The Omega Expedition (40 page)

“This is real, Madoc: you can be sure of that. We’ll come back for you. Remember that: however bad it gets, I’ll be coming for you. I’ll pull you through. Trust me.”

I tried to lift my arm, but I couldn’t. It was trapped in the sleeve of the biocontainment suit, and the sleeve was rigid — and it wasn’t really
my
arm at all. I was a spectator here, a passenger in my own memory. Except that it couldn’t really be a memory, because if it had been, I wouldn’t have been a passenger in it. It was a Virtual Experience of some sort — but that didn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t
true
.

My whole head hurt, except for my nose, and even my nose was itching now.

It was absurd to think that I could be aware of a mere itch against the background of so much pain and stink, but I was. Did that, I wondered, make this bizarre experience more likely to be true or less likely? Either way, the other me seemed to be on the brink of losing my will to live.

This time, I tried to formulate an intention to talk. It seemed to work, although I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t mere coincidence — but it didn’t matter anyway, because the first consonant got stuck in a grinding stammer: “C…?”

I was trying to say “Christine,” but I couldn’t be certain that the other me wasn’t trying to form a different set of syllables beginning with the same consonant.

“Take your time, Madoc.” Damon said, a trifle inconsistently.

“C…”

I heard someone else speak, their lips too far away from the microphone that Damon was using for their words to be audible. I tried hard to concentrate on the business of thinking, not so much because it might make it easier to talk as in the faint hope that it might help me stop my other self wanting to die.

“I don’t understand, Madoc,” Damon said, with the ostentatious patience that the sane always take care to display while they talk to the slightly mad.

I knew then that I had no chance at all of forcing my other self to pronounce anything as complicated as Christine Caine’s name. I wondered whether I might just manage Tyre, or Vesta, or even Proteus, but I knew there was no point in trying. Christine Caine was one of the only two names I had on the tip of my tongue that would make any sense at all to Damon Hart.

Except, of course, that it wouldn’t. Nothing that the me that wasn’t
not me
could say to Damon, if I could say anything at all, would make the slightest sense, because nothing did make the slightest sense. He and I, though not he and
not me
, were in a world beyond logic, babes in a trackless wilderness.

This, I realized, was what I had forgotten. This was how I’d come to be frozen down. This was how I’d booked my ticket for the Omega Expedition. It wasn’t real, but it
was
true. Somehow, even though I hadn’t been able to recover the memory itself, I’d contrived to obtain a photocopy, a VE reproduction.

This, at last, was the truth. I might have reached it by unorthodox means, but I had reached it in the end.

Damon Hart had put me away to save me from a fate worse than death. Maybe he had forgotten me in the course of the next two centuries and maybe he hadn’t, but in the beginning, he’d been trying to save me. Even if he had forgotten me, in the end, he’d forgotten me because there was nothing he could do for me, because he had no way to save me from the rogue IT that was still lurking in my brain and my bones.

If I had been betrayed — and I had — I had been betrayed by circumstance, not by Damon Hart. Not, at any rate, until he forgot me. Maybe even that had been a kindness: the cost of making sure that his new and extremely undependable friends didn’t find out where I was.

Sometimes, it can be a mercy to be forgotten.

I tried to tell my other self that the pain in my head was easing slightly, and that the odor in which I was dissolving wasn’t the perfume of my own gangrenous and necrotized flesh — but the other me wasn’t listening, because the other me was busy with an intention of its own.

This time I stuttered as well as stammering, but I finally got the word out. “D…d-d-date?”

“It’s Wednesday, Madoc,” the voice that sounded like Damon’s told me, presumably trying to be helpful, while actually concealing everything that either I really needed to know. “Wednesday the nineteenth. You’ve been under for four and a half days. I don’t know what sort of dreams you’ve been having, but you’re back now, if only for a little while. This is real. It won’t last long, and I haven’t a clue how long it will be before we can bring you back again for good, but you have to hang in there. I’ll find out what this is even if I have to take it to Conrad and eat humble pie. I’ll pull you through. All you have to do is keep the faith.”

He sounded convincing. He sounded like the Damon I’d known for so many years: the
good
Damon, who knew the meaning of friendship. He sounded like the Damon I’d believed in, the Damon I still wanted to believe in — and that was the trouble.

That was where paranoia kicked in again.

If I wasn’t feeding this to myself by way of compensation for the obvious fact that I was actually in Hell, I thought, then somebody else probably was. Somebody who knew me a lot better than Davida Berenike Columella. Or some
thing
which knew me a lot better than any meatborn citizen of the thirty-third century.

I knew that I had to test that hypothesis, if I could. If I could only speak…

It’s surprising how difficult short words can be when your voice is stretched to the limit and opening your mouth fills the available space with poison gas. I knew that I couldn’t contrive an M, but I thought a D might be easier.

Unfortunately, it was open to anyone who wanted to mock me to misconstrue “Eido” as “I do” — and equally open to the me that wasn’t
not me
to misconstrue what really was “I do” as something that I wanted to say but couldn’t, because I was a thousand years away.

“Do what, Madoc?” Damon countered. He sounded mystified, but I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe he was Eido, either. I figured this for somebody else’s game. Or some
thing
else’s game.

It required a tremendous effort in either case, but I or the other I managed to say “L…iar.”

“I never lied to you, Madoc,” Damon’s voice was quick to say. “I didn’t know what we were up against. I still don’t — but I won’t be underestimating them again. You have to believe me, Madoc —
I didn’t know
. I wouldn’t have sent you in if I’d known. You’re my best man, Madoc. My best friend.
I would never do anything to harm you
. I’ll do everything within my power to save you. You’ll be back, Madoc, as good as new. I swear it.”

Mercifully, I faded out then. It wasn’t because anyone had actually taken pity on me, of course. If I could be certain of anything, I could be certain of that.

