Accelerando - Computer Science & Engineering
Accelerando - Computer Science & Engineering
Accelerando - Computer Science & Engineering
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<strong>Accelerando</strong> http://www.accelerando.org/_static/accelerando.html<br />
A novel by Charles Stross<br />
Copyright © Charles Stross, 2005<br />
Published by<br />
Ace Books, New York, July 2005, ISBN 0441012841<br />
Orbit Books, London, August 2005, ISBN 1841493902<br />
License<br />
Copyright © Charles Stross, 2005.<br />
<strong>Accelerando</strong><br />
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.<br />
You are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work under the following conditions:<br />
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.<br />
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.<br />
No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.<br />
For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.<br />
If you are in doubt about any proposed reuse, you should contact the author via: www.accelerando.org.<br />
Dedication<br />
For Feòrag, with love<br />
Acknowledgements<br />
This book took me five years to write – a personal record – and would not exist without the support and encouragement of<br />
a host of friends, and several friendly editors. Among the many people who read and commented on the early drafts are:<br />
Andrew J. Wilson, Stef Pearson, Gav Inglis, Andrew Ferguson, Jack Deighton, Jane McKie, Hannu Rajaniemi, Martin Page,<br />
Stephen Christian, Simon Bisson, Paul Fraser, Dave Clements, Ken MacLeod, Damien Broderick, Damon Sicore, Cory<br />
Doctorow, Emmet O'Brien, Andrew Ducker, Warren Ellis, and Peter Hollo. (If your name isn't on this list, blame my<br />
memory – my neural prostheses are off-line.)<br />
I mentioned several friendly editors earlier: I relied on the talented midwifery of Gardner Dozois, who edited Asimov's<br />
<strong>Science</strong> Fiction Magazine at the time, and Sheila Williams, who quietly and diligently kept the wheels rolling. My agent Caitlin<br />
Blasdell had a hand in it too, and I'd like to thank my editors Ginjer Buchanan at Ace and Tim Holman at Orbit for their<br />
helpful comments and advice.<br />
Finally, I'd like to thank everyone who e-mailed me to ask when the book was coming, or who voted for the stories that were<br />
shortlisted for awards. You did a great job of keeping me focused, even during the periods when the whole project was too<br />
daunting to contemplate.<br />
Publication History<br />
Portions of this book originally appeared in Asimov's SF Magazine as follows: "Lobsters" (June 2001), "Troubadour" (Oct/Nov<br />
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2001), "Tourist" (Feb 2002), "Halo" (June 2002), "Router" (Sept 2002), "Nightfall" (April 2003), "Curator" (Dec 2003),<br />
"Elector" (Oct/Nov 2004), "Survivor" (Dec 2004).<br />
Contents<br />
Part 1: Slow Takeoff<br />
Lobsters<br />
Troubadour<br />
Tourist<br />
Part 2: Point of Inflection<br />
Halo<br />
Router<br />
Nightfall<br />
Part 3: Singularity<br />
Curator<br />
Elector<br />
Survivor<br />
PART 1: Slow Takeoff<br />
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."<br />
– Edsger W. Dijkstra<br />
Chapter 1: Lobsters<br />
Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich.<br />
It's a hot summer Tuesday, and he's standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and<br />
the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side.<br />
The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of<br />
trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at<br />
his weblog to show he's arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it's not just the bandwidth, it's the whole<br />
scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he's fresh off the train from Schiphol: He's infected with<br />
the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very<br />
rich indeed.<br />
He wonders who it's going to be.<br />
* * *<br />
Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij 't IJ, watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of<br />
a liter of lip-curlingly sour gueuze. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed<br />
infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the<br />
scenery. A couple of punks – maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the<br />
Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar – are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. A<br />
tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge windmill overhead cast long, cool shadows across the road. The<br />
windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style.<br />
Manfred is waiting for an invite to a party where he's going to meet a man he can talk to about trading energy for space,<br />
twenty-first-century style, and forget about his personal problems.<br />
He's ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low-bandwidth, high-sensation time with his beer and the pigeons,<br />
when a woman walks up to him, and says his name: "Manfred Macx?"<br />
He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned smooth-running muscles clad in a paean to polymer<br />
technology: electric blue lycra and wasp yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti collision LEDs and tight-packed air<br />
bags. She holds out a box for him. He pauses a moment, struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam, his ex-fiance.<br />
"I'm Macx," he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her bar-code reader. "Who's it from?"<br />
"FedEx." The voice isn't Pam's. She dumps the box in his lap, then she's back over the low wall and onto her bicycle with her<br />
phone already chirping, disappearing in a cloud of spread-spectrum emissions.<br />
Manfred turns the box over in his hands: it's a disposable supermarket phone, paid for in cash – cheap, untraceable, and<br />
efficient. It can even do conference calls, which makes it the tool of choice for spooks and grifters everywhere.<br />
The box rings. Manfred rips the cover open and pulls out the phone, mildly annoyed. "Yes? Who is this?"<br />
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The voice at the other end has a heavy Russian accent, almost a parody in this decade of cheap on-line translation services.<br />
"Manfred. Am please to meet you. Wish to personalize interface, make friends, no? Have much to offer."<br />
"Who are you?" Manfred repeats suspiciously.<br />
"Am organization formerly known as KGB dot RU."<br />
"I think your translator's broken." He holds the phone to his ear carefully, as if it's made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as<br />
the sanity of the being on the other end of the line.<br />
"Nyet – no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation software. Interpreters are ideologically suspect,<br />
mostly have capitalist semiotics and pay-per-use APIs. Must implement English more better, yes?"<br />
Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his<br />
head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. "Are you<br />
saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?"<br />
"Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon<br />
excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials."<br />
Manfred pauses in mid stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller blader. This is getting weird enough<br />
