The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [5]
Mortimer Gray’s autobiography records how his determination to write the history of death was actuated by a close encounter of his own, when the cruise ship on which he was taking a holiday was caught up in the Coral Sea Disaster of 2542, when a rift in the Earth’s crust split the ocean bed and spilled out massive amounts of hot magma, causing the sea to boil and sending huge tidal waves to devastate the Pacific Rim. In the aftermath of the disaster Mortimer made the acquaintance of the abruptly orphaned Emily Marchant, whose own determination to make the most of her life was similarly hardened by the misfortune. Emily subsequently becomes very rich, by virtue of extrapolating gantzing techniques to solve the problems of construction in extraterrestrial environments. She is heavily involved in the construction of “ice palaces” on the Jovian and Saturnian satellites — edifices which find an earthbound echo in showpieces constructed in Antarctica, where Mortimer resides while researching the middle part of his project.
Being somewhat accident-prone by the standards of his day, Mortimer has several other close encounters with his subject matter during the compilation of his masterpiece, one of which is consequent on his troubled relationship with the Thanaticists, a briefly fashionable cult interested in the aesthetics of death and disease. The last of these near misses results from a fall through the Arctic ice cap while traveling in a snowmobile. The long discussion about life’s prospects he once shared with Emily Marchant is eerily echoed in a similarly extended and equally intense discussion about death’s significance that he shares with the snowmobile’s navigator: a moderately sophisticated silver. (Over the centuries, Artificial Intelligences have been routinely subcategorized as “sloths” and “silvers”; the acronym AI has been redefined to signify “artificial idiot,” and ai is the Tupi name for the three-toed sloth, while more advanced machines have been redesignated “artificial geniuses,” and Ag is the chemical symbol for silver.)
Toward the end of his labor on the history of death Mortimer has some dealings with the Cyborganizers, a new existential avant garde dedicated to the progressive fusion of humans and inorganic technology. Cyborganization is widely accepted as the emergent norm in extraterrestrial communities, with the exception of faber society — fabers are humans genetically engineered for life in low or zero gravity, whose legs are replaced by an extra set of armlike limbs. On Earth, however, cyborganization is a mere fashion rather than a matter of utilitarian necessity, and it is rivaled there by many other philosophies. These include the ecological mysticism of the Gaean Liberationists, and the ambitions of the Type 2 Movement — followers of the twentieth century prophet Freeman Dyson — whose aim is to extrapolate the technologies employed in continental engineering and terraformation to the construction of vast new macrostructures within the solar system.
I apologize for the fact that this torrent of data is a great deal for the interested reader to bear in mind while following the plot of The Omega Expedition, but the future is a big place and one of the few things that we can confidently say is that it will get less like the present the further it goes. If technological and social progress continue — as we must all hope, in spite of our keen Cassandrian awareness of the impending ecocatastrophic Crash — its strangeness will probably increase much faster than my exceedingly modest future history is content to suppose.
One other thing that the reader might care to bear in mind, if it is not asking too much, is that the greatest merit of science fiction as a genre is to demonstrate by its plenitude that the as yet unmade future holds a multitude of possibilities, whose actual outcome will depend on the choices we make