The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [28]
But Christine Caine really was a monster, by all accounts. She was also the subject of the most notorious illegal VE drama of all time — or had been, when “all time” had only extended as far as July 2202.
Suddenly, I was forced to contemplate the exact terms of the “trial run” of which I was now a part.
“You’ve tried to bring me back exactly as I was when I was put away,” I said, by way of clarification. “You wanted to be as certain as you can be that you could do a good job of restoration, because that’s what you hope to do with Adam Zimmerman. So you’ve also tried as hard as you can to put Christine Caine back together exactly as she was when she went into the freezer, right?”
“That’s correct,” the wonderful child agreed.
“And so far as I can tell,” I reported, “you’ve done a reasonably good job on me, save for a few recent memories. Not that I’d be consciously aware of any differences, I suppose, and I haven’t had time to check my other memories as closely as I might, and I really don’t quite feel like myself…but even so, I’m perfectly prepared to accept me as I am. In which case, you might want to take a few extra precautions with Christine Caine.”
“Why?”
“Well,” I said. “For one thing, she was convicted of murdering thirteen people, ten of whom were her adoptive parents. For another, although opinions varied as to the exact nature and extent of her mental illness, nobody doubted that she was barking mad.”
“Did you know her?” Davida Berenike Columella inquired, innocently.
“Know her? Of course I didn’t know her. She was frozen down when I was four years old. But I was in the illicit VE business for a while and I knew all about Bad Karma. I suppose I even wished I’d made it, or had been capable of making it.”
I could tell that Davida had known full well that Christine Caine had been frozen down in 2167, thirty-five years before me. That had been another little test, which I’d obviously passed. But I could tell, too, that she really didn’t have a clue what Bad Karma was. Classic of early VE or not, it was one work of art that hadn’t stood the test of time. It had been lost — or successfully suppressed.
“Bad Karma was a VE drama,” I explained. “Underground stuff, shot circa twenty-one ninety-five. I used to make sex tapes and fight tapes in my youth, some of them far enough out on the edge to be bannable, but nothing like Bad Karma. The visuals were fairly crude — I could have improvised those easily enough without doing serious damage to any of the people that were supposedly carved up by the viewpoint character — but the sound track was something else. It was a whispered voice-over representing the stream-of-consciousness of the murderer whose eyes the user was supposedly seeing through.
“The improvised thought-track provided a theory of sorts as to why Christine Caine had committed the murders. It was partly based on one of several conflicting statements she’d given to the police and various psychiatric examiners after her arrest, but mainly improvised. In those days, even visuals were considered a potentially dangerous medium of consumer/perpetrator identification, but that thought-track kicked off a real moral panic.
“Rumor had it that sensitive users — especially kids — might be taken over by the thought-track, driven mad, and led to commit copycat crimes. The rumors were probably started by the guys who made the tape, for marketing purposes, but they proved a little too effective. There were copycat crimes, for which the VE might have been partly responsible — but you probably know better than I do how crazy those times were. Christine Caine can’t know anything about the VE tape, of course, and she might be a very different person from the one represented in