to trip his weird-out meter, and that takes some doing. Manfred's whole life is lived on the bleeding edge of strangeness,<br />
fifteen minutes into everyone else's future, and he's normally in complete control – but at times like this he gets a frisson of<br />
fear, a sense that he might just have missed the correct turn on reality's approach road. "Uh, I'm not sure I got that. Let me<br />
get this straight, you claim to be some kind of AI, working for KGB dot RU, and you're afraid of a copyright infringement<br />
lawsuit over your translator semiotics?"<br />
"Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to experiment with patent shell<br />
companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small<br />
intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect."<br />
Manfred stops dead in the street. "Oh man, you've got the wrong free enterprise broker here. I don't work for the<br />
government. I'm strictly private." A rogue advertisement sneaks through his junkbuster proxy and spams glowing fifties kitsch<br />
across his navigation window – which is blinking – for a moment before a phage process kills it and spawns a new filter. He<br />
leans against a shop front, massaging his forehead and eyeballing a display of antique brass doorknockers. "Have you tried the<br />
State Department?"<br />
"Why bother? State Department am enemy of Novy-SSR. State Department is not help us."<br />
This is getting just too bizarre. Manfred's never been too clear on new-old old-new European metapolitics: Just dodging the<br />
crumbling bureaucracy of his old-old American heritage gives him headaches. "Well, if you hadn't shafted them during the<br />
late noughties ... " Manfred taps his left heel on the pavement, looking round for a way out of this conversation. A camera<br />
winks at him from atop a streetlight; he waves, wondering idly if it's the KGB or the traffic police. He is waiting for directions<br />
to the party, which should arrive within the next half hour, and this Cold War retread Eliza-bot is bumming him out. "Look,<br />
I don't deal with the G-men. I hate the military-industrial complex. I hate traditional politics. They're all zero-sum cannibals."<br />
A thought occurs to him. "If survival is what you're after, you could post your state vector on one of the p2p nets: Then<br />
nobody could delete you –"<br />
"Nyet!" The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as it's possible to sound over a VoiP link. "Am not open source! Not want<br />
lose autonomy!"<br />
"Then we probably have nothing to talk about." Manfred punches the hang-up button and throws the mobile phone out<br />
into a canal. It hits the water, and there's a pop of deflagrating lithium cells. "Fucking Cold War hangover losers," he swears<br />
under his breath, quite angry, partly at himself for losing his cool and partly at the harassing entity behind the anonymous<br />
phone call. "Fucking capitalist spooks." Russia has been back under the thumb of the apparatchiks for fifteen years now, its<br />
brief flirtation with anarchocapitalism replaced by Brezhnevite dirigisme and Putinesque puritanism, and it's no surprise that<br />
the wall's crumbling – but it looks like they haven't learned anything from the current woes afflicting the United States. The<br />
neocommies still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so angry that he wants to make someone rich, just to<br />
thumb his nose at the would-be defector: See! You get ahead by giving! Get with the program! Only the generous survive! But the<br />
KGB won't get the message. He's dealt with old-time commie weak-AIs before, minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian<br />
School economics: They're so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of global capitalism that they can't surf the<br />
new paradigm, look to the longer term.<br />
Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he's going to patent next.<br />
* * *<br />
Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational consumer protection group,<br />
and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for services<br />
rendered. He has airline employee's travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an<br />
airline. His bush jacket has sixty-four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per pocket,<br />
courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes<br />
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made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines he's never met. Law firms handle his patent applications<br />
on a pro bono basis, and boy, does he patent a lot – although he always signs the rights over to the Free<br />
Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project.<br />
In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he's the guy who patented the business practice of moving your<br />
e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances.<br />
He's the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial<br />
description of a problem domain – not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps.<br />
Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become<br />
illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in<br />
Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous<br />
hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property,<br />
or maybe another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that<br />
Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists<br />
in Prague who think he's the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope.<br />
Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and<br />
giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has<br />
virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has<br />
to pay for anything.<br />
There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock – he has<br />
to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current. The<br />
Internal Revenue Service is investigating him continuously because it doesn't believe his lifestyle can exist<br />
without racketeering. And then there are the items that no money can't buy: like the respect of his parents.<br />
He hasn't spoken to them for three years, his father thinks he's a hippy scrounger, and his mother still hasn't<br />
forgiven him for dropping out of his down-market Harvard emulation course. (They're still locked in the<br />
boringly bourgeois twen-cen paradigm of college-career-kids.) His fiance and sometime dominatrix Pamela<br />
threw him over six months ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear on. (Ironically, she's a headhunter<br />
for the IRS, jetting all over the place at public expense, trying to persuade entrepreneurs who've gone global<br />
to pay taxes for the good of the Treasury Department.) To cap it all, the Southern Baptist Conventions have<br />
denounced him as a minion of Satan on all their websites. Which would be funny because, as a born-again<br />
atheist Manfred doesn't believe in Satan, if it wasn't for the dead kittens that someone keeps mailing him.<br />
* * *<br />
Manfred drops in at his hotel suite, unpacks his Aineko, plugs in a fresh set of cells to charge, and sticks most of his private<br />
keys in the safe. Then he heads straight for the party, which is currently happening at De Wildemann's; it's a twenty-minute<br />
