In other words, although I might be temporarily locked in my room, I wasn’t locked into a particular era in the history of the universe. Nobody was. Emortality plus Suspended Animation equalled freedom. To be or not to be was no longer the only choice available to the children of humankind; the real choice now was when to be, or when to aim for.
Wait until Adam Zimmerman hears that one, I thought. When he put himself away, the only thing on his mind was not dying. Now, he’s going to have to come to terms with the next existential question but one. He’s going to have to decide what he’s going to do with his emortality.
And it wasn’t just Adam Zimmerman who had to do that, I realized.
Everybody did.
In the new world into which I’d now been delivered, everybody already had, although every single one of them was still entitled to further changes of mind. I hadn’t made any such choice. Nor had Christine Caine or Adam Zimmerman.
That, I thought, had to be one of the things in which the invisible monitors observing our every word and action were most interested. For one reason or another, if only out of simple curiosity, they might even careabout the decisions we would make.
Eight
Lilith
Maybe you could go all the way to the Omega Point,” I said to Christine Caine, carefully steering our collaborative flight of fancy down to Earth — or at least to Excelsior. “Maybe it’s the only tourist trip worth taking, if we’re condemned to be eternal tourists. Unfortunately I doubt that SusAn technology is perfectible. It might take ten or a hundred reps, but the time would surely come when we’d turn into deep-frozen dead meat. I don’t know the percentages, but the sisterhood could probably hazard a guess. My bet is that the vast majority of the people frozen down before and after us didn’t even make it this far — and I’m not just talking about the ones who got out on their due release dates, or the ones who melted during accidental power cuts, earthquakes, and supervolcanic eruptions.
“We’re realfreaks, Christine. Thousand-to-one shots. Maybe million-to-one shots. Adam Zimmerman got here because every possible effort was extended to make sure that he did; we just happened to survive the great freezer lottery. My guess is that everybody who embarks on that kind of Omega Expedition is bound to die long before they reach their destination.”
But what about the other kinds?I added, purely for my own consideration.
Christine Caine got to her feet then, balancing herself in a deliberate fashion. It didn’t take her long to build up the confidence required to walk — and once she’d walked around the room, trailing her fingers along the seemingly featureless walls, she didn’t waste any time before taking the next step. She threw herself forward into a somersault, and when she landed on her feet she threw herself into another, glorying in the lift and the slowness of the arc.
Then she came unstuck, and collapsed in an ungainly heap. She laughed, as if the fall had given her almost as much pleasure as the safely completed somersaults.
“Trust your clever IT,” I told her, knowing that I had no reason to feel envious but not quite succeeding in controlling my resentment at the way she was coping with her unexpected situation. “It’ll adjust your reflexes to the three-quarters Earth-gravity if you let it. Just don’t try to think too hard about what you’re doing.”
“This isn’t a VE,” she said, smugly. “I’m no sim. I’m alive — and I’m out.”
“And you’re still a homicidal maniac,” I was unable to prevent myself adding: “albeit a harmless one. They’ve rigged internal censors to stop you doing anything nasty, but the whole point of the trial run was to put you back together exactly the way you were.”
She didn’t like that at all, but she seemed more hurt than angry. “You don’t know shit about the way I was,” she retorted.
I repented my recklessness. “No, I don’t,” I admitted. “In fact, I may have entirely the wrong idea about it. If I remember correctly, you gave the police half a dozen contradictory explanations of what you did — but only one stuck fast. There was a VE tape about your case. Everybody my age hooked into it. It was pure fiction, but it colored everybody’s understanding.”
That made her pause for thought. “Some sort of psychoanalysis?” she asked.
“Not exactly. A reconstruction of your murders, putting the user into your viewpoint. There was a whispered voice-over that passed itself off as your internal stream-of-consciousness. It was called Bad Karma.”
“Why?” I wasn’t sure to what extent she was offended by the whole idea, as opposed to the mere title.
“Because it tried to explain what you’d done in terms of camouflage: hiding your true self within a series of alternative personalities, all of which masqueraded as invaders from the past. According to the script, the multiple personalities locked you into what the writer called a karmic ritual: the reenactment of an event so unbearable that you had tried to distance it from your present self by projecting it into a hypothetical pattern of eternal recurrence.”
She stared at me as if I were the one that might be mad. “It was fiction,” I added. “Pornography, of a sort.”
“I want to see it,” she said. She was no longer in a laughing mood, but I couldn’t tell what sort of a mood had taken its place. She was fearful, but in an odd way. There was something in her reaction to the memory of her crimes with which my empathetic imagination couldn’t get to grips.
“They don’t have it,” I told her. “Not here, at any rate. The sisters reckon that a few copies might have been exported from Earth before the last ecocatastrophe, but they don’t know if it was ever adapted to run on modern equipment. Gray — the historian from Earth — might be able to locate one, if anyone can.”
“But you saw it.”
“A long time ago…that is, a long time before I was put away. My memory of it is vague. I was more interested in the technical production than the story — I was in the business at the time. Fight tapes, sex tapes…but nothing like Bad Karma. The business had already moved on by the time I was frozen down. The technics were evolving at an incredible pace, thanks to nanotech enhancements. Bad Karmamust have become a museum piece long before the end of the twenty-third century. It was probably lost more than five hundred years ago.”
“That’s bullshit,” she said. “All VE tapes were routinely upgraded to take aboard new developments. I saw six different updates of The Snow Queenwhen I was a kid, and four of Peter Pan.”
The Snow Queenand Peter Panwere classic VE tapes made for children. The twenty-second-century versions Christine was referring to had been modeled on much earlier webware, but dozens of writers over the course of half a century had added more and more code to them, building up the backgrounds and making the special effects more elaborate. Even Damon had done a little hackwork on The Snow Queenat one time.
“It’s not the same thing,” I told her. “The hoods you and I used got better and better, but the basic design and coding routines remained the same. Those technics were already reaching their limit when I got out of the business. The next generation of hoods was about to restart from scratch, using an entirely different set of electronic substrates. They might have remade The Snow Queenyet again after I was put away, but if they did they’d have had to do it from the bottom up rather than continuing the series of add-ons. More likely it was filed away, replaced with some new favorite specifically designed to show what the new technics could do. When Bad Karmawas made your case was still relatively fresh in the older generation’s memory, but it couldn’t have stayed that way. We were supposed to be living in the New Utopia, but there was no shortage of killers around. Compared with the Eliminators you were old news — and Davida assures me that there were plenty more to come.”