she was working on the problem herself, but I was slightly surprised by the ease of her assumption that if we weren’t who we thought we were then the people we thought we were must be dead.

“Maybe they’re interested in the outlaws of olden times,” I suggested, wondering what Davida and her sisters thought of the direction the conversation was taking. “Maybe they want to know what made us tick.”

“I didn’t tick,” she said, her tone becoming oddly distant. “If I’d been ticking, I’d have blown up — or run down. Not a bomb and not a clock, let alone a pacemaker. Silent but deadly. So they said.”

Not so silent, I thought, once people started hooking into Bad Karma.

“Either way,” I said, “it might be wise not to take anything for granted. I think they’ll want to take a good long look at us anyway. Whatever we may think of ourselves, to them we’re the next best thing to reanimated Neanderthals. Adam Zimmerman has his sainthood to keep him warm, but we don’t. Quite the reverse, in fact. We might have to handle our situation very carefully — and it won’t be easy.”

“Are we being watched?” she wanted to know.

“All the time,” I assured her. “Monitored inside and out. So far as I know, they can’t overhear our private thoughts, but nothing else is secret.”

If appearances could be trusted, that thought disturbed and distressed her more than any she’d so far come across. Her gaze flickered as her pale blue eyes looked toward the window, then up at the ceiling and round the walls, then back at me.

“Shit,” she murmured. Then she composed herself again. “Lousy view,” she remarked.

“It was supposed to be a slice of home,” I said. “It’s long gone — blown to smithereens, so they say.”

“The whole Earth?”

“Just America — but the whole ecosphere had a catastrophic fit and had to be regenerated.”

She didn’t seem to think that the destruction of America was an issue worth pursuing. “Who’s they, exactly?” she asked.

I told myself that the fact she was taking everything so calmly was a compliment to the IT the microworlders had installed in her brain — but I knew that if that was true for her it ought to have been true for me, too. I wasn’t taking everything calmly. My tranquilizing IT obviously wasn’t programmed to kick in until I got badly steamed up; a certain amount of i

“You’ll see them soon enough,” I said. “I ought to warn you that they’re very weird. Apparently, there are lots of people around who look pretty much like you or me, but there are lots who don’t. It so happens that this particular microworld is run by people who don’t.”

“So what dothey look like?”

“Children. Little girls. They’re genetically engineered for a particular kind of emortality — programmed to stop growing and maturing at nine or ten, before puberty sets in. I assume that their brains keep changing as they learn. That’s probably why they do it. They must be hoping to preserve their brains in a better-than-adult state.”

“Neoteny,” she said.

I was somewhat surprised that she knew the word. One tends to think of crazy serial killers as undereducated individuals. “That’s right,” I conceded. “We’re neotenic apes, sort of, so I guess they figured that neotenic people were the next evolutionary step forward. If you think that’s weird, wait till you see pictures of fabers and cyborganizers.”

“But there are still people like us around?”

“People who look like us,” I corrected her. “Engineered for emortality, and lots of other cute tricks. We’ll have visitors of that kind in a couple of days. There’s a spaceship en route from Earth, and another heading in from the Jovian moons, although the people it’s carrying are mostly Titanians. They’re coming to welcome Zimmerman, of course, but they can hardly refuse us invitations to the party. There’s a historian with the Earth delegation, apparently, who’s as keen to talk to us as he is to pay his respects to Zimmerman. There’s also a UN rep, who probably answers to the Secret Masters as well as the not-so-secret ones. You don’t have to worry about that, but I might. I used to work for the organization.”