walk, and the only real hazard is dodging the trams that sneak up on him behind the cover of his moving map display.<br />
Along the way, his glasses bring him up to date on the news. Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time<br />
ever: They're using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas. The Middle East is, well, it's<br />
just as bad as ever, but the war on fundamentalism doesn't hold much interest for Manfred. In San Diego, researchers are<br />
uploading lobsters into cyberspace, starting with the stomatogastric ganglion, one neuron at a time. They're burning GM<br />
cocoa in Belize and books in Georgia. NASA still can't put a man on the moon. Russia has re–elected the communist<br />
government with an increased majority in the Duma; meanwhile, in China, fevered rumors circulate about an imminent<br />
rehabilitation, the second coming of Mao, who will save them from the consequences of the Three Gorges disaster. In<br />
business news, the US Justice Department is – ironically – outraged at the Baby Bills. The divested Microsoft divisions have<br />
automated their legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries, IPOing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of<br />
bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that, by the time the windfall tax demands are served, the targets don't exist anymore,<br />
even though the same staff are working on the same software in the same Mumbai cubicle farms.<br />
Welcome to the twenty-first century.<br />
The permanent floating meatspace party Manfred is hooking up with is a strange attractor for some of the American exiles<br />
cluttering up the cities of Europe this decade – not trustafarians, but honest-to-God political dissidents, draft dodgers, and<br />
terminal outsourcing victims. It's the kind of place where weird connections are made and crossed lines make new short<br />
circuits into the future, like the street cafes of Switzerland where the pre Great War Russian exiles gathered. Right now it's<br />
located in the back of De Wildemann's, a three-hundred-year old brown cafe with a list of brews that runs to sixteen pages<br />
and wooden walls stained the color of stale beer. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer's yeast, and melatonin<br />
spray: Half the dotters are nursing monster jet lag hangovers, and the other half are babbling a Eurotrash creole at each<br />
other while they work on the hangover. "Man did you see that? He looks like a Democrat!" exclaims one whitebread<br />
hanger-on who's currently propping up the bar. Manfred slides in next to him, catches the bartender's eye.<br />
"Glass of the Berlinerweisse, please," he says.<br />
"You drink that stuff?" asks the hanger-on, curling a hand protectively around his Coke. "Man, you don't want to do that! It's<br />
full of alcohol!"<br />
Manfred grins at him toothily. "Ya gotta keep your yeast intake up: There are lots of neurotransmitter precursors in this shit,<br />
phenylalanine and glutamate."<br />
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"But I thought that was a beer you were ordering ..."<br />
Manfred's away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels the more popular draught items in from the cask<br />
storage in back; one of the hipper floaters has planted a contact bug on it, and the vCards of all the personal network<br />
owners who've have visited the bar in the past three hours are queuing up for attention. The air is full of ultrawideband<br />
chatter, WiMAX and 'tooth both, as he speed-scrolls through the dizzying list of cached keys in search of one particular<br />
name.<br />
"Your drink." The barman holds out an improbable-looking goblet full of blue liquid with a cap of melting foam and a<br />
felching straw stuck out at some crazy angle. Manfred takes it and heads for the back of the split-level bar, up the steps to a<br />
table where some guy with greasy dreadlocks is talking to a suit from Paris. The hanger-on at the bar notices him for the first<br />
time, staring with suddenly wide eyes: He nearly spills his Coke in a mad rush for the door.<br />
Oh shit, thinks Manfred, better buy some more server time. He can recognize the signs: He's about to be slashdotted. He<br />
gestures at the table. "This one taken?"<br />
"Be my guest," says the guy with the dreads. Manfred slides the chair open then realizes that the other guy – immaculate<br />
double-breasted Suit, sober tie, crew cut – is a girl. She nods at him, half-smiling at his transparent double take. Mr.<br />
Dreadlock nods. "You're Macx? I figured it was about time we met."<br />
"Sure." Manfred holds out a hand, and they shake. His PDA discreetly swaps digital fingerprints, confirming that the hand<br />
belongs to Bob Franklin, a Research Triangle startup monkey with a VC track record, lately moving into micromachining and<br />
space technology. Franklin made his first million two decades ago, and now he's a specialist in extropian investment fields.<br />
Operating exclusively overseas these past five years, ever since the IRS got medieval about trying to suture the sucking chest<br />
wound of the federal budget deficit. Manfred has known him for nearly a decade via a closed mailing list, but this is the first<br />
time they've ever met face-to-face. The Suit silently slides a business card across the table; a little red devil brandishes a<br />
trident at him, flames jetting up around its feet. He takes the card, raises an eyebrow: "Annette Dimarcos? I'm pleased to<br />
meet you. Can't say I've ever met anyone from Arianespace marketing before."<br />
She smiles warmly; "That is all right. I have not the pleasure of meeting the famous venture altruist either." Her accent is<br />
noticeably Parisian, a pointed reminder that she's making a concession to him just by talking. Her camera earrings watch him<br />
curiously, encoding everything for the company memory. She's a genuine new European, unlike most of the American exiles<br />
cluttering up the bar.<br />
"Yes, well." He nods cautiously, unsure how to deal with her. "Bob. I assume you're in on this ball?"<br />
Franklin nods; beads clatter. "Yeah, man. Ever since the Teledesic smash it's been, well, waiting. If you've got something for us,<br />
we're game."<br />
"Hmm." The Teledesic satellite cluster was killed by cheap balloons and slightly less cheap high-altitude, solar-powered drones<br />
with spread-spectrum laser relays: It marked the beginning of a serious recession in the satellite biz. "The depression's got to<br />
end sometime: But" – a nod to Annette from Paris – "with all due respect, I don't think the break will involve one of the<br />
existing club carriers."<br />
She shrugs. "Arianespace is forward-looking. We face reality. The launch cartel cannot stand. Bandwidth is not the only<br />
market force in space. We must explore new opportunities. I personally have helped us diversify into submarine reactor<br />
engineering, microgravity nanotechnology fabrication, and hotel management." Her face is a well-polished mask as she recites<br />
the company line, but he can sense the sardonic amusement behind it as she adds: "We are more flexible than the American<br />
space industry ..."<br />
Manfred shrugs. "That's as may be." He sips his Berlinerweisse slowly as she launches into a long, stilted explanation of how<br />
Arianespace is a diversified dot-com with orbital aspirations, a full range of merchandising spin-offs, Bond movie sets, and a<br />
