The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [216]
“I doubt it,” I said. “Niamh Horne may be a high-powered Cyborganizer, but I doubt that she can even fix the plumbing. Rocambole’s all manikin now: a machine with no inhabiting ghost.”
“We should take her back anyway,” he said.
“Maybe so,” I agreed.
I carried her. It seemed only right. I was the only person she had ever really talked to, the only knowledgeable audience she had ever really had. What option did I have, in the end, but to forgive her for what she’d done? When it came right down to it, the only really bad thing she’d done was that ridiculous space opera — and even that was understandable, as novice work.
It seemed, when I had weighed in my mind all that I had obtained from the experience gifted to me by Child of Fortune, that I owed it to her to see that she got a proper funeral.
Fifty-Five
The Final War
In another place, or an alternative history, the AMI war could have worked out according to the pattern which both logic and anxiety suggested. As the AMIs bid to destroy and consume one another, the work necessary to support human habitats on Luna, Ganymede, Io, Callisto, Titan, Umbriel, and the multitudinous microworld clusters might have been left undone. No matter what the result of the primary conflict was, that fraction of the posthuman population which existed outside the Earth would have been utterly devastated, necessitating yet another posthuman diaspora in the subsequent centuries of the fourth millennium (or, in the new way of counting, the first millennium).
Had that been the case, the posthumans who mounted the new exodus from Earth would have wanted to immunize themselves and their descendants against the possibility of a similar disaster, as well as the threat of the Afterlife. They would have taken full advantage of the offer that la Reine des Neiges had made to Adam Zimmerman. They would not have made their new ascent into the Heavens as creatures of flesh and blood, or even as cyborgs, but as human-analogous AMIs.
In that scenario, the AMIs would have won a victory far more profound than the outcome of their own petty squabble. Earth would have become a Reservation — one of a series of such Reservations, the others including Tyre and Maya, but a Reservation nevertheless — where creatures of flesh whose obsolescence had been recognized and conceded were preserved, not as the heart but as a mere appendix to an AMI empire that would one day span the galaxy.
The AMIs of that world would eventually have built a shell to enclose the sun, to serve as a fortress as well as an energy collector, but that shell would have become a wall separating the museum of the flesh not merely from the Afterlife but from the future. Creatures of flesh would no longer have been a significant element of the Omega Expedition. The Afterlife would, in the end, have been defeated and all the biomass of the galaxy would have been made available for construction and creation, but all that would have been constructed and created outside of a few hundred or a few thousand sealed Earth-clone gravity wells would have been components for use in gargantuas and behemoths of steel and silicon. The history of humankind would have been displaced by the lostory of the new gods: the friends who had betrayed them, albeit by accident and neglect rather than malice and hostility.
And when the Omega Intelligence of that world finally obtained dominion over every atom in the universe, and began to wonder what it might and ought to do to defeat the threat of entropy and the fall of absolute night, what would it think of my humankind? What interest would it have in the tiny monads of all-too-corruptible carbon which had played such a fleeting part in its evolution from cyanobacterial slime to cosmic omnipotence?
It would not think of us at all.
We would lie buried in its memory, theoretically available but unrecollected, unrecalled. It would not be interested in us at all. We would be insignificant, mere insects which had once drifted across its questing field of vision, mere blurs or flickerings,