The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [43]
I asked to look at an inset map, but the request wasn’t specific enough; I got one with a crazy projection.
It took me a few minutes to figure out that the center of the flower-shaped design at which I was staring was the south pole. The equator was the ring drawn around the mid points of the “petals.”
I still couldn’t connect the landmasses to their “originals.” I was out of my depth, floundering in uncertainty.
I had expected that the outlines of the continents might have changed slightly, but not to anything like the extent that they had. New islands had been raised from the seabed even in my day, but I’d expected to be able to see the fundamental shapes of Australia, Africa, and the Americas, the open expanses of the Pacific and the South Atlantic and the vast clotted mass of Eurasia.
They were all gone; coastlines had obviously become negotiable, and continental shelves prime development sites.
I figured out, eventually, that the differences were mainly a matter of three new continents having been constructed and some of the older ones split by artificial straits, but so many coastlines had been amended — sometimes drastically — that the shapes I knew had simply been obliterated.
When I asked for a new inset of a 3-D globe pivoted at the poles it became a little easier to see what had been what, and to reassure myself that the Continental Engineers hadn’t actually won control of continental drift, but it was an alien world just the same.
I asked to be connected to a series of ground-level feeds.
Given that a mere ninety-nine years had elapsed since the planet had been shrouded in volcanic ash I expected to find the remains of North America in a bad way. Even if the atmosphere had cleared within a decade, I reasoned, ecosystemic recovery must be at a very early stage. I expected an underpopulated wilderness still struggling to establish itself, but that wasn’t what I found.
I found a riot of exotic gardens, and a hundred brand-new cities, all competing to outdo one another in the craziness of their architecture. There were towers sculpted out of all manner of gemlike stones; sprawling multichambered branching growths like thousand-year-old trees; walls of metal and roofs of glass; piazzas lined with all kinds of synthetic hide; roadways of smart fabric; and much more.
It was an unholy mess, but it certainly wasn’t a wilderness and it was anything but underpopulated.
The Los Angeles in which I had grown up had been in recovery from its own ecocatastrophe, and I’d always thought of it as a living monument to the efficiency and capability of gantzing nanotech. Maybe it had been, by the standards of its own century, but history had moved on and technology had undergone a thousand years of further progress.
As I settled my virtual self into an artificial eye gazing out upon the streets of the city nearest to the now-drowned coordinates that LA had once occupied I saw that it wasn’t just VE tech that had undergone more than one phase-shift. I had to suppose that the buildings I was staring at had been raised by a process analogous to gantzing, but they certainly hadn’t been aggregated out of commonplace materials or embellished with the synthetic cellulose, lignin, and chitin derivatives that had surrounded me in my former incarnation. Here, once-precious stones and once-precious metals seemed to be everyday building materials, and they were augmented by all manner of fancy organics.
When I asked, a whispering voice told me that there were more than a hundred different kinds of “incorruptible” organic construction materials on display, as well as inorganic crystallines.
My informant wasn’t a human voice — it was a machine whose responses were filtered through a sim of some sort — but that didn’t mean that the member of the sisterhood commissioned to monitor me had packed up her kit and gone home. My questions were still being mediated by actual listeners, even though I was getting