The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [131]
It would have been good to have had the leisure to discuss what I had learned with Davida or Mortimer Gray, but they were busy with their own inquiries. There was no more conferencing, and when it came to selecting partners for intense conversations no one was interested in comparing notes with me. The posthumans were only interested in comparing notes with other posthumans, and the only relic of the ancient world they were enthusiastic to copy in on their conclusions was Adam Zimmerman.
In spite of all my heroic efforts in bringing the situation to its present phase, I was now considered peripheral, or worse: a barbarian from the beginning of time, too stupid and ignorant to have anything more to contribute to the understanding or solution of the posthumans’ predicament.
I was sufficiently annoyed by this attitude to take care not to reproduce it myself in my dealings with the other person suffering the same reflexive exclusion: Christine Caine. I shared my discoveries with her whiles I tried to extrapolate a better understanding of the world of the AMIs.
When we finally returned to our beds we all had a lot more fuel for our dreams, and a lot more food for thought to keep our sleep-resistant minds racing. When the lights went out, however, darkness brought doubts.
“She could be lying,” Christine said, meaning Alice. “It might be one more fairy story, intended to distract and confuse us.
“It might,” I admitted.
“If we are in rehab, though,” she observed, “therapy’s moved on since our day.”
“It’s not therapy,” I told her. “It might be lies, but it’s not therapy. It’s too weird for that. It may be fiction for fiction’s sake, but if it isn’t that, it’s true.” Paranoia had compelled me to consider the possibility that our captors had made a show of flushing our IT in order to increase our vulnerability to the conviction that everything around us was real, including the stories they wanted to tell us, but I couldn’t believe that this was just a show. If I was still being played for a fool, then my adversary had won. I was a fool.
“It has to be true,” Christine said, her tone suggesting that she had not reached the conclusion easily or gladly. “It’s too insane to be anything else. But they can’t let us go now, can they? We know too much. If things don’t work out, they’ll kill us.”
“That’s not the worst of it,” I told her. “The problem is that anyone on the other side who wants to win a further delay will have to kill us just to slow things down. If we actually get to Vesta and all the sides agree to settle the matter by negotiation, we’ll probably be okay. Alice has been afraid all along that we might not even get there — and our chances haven’t improved since we extracted the truth from her.”
“They wouldn’t actually have to kill us, though,” Christine mused, drawing back from her own conclusion. “All they’d have to do is take us away — or put us all into SusAn for a thousand years or so.”
She was right, of course — except that there might not be enough time left to negotiate that kind of a compromise, if it turned out to be the best deal we could get.
“That wouldn’t be such a bad thing,” was the reply I offered. “Here, you and I are the freaks in the sideshow within the zoo. Maybe the best thing that could possibly happen to us is that these talks between the ultrasmart machines will break down, so that Alice’s friend can be instructed to ferry us back to Tyre.”
“Do you want to go to Tyre?” she asked.
“Not particularly — but it might be interesting.”
“Because we’d get the chance to be shapeshifters?” she asked.
“Because the situation there sounds a lot simpler, and a lot more harmonious, than a home system full of rival posthumans and paranoid machines. It has potential, and a reasonable chance of developing that potential.”
“But we would get the chance to be shapeshifters,” she said. “I think perhaps I’ve always wanted to be a shapeshifter, without knowing it.”
“You haven’t heard what the other emortality salesmen are offering yet,” I pointed out.