The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [17]
“What we call maturation is the seal set upon us by the Grim Reaper, and until science finds a way to reverse these processes, correcting the nucleic acid errors and obliterating the stultifying cross-linkages, there is no hope for any of us, whether we sleep in silken sheets or starve in arid waste-lands. We are all equal before the horror of it, whether we have the best of care or none at all. In such circumstances, there is no honor in conscience, no shame in selfishness. In an evil world, we are free to be evil — but anyone who wishes to be good has only one option before him, and that is to oppose the dread empire of Death.
“Death has no greater opponent in all the world than me, and everything I do is directed to the overthrow of that tyrant. Never ask for my pity on behalf of the impoverished, the propertyless, the starving, the destitute or the dying. I am fighting their fight, while they cannot, just as I am fighting your fight, while you cannot.”
His ex-mistresses undoubtedly understood these arguments, because he could not abide unintelligent companions, but they found it impossible to agree with him. Without exception, they concluded that he was lonely, bitter, and neurotic, and condescended to pity him as much as they had once adored him. He broke their hearts, but he broke them in a good cause. He was a careful man, and never fathered a child. He was not so arrogant as to take it for granted that all the future generations of emortal humankind would be children of his endeavor, and he their one true Adam, but there remains a sense in which his childlessness reflected that potential.
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 planned, or as anyone — Adam least of all — could ever have anticipated.
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 vitro to 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.