The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [226]
There is no doubt at all that the trustees were right to let Adam Zimmerman sleep through the entire era of nanotechnologically assisted longevity. Even the most sophisticated Internal Technology, coupled with occasional intrusive deep-tissue rejuvenation, were plainly inadequate to fulfil the criteria Adam had laid down for his revival. They extended the human lifespan from one hundred twenty years to three hundred but that was obviously far from the true emortality which Adam had coveted. The Zaman Transformation technologies which replaced them were far more effective, but they required genetic engineering of an embryo at a single-cell stage, and were therefore not the slightest use to anyone but the unborn. There could be no question of reviving Adam Zimmerman in response to that development. Perhaps there was a case to be made for Adam’s revival in the thirty-first or thirty-second century, but with genomic engineering still in its infancy in the home system the prudent thing to do was to wait for the further improvements that were bound to come.
The suspicion that Adam would never have been unfrozen had it not been for the AMI intervention is probably groundless. It is doubtless unfortunate, from Adam’s viewpoint, that research dedicated to the further refinement of technologies of emortality between the twenty-fifth and thirtieth centuries was almost entirely concentrated in the area of embryonic engineering, but the concentration is perfectly understandable. After all, no one but Adam and a few thousand others in his situation — most of whom were criminals convicted of terrible crimes — actually stood in need of a technology of emortality applicable to adults.
There were critics within and without the Ahasuerus Foundation who pointed out during this historical phase that since the Foundation was now the prime mover of emortality research, it could have diverted a greater fraction of its resources to the kinds of technology which would have benefited its founder, but the Earthbound trustees of the Foundation were sensibly determined to move forward in measured and unhurried steps. The situation was complicated in the twenty-ninth and thirtieth centuries by the clamor of the cyborganizers, whose contention that hybridization was a better route to complete existential security than pure biomodification had to be considered very carefully indeed.
Seven
When the day of Adam Zimmerman’s reawakening finally did arrive, in the year 99 of the New Era (3263 in the old reckoning) it seemed at first to have arrived by accident. The decision was not made by a properly convened meeting of the Foundation’s trustees, and those resident on Earth began to complain about the lack of consultation as soon as news of the impending event was broadcast. It seemed to them — incorrectly, as it turned out — that cryogenic scientists resident in the microworld Excelsior, which happened to be a near neighbor of the microworld in the Counter-Earth Cluster where Adam Zimmerman’s body was now stored, had taken the decision into their own hands.
I was privileged to be part of a hastily constituted delegation sent by the United Nations of Earth to witness Adam Zimmerman’s reawakening. I assumed at the time that I had been honored by my own people for my services to history, but it became clear eventually that the authorities responsible for such decisions had been bypassed as easily and as invisibly as those which should have been responsible for the decision to awaken the sleeper.
What happened after my arrival in Excelsior is far too well known to require any elaborate description. The momentous meeting was interrupted by the audacious crime that precipitated the AMI war. Having made every effort to live as securely and as unobtrusively as a man of his means could in the early years of the twenty-first century, Adam Zimmerman awoke not merely to find himself famous but to be made a prize