The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [230]
Adam Zimmerman was not a fool; he knew that he could become another person — given time, a thousand other persons. He knew that he could obtain whatever he lacked: joy, ambition, zest, happiness, all the rewards of new and unexpected emotional spectra…everything. But he feared that if he did so, he would be surrendering the very things that had made him what he was and had defined who he was: his self-sufficiency and his self-discipline.
Perhaps he would have fared better had he not been so famous, but the drama contrived by la Reine des Neiges succeeded — albeit belatedly, in seizing the imagination of AMIs and posthumans alike.
Wherever Adam went he attracted far more attention than he desired, and the attention in question was always focused on the question that he had declined to answer, on the grounds that the matter required extremely careful thought.
When Adam had spoken to his twenty-first-century contemporaries of vulnerability to the iniquities of inquisitiveness and heightened susceptibility to flattery, he had always been talking first and foremost to himself. When he had told others that flattery was a powerful force, whose attractions were difficult to resist, he was recognizing a weakness in himself. He had been correct in observing that fame tends to breed sickness and self-abuse, and in judging that the unluckiest people in the world are those who have a fame thrust upon them from which they cannot escape.
Men are few who can endure much trouble, had been his watchword, in the days when he prided himself on the amount of trouble that he was able to endure. In our world, his endurance was more fully tested, and he found his limitations.
“I find myself wondering, more and more, what I am,” he told me, when I asked him to explain the decision he eventually made. “Am I the young man who became obsessed with the idea of escaping mortality, or am I merely the tragicomical end result of that obsession: an old man pretending to be something half-forgotten, half-remade?”
“What matters,” I told him, “is what you intend to become.”
“And what if that becoming were a betrayal of what I am?” he asked. “What if that becoming were a denial and an abandonment of everything that Adam Zimmerman was, everything that was Adam Zimmerman?”
“The old Adam Zimmerman was a mortal,” I told him. “It is time now to become emortal. The old Adam Zimmerman was a human. It is time now to be posthuman. You must leave the old Adam Zimmerman behind if you are to receive the rewards of futurity.”
It was not, in the end, a price he was willing to pay.
In his own estimation, Adam had not needed courage to be different in the twenty-first century, but he certainly needed it in the first. He found that courage, quickly enough to be able to declare, on his one thousand and three hundredth birthday, that he did not intend to avail himself of any of the technologies of emortality that had been offered to him.
He told the inquisitive world that he had decided to remain as he was: the only person in the world doomed to senescence and death; the only person in the world who knew the luxury of angst.
Nine
Adam Zimmerman explained to anyone and everyone, whenever he was asked, that the decision he had made seemed to him to be the only way that he could maintain his self-respect. He had realized almost as soon as he had opened his eyes on Excelsior, that he was no longer the man he had once been. Worse than that, he had realized that no matter how secure his body might become to the corruptions of ageing and decay, the pressures exerted on his personality would be irresistible.
He wanted to remain as he was. He wanted to remain what he was. He wanted to remain who he was. In the past, he had believed that the only way to do that was to refuse to die. Now, he had arrived at an opposite conclusion. He now believed that the