EPILOGUE
"But I don't want to go to Bible class!"
"It's the last class you need for your civics credit, little bro. And there's one tomorrow. Next one is in a fourthnight. Come on, you can go to the beach with Aliasse after."
"But... we're both grounded!"
Gloria sighed. "It's okay, I already talked to her big person. It's short summer, everyone should get to enjoy it."
That cut down on most of the arguing. Avan gave his adoptive big sister a hearty squeeze and got back to lazily poking at his homework. He didn't mind Bible class so much, just... why did things always have to be rushed? The way he saw it, they had all the time in the universe.
Bible class was, for safety reasons, held outside the settlement's main dome, in an auxiliary greenhouse built a few hundred meters out: kids in the past and present would occasionally make it a game to see if they could cross between the two without air filters. Pursuant to the fact that this kept happening regardless of punishment, the base council had installed a small pressurized tent halfway through, ostensibly as restrooms.
The twenty or so children and young adults of Class G met at what had originally been a pressurized bunker on the edge of the reclaimed area. Nowadays, it was mostly used as a greenhouse of sorts; the air outside was safe for most plants and hybrid animals by now, but some cultivars still required filters just as humans did, and none of the old people wanted to give up familiar flavors such as raspberries and kiwis.
The slight loss in biomass after each of these classes, as the students walked next to the bushes and plucked the occasional berry, was a known factor and easily compensated by the waldo arms tending the facility.
The class itself was set up in a fallow corner of the greenhouse.
Built inside one of the structural columns of it was an armored glass box containing, in sterile oil and fed by nanovolt-precise power supplies, a small group of ancient desktop computers whose cases were welded together. The cluster was networked to a small box outside the oil vat, a piece of modern equipment that emulated untold thousands of those same ancient computers. A small plaque indicated that these were among the rare pieces of the original Omega architecture, now distributed across the various towns and bases that could guarantee a safe environment for them, and gave a pointer to the Omega's datalink entry.
The Omega introduced themselves politely, and gave the class a small list of greenhouse-related tasks that were most efficiently performed by a human rather than a computer-controlled servo arm.
Granted, it was a far cry from commanding armies of legionaries and drones, but the Omega had no ability to pine about their past. If they had, they would probably prefer a time in which their prime function to help Humanity thrive was easy to fulfill than not, anyway.
So, as it had for many short and long seasons, the boarding school's Bible class would be given by the old quasi-AI to students while they worked the soil. Through the usual trial and error procedure, this had been found to be optimal in most cases.
"The text you are about to be exposed to carries a significant memetic charge, more than any other, but must be understood without the aid of psi algoritms. Please remind yourselves of this fact as you go through the lecture cycle. There will be a MRI-assisted essay test at the end of the lecture cycle. We're going to start from the end, the Book of the Revelation, also known as Apokalipsi. What had long been thought to be a poetic or allegorical text was found to have a significantly more literal meaning a few years after the end of the Cold War..."
Avan quickly traded assignments with Aliasse - she'd rather assist the aging AI with flower arranging and, well, he'd rather be in a spot where it would be easy to get some raspberries - and listened to the Omega's measured voice match the events of the Tribulation and Millennium with a particular interpretation of Christian Scripture. The vocoder's low fidelity sounded a little funny. The agricultural work itelf was the mildly tedious sort that put one's mind at ease; Avan would rather have been napping, but didn't mind it. Every few minutes, the Omega's voice changed pitch to avoid getting tuned out.
"...consider then the following cybernetics problem: Over an infinite spam of time, how will a processing system Y whose throughput value is a constant infinity handle the emulation of a processing system O, that is in the process of executing an exponentially unbound main process replication operation? This will be a question on the test."
Huh? That was out of the blue. Did Avan space out again? A quick glance at the other students indicated that most were just as confused.
Leave it to Zeri to figure it out first. "You mean the White Throne Judgement that you explained earlier?"
"Correct. While we do not have sufficient data to arrive at a thorough conclusion, we surmise from the lack of further attempts at interfacing that from a computational standpoint the White Throne Judgement is currently and foreseeably in a state of minimum throughput scheduling."
"Does that mean people are still going to Hell if they perma-die and can't be taken to a vault?" Cosette asked, worried. Avan tensed a bit. He'd heard that story before, unofficially, and... well, tried to not think about it too much.
