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. That’s an understandable side effect of being lost in an infinite maze of uncertainty, and I don’t suppose I’ll ever be completely free of uncertainty — but I know now that it doesn’t really matter whether I’m quite myself or not. Nobody is, because we’re all in the process of becoming, permanently suspended between the self we used to be and the self we’ve yet to generate.

With luck, I’ll have an infinite number of selves to create and leave behind, and I’ll never quite settle into any one of them, unless and until I decide that it’s time to be reborn as an ultrasmart robot. I’ll have to do it one day, if only to discover what stands in for pleasure in the mechanical spectrum of the emotions. Maybe I’ll find it existentially unsatisfying and return to my roots. Maybe I won’t — in which case, I’ll move on. And on.

One thing I won’t 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 I’m 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 don’t 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.

Although the research conducted in the twenty-first century by the Ahasuerus Foundation did make many significant contributions to the conquest of disease and the enhancement of immune systems, it was not involved in the first conspicuous breakthrough in life extension. The development of nanotechnological tissue-repair systems was pioneered by the Institute of Algeny, which was subsequently absorbed by the most powerful of the late twenty-second century cosmicorporations, PicoCon. In a sense, this might be regarded as a fortunate failure. Had the breakthrough in question been made by Ahasuerus, it would undoubtedly have suffered the same fate, being swallowed up by a much larger institution and effectively digested. As things stood, the Foundation was allowed to retain much of its independence, following its own agenda in the slipstream of progress. The trustees were undoubtedly subject to considerable pressure from the Cartel of Cosmicorporations, which exercised a right of veto over its publications and products, but it was never formally taken over.

By the time the Ahasuerus Foundation did achieve a crucial breakthrough in longevity technology, the political climate in which it was operating had changed considerably, becoming far more benign. The Cartel had become far less combative internally, and far less assertive in its dealings with the democratic agencies of world government, having long settled into the comfortable routines of what its critics still called “invisible despotism.”

The central institution of the new world older was the New Charter of Human Rights, which sought to establish a right of emortality for everyone. Some historians have asserted that the Cartel only allowed the establishment of the charter because they knew that nanotechnological repair systems had reached the limit of effective achievement and the end of their natural lifetime as a generator of core profits, but this is unnecessarily cynical. What is certain, however, is that the granting of the charter placed a new responsibility on democratic institutions, which could only be discharged with the assistance and good will of the corporations, further enhancing the authority that commerce already exercised over the political apparatus.

Whatever the reasons may have been for its establishment, the New Charter provided the ideal context for purely biotechnological methods of life extension to move from the periphery to the heart of humankind’s progressive endeavours. The quest for “true” emortality — the promise of supportive Internal Technology having stopped some way short of that goal — was rapidly rewarded by the Foundation’s development of the Zaman Transformation.

In an earlier era Ali Zaman and his coworkers might have been coopted by the Cosmicorporations, but the twenty-fifth century was a more relaxed period, when a spirit of laissez faire — symbolized, albeit rather uneasily, by the Great Exhibition of 2405 — was not merely permitted but encouraged by the Earth’s economic directors. Rumors that the Foundation had actually discovered the relevant transformative techniques before Ali Zaman had even been born, but had obligingly kept them secret until the Cartel was fully prepared for their release, are probably false, being merely the latest in a long sequence of absurdly overcomplicated conspiracy theories.

The income flow generated by the increasingly effective and widely customized Zaman Transformations revived the stagnant finances of the Ahasuerus Foundation. Although Adam Zimmerman’s fortune had been considerable by twenty-first-century standards and the expenses of the Foundation were almost entirely met from income rather than capital, it had not been able to match the growth of the world economy. Now, placed firmly in the driving seat of progress, it began to grow richer at a rapid rate. The income available to its trustees increased massively, allowing them to diversify the Foundation’s holdings and researches on and off Earth. The trustees grew exceedingly rich in their own right.

As generation followed generation the custodians of Adam Zimmerman’s frozen body fought off a series of attempts to have him revived, on the grounds that the time was not yet ripe. Again, cynics who contended that their principal motive was to preserve their own authority and wealth from the claims of their founder were probably imagining a conspiracy where none really existed.

There is no doubt at all that the trustees were right to let Adam Zimmerman sleep through the entire era of nanotechnologically assisted longevity. Even the most sophisticated Internal Technology, coupled with occasional intrusive deep-tissue rejuvenation, were plainly inadequate to fulfil the criteria Adam had laid down for his revival. They extended the human lifespan from one hundred twenty years to three hundred but that was obviously far from the true emortality which Adam had coveted. The Zaman Transformation technologies which replaced them were far more effective, but they required genetic engineering of an embryo at a single-cell stage, and were therefore not the slightest use to anyone but the unborn. There could be no question of reviving Adam Zimmerman in response to that development. Perhaps there was a case to be made for Adam’s revival in the thirty-first or thirty-second century, but with genomic engineering still in its infancy in the home system the prudent thing to do was to wait for the further improvements that were bound to come.