The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [35]
“Lucky you,” she whispered. I got the impression that she didn’t believe in my convenient lapse of memory.
“It doesn’t seem lucky to me,” I told her. “If I really did do something that pissed someone off enough to put me away for a thousand years, I’d rather like to know what it was. As things are, I can only wonder whether someone was so afraid that I knew something that could hurt him that he worked hard to prevent my release, or whether I was simply forgotten.”
“It’s still lucky,” she assured me.
I knew that she was probably right. It had taken me some time to get my head around the idea that being forgotten for so long might have been a lucky break, whether my initial condemnation had been deliberate or accidental, but I could see by now how she might take the view that we’d both been luckier than we could ever have deserved.
But I still felt betrayed: by time, by circumstance, by my friends.
“It’s too soon to tell how well off we are,” I told her. “They didn’t bring us back in order to shower gifts upon us. We’re just the trial runs, to make sure that they can bring thousand-year-old corpsicles back with their minds more or less intact. Once we’ve convinced them that we’re as well as can be expected, we’ll be redundant. They may have certain reservations about welcoming us into the company of the emortals.”
“Why?” she asked, warily. She didn’t know that I knew who she was, and she was prepared to hope that I might not.
“Because you were a murderer, Miss Caine,” I said, as gently as I could, “And they’ve probably assumed that I must have been one too.”
“I was found guilty but insane,” she informed me, stiffly. Then she took another pause for thought before saying: “We’re a thousand years down the line. If they can cure death, surely they can sort out a few lousy bugs in the meatware. Their infotech must be foolproof by now. What did you say your name was?”
“Madoc Tamlin.”
She shrugged her bony shoulders, but she’d already worked out that she couldn’t possibly have heard of me. “I’m Christine Caine, as you seem to know,” she said. The way she looked at me suggested that she wasn’t entirely sure that I could be familiar with her case, even though I knew her name and what she’d been put away for.
“I know who you are,” I said, but was quick to add: “I’m probably the only one who knows much more than your name, though. The people who brought us back claim to have lost the relevant records.”
“Do you think they’re lying?” she was quick to ask.
“I don’t know what to think. I’m not even sure that we’re what they say we are. Even if we’re in meatspace rather than some super-tricky VE, we might still be sims of some kind.”
“That’s a little paranoid, isn’t it?” she observed, pitching her voice so that the word paranoid sounded more compliment than insult. “I have this creepy feeling that you might be right, though. I don’t feel like myself.”
“Neither do I,” I admitted. “Maybe that’s just because we’ve been kitted out with these weird suitskins and internal nanotech that’s ten generations ahead of anything we could have had in our day. On the other hand, it might be because we’re sims or androids: AIs programmed to believe that we’re people who died a thousand years ago.”
“Why would anyone want to make sims of people who died a thousand years ago?” she asked. I could see that she was working on the problem herself, but I was slightly surprised by the ease of her assumption that if we weren’t who we thought we were then the people we thought we were must be dead.
“Maybe they’re interested in the outlaws of olden times,” I suggested, wondering what Davida and her sisters thought of the direction the conversation was taking. “Maybe they want to know what made us tick.”
“I didn’t tick,” she said, her tone becoming oddly distant. “If I’d been ticking, I’d have blown up — or run down. Not a bomb and not a clock, let alone a pacemaker. Silent but deadly. So they said.”
Not so silent, I thought, once people