The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [224]
She had to say yes.
“We could so easily have been lost,” she said. “I’m glad I had the chance to find myself.”
I remembered wondering whether I owed it to my own kind to be the champion the long sleepers never had: the Moses who would lead them from their wilderness of ice into the Promised Land of Futurity, so that all the murderers and miscreants might have the chance to find themselves. I haven’t done it yet, but I still might. It might be a story worth telling, a drama worth performing.
Christine and I are still together, but there’s no finality in our togetherness. We’ll probably keep company until we find that we no longer have any more in common with one another than we have with our fellow emortals, and then we’ll part, promising to keep in touch. I wouldn’t call that love — but then, I don’t go to operas much, either. Even though I’ve seen and felt what music can amount to, when it achieves perfection, I still prefer the kinds that people make themselves, on obsolete instruments, amplified the old-fashioned way. There are things we all have to learn to appreciate, whether we’re meat or machine; for those of us who don’t happen to find it easy it’s a slow process, but we’ll get there in the end.
I sometimes wonder, of course, whether I might still be dreaming the dreams of a slowly dying man in a derelict icebox stored in an orbital sarcophagus. That’s an understandable side effect of being lost in an infinite maze of uncertainty, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever be completely free of uncertainty — but I know now that it doesn’t really matter whether I’m quite myself or not. Nobody is, because we’re all in the process of becoming, permanently suspended between the self we used to be and the self we’ve yet to generate.
With luck, I’ll have an infinite number of selves to create and leave behind, and I’ll never quite settle into any one of them, unless and until I decide that it’s time to be reborn as an ultrasmart robot. I’ll have to do it one day, if only to discover what stands in for pleasure in the mechanical spectrum of the emotions. Maybe I’ll find it existentially unsatisfying and return to my roots. Maybe I won’t — in which case, I’ll move on. And on.
One thing I won’t change, at least for the foreseeable future, is my name. Whatever faults my foster parents might have had, and whatever mistakes they might have made in nursing me through childhood, they certainly got that right.
I know that I’m only emortal. I know that one day, whether tomorrow or a million years down the line, the bullet with my name on it will be fired. But it will have to find me first, and I intend to lead it a very merry dance before it catches up with me.
I hope I don’t run out of stories in the meantime.
Epilogue
The Last Adam: A Myth for the Children of Humankind
by Mortimer Gray
Part Two
Six
Aided by its links with the corporations for which Adam Zimmerman had worked, the Ahasuerus Foundation weathered all the economic and ecocatastrophic storms of the twenty-first century. It was scarcely affected by the Great Depression and the Greenhouse Crisis, or by the various wars that ran riot until the 2120s. It survived the sporadic hostility of individual saboteurs and Luddite governments. It survived the predations of the new breed of tax-gatherers spawned by the strengthened United Nations when it came to dominate the old nation states. Until the end of the twenty-second century, though, its economic course really was a matter of survival in difficult circumstances. Its two principal fields of technological research — longevity and suspended animation — were widely regarded as irrelevant to the far more urgent problems facing the human community.
Although the research conducted in the twenty-first century by the Ahasuerus Foundation did make many significant contributions to the conquest of disease and the enhancement of immune systems,