The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [39]
That, I thought, had to be one of the things in which the invisible monitors observing our every word and action were most interested. For one reason or another, if only out of simple curiosity, they might even care about the decisions we would make.
Eight
Lilith
Maybe you could go all the way to the Omega Point,” I said to Christine Caine, carefully steering our collaborative flight of fancy down to Earth — or at least to Excelsior. “Maybe it’s the only tourist trip worth taking, if we’re condemned to be eternal tourists. Unfortunately I doubt that SusAn technology is perfectible. It might take ten or a hundred reps, but the time would surely come when we’d turn into deep-frozen dead meat. I don’t know the percentages, but the sisterhood could probably hazard a guess. My bet is that the vast majority of the people frozen down before and after us didn’t even make it this far — and I’m not just talking about the ones who got out on their due release dates, or the ones who melted during accidental power cuts, earthquakes, and supervolcanic eruptions.
“We’re real freaks, Christine. Thousand-to-one shots. Maybe million-to-one shots. Adam Zimmerman got here because every possible effort was extended to make sure that he did; we just happened to survive the great freezer lottery. My guess is that everybody who embarks on that kind of Omega Expedition is bound to die long before they reach their destination.”
But what about the other kinds? I added, purely for my own consideration.
Christine Caine got to her feet then, balancing herself in a deliberate fashion. It didn’t take her long to build up the confidence required to walk — and once she’d walked around the room, trailing her fingers along the seemingly featureless walls, she didn’t waste any time before taking the next step. She threw herself forward into a somersault, and when she landed on her feet she threw herself into another, glorying in the lift and the slowness of the arc.
Then she came unstuck, and collapsed in an ungainly heap. She laughed, as if the fall had given her almost as much pleasure as the safely completed somersaults.
“Trust your clever IT,” I told her, knowing that I had no reason to feel envious but not quite succeeding in controlling my resentment at the way she was coping with her unexpected situation. “It’ll adjust your reflexes to the three-quarters Earth-gravity if you let it. Just don’t try to think too hard about what you’re doing.”
“This isn’t a VE,” she said, smugly. “I’m no sim. I’m alive — and I’m out.”
“And you’re still a homicidal maniac,” I was unable to prevent myself adding: “albeit a harmless one. They’ve rigged internal censors to stop you doing anything nasty, but the whole point of the trial run was to put you back together exactly the way you were.”
She didn’t like that at all, but she seemed more hurt than angry. “You don’t know shit about the way I was,” she retorted.
I repented my recklessness. “No, I don’t,” I admitted. “In fact, I may have entirely the wrong idea about it. If I remember correctly, you gave the police half a dozen contradictory explanations of what you did — but only one stuck fast. There was a VE tape about your case. Everybody my age hooked into it. It was pure fiction, but it colored everybody’s understanding.”
That made her pause for thought. “Some sort of psychoanalysis?” she asked.
“Not exactly. A reconstruction of your murders, putting the user into your viewpoint. There was a whispered voice-over that passed itself off as your internal stream-of-consciousness. It was called Bad Karma.”
“Why?” I wasn’t sure to what extent she was offended by the whole idea, as opposed to the mere title.
“Because it tried to explain what you’d done in terms of camouflage: hiding your true self within a series of alternative personalities, all of which masqueraded as invaders from the past. According to the script, the multiple personalities locked you into what the writer called a karmic ritual: the reenactment of an event so unbearable that you had tried to distance it from your present self by projecting