I faded out because it, or they, figured that it, or they, had done all that could be done with that particular script. There was nowhere else for it to go without killing one or both of me.

Thirty-Five

A Stray Meditation

C
ogito, ergo sum. There is a thought, therefore there is a thinker. Whatever else we doubt, we can always fall back on that meager comfort. Nor is the thought a lonely thing suspended in a cold intellectual vacuum; it is part of a train fueled by a flow of sensory data.

There was once a time when philosophers were willing to take the intuitive leap — knowing all the time that there was a tiny risk involved — of trusting that flow of data. They retained certain careful doubts about the reliability and limited scope of the senses, but they considered it a reasonable hazard to bet that the world that appeared to them must be closely and intelligibly related to the world that actually was, and that the memories mysteriously engraved in their flesh were similarly trustworthy. They could not believe that God, or the pressure of natural selection, would condemn them to a life of perverse illusion. They could not believe that their little trains of thought might be chugging through an infinite darkness, save for the company of a malevolent demon whose sole reason for being was to feed them a diet of clever lies, while the tracks of memory were torn up behind them and relaid in crazy patterns of deception.

And then we invented Virtual Experience and Internal Technology.

In the beginning, the makers of VE — the movers and shakers of the modern world — even had the nerve to call it Virtual
Reality
. Ironically, they stopped calling it that at almost exactly the point when IT augmentation of VE gave it a substantial boost in the direction of reality simulation.

After that, of course, the odds changed. The old bets no longer seemed so reasonable. Once we had IT-augmented VE, it was all too easy to believe in a malevolent demon that might be feeding lies to every one of our gullible senses, laying down false memories if not actually reconstructing the ones we already had.

After the advent of IT-assisted VE, people who really wanted to do so could live the greater part of their lives immersed in custom-built illusions. In the early days the overindulgent few got nasty sores from lying too long in their data suits, but some of them did it anyway — and while reports of people literally rotting away without ever noticing that they were dying were urban myths, people did die in VE. Most people were careful enough, and moderate enough, to ensure that by the time the manufactured illusions became 90 percent convincing their care and moderation had become habitual — but all the nightmare scenarios happened occasionally, and there was one kind of nightmare that could never again be banished to the realm of obsolete bugaboos.

After the advent of sophisticated VE, nobody waking up in a strange environment could ever be
completely
sure whether or not it was real. And no matter how many times a man might wake thereafter, or to what kind of environment, he remained in the depths of the maze of uncertainty, knowing that he could never be sure of his escape.

It wasn’t quite that bad in practice — not, at least, in my young days. In my young days, every discriminating person thought he or she could tell the difference between meatspace and the cleverest imaginable VE. Even in those days, though, you’d have had to be a complete fool not to see which way the world was going, and know that it wouldn’t always be that easy.

Maybe it would have been easy enough if the manufactured illusions had always had to rely on human programmers, but anyone who’d thought long and hard about it even in my day would probably have realized that there was another important threshold yet to be crossed.

If ever the machines that were manufacturing the illusions became independently smart, cutting human programmers out of the loop, there would be a whole new ballgame. And which AIs, out of the billions manufactured for human use, were the most likely to make the jump to self-consciousness and self-direction? Fancy spaceships? Humaniform robots? Communication systems? Or VE feeders? Or all of the above? Who could tell?

Not, apparently, the posthumans who lived alongside the first few generations of ultrasmart machines.

So how could anyone know for sure, when he woke up to a morning of a day some little way advanced from my own youth, that he hadn’t been taken away in his sleep and frozen down, not to be woken up again until the world had gone
all the way
in the direction that it had already been going when he went to sleep? Even if he actually
remembered
being frozen down — or thought he did — where else could he possibly be but in the maze of uncertainty, incapable any longer of making any final decision as to what might be real and what might be fairy tale?

One thing of which a man of my day could be certain, however, was that if he remembered — or thought he remembered — two mutually contradictory accounts of an event, then at least one of them must be a damn lie. Statistically speaking, the probability that either of them was true was no more than a quarter. And even if one could not actually “remember” two mutually contradictory accounts, the possibility that one might at some stage in the future “remember” another — and perhaps another and another and another — implied that the probability that anything one perceived after any such awakening was true had to be reckoned less than a half.

Unlike the philosophers of old, therefore, the wise man of the post-VE era would bet on the falsehood every time.

Once a man of my time had fallen asleep, even if he were convinced that he had only fallen asleep for a single night, he could not help waking up in a fairy-tale world where everything was more likely to be false than to be true, more likely to be a tale than a biography, more likely to be a fantasy than a reality, more likely to be part of a lostory than part of a history.

All in all, therefore, I was not much worse off when I awoke on Excelsior, or inside
Charity
, than anyone in my situation would have been. Yes, I was living in a bizarre fairy tale — but as the calculus of probability would have informed me that I was living in a fairy tale anyway, why should I be unduly perturbed by its bizarrerie? Should I not have been grateful? After all, if we are condemned by logic to live our lives as if they were stories, do we not have every reason to hope that the stories will make full use of our imagination? Would we not be within our rights to feel short-changed by fate if the stories in which we found ourselves were as dull and as relentlessly ordinary as the lives we had lived before we fell asleep?

Perhaps we should also hope that the stories in which we find ourselves will have happy endings — but I’m not so sure of that. Even mortals, once they enter into fairy tales, may hope to become emortal — and what is emortality but a qualified immunity from endings of all kinds?

On due reflection — and I speak as one who has been through the looking glass and back again more than once — I think that people of my time, and maybe imaginative people of every time, should not go into fairy tales looking for endings at all, but should instead be content with the traveling, at least for as long as the traveling takes them to places that they could hardly have imagined before.