Free The Omega Expedition by Brian Stableford

out of denial we tend to flip to the opposite extreme. No game , I thought. All real. A thousand fucking years. Some human races still look like me. Others obviously don’t. Who did this to me? Why?
    “Where’s Damon?” I asked, a little more harshly than I intended.
    When she didn’t reply I amplified the request. “Damon Hart. Biological son of Conrad Helier, reared by his father’s accomplices in crime. Late recruit to the Hardinist Cabal, breaking his surviving foster mother’s rebellious heart. Don’t tell me he ’s not in your records, alive or dead.”
    “He’s dead,” said Davida Berenike Columella, after pausing to consult her inner resources. “Everyone who was alive in your time is dead, except for a handful of individuals preserved, as you have been, in Suspended Animation. According to the available data, Damon Hart is not one of those. We can’t be absolutely sure, because there are other repositories, but all the customary evidence of death is in place.”
    That was what they had said about Conrad Helier. Even Damon had believed it, until he learned better. I knew how easily “all the customary evidence of death” could be faked, even in the twenty-second century, because it was a business I’d dabbled in more than once — but that wasn’t the issue my distraught mind seized upon.
    “ Everyone? ” I echoed. “What about the escalator to emortality? We all thought that the lucky ones, at least, would get to live forever.”
    “The technologies of longevity available in your time were inadequate,” she informed me, flatly. “Nanotechnological repair and somatic rejuvenation had inbuilt limitations. The first true technologies of emortality didn’t come into use until the twenty-fifth century. They required the extensive genetic engineering of fertilized egg cells, so the first emortal human species had to be born to that condition. The oldest currently living individuals who have been continuously active were born in the two thousand four hundred and eighties.”
    “When did Damon die?” I asked, not bothering to add the word “allegedly.”
    She obviously had a covert data feed whispering incessantly into her inner ear. “In the year two thousand five hundred and two,” was the prompt answer.
    Three hundred years! He’d left me where I was for three hundred years of his own protracted lifetime. Why hadn’t he used his authority and influence to get me out? What on Earth had I done to deserve that kind of neglect?
    “All I ever did was hack into a few data stores,” I said, my voice no more than a whisper. “Steal a little information here, delete a little there, reconstruct a little here and there. I was working for the government, for God’s sake. The real government, not the elected one. I really am innocent, by any reasonable standard. I never killed anyone, or even hurt anyone much who wasn’t asking for it.”
    “Can you be certain of that?” my interlocutor asked, still probing.
    “Yes,” I said. “I am certain. I’ve lost a few memories. I can’t remember August twenty-two zero-two, let alone September. In June and July I was working for Damon, with Damon. Not just working — playing too. Having a good time. Planning a little espionage. Nothing heavy, just run-of-the-mill low-level skulduggery. We weren’t even outlaws by then. We were on the inside, rubbing shoulders with the elite, playing in the big boys’ game, by their rules. I never killed anybody . I would remember. I remember what I did, what I was. Even if they’d added in every last one of all the things I could have been charged with in my youth but never was — all the burglary, the smuggling, the dealing, the tax evasion, the so-called pornography, and all the rest of that penny-ante crap — they couldn’t have put me away for more than twenty years. Why on Earth would they throw away the fucking key? ”
    Davida Berenike Columella didn’t know the answer. Either she figured that I needed a