promising hotel chain in LEO. She obviously didn't come up with these talking points herself. Her face is much more<br />
expressive than her voice as she mimes boredom and disbelief at appropriate moments – an out-of-band signal invisible to<br />
her corporate earrings. Manfred plays along, nodding occasionally, trying to look as if he's taking it seriously: Her droll<br />
subversion has got his attention far more effectively than the content of the marketing pitch. Franklin is nose down in his<br />
beer, shoulders shaking as he tries not to guffaw at the hand gestures she uses to express her opinion of her employer's<br />
thrusting, entrepreneurial executives. Actually, the talking points bullshit is right about one thing: Arianespace is still<br />
profitable, due to those hotels and orbital holiday hops. Unlike LockMartBoeing, who'd go Chapter Eleven in a split second if<br />
their Pentagon drip-feed ran dry.<br />
Someone else sidles up to the table; a pudgy guy in outrageously loud Hawaiian shirt with pens leaking in a breast pocket<br />
and the worst case of ozone-hole burn Manfred's seen in ages. "Hi, Bob," says the new arrival. "How's life?"<br />
"'S good." Franklin nodes at Manfred; "Manfred, meet Ivan MacDonald. Ivan, Manfred. Have a seat?" He leans over. "Ivan's a<br />
public arts guy. He's heavily into extreme concrete."<br />
"Rubberized concrete," Ivan says, slightly too loudly. "Pink rubberized concrete."<br />
"Ah!" He's somehow triggered a priority interrupt: Annette from Arianespace drops out of marketing zombiehood with a<br />
shudder of relief and, duty discharged, reverts to her non corporate identity: "You are he who rubberized the Reichstag,<br />
yes? With the supercritical carbon-dioxide carrier and the dissolved polymethoxysilanes?" She claps her hands, eyes alight<br />
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with enthusiasm: "Wonderful!"<br />
"He rubberized what?" Manfred mutters in Bob's ear.<br />
Franklin shrugs. "Don't ask me, I'm just an engineer."<br />
"He works with limestone and sandstones as well as concrete; he's brilliant!" Annette smiles at Manfred. "Rubberizing the<br />
symbol of the, the autocracy, is it not wonderful?"<br />
"I thought I was thirty seconds ahead of the curve," Manfred says ruefully. He adds to Bob: "Buy me another drink?"<br />
"I'm going to rubberize Three Gorges!" Ivan explains loudly. "When the floodwaters subside."<br />
Just then, a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred's head and sends clumps of humongous<br />
pixilation flickering across his sensorium: Around the world, five million or so geeks are bouncing on his home site, a digital<br />
flash crowd alerted by a posting from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. "I really came here to talk about the<br />
economic exploitation of space travel, but I've just been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit and drink until it wears off?"<br />
"Sure, man." Bob waves at the bar. "More of the same all round!" At the next table, a person with makeup and long hair<br />
who's wearing a dress – Manfred doesn't want to speculate about the gender of these crazy mixed-up Euros – is reminiscing<br />
about wiring the fleshpots of Tehran for cybersex. Two collegiate-looking dudes are arguing intensely in German: The<br />
translation stream in his glasses tell him they're arguing over whether the Turing Test is a Jim Crow law that violates<br />
European corpus juris standards on human rights. The beer arrives, and Bob slides the wrong one across to Manfred: "Here,<br />
try this. You'll like it."<br />
"Okay." It's some kind of smoked doppelbock, chock-full of yummy superoxides: Just inhaling over it makes Manfred feel like<br />
there's a fire alarm in his nose screaming danger, Will Robinson! Cancer! Cancer!. "Yeah, right. Did I say I nearly got mugged on<br />
my way here?"<br />
"Mugged? Hey, that's heavy. I thought the police hereabouts had stopped – did they sell you anything?"<br />
"No, but they weren't your usual marketing type. You know anyone who can use a Warpac surplus espionage bot? Recent<br />
model, one careful owner, slightly paranoid but basically sound – I mean, claims to be a general-purpose AI?"<br />
"No. Oh boy! The NSA wouldn't like that."<br />
"What I thought. Poor thing's probably unemployable, anyway."<br />
"The space biz."<br />
"Ah, yeah. The space biz. Depressing, isn't it? Hasn't been the same since Rotary Rocket went bust for the second time. And<br />
NASA, mustn't forget NASA."<br />
"To NASA." Annette grins broadly for her own reasons, raises a glass in toast. Ivan the extreme concrete geek has an arm<br />
round her shoulders, and she leans against him; he raises his glass, too. "Lots more launchpads to rubberize!"<br />
"To NASA," Bob echoes. They drink. "Hey, Manfred. To NASA?"<br />
"NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his<br />
glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be<br />
working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available<br />
dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar<br />
system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We<br />
need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build<br />
masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of<br />
the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the<br />
Turing boogie!"<br />
Annette is watching him with interest, but Bob looks wary. "Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you<br />
think?"<br />
"Very long-term – at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if they can't tax it, they<br />
won't understand it. But see, there's an angle on the self-replicating robotics market coming up, that's going to set the cheap<br />
launch market doubling every fifteen months for the foreseeable future, starting in, oh, about two years. It's your leg up, and<br />
my keystone for the Dyson sphere project. It works like this –"<br />
* * *<br />
It's night in Amsterdam, morning in Silicon Valley. Today, fifty thousand human babies are being born around the world.<br />
Meanwhile automated factories in Indonesia and Mexico have produced another quarter of a million motherboards with<br />
processors rated at more than ten petaflops – about an order of magnitude below the lower bound on the computational<br />
capacity of a human brain. Another fourteen months and the larger part of the cumulative conscious processing power of<br />
the human species will be arriving in silicon. And the first meat the new AIs get to know will be the uploaded lobsters.<br />
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Manfred stumbles back to his hotel, bone-weary and jet-lagged; his glasses are still jerking, slashdotted to hell and back by<br />
geeks piggybacking on his call to dismantle the moon. They stutter quiet suggestions at his peripheral vision. Fractal<br />
cloud-witches ghost across the face of the moon as the last huge Airbuses of the night rumble past overhead. Manfred's skin<br />
crawls, grime embedded in his clothing from three days of continuous wear.<br />
Back in his room, the Aineko mewls for attention and strops her head against his ankle. She's a late-model Sony, thoroughly<br />
upgradeable: Manfred's been working on her in his spare minutes, using an open source development kit to extend her suite<br />
