The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [9]
Sylvia applauded this particular decision heartily, but Adam’s angst became, in Sylvia’s eyes, a marital misdemeanor. She was eventually to divorce him on the grounds that he could not provide her with essential emotional support. “The trouble with you,” she said, on the day she finally left him, “is that you’re incapable of enjoying yourself.”
Sylvia never remarried and remained permanently childless, living comfortably on the alimony which Adam paid her until she died in 2019, but whether she escaped the ravages of her own angst remains unclear. Adam always claimed, with a hint of residual vindictiveness, that she died an alcohol-sodden wreck; although he was an unusually honest and serious man, all other surviving documents suggest that she lived a rich life, within the constraints of her time, and died as happily as anyone can who accepts the necessity.
Two
Mere mortal though he was, by the time Adam Zimmerman was asked to compile a definitive account of his formative experiences he had forgotten many significant details. He could not recall when he had first become aware of the central thesis of Garrett Hardin’s essay on “The Tragedy of the Commons” or when he first read Conquest of Death by Alvin Silverstein. Given that he was only ten years old when the former item was first published, it seems likely that he must have run across it at a much later date, in one of its many reprintings. It is conceivable that he had read the latter item in 1979, when it first appeared — four years before his close encounter with Heidegger — but had not been in a position to anticipate the significance that its central concept would eventually come to assume within his thinking.
That central concept was, of course, emortality.
The word “emortality” is such a commonplace item of contemporary vocabulary that it is difficult to imagine a time before it was coined, but it was almost unknown in Adam Zimmerman’s day. The distinction between “immortality” — which implies an absolute immunity to death — and emortality did not seem worthwhile in an era when both were out of reach. Although a condition in which individuals were immune to disease and aging, and enjoyed a greatly enhanced capacity of bodily self-repair, was imaginable in the twentieth century, it was the stuff of fantastic fiction — a medium even more despised by the cultural elite of the day than the determinedly unadventurous naturalistic fiction that Adam Zimmerman considered futile. Silverstein was among the first mortals to propose, in all seriousness, that the scientific conquest of death might only be decades away, and that a term was therefore urgently required for the state of being in which human life might be extended indefinitely, although remaining permanently subject to the possibility of accidental or violent death.
Adam did recall that his interest in Silverstein’s thesis was, for a while, confused in his mind by another proposition, popularized by R. C. W. Ettinger, that the advancement of science might one day make it possible to revive some individuals who would be considered clinically dead by twentieth-century standards. Ettinger proposed in the 1960s that people then alive might be able to take advantage of such future progress if only their bodies could be preserved in a state immediately following the moment of death-as-currently-defined. The method of preservation he favored was, of course, freezing. By the time Adam was forty years old, a considerable number of people had made provision for themselves to take advantage of this potential opportunity by arranging to have their bodies frozen after death and maintained indefinitely in a cryogenic facility.
Adam could never convince himself that a death once suffered could