The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [223]
I waited, but in vain, for the call to come that would summon me to the forefront of the ongoing political and economic negotiations between the posthuman factions and the AMIs. I maintained the hope for as long as I could that my conscription had merely been delayed, but in the end I accepted the sad truth.
In spite of all my heroic efforts during the last few minutes of la Reine’s stint as Scheherazade I was not to receive my due. Nobody wanted me for an ambassador, nor even for an expert audience. It was a mistake, I think. I could have been useful to all sides.
Had la Reine survived, it would have been a different story, but the time came when I had to stop hoping for that particular miracle. She had known my true worth, at the end, but she had been the only one who did. I might now be the only one who understands her true worth, even in a world which contains Mortimer Gray, but I hope that I am wrong. She deserves to be accurately remembered, especially by her own kind.
In the end, Christine and I decided to take the jobs that Mortimer Gray had offered us, at least for the time being. Given that we were historical curiosities in any case, and that everyone wanted to hear our story, we figured that we might as well get as much spendable credit as possible for answering questions. It turned out to be harder than we had expected; newscasters only want to know what’s newsworthy, but historians want to know everything, and then some. Inevitably, we both set out to write our own accounts of everything we’d been through.
It really was inevitable that we’d have to write our accounts, because text retains certain qualities that even the very best VE scripts will never be able to emulate. In a VE you use your eyes as eyes and your ears as ears; it really is virtual experience — but when you read you switch off your other senses and turn your eyes into code readers, retreating into a world of pure thought and imagination. It was that world of abstraction that had shaped and organized our ancestors’ inner lives during the early phases of the technological revolution; it was there that they learned to be the complex kind of being we now call human. It is there that true humanity still resides, even after all this time. It is there that histories and lostories, autobiographies and fantasies, moral fables and contes philosophiques, comedies and cautionary tales all belong — and my story is all of those things, although it is first and foremost a cautionary tale…and a comedy. Although I am not an AMI, and probably never will be, I have no intention of living my life, or reviewing my life, in an unironic way.
“It seems a little silly to be writing an autobiography,” Christine told me, when we set out on our separate labors of love. “Discounting downtime in the freezer, I’m only twenty-three years old. That wasn’t much by the standards of our day — by today’s standards, it’s nothing at all. If it wasn’t for the rash of new births prompted by the war, there’d only be a few hundred people younger than me in the whole world.”
“It’s just the first chapter of a lifelong project,” I told her. “It’s best to start early, because every day that passes consigns a little more of our experience to the abyss of forgetfulness, and turns a few more memories into pale shadows of their former selves. We’re not human any more, and if we want to recollect what it was like to be human, we have to start doing it now. We should, given that we’re two of the most interesting human beings that ever existed.”
“Are we?” she asked, skeptically.
“If we weren’t before,” I said, “we are now. We lived through the aftermath of the last last war but one, and we were in the thick of the last one. Who else can say that?”
“We were innocent bystanders standing on the sidelines,” she pointed out.
“You were an innocent bystander,” I admitted, “but even your innocence had to be proved. I tried as hard as I could to be something more than a mere bystander, and something more than a mere innocent. Maybe I didn’t succeed as well as I could have hoped in