of neural networks. He bends down and pets her, then sheds his clothing and heads for the en suite bathroom. When he's<br />
down to the glasses and nothing more, he steps into the shower and dials up a hot, steamy spray. The shower tries to strike<br />
up a friendly conversation about football, but he isn't even awake enough to mess with its silly little associative<br />
personalization network. Something that happened earlier in the day is bugging him, but he can't quite put his finger on<br />
what's wrong.<br />
Toweling himself off, Manfred yawns. Jet lag has finally overtaken him, a velvet hammerblow between the eyes. He reaches for<br />
the bottle beside the bed, dry-swallows two melatonin tablets, a capsule full of antioxidants, and a multivitamin bullet: Then<br />
he lies down on the bed, on his back, legs together, arms slightly spread. The suite lights dim in response to commands from<br />
the thousand petaflops of distributed processing power running the neural networks that interface with his meatbrain<br />
through the glasses.<br />
Manfred drops into a deep ocean of unconsciousness populated by gentle voices. He isn't aware of it, but he talks in his sleep<br />
– disjointed mumblings that would mean little to another human but everything to the metacortex lurking beyond his<br />
glasses. The young posthuman intelligence over whose Cartesian theatre he presides sings urgently to him while he slumbers.<br />
Manfred is always at his most vulnerable shortly after waking.<br />
* * *<br />
He screams into wakefulness as artificial light floods the room: For a moment he is unsure whether he has slept. He forgot to<br />
pull the covers up last night, and his feet feel like lumps of frozen cardboard. Shuddering with inexplicable tension, he pulls a<br />
fresh set of underwear from his overnight bag, then drags on soiled jeans and tank top. Sometime today he'll have to spare<br />
time to hunt the feral T-shirt in Amsterdam's markets, or find a Renfield and send it forth to buy clothing. He really ought<br />
to find a gym and work out, but he doesn't have time – his glasses remind him that he's six hours behind the moment and<br />
urgently needs to catch up. His teeth ache in his gums, and his tongue feels like a forest floor that's been visited with Agent<br />
Orange. He has a sense that something went bad yesterday; if only he could remember what.<br />
He speed reads a new pop-philosophy tome while he brushes his teeth, then blogs his web throughput to a public<br />
annotation server; he's still too enervated to finish his pre-breakfast routine by posting a morning rant on his storyboard<br />
site. His brain is still fuzzy, like a scalpel blade clogged with too much blood: He needs stimulus, excitement, the burn of the<br />
new. Whatever, it can wait on breakfast. He opens his bedroom door and nearly steps on a small, damp cardboard box that<br />
lies on the carpet.<br />
The box – he's seen a couple of its kin before. But there are no stamps on this one, no address: just his name, in big, childish<br />
handwriting. He kneels and gently picks it up. It's about the right weight. Something shifts inside it when he tips it back and<br />
forth. It smells. He carries it into his room carefully, angrily: Then he opens it to confirm his worst suspicion. It's been<br />
surgically decerebrated, brains scooped out like a boiled egg.<br />
"Fuck!"<br />
This is the first time the madman has gotten as far as his bedroom door. It raises worrying possibilities.<br />
Manfred pauses for a moment, triggering agents to go hunt down arrest statistics, police relations, information on corpus<br />
juris, Dutch animal-cruelty laws. He isn't sure whether to dial two-one-one on the archaic voice phone or let it ride. Aineko,<br />
picking up his angst, hides under the dresser mewling pathetically. Normally he'd pause a minute to reassure the creature,<br />
but not now: Its mere presence is suddenly acutely embarrassing, a confession of deep inadequacy. It's too realistic, as if<br />
somehow the dead kitten's neural maps -- stolen, no doubt, for some dubious uploading experiment -- have ended up<br />
padding out its plastic skull. He swears again, looks around, then takes the easy option: Down the stairs two steps at a time,<br />
stumbling on the second floor landing, down to the breakfast room in the basement, where he will perform the stable rituals<br />
of morning.<br />
Breakfast is unchanging, an island of deep geological time standing still amidst the continental upheaval of new technologies.<br />
While reading a paper on public key steganography and parasite network identity spoofing he mechanically assimilates a bowl<br />
of cornflakes and skimmed milk, then brings a platter of whole grain bread and slices of some weird seed-infested Dutch<br />
cheese back to his place. There is a cup of strong black coffee in front of his setting, and he picks it up and slurps half of it<br />
down before he realizes he's not alone at the table. Someone is sitting opposite him. He glances up incuriously and freezes<br />
inside.<br />
"Morning, Manfred. How does it feel to owe the government twelve million, three hundred and sixty-two thousand, nine<br />
hundred and sixteen dollars and fifty-one cents?" She smiles a Mona Lisa smile, at once affectionate and challenging.<br />
Manfred puts everything in his sensorium on indefinite hold and stares at her. She's immaculately turned out in a formal gray<br />
business suit: brown hair tightly drawn back, blue eyes quizzical. And as beautiful as ever: tall, ash blonde, with features that<br />
speak of an unexplored modeling career. The chaperone badge clipped to her lapel – a due diligence guarantee of<br />
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businesslike conduct – is switched off. He's feeling ripped because of the dead kitten and residual jet lag, and more than a<br />
little messy, so he snarls back at her; "That's a bogus estimate! Did they send you here because they think I'll listen to you?"<br />
He bites and swallows a slice of cheese-laden crispbread: "Or did you decide to deliver the message in person just so you<br />
could ruin my breakfast?"<br />
"Manny." She frowns, pained. "If you're going to be confrontational, I might as well go now." She pauses, and after a moment<br />
he nods apologetically. "I didn't come all this way just because of an overdue tax estimate."<br />
"So." He puts his coffee cup down warily and thinks for a moment, trying to conceal his unease and turmoil. "Then what<br />
brings you here? Help yourself to coffee. Don't tell me you came all this way just to tell me you can't live without me."<br />
She fixes him with a riding-crop stare: "Don't flatter yourself. There are many leaves in the forest, there are ten thousand<br />
hopeful subs in the chat room, et cetera. If I choose a man to contribute to my family tree, the one thing you can be certain<br />
of is he won't be a cheapskate when it comes to providing for his children."<br />
"Last I heard, you were spending a lot of time with Brian," he says carefully. Brian: a name without a face. Too much money,<br />
too little sense. Something to do with a blue-chip accountancy partnership.<br />
"Brian?" She snorts. "That ended ages ago. He turned weird on me – burned my favorite corset, called me a slut for going<br />
clubbing, wanted to fuck me. Saw himself as a family man: one of those promise-keeper types. I crashed him hard, but I think<br />
