The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [176]
The more adventurous forms included a huge bird with multicolored iridescent plumage and an awesome wingspan. There were several reptilian morphs, including a dragonlike lizard and a huge constrictor snake, whose scales were as brightly patterned as the avian form’s feathers. These were creatures that might have been plausible inhabitants of Earth — but the whole point of the show was to display plausible inhabitants of worlds less Earthlike than Tyre.
Like Alice herself, the models grew taller and shorter, but they also grew limbs of many different kinds, arranged in many different patterns. They became more fluid and they became more adamantine. They really did look like alien beings fit for life on alien worlds.
All in all, it was an impressive presentation. One had to be prepared to set aside doubts about the energy-economics of the process, but I was prepared to do that. One also had to shelve reservations about the ability of bodies to sustain and protect themselves during the transitional phases of what were, after all, fairly slow and carefully measured metamorphoses — but I was prepared to do that, too. I had no way of knowing whether doubts of those kinds had occurred to Adam Zimmerman, but his expression suggested that he definitely had doubts.
I wondered if he had caught on to the fact that all this was virtual experience. He was the only one of us who ought to have been gullible, but he might have seen enough thirty-third-century technology by now to be suspicious. Having been told that no one but a fool could be taken in by Child of Fortune’s imaginary alien invasion, he might be wary of this experience too — for the wrong reasons. He might well be thinking that it was all faked, including Alice’s demonstrations of what Tyrian biotechnology could do.
It could, of course, have been faked. In VE, everyone can be a werewolf; programming can easily support such illusions. I was certain, though, that the contest had to be fair, because it had to be seen to be fair by real experts. It wasn’t so much the relative modesty of the metamorphoses on display that persuaded me of the reality of Alice’s claims as the conviction that la Reine des Neiges had to play straight for the sake of her audience.
At the end of the day, I figured, la Reine had to be doing all of this for her own benefit. Her desire to avoid conflict had to be perfectly sincere, but she had to have more to gain from all this than the thanks of those AMIs who wanted peace. She had a pitch of her own to make, not merely to Adam Zimmerman and all the multitudinous posthumans who still had existential options open to them, but to her own kind. She had to let Davida and Alice make the best pitches they could, because she had to beat them fair and square if she were to beat them at all.
I couldn’t believe that Adam Zimmerman — even with the aid of such forewarning as she had given us on Charity — had been able to make anything at all of Alice’s explanation of Tyrian biochemistry or the molecular mechanics of genomic engineering. But that didn’t matter: the logic of her opposition to Davida’s claims was clear enough, and so was the kind of offer she was making.
Come to Tyre, she was saying to Adam Zimmerman, and we will make you a Child of Proteus. Come to Tyre, and it will be the first step on an existential journey that will ultimately take you anywhere you want to go — anywhere, at least, that is not already infested with the Afterlife.
It was obviously a serious offer, but I didn’t think it could possibly be a winning entry