Free The Omega Expedition by Brian Stableford Page B

regenerating the ecosphere according to their own schemes. This time, unlike any other in the deep prehistory of the Earth, there must have been human survivors, but millions or billions must have died. Millions or billions of emortals.
    “Did the Hardinist Cabal still own the planet when it happened?” I asked.
    She didn’t procrastinate over the precise significance of the term, although she took the trouble to substitute one of her own. “The people who styled themselves Stewards of the Earth had already lost some of their former power and influence,” she reported, “and the fact that the planet’s balance of trade with the outer system was in irredeemable deficit implied that their decline was irreversible. They probably remain privately convinced that the eruption was sabotage directed at them, perhaps by Earthbound rebels and perhaps by outer system radicals, although their public position is that it was an unfortunate accident. Certain other factions have suggested that the Stewards were the responsible party, and that the effective destruction of the ecosphere enabled them to reestablish a local economic hegemony that they would soon have lost. That seems unlikely, given that the disaster brought about a dramatic increase in imports from the outer system.”
    “Do the Secret Masters of Earth know you’ve woken me up?” I asked, trying not to sound too paranoid.
    “They have been kept fully informed of our plans and our progress, as a matter of courtesy,” the wonderful child assured me. “The United Nations of Earth will send a delegation to attend the awakening of Adam Zimmerman, as will the Outer System Confederation. If their deceleration patterns proceed according to plan, the ships carrying the delegations will both arrive within a hundred hours’ time.”
    “So you’re still going to wake Zimmerman, even though my memory is impaired?”
    “Yes. We shall continue to monitor your progress, and if we can find a way to help you recover your lost memories we’ll do it. If Adam Zimmerman suffers similar problems, we’ll counter them as best we can.”
    “How’s the second test subject doing?”
    “We hope to awaken the second subject in seven hours’ time. Everything has gone well so far, but her state of mind remains to be ascertained.”
    “Who is the other trial subject?” I asked, not really expecting to hear a name I knew.
    “A woman named Christine Caine,” was the reply I got.
    Like most of the other names which figure in this lostory, that one had a tale attached — one which bore a decidedly sinister significance.

Four
    Bad Karma
    T he single most astonishing aspect of my return to consciousness, a thousand years later than could ever have been expected, was that the one thing that tangibly astonished me during that first interview with the child-who-wasn’t-a-child was the sound of Christine Caine’s name. I’d just been informed that I’d missed out on a millennium of human history, including the advent of universal emortality and the temporary devastation of the Gaean ecosphere, and the news that actually threw me way off-balance was hearing that the other person appointed to share my fate — I didn’t, at that time, regard the legendary Adam Zimmerman as a partner in my fate — was the most notorious mass murderer of my parents’ lifetime.
    “You mean Christine Caine as in Bad Karma ,” I said to Davida Berenike Columella, just in case the name had become fashionable after 2202.
    Davida seemed to have no idea what I was talking about, and her data feed obviously wasn’t helping. Apparently, it wasn’t just my record that had been erased.
    Again I was seized by the conviction that it had to be a joke. I’d almost given up hoping that it was all a VE drama, but the reference to the most notorious VE drama of my own era seemed too surreal to be anything but contrivance. Except that it wasn’t really a reference, from the viewpoint of Davida Berenike Columella. If