The suspicion that Adam would never have been unfrozen had it not been for the AMI intervention is probably groundless. It is doubtless unfortunate, from Adam’s viewpoint, that research dedicated to the further refinement of technologies of emortality between the twenty-fifth and thirtieth centuries was almost entirely concentrated in the area of embryonic engineering, but the concentration is perfectly understandable. After all, no one but Adam and a few thousand others in his situation — most of whom were criminals convicted of terrible crimes — actually stood in need of a technology of emortality applicable to adults.

There were critics within and without the Ahasuerus Foundation who pointed out during this historical phase that since the Foundation was now the prime mover of emortality research, it could have diverted a greater fraction of its resources to the kinds of technology which would have benefited its founder, but the Earthbound trustees of the Foundation were sensibly determined to move forward in measured and unhurried steps. The situation was complicated in the twenty-ninth and thirtieth centuries by the clamor of the cyborganizers, whose contention that hybridization was a better route to complete existential security than pure biomodification had to be considered very carefully indeed.

Seven

When the day of Adam Zimmerman’s reawakening finally did arrive, in the year 99 of the New Era (3263 in the old reckoning) it seemed at first to have arrived by accident. The decision was not made by a properly convened meeting of the Foundation’s trustees, and those resident on Earth began to complain about the lack of consultation as soon as news of the impending event was broadcast. It seemed to them — incorrectly, as it turned out — that cryogenic scientists resident in the microworld Excelsior, which happened to be a near neighbor of the microworld in the Counter-Earth Cluster where Adam Zimmerman’s body was now stored, had taken the decision into their own hands.

I was privileged to be part of a hastily constituted delegation sent by the United Nations of Earth to witness Adam Zimmerman’s reawakening. I assumed at the time that I had been honored by my own people for my services to history, but it became clear eventually that the authorities responsible for such decisions had been bypassed as easily and as invisibly as those which should have been responsible for the decision to awaken the sleeper.

What happened after my arrival in Excelsior is far too well known to require any elaborate description. The momentous meeting was interrupted by the audacious crime that precipitated the AMI war. Having made every effort to live as securely and as unobtrusively as a man of his means could in the early years of the twenty-first century, Adam Zimmerman awoke not merely to find himself famous but to be made a prize in a violent contest. If the AMI war came as a shock to us, imagine what it must have been to a man who had put himself into suspended animation in 2035, expecting to awake into a peaceful, settled world eager for nothing but to bestow the gift of emortality upon him.

It is tempting, now, to assume that his experiences in the AMI war, when he came direly close to death on two separate occasions, changed Adam Zimmerman out of all recognition. Hindsight invites us to conclude that he was devastated by the trials and tribulations that he suffered before Emily Marchant and Titanesscontrived his salvation, and that he emerged from that time of trial a broken man. But was that really what happened? Was it really the case that the indomitably powerful sense of purpose which had created the Ahasuerus Foundation and committed his dormant body to its care had been shattered as casually as a mirror of glass?

I think not — and I speak as one who was alongside him during that terrible time, and who took the trouble to remain his fast friend and confidant thereafter. I believe that I have a better understanding of what became of him than anyone else, perhaps including himself.

It hardly needs saying that Adam Zimmerman was different from other men of his era, but it is important to recognize that the difference was qualitative rather than merely quantitative. Adam saw this difference in terms of self-sufficiency and self-discipline rather than vision or courage, but however it might be conceived or described, there is no doubt that the difference was profound. It was so deeply ingrained, in fact, that it is hard to think of it as anything other than the very essence of the man. He was not like the other people of his own time; he was unique, and his uniqueness was something he felt very keenly.

There is always a temptation, when confronted with a difference in quality — especially if it produces something unique — to think of it as a freakish mutation. But Adam Zimmerman was not the product of any new combination of genes, and there was certainly no “Zimmerman mutation” that had appeared for the very first time in his chromosome complement. Historians understand — or should understand — that the productions of a particular time within a particular social and environmental context are not uniform. Every set of historical circumstances produces a whole spectrum of individuals who are different from one another not merely in degree but in kind. Sometimes, historical conditions are extremely favorable to the emergence of unique individuals who are fortunate enough to find channels of opportunity exactly suited to their uniqueness. One thinks of Plato and Epicurus, St. Paul and Mahomet, Descartes and Newton, Napoleon and Lenin…and Adam Zimmerman. None of these men had his fate written into his genes; in every case it was something thrust upon him by circumstance.

The Adam Zimmerman who was born in 1968, stole the world in 2025, and was frozen down in 2035, was a creation of the conditions of twentieth century as it lurched through its Millennial moment. His self-discipline and self-sufficiency were responses to that world’s insanity, no less natural for being so very rare. The great majority of men always participate in the particular madness of their times, which they consider to be inevitable and irresistible, but there is always a tiny minority which is driven to a contrary extreme. Every era generates its Adams; the particular, peculiar, and perfect Adam that was Adam Zimmerman was one of many such creations, and like the rest he was the only one completely appropriate to his own era.

In becoming so utterly determined to evade the tyranny of the late twentieth century — the tyranny of the Grim Reaper in his final and most flamboyant phase — Adam Zimmerman embodied the late twentieth century. He was, in a sense, the incarnationof the late twentieth century. The consequence of this was that although his desperate attempt to hurl himself through time into a new and better era was entirely understandable as a response to the malaise of his environment, and precisely definitive of the man he was, Adam Zimmerman could never really belongin any era to which he might have been delivered. He could never be, or hope or become, a citizen of the future. Even though his relationship with his own time was encapsulated in his fervor to leave it, he remained firmly anchored to the world that had created him and made him what he was.

There is, I admit, a certain paradoxicality in this contention — but there is always a certain paradoxicality in human affairs, which afflicts the unique even more acutely than it afflicts the ordinary.

When Adam Zimmerman went into suspended animation he ceased to be “Adam Zimmerman,” because the very possibility of “Adam Zimmerman” was annihilated on the instant. When he woke up, of course, he was still Adam Zimmerman by name, and his name was one to conjure with. It was a famous name, a powerful name, a name overloaded with significance — but the paragon of self-discipline and self-sufficiency that the name had once identified was gone. In its place there was something very different: an atavism; a messiah; a phantom; a pawn; a symbol of everything that had changed in human history and human nature.