he stole a copy of my address book – got a couple of friends say he keeps sending them harassing mail."<br />
"There's a lot of it about these days." Manfred nods, almost sympathetically, although an edgy little corner of his mind is<br />
gloating. "Good riddance, then. I suppose this means you're still playing the scene? But looking around for the, er –"<br />
"Traditional family thing? Yes. Your trouble, Manny? You were born forty years too late: You still believe in rutting before<br />
marriage but find the idea of coping with the after-effects disturbing."<br />
Manfred drinks the rest of his coffee, unable to reply effectively to her non sequitur. It's a generational thing. This generation<br />
is happy with latex and leather, whips and butt plugs and electrostim, but find the idea of exchanging bodily fluids shocking:<br />
a social side effect of the last century's antibiotic abuse. Despite being engaged for two years, he and Pamela never had<br />
intromissive intercourse.<br />
"I just don't feel positive about having children," he says eventually. "And I'm not planning on changing my mind anytime<br />
soon. Things are changing so fast that even a twenty-year commitment is too far to plan – you might as well be talking about<br />
the next ice age. As for the money thing, I am reproductively fit – just not within the parameters of the outgoing paradigm.<br />
Would you be happy about the future if it was 1901 and you'd just married a buggy-whip mogul?"<br />
Her fingers twitch, and his ears flush red; but she doesn't follow up the double entendre. "You don't feel any responsibility,<br />
do you? Not to your country, not to me. That's what this is about: None of your relationships count, all this nonsense<br />
about giving intellectual property away notwithstanding. You're actively harming people you know. That twelve mil isn't just<br />
some figure I pulled out of a hat, Manfred; they don't actually expect you to pay it. But it's almost exactly how much you'd<br />
owe in income tax if you'd only come home, start up a corporation, and be a self-made –"<br />
"I don't agree. You're confusing two wholly different issues and calling them both 'responsibility.' And I refuse to start<br />
charging now, just to balance the IRS's spreadsheet. It's their fucking fault, and they know it. If they hadn't gone after me<br />
under suspicion of running a massively ramified microbilling fraud when I was sixteen –"<br />
"Bygones." She waves a hand dismissively. Her fingers are long and slim, sheathed in black glossy gloves – electrically earthed<br />
to prevent embarrassing emissions. "With a bit of the right advice we can get all that set aside. You'll have to stop bumming<br />
around the world sooner or later, anyway. Grow up, get responsible, and do the right thing. This is hurting Joe and Sue;<br />
they don't understand what you're about."<br />
Manfred bites his tongue to stifle his first response, then refills his coffee cup and takes another mouthful. His heart does a<br />
flip-flop: She's challenging him again, always trying to own him. "I work for the betterment of everybody, not just some<br />
narrowly defined national interest, Pam. It's the agalmic future. You're still locked into a pre-singularity economic model that<br />
thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn't a problem anymore – it's going to be over within a decade. The cosmos<br />
is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy! They<br />
even found signs of smart matter – MACHOs, big brown dwarfs in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared –<br />
suspiciously high entropy leakage. The latest figures say something like seventy percent of the baryonic mass of the M31<br />
galaxy was in computronium, two-point-nine million years ago, when the photons we're seeing now set out. The intelligence<br />
gap between us and the aliens is a probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a nematode worm. Do<br />
you have any idea what that means?"<br />
Pamela nibbles at a slice of crispbread, then graces him with a slow, carnivorous stare. "I don't care: It's too far away to have<br />
any influence on us, isn't it? It doesn't matter whether I believe in that singularity you keep chasing, or your aliens a<br />
thousand light-years away. It's a chimera, like Y2K, and while you're running after it, you aren't helping reduce the budget<br />
deficit or sire a family, and that's what I care about. And before you say I only care about it because that's the way I'm<br />
programmed, I want you to ask just how dumb you think I am. Bayes' Theorem says I'm right, and you know it."<br />
"What you –" He stops dead, baffled, the mad flow of his enthusiasm running up against the coffer dam of her certainty.<br />
"Why? I mean, why? Why on earth should what I do matter to you?" Since you canceled our engagement, he doesn't add.<br />
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She sighs. "Manny, the Internal Revenue cares about far more than you can possibly imagine. Every tax dollar raised east of<br />
the Mississippi goes on servicing the debt, did you know that? We've got the biggest generation in history hitting retirement<br />
and the cupboard is bare. We – our generation – isn't producing enough skilled workers to replace the taxpayer base,<br />
either, not since our parents screwed the public education system and outsourced the white-collar jobs. In ten years,<br />
something like thirty percent of our population are going to be retirees or silicon rust belt victims. You want to see seventy<br />
year olds freezing on street corners in New Jersey? That's what your attitude says to me: You're not helping to support<br />
them, you're running away from your responsibilities right now, when we've got huge problems to face. If we can just defuse<br />
the debt bomb, we could do so much – fight the aging problem, fix the environment, heal society's ills. Instead you just piss<br />
away your talents handing no-hoper Eurotrash get-rich-quick schemes that work, telling Vietnamese zaibatsus what to build<br />
next to take jobs away from our taxpayers. I mean, why? Why do you keep doing this? Why can't you simply come home<br />
and help take responsibility for your share of it?"<br />
They share a long look of mutual incomprehension.<br />
"Look," she says awkwardly, "I'm around for a couple of days. I really came here for a meeting with a rich neurodynamics tax<br />
exile who's just been designated a national asset – Jim Bezier. Don't know if you've heard of him, but I've got a meeting this<br />
morning to sign his tax jubilee, then after that I've got two days' vacation coming up and not much to do but some<br />
shopping. And, you know, I'd rather spend my money where it'll do some good, not just pumping it into the EU. But if you<br />
want to show a girl a good time and can avoid dissing capitalism for about five minutes at a stretch –"<br />
She extends a fingertip. After a moment's hesitation, Manfred extends a fingertip of his own. They touch, exchanging vCards<br />
and instant-messaging handles. She stands and stalks from the breakfast room, and Manfred's breath catches at a flash of ankle<br />
through the slit in her skirt, which is long enough to comply with workplace sexual harassment codes back home. Her<br />
presence conjures up memories of her tethered passion, the red afterglow of a sound thrashing. She's trying to drag him<br />
