It seems a little silly to be writing an autobiography, Christine told me, when we set out on our separate labors of love. Discounting downtime in the freezer, Im only twenty-three years old. That wasnt much by the standards of our day by todays standards, its nothing at all. If it wasnt for the rash of new births prompted by the war, thered only be a few hundred people younger than me in the whole world.
Its just the first chapter of a lifelong project, I told her. Its best to start early, because every day that passes consigns a little more of our experience to the abyss of forgetfulness, and turns a few more memories into pale shadows of their former selves. Were not human any more, and if we want to recollect what it was like to be human, we have to start doing it now. We should, given that were two of the most interesting
human beings that ever existed.
Are we? she asked, skeptically.
If we werent before, I said, we are now. We lived through the aftermath of the last last war but one, and we were in the thick of the last one. Who else can say that?
We were innocent bystanders standing on the sidelines, she pointed out.
You were an innocent bystander, I admitted, but even your innocence had to be proved. I tried as hard as I could to be something more than a mere bystander, and something more than a mere innocent. Maybe I didnt succeed as well as I could have hoped in my attempts to get involved, but nobody else is going to build up my particular subplot if I dont. I think I can make myself a little more interesting if I try hard. Dont you?
She had to say yes.
We could so easily have been lost, she said. Im glad I had the chance to find myself.
I remembered wondering whether I owed it to my own kind to be the champion the long sleepers never had: the Moses who would lead them from their wilderness of ice into the Promised Land of Futurity, so that all the murderers and miscreants might have the chance to find themselves. I havent done it yet, but I still might. It might be a story worth telling, a drama worth performing.
Christine and I are still together, but theres no finality in our togetherness. Well probably keep company until we find that we no longer have any more in common with one another than we have with our fellow emortals, and then well part, promising to keep in touch. I wouldnt call that love but then, I dont go to operas much, either. Even though Ive seen and felt what music can amount to, when it achieves perfection, I still prefer the kinds that people make themselves, on obsolete instruments, amplified the old-fashioned way. There are things we all have to learn to appreciate, whether were meat or machine; for those of us who dont happen to find it easy its a slow process, but well get there in the end.
I sometimes wonder, of course, whether I might still be dreaming the dreams of a slowly dying man in a derelict icebox stored in an orbital sarcophagus. Thats an understandable side effect of being lost in an infinite maze of uncertainty, and I dont suppose Ill ever be completely free of uncertainty but I know now that it doesnt really matter whether Im quite myself or not. Nobody is, because were all in the process of becoming, permanently suspended between the self we used to be and the self weve yet to generate.
With luck, Ill have an infinite number of selves to create and leave behind, and Ill never quite settle into any one of them, unless and until I decide that its time to be reborn as an ultrasmart robot. Ill have to do it one day, if only to discover what stands in for pleasure in the mechanical spectrum of the emotions. Maybe Ill find it existentially unsatisfying and return to my roots. Maybe I wont in which case, Ill move on. And on.
One thing I wont change, at least for the foreseeable future, is my name. Whatever faults my foster parents might have had, and whatever mistakes they might have made in nursing me through childhood, they certainly got that right.
I know that Im only emortal. I know that one day, whether tomorrow or a million years down the line, the bullet with my name on it will be fired. But it will have to find me first, and I intend to lead it a very merry dance before it catches up with me.
I hope I dont run out of stories in the meantime.
Epilogue
The Last Adam: A Myth for the Children of Humankind
by Mortimer Gray
Part Two
Six
Aided by its links with the corporations for which Adam Zimmerman had worked, the Ahasuerus Foundation weathered all the economic and ecocatastrophic storms of the twenty-first century. It was scarcely affected by the Great Depression and the Greenhouse Crisis, or by the various wars that ran riot until the 2120s. It survived the sporadic hostility of individual saboteurs and Luddite governments. It survived the predations of the new breed of tax-gatherers spawned by the strengthened United Nations when it came to dominate the old nation states. Until the end of the twenty-second century, though, its economic course really was a matter of survival in difficult circumstances. Its two principal fields of technological research longevity and suspended animation were widely regarded as irrelevant to the far more urgent problems facing the human community.