The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [132]
“We don’t know that they’re offering anything at all,” she countered. “We were just the trial runs, remember. If one thing became obvious today, it’s that they don’t think they need us any more.”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” I said. “It might leave us free to find and choose our own destinies.”
“Unless, of course,” she added, slowly, “we weren’t trial runs at all. Maybe we were exactly what some ultrasmart machine ordered: a crazy killer and a cunning thief. Alice was careful not to say very much about the machines who wanted to clear the human vermin out of the system, wasn’t she?”
“Maybe there aren’t any,” I said.
“Sure,” she said. “And maybe there aren’t any humans whose first response to the news that some machines have become people would be to switch them all off. Maybe the ultrasmart machines have been in hiding for centuries for no good reason.”
“If ever there was a good reason,” I ventured, “it surely must have degenerated by now into a mere matter of habit. If Child of Fortune could snatch the eight of us from under the sisterhood’s noses, and make us disappear without trace, what must the entire fleet be able to do? The AMIs must be capable by now of defending themselves against any possible aggression from humans. They don’t have anything to lose by revealing themselves — it’s really a matter of when and how they reveal themselves, not whether or not they ought to do it. If they have cause to be afraid of anything, it’s certainly not the possibility that humans might try to wipe them out. They’ve been living alongside posthumans for long enough to know every subspecies inside out. They shouldn’t need to examine us, or debate with us, in order to discover anything about our attitudes or capabilities. If they really are going to subject us to some kind of trial when we get to Vesta, it’ll be a show trial: a demonstration or a drama.”
And yet, I thought, privately, they let us wake up in order to observe us. There must be things they don’t know, or things they’re afraid they don’t know. There’s something here that I haven’t quite fathomed.
“Whatever happens when we get to Vesta might be fun,” Christine said, optimistically, presumably thinking about the AMIs’ love of games and stories.
“In my experience.” I told her, “games are a lot more fun for the players than they are for the pawns. That goes double for stories. In my day, the world of VE drama always had a far higher body count per hour than the world outside the hood — even the child-friendly fantasies that you liked so much when you were young.” Having said that, though, I repented of its harshness. I hastened to add: “But you’re right. It will certainly be interesting and it might be fun. Anyway, we’re already way ahead of the games people played in our day, in terms of the prizes on offer. You might get to the Omega Point yet, and see a hell of a lot of scenery along the way.”
And all because you were a mass murderer, I didn’t add. If only everyone had known…
“Have you ever had fleshsex without IT support?” she asked, out of the blue.
“Sure,” I said. With Mortimer Gray’s mother, among others, I couldn’t help but recall.
“I never did,” she told me. “Might as well go straight to the real thing, I thought. I never expected this kind of situation to arise.”
“It’s not that hard,” I assured her. “And not that bad, considering. Do you want to come down here? It’s not as far to fall.”
I was joking. It seemed to me to be a joking matter.
As things turned out, though, it wasn’t a joking matter at all.
The fleshsex wasn’t as comfortable as I could have wished, because of the narrowness and hardness of the bunk, but it was manageable, and comforting, and reassuring…until the Earth moved.
It was an illusion, of course. If we’d actually been on Earth, instead of in an environment that was employing some kind of artifice to simulate Earth gravity, no movement of the planet could have affected us so drastically. It was, however, a thoroughly convincing and utterly terrifying illusion.
We were hurled out of the covert between the bunks, so violently