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 in the present day. There are no predictions in this series of novels, or any other work of science fiction that aspires, no matter how feebly, to intellectual seriousness; all anticipations are conditional. The only purpose the series has, beyond that of providing harmless entertainment, is the hope of making a contribution, however minuscule, to the information of the present-day choices that will determine which of the infinite number of possible futures our emortal descendants will eventually inherit and inhabit.

Prologue

The Last Adam: A Myth for

the Children of Humankind

by Mortimer Gray

Part One

One

This is the way it must have happened.

In September 1983, shortly after returning from his honeymoon in the Dominican Republic, Adam Zimmerman began to read Sein und Zeitby Martin Heidegger. He had decided to improve his German, and he did not want to practice by reading novels in that language because he considered all fiction to be a waste of time. He wanted to read something that was serious, difficult, and important, so that he would obtain the maximum reward for the effort he put in.

That was the kind of man he was, in those days. He could not have regarded himself, at the age of twenty-five years and four months, as a completeman, but he had put away all childish things with stern determination. He hated to let time go to waste, and he required full recompense from every passing moment.

It is tempting to wonder whether the history of the next thousand years might have been somewhat different if Adam had chosen to read, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustraor Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, but there was no danger of that. Both those books had been published in the nineteenth century, and Adam was very much a twentieth-century man. We, of course, have grown used to thinking of him as thetwentieth century man, but while he was actually living in that era he was far from typical. He must have been considerably more earnest than the average, although he would probably have gone no further on his own behalf than to judge himself “serious.”

Although he was a native of New York in the United States of America, Adam had always been conscious of his European ancestry. He was the grandson of Austrian Jews who had fled Vienna in 1933, when his father Sigmund was still a babe in arms. Sigmund Zimmerman’s only sibling — a sister — was born in New York, and he had not a single cousin in the world to lose, but the war of 1939–45 contrived nevertheless to inscribe a deep scar upon his soul. Sigmund frequently declared himself to be a “child of the Holocaust,” and sometimes applied the same description to his own son, even though Adam was not born until 13 February 1958.

Neither Sigmund nor Adam ever visited Israel, but Sigmund certainly considered himself a Zionist fellow traveler, and that conviction could not help but color the idealistic spectrum of Adam’s adolescent rebellion against the ideas and ideals of his parents. Although that rebellious phase was in the past by the time of his marriage to Sylvia Ruskin (a gentile), its legacy must have played some small part in Adam’s decision to try to perfect his German with the aid of a philosopher of whom his father would definitely not have approved.

Perhaps that same awareness assisted, if it did not actually provoke, Adam’s powerful reaction to Heidegger’s argument. On the other hand, it might have been the fact that he set out to wrestle with the text purely as an exercise in linguistics that left him psychologically naked to its deeper implications. Then again, it does not seem to have been at all unusual for males of his era and cultural background to hold themselves sternly aloof from schmaltzwhile being extravagantly self-indulgent in the matter of angst.

For whatever reason, Adam was ready-made for the strange sanctification of self-pity that was the primitive existentialist’s red badge of courage. While he read Heidegger, a couple of chapters at a time, on those nights when he elected not to claim his conjugal rights, Adam felt that he was gradually bringing to consciousness precious items of knowledge that had always lain within him, covert and unapprehended. He did not need to be persuaded that angstis the fundamental mood of mortal existence, because that knowledge had always nested in his soul, waiting only to be recognised and greeted with all due deference.

Heidegger explained to Adam that human awareness of inevitable death, though unfathomably awful, was normally repressed to a subliminal level in order that the threat of nothingness could be held at bay, but that individuals who found such dishonesty impalatable were perennially catching fugitive glimpses of the appalling truth. Adam felt a surge of tremendous relief when he realized that he must be one of the honest few, and that this was the explanation of his inability to relate meaningfully to the insensitive majority of his fellows. It was as if a truth that had long been captive in some dark cranny of his convoluted brain had been suddenly set free.