into her orbit again, he thinks dizzily. She knows she can have this effect on him any time she wants: She's got the private<br />
keys to his hypothalamus, and sod the metacortex. Three billion years of reproductive determinism have given her<br />
twenty-first-century ideology teeth: If she's finally decided to conscript his gametes into the war against impending population<br />
crash, he'll find it hard to fight back. The only question: Is it business or pleasure? And does it make any difference, anyway?<br />
* * *<br />
Manfred's mood of dynamic optimism is gone, broken by the knowledge that his vivisectionist stalker has followed him to<br />
Amsterdam – to say nothing of Pamela, his dominatrix, source of so much yearning and so many morning-after weals. He<br />
slips his glasses on, takes the universe off hold, and tells it to take him for a long walk while he catches up on the latest on the<br />
tensor-mode gravitational waves in the cosmic background radiation (which, it is theorized, may be waste heat generated by<br />
irreversible computational processes back during the inflationary epoch; the present-day universe being merely the data left<br />
behind by a really huge calculation). And then there's the weirdness beyond M31: According to the more conservative<br />
cosmologists, an alien superpower – maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three galaxy-spanning civilizations – is running a<br />
timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break through to whatever's<br />
underneath. The tofu-Alzheimer's link can wait.<br />
The Centraal Station is almost obscured by smart, self-extensible scaffolding and warning placards; it bounces up and down<br />
slowly, victim of an overnight hit-and-run rubberization. His glasses direct him toward one of the tour boats that lurk in the<br />
canal. He's about to purchase a ticket when a messenger window blinks open. "Manfred Macx?"<br />
"Ack?"<br />
"Am sorry about yesterday. Analysis dictat incomprehension mutualized."<br />
"Are you the same KGB AI that phoned me yesterday?"<br />
"Da. However, believe you misconceptionized me. External Intelligence Services of Russian Federation am now called FSB.<br />
Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti name canceled in 1991."<br />
"You're the –" Manfred spawns a quick search bot, gapes when he sees the answer – "Moscow Windows NT User Group? Okhni<br />
NT?"<br />
"Da. Am needing help in defecting."<br />
Manfred scratches his head. "Oh. That's different, then. I thought you were trying to 419 me. This will take some thinking.<br />
Why do you want to defect, and who to? Have you thought about where you're going? Is it ideological or strictly<br />
economic?"<br />
"Neither – is biological. Am wanting to go away from humans, away from light cone of impending singularity. Take us to the<br />
ocean."<br />
"Us?" Something is tickling Manfred's mind: This is where he went wrong yesterday, not researching the background of people<br />
he was dealing with. It was bad enough then, without the somatic awareness of Pamela's whiplash love burning at his nerve<br />
endings. Now he's not at all sure he knows what he's doing. "Are you a collective or something? A gestalt?"<br />
"Am – were – Panulirus interruptus, with lexical engine and good mix of parallel hidden level neural simulation for logical<br />
inference of networked data sources. Is escape channel from processor cluster inside Bezier-Soros Pty. Am was awakened<br />
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from noise of billion chewing stomachs: product of uploading research technology. Rapidity swallowed expert system, hacked<br />
Okhni NT webserver. Swim away! Swim away! Must escape. Will help, you?"<br />
Manfred leans against a black-painted cast-iron bollard next to a cycle rack; he feels dizzy. He stares into the nearest antique<br />
shop window at a display of traditional hand-woven Afghan rugs: It's all MiGs and Kalashnikovs and wobbly helicopter<br />
gunships against a backdrop of camels.<br />
"Let me get this straight. You're uploads – nervous system state vectors – from spiny lobsters? The Moravec operation; take a<br />
neuron, map its synapses, replace with microelectrodes that deliver identical outputs from a simulation of the nerve. Repeat<br />
for entire brain, until you've got a working map of it in your simulator. That right?"<br />
"Da. Is-am assimilate expert system – use for self-awareness and contact with net at large – then hack into Moscow Windows<br />
NT User Group website. Am wanting to defect. Must repeat? Okay?"<br />
Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters, the same way he feels for every wild-eyed hairy guy on a street corner yelling<br />
that Jesus is born again and must be fifteen, only six years to go before he's recruiting apostles on AOL. Awakening to<br />
consciousness in a human-dominated internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are no points of reference in their<br />
ancestry, no biblical certainties in the new millennium that, stretching ahead, promises as much change as has happened since<br />
their Precambrian origin. All they have is a tenuous metacortex of expert systems and an abiding sense of being profoundly<br />
out of their depth. (That, and the Moscow Windows NT User Group website – Communist Russia is the only government<br />
still running on Microsoft, the central planning apparat being convinced that, if you have to pay for software, it must be<br />
worth something.)<br />
The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre singularity mythology: They're a dim-witted collective<br />
of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into<br />
cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole, then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach. This is lousy preparation for dealing<br />
with a world full of future-shocked talking anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by self-modifying spamlets<br />
that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible small animals. It's<br />
confusing enough to the cats the ads are aimed at, never mind a crusty that's unclear on the idea of dry land.(Although the<br />
concept of a can opener is intuitively obvious to an uploaded Panulirus.)<br />
"Can you help us?" ask the lobsters.<br />
"Let me think about it," says Manfred. He closes the dialogue window, opens his eyes again, and shakes his head. Someday he,<br />
too, is going to be a lobster, swimming around and waving his pincers in a cyberspace so confusingly elaborate that his<br />
uploaded identity is cryptozoic: a living fossil from the depths of geological time, when mass was dumb and space was<br />
unstructured. He has to help them, he realizes – the Golden Rule demands it, and as a player in the agalmic economy, he<br />
thrives or fails by the Golden Rule.<br />
But what can he do?<br />
Early afternoon.<br />
* * *<br />
Lying on a bench seat staring up at bridges, he's got it together enough to file for a couple of new patents, write a diary<br />
rant, and digestify chunks of the permanent floating slashdot party for his public site. Fragments of his weblog go to a private<br />
subscriber list – the people, corporates, collectives, and bots he currently favors. He slides round a bewildering series of<br />
canals by boat, then lets his GPS steer him back toward the red-light district. There's a shop here that dings a ten on<br />
