The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [38]
The idea of the Omega Point had already gone through several different versions before I was born, but the basic proposition was that somewhen in the very distant future the gradual spread of organic and inorganic intelligence throughout the universe would have produced some kind of cosmic mind. It was, I guess, an extrapolation of Voltaire’s remark that if God didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent Him.
The Omega Point was the point at which the Absent Creator would finally emerge from the evolutionary climax community of life and intelligence — at which point, philosophers desperate for a God-substitute were wont to claim, the Creator in question would naturally set out to do all the godly things that all the old imaginary gods had been prevented from doing by the inconvenience of their nonexistence. What else, after all, could the Omega Intelligence be interested in, except for omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence? And how else could it serve these ends but by recreating, reexamining, and correcting its own history — a process whose side-effects would inevitably include the resurrection of the entire human race, albeit virtually, and their situation in an appropriate kind of Heaven?
Personally, I had never believed a word of it, but I had lived in a world in which religions far less decorous had been clinging to existence like stubborn limpets, using any and every imaginative instrument to avoid recognizing their absurdity, redundancy, and incapacity to resist extinction.
The only thing fairly certain about the future evolution of intelligence, it had always seemed to me — if one assumed that intelligence had any future at all — was that something, somewhere, and somewhen, would try to become an Omega Intelligence, or at least to pretend that it was one.
In which case, I thought, after talking to Christine Caine, it might be a mistake to think that the kind of illusion I was lost in was a kind I could easily understand.
If my second lease of life turned out to be a sham, generated by a clever combination of IT and some kind of body suit, its actual temporal location could as easily be long after 3263 as long before. And if I had no body at all, but was in fact the software reconstruction of what some artificial superintelligence thought human beings might have been like, my actual temporal location might be more likely to be long after 3263 than before.
Christine Caine was right, though. Even if my current temporal location did turn out to be 3263, or year 99 of the newest New Era, and even if I did have my old body back again, only slightly worn away by more than a thousand years in a freezer, I was obviously capable of escaping the prison of time again and again and again. If I wasn’t at the Omega Point yet, I could legitimately regard myself as one step removed from square one, embarked upon the Omega Expedition.
In other words, although I might be temporarily locked in my room, I wasn’t locked into a particular era in the history of the universe. Nobody was. Emortality plus Suspended Animation equalled freedom. To be or not to be was no longer the only choice available to the children of humankind; the real choice now was when to be, or when to aim for.
Wait until Adam Zimmerman hears that one, I thought. When he put himself away, the only thing on his mind was not dying. Now, he’s going to have to come to terms with the next existential question but one. He’s going to have to decide what he’s going to do with his emortality.
And it wasn’t just Adam Zimmerman who had to do that, I realized.
Everybody did.
In the new world into which I’d now been delivered, everybody already had, although every single one of them was still entitled to further changes of mind. I hadn’t made any such choice. Nor had Christine Caine or Adam Zimmerman.