The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [45]
“Two million, one hundred and thirty-three thousand, seven hundred and eighty-seven people were killed by the great North American Basalt Flow,” I was told. “The deficit was made up within thirty years. Sixty-one percent of the replacements were new births, thirty-nine percent returnees. Forty percent of the returnees came from the moon…”
“Two million,” I repeated incredulously. “You’re telling me that the northern half of the American continent blew up and only a few more than two million people died?”
“The margin of uncertainty applicable to the figure is approximately nought point two percent. The uncertainty is due to the difficulty in whether numerous ambiguous deaths ought to be attributed to the explosion or to other causes.”
I wasn’t concerned with abstruse matters of definition. “How did the rest of the population escape?” I asked.
“A warning of the impending eruption was broadcast. Approximately fifty percent of the victims were unable to escape the effects of the blast. Most of the remainder were caught in the open by the deluge of ash. The vast majority of people resident in North America or its satellite subcontinents were able to cocoon themselves in time to avoid serious injury.”
“And how many more died in the resultant ecocatastrophe?”
“The figure previously quoted includes all casualties directly or indirectly attributable to the event, within the limitations of the aforementioned margin of uncertainty. There were problems of supply, which meant that a few of the affected individuals had to remain cocooned for as much as a year, but most emerged within days to begin the work of restoration.”
I was impressed — but when I had thought it over, I figured that it wasn’t so very surprising. The people in the thirty-third century didn’t just have better IT and better smartsuits; they had a protective environment that was ever ready to take them in and seal them away from danger. Every city on Earth — every home on Earth — was a kind of Excelsior: a microworld combining all the most useful features of organic and inorganic technology. Posthumans were parasites on and within protective giants of their own manufacture. Even if Earth had been hit by the kind of extraterrestrial missile that had blasted away the last of the dinosaurs, all but a tiny minority of its people could have survived. Even if it were to suffer a nuclear holocaust…
On the other hand, I thought, that kind of defensive capability might make nuclear holocaust a far less unthinkable proposition than it had seemed in my day. And as for plague warfare — well, what kind of weapon was best equipped to worm its way through a protective cocoon to reach the helpless grub within?
Maybe the people of Earth were safe from most natural disasters, but that didn’t make them safe from one another.
I left Los Angeles behind in order to take a look at cities and wildernesses in Africa, Australia, Oceania, New Pacifica, Atlantis, and Siberia.
There was a great deal else that I wanted to see — but there was also a great deal that I needed to know, so I eventually abandoned the tourist trip altogether and retreated to a world of data that wasn’t quite as raw. I played the scholar more earnestly and more insistently than I’d ever done in my own time, although I knew there was far more to learn than I could cope with in a matter of hours, or months, or years.
To educate myself after so long an absence would be the work of several lifetimes. That was a sobering thought. But the likelihood seemed to be that I would have as many lifetimes as I needed. Like Adam Zimmerman, I too would be made emortal — or so I hoped. Had I dared to assume it, I would have; but I was too wary, and too fearful. I was at the mercy of a world whose mores and folkways I could not hope to understand.
It was a mental condition