"Possible. Another possibility is that modern humans simply have no soul to harvest. As you should know from your first aid course, intercision and MEC installation is now a routine procedure performed shortly after birth. While we have perfected 4D-crystal vault technology two generations before yours, theologians still see it as a stopgap measure at best. It's a career path to consider. I recommend visiting the mind vault and paying your respects when you get home. This brings us to the topic of Age of Accountability. The previous society did not have adulthood exams; rather, responsibility to follow Divine law was imposed by chronological sorting..."
The lecture module went on. Aliasse only cared about the first sentence.
"But then we've got to breach through and - I mean, doesn't current strategic doctrine indicate that it would be most efficient to liberate Hell?" Avan tensed a little. Aliasse getting... intense... about something like this could cause a bit of a mess. He'd seen her take out a pack of nightstalkers while holding her breath.
"Also correct. We currently do not have the technology to reliably transfer baryonic matter to and from the afterlife, although work has been ongoing. It's a career path to consider. I recommend looking up the Inaros program when you get home. Now, let's get back to the topic survey. We've covered Age of Accountability, so, next topic. An Angel, standard Greek for 'messenger', is any category of semicorporeal entity responsible for..."
The semiretired Omega nodes went on for the best part of the day, imparting crucial knowledge to the students and answering questions to the best of their ability. Taking a nap on the non-hybrid grass was encouraged after the lesson; the test would come in a few days, to prevent the students from using cram-and-forget psi algorithms. Since the settlement could afford it, those with the appropriate MRI response would be given one encouragement to continue theological studies if so inclined.
"Bright night tonight. Want to hit the beach?"
"I can't, I'm still grounded."
"But.. Gloria said that Dr. Forster changed her mind."
Aliasse checked her terminal watch to find a message from her mentor telling her, in usual curt way, that she was no longer grounded.
Gloria must've talked to her - and the Omega, possibly - during the class.
"She has! Awesome!"
Aliasse stretched out her r-whip and gave Avan a gentle poke with it, by means of a tag. "Race you there!" The two students quickly donned air filters and ran off to the bus terminal, the first of the class to leave after having been dismissed.
Zeri and Juliana tarried. The greenhouse wasn't exactly a popular makeout spot, but they enjoyed the privacy and the intellectual stimulation that came from being able to poke the Omega - their cuddling sessions tended to intertwine with friendly arguments, and when they disagreed, it was a lot more interesting than looking things up in the datalinks. Unlike most of Class G, they'd been here before.
"So... the Bible was right; the meek did inherit the Earth."
"Correct, semantically."
"Hmm. I gotta wonder. What does that leave us?"
Juliana smiled and flicked a strand of pink hair in her companion's face. "Why Zeri, the universe, of course."
The Omega could see that these two didn't actually want much to do with the rest of the universe for the next little while, marked them as safe but unavailable on the tracking system, and entered sleep mode.
Proxima was high in the sky tonight, just out-of-sync with the twin suns of Alpha Centauri enough to be a bright point of light without marring the darkness of the night sky. The secluded beach in the reclaimed area would be full of people, Avan and Aliasse among them, enjoying the bioluminescence that the companion star brought out in the ichtyoids and native underwater flora.
Perhaps taking a cue from the native wildlife's increase in friskiness when Proxima was high in the sky, quite a few of the older people would be otherwise busy - technology would always be there to help when needed, as had been for millennia now, but most people felt that old-fashioned way of restoring Humanity's footprint in the universe was still the best. After all, when in Rome, drive too fast and ignore traffic signals.
The only residents of the new heaven and new earth were those written in the Lamb's Book of Life. And they would reign forever and ever. One star system away, spread out across two planets and an asteroid belt and sure that it was just a start towards inheriting the cosmos, the scions of Humanity were largely too busy to mind them.
Aliasse threw a beachball at Avan and beaned him right on the nose, daring him to chase her into the shallows. There would always be work to do - maybe there would have to be a fight after all - but not today, and not tonight, tonight was for play.
Gloria and Dr. Forster watched their charges get into a splash fight. "They grow up so fast, don't they?"
"The Earth is the cradle of Humanity, but a human cannot stay in the cradle forever." -Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Datalinks
Author's note: The chronicle of The Omega Legacy and of the last 100 years of the Millennium can be found by Googling "Left Beyond Quest" and clicking on the Archive link that should show up in first position. It is an interesting piece of fiction written cooperatively over the course of about a year. You can also use the redirect URL at
http：／／www．f3．to／omega／