She was full of surprises. First neoteny, now the Omega Point. I realized that she was testing me, in case I was stupid. I was here to soften her introduction to the all-but-unthinkable, and she was trying the limits of my ability to cope.
I should have laughed, but I didnt. I thought hard, knowing that I had to get ahead of her if I were to maintain the advantage to which my years and my intellect entitled me.
After all, I thought, if I couldnt even help my hosts deal with Christine Caine, what hope had I of persuading them that they needed me to deal with Adam Zimmerman?
Seven
The Omega Intelligence
Until Christine Caine mentioned the Omega Point, I hadnt given very much thought to the question of when and where I might be if I wasnt when and where I seemed to be. Once she had mentioned it, I realized that Id taken it for granted that the more probable alternative was that I was much closer to home than I appeared to be. I hadnt even considered the possibility that I might be much farther away.
The idea that someone was messing with my head had automatically translated itself into the idea that someone akin to the nanotech buccaneers of PicoCon was messing with my head, feeding me a weird science fiction script while I was still in my own historical backyard. The possibility remained, however, that instead of things really being less weird than they seemed, they might actually be even weirder than they seemed.
The idea of the Omega Point had already gone through several different versions before I was born, but the basic proposition was that somewhen in the very distant future the gradual spread of organic and inorganic intelligence throughout the universe would have produced some kind of cosmic mind. It was, I guess, an extrapolation of Voltaires remark that if God didnt exist it would be necessary to invent Him.
The Omega Point
was the point at which the Absent Creator would finally emerge from the evolutionary climax community of life and intelligence at which point, philosophers desperate for a God-substitute were wont to claim, the Creator in question would naturally set out to do all the godly things that all the old imaginary gods had been prevented from doing by the inconvenience of their nonexistence. What else, after all, could the Omega Intelligence be interested in, except for omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence? And how else could it serve these ends but by recreating, reexamining, and correcting its own history a process whose side-effects would inevitably include the resurrection of the entire human race, albeit virtually, and their situation in an appropriate kind of Heaven?
Personally, I had never believed a word of it, but I had lived in a world in which religions far less decorous had been clinging to existence like stubborn limpets, using any and every imaginative instrument to avoid recognizing their absurdity, redundancy, and incapacity to resist extinction.
The only thing fairly certain about the future evolution of intelligence, it had always seemed to me if one assumed that intelligence had any future at all was that something, somewhere, and somewhen, would try to become an Omega Intelligence, or at least to pretend that it was one.
In which case, I thought, after talking to Christine Caine, it might be a mistake to think that the kind of illusion I was lost in was a kind I could easily understand.
If my second lease of life turned out to be a sham, generated by a clever combination of IT and some kind of body suit, its actual temporal location could as easily be long after 3263 as long before. And if I had no body at all, but was in fact the software reconstruction of what some artificial superintelligence thought human beings might have been like, my actual temporal location might be more likely to be long after 3263 than before.
Christine Caine was right, though. Even if my current temporal location did turn out to be 3263, or year 99 of the newest New Era, and even if I did have my old body back again, only slightly worn away by more than a thousand years in a freezer, I was obviously capable of escaping the prison of time again and again and again. If I wasnt at the Omega Point yet , I could legitimately regard myself as one step removed from square one, embarked upon the Omega Expedition.
In other words, although I might be temporarily locked in my room, I wasnt 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, hes going to have to come to terms with the next existential question but one. Hes going to have to decide what hes going to do with his emortality .
And it wasnt just Adam Zimmerman who had to do that, I realized.