The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [55]
I had to remember, though, that no one seemed to know for certain whether the two million people who had been killed by the Yellowstone supervolcano were the victims of an accidental malfunction or deliberate sabotage. With assassination weapons like that around, the only advantage a human assassin could offer was precision.
If Christine Caine were an assassination weapon, I reasoned, then I might be one too — in which case, I thought, I might have been selected precisely because I didn’t have a record of unmotivated violence. Perhaps, if that were the case, Christine Caine was only the decoy, to distract attention away from the real threat.
On the other hand…
It was too complicated. I needed more hard data.
What Excelsior’s datastores could tell me about Michael Lowenthal was limited, but they did reveal that he had been born in 2464. As Davida Berenike Columella had already told me, having drawn the information from the same source, Damon Hart hadn’t died until 2502 — which meant that if Lowenthal had been affiliated to the Inner Circle in his youth, in however humble a capacity, he might have known Damon.
One item of Lowenthal’s background peculiar enough to attract attention from the compiler of the datastore was that although he was not a policeman he had been involved — as an “observer” — in the investigation of a case of serial murder that had occurred in 2495. It wasn’t the last on record, but it had been very big news at the time, and it had been a case whose craziness was at least the equal of Christine Caine’s. I wondered whether that might be a reason why Michael Lowenthal might have a particular interest in Christine Caine.
I didn’t want to give the people monitoring my actions too much insight into my suspicions, but I figured that it was probably safe to look into the history of SusAn penology, with particular reference to the possible survival of other “prisoners” of my own era.
At the time of my own incarceration SusAn had been used throughout the world as a repository for criminals of all kinds. It had been widely advertised as “protection without punishment” for half a century: a humane alternative to traditional practices, one wholly befitting the philosophy of the supposed New Utopia. Much had been said and written about “future rehabilitation”: the idea that the increased efficiency of future technologies would more than compensate for the fact that any resources and skills possessed by individuals confined in SusAn would become obsolete. Not only would future IT be able to “treat” or “cure” antisocial tendencies at root, turning psychopaths and recidivists into model citizens, but improved educational systems would allow the remodeled citizens in question to be retrained for whatever useful work might be available.
Everybody with half a brain knew, of course, that it was all bullshit — but it was politically useful bullshit. It provided an ideological basis for getting rid of anyone who proved to be too much of a pest. People who committed minor offenses were put away for a few months or a few years, as a warning to them and to others — and people who couldn’t take the hint were put away indefinitely. Present society washed its hands of them, swept them under the carpet and left the dirt to be tidied up by future generations. Was anyone ever surprised that the future generations never quite got around to it, preferring to discover all kinds of good reasons for continuing to pass the buck? I suspect not.
If the corpsicles had continued to pile up, of course, the situation might have become absurd, and eventually intolerable, but they hadn’t. Unlike all previous penal systems, SusAn incarceration had appeared to be effective, in the crude statistical sense that crime rates began to drop — quite sharply — as the twenty-third century progressed. The drop had been represented by enthusiasts as proof that this deterrent actually worked. It was, of course, no such thing. The real reasons for the steady fall in crime rates, my sources assured me, were