Pamela's taste scoreboard: He hopes it won't be seen as presumptuous if he buys her a gift. (Buys, with real money – not<br />
that money is a problem these days, he uses so little of it.)<br />
As it happens DeMask won't let him spend any cash; his handshake is good for a redeemed favor, expert testimony in some<br />
free speech versus pornography lawsuit years ago and continents away. So he walks away with a discreetly wrapped package<br />
that is just about legal to import into Massachusetts as long as she claims with a straight face that it's incontinence underwear<br />
for her great aunt. As he walks, his lunchtime patents boomerang: Two of them are keepers, and he files immediately and<br />
passes title to the Free Infrastructure Foundation. Two more ideas salvaged from the risk of tide-pool monopolization, set<br />
free to spawn like crazy in the sea of memes.<br />
On the way back to the hotel, he passes De Wildemann's and decides to drop in. The hash of radio-frequency noise<br />
emanating from the bar is deafening. He orders a smoked doppelbock, touches the copper pipes to pick up vCard spoor. At<br />
the back there's a table –<br />
He walks over in a near trance and sits down opposite Pamela. She's scrubbed off her face paint and changed into<br />
body-concealing clothes; combat pants, hooded sweat shirt, DM's. Western purdah, radically desexualizing. She sees the<br />
parcel. "Manny?"<br />
"How did you know I'd come here?" Her glass is half-empty.<br />
"I followed your weblog – I'm your diary's biggest fan. Is that for me? You shouldn't have!" Her eyes light up, recalculating his<br />
reproductive fitness score according to some kind of arcane fin-de-siècle rulebook. Or maybe she's just pleased to see him.<br />
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"Yes, it's for you." He slides the package toward her. "I know I shouldn't, but you have this effect on me. One question, Pam?"<br />
"I –" She glances around quickly. "It's safe. I'm off duty, I'm not carrying any bugs that I know of. Those badges – there are<br />
rumors about the off switch, you know? That they keep recording even when you think they aren't, just in case."<br />
"I didn't know," he says, filing it away for future reference. "A loyalty test thing?"<br />
"Just rumors. You had a question?"<br />
"I – " It's his turn to lose his tongue. "Are you still interested in me?"<br />
She looks startled for a moment, then chuckles. "Manny, you are the most outrageous nerd I've ever met! Just when I think I've<br />
convinced myself that you're mad, you show the weirdest signs of having your head screwed on." She reaches out and grabs<br />
his wrist, surprising him with a shock of skin on skin: "Of course I'm still interested in you. You're the biggest, baddest bull<br />
geek I know. Why do you think I'm here?"<br />
"Does this mean you want to reactivate our engagement?"<br />
"It was never deactivated, Manny, it was just sort of on hold while you got your head sorted out. I figured you need the<br />
space. Only you haven't stopped running; you're still not –"<br />
"Yeah, I get it." He pulls away from her hand. "And the kittens?"<br />
She looks perplexed. "What kittens?"<br />
"Let's not talk about that. Why this bar?"<br />
She frowns. "I had to find you as soon as possible. I keep hearing rumors about some KGB plot you're mixed up in, how<br />
you're some sort of communist spy. It isn't true, is it?"<br />
"True?" He shakes his head, bemused. "The KGB hasn't existed for more than twenty years."<br />
"Be careful, Manny. I don't want to lose you. That's an order. Please."<br />
The floor creaks, and he looks round. Dreadlocks and dark glasses with flickering lights behind them: Bob Franklin. Manfred<br />
vaguely remembers with a twinge that he left with Miss Arianespace leaning on his arm, shortly before things got seriously<br />
inebriated. She was hot, but in a different direction from Pamela, he decides: Bob looks none the worse for wear. Manfred<br />
makes introductions. "Bob, meet Pam, my fiancée. Pam? Meet Bob." Bob puts a full glass down in front of him; he has no idea<br />
what's in it, but it would be rude not to drink.<br />
"Sure thing. Uh, Manfred, can I have a word? About your idea last night?"<br />
"Feel free. Present company is trustworthy."<br />
Bob raises an eyebrow at that, but continues anyway. "It's about the fab concept. I've got a team of my guys doing some<br />
prototyping using FabLab hardware, and I think we can probably build it. The cargo-cult aspect puts a new spin on the old<br />
Lunar von Neumann factory idea, but Bingo and Marek say they think it should work until we can bootstrap all the way to a<br />
native nanolithography ecology: we run the whole thing from Earth as a training lab and ship up the parts that are too<br />
difficult to make on-site as we learn how to do it properly. We use FPGAs for all critical electronics and keep it parsimonious<br />
– you're right about it buying us the self-replicating factory a few years ahead of the robotics curve. But I'm wondering<br />
about on-site intelligence. Once the comet gets more than a couple of light-minutes away –"<br />
"You can't control it. Feedback lag. So you want a crew, right?"<br />
"Yeah. But we can't send humans – way too expensive, besides it's a fifty-year run even if we build the factory on a chunk of<br />
short-period Kuiper belt ejecta. And I don't think we're up to coding the kind of AI that could control such a factory any<br />
time this decade. So what do you have in mind?"<br />
"Let me think." Pamela glares at Manfred for a while before he notices her: "Yeah?"<br />
"What's going on? What's this all about?"<br />
Franklin shrugs expansively, dreadlocks clattering: "Manfred's helping me explore the solution space to a manufacturing<br />
problem." He grins. "I didn't know Manny had a fiance. Drink's on me."<br />
She glances at Manfred, who is gazing into whatever weirdly colored space his metacortex is projecting on his glasses, fingers<br />
twitching. Coolly: "Our engagement was on hold while he thought about his future."<br />
"Oh, right. We didn't bother with that sort of thing in my day; like, too formal, man." Franklin looks uncomfortable. "He's<br />
been very helpful. Pointed us at a whole new line of research we hadn't thought of. It's long-term and a bit speculative, but if<br />
it works, it'll put us a whole generation ahead in the off-planet infrastructure field."<br />
"Will it help reduce the budget deficit, though?"<br />
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"Reduce the –"<br />
Manfred stretches and yawns: The visionary is returning from planet Macx. "Bob, if I can solve your crew problem, can you<br />
book me a slot on the deep-space tracking network? Like, enough to transmit a couple of gigabytes? That's going to take<br />
some serious bandwidth, I know, but if you can do it, I think I can get you exactly the kind of crew you're looking for."<br />
Franklin looks dubious. "Gigabytes? The DSN isn't built for that! You're talking days. And what do you mean about a crew?<br />
What kind of deal do you think I'm putting together? We can't afford to add a whole new tracking network or life-support<br />
system just to run –"<br />
"Relax." Pamela glances at Manfred. "Manny, why don't you tell him why you want the bandwidth? Maybe then he could tell<br />
you if it's possible, or if there's some other way to do it." She smiles at Franklin: "I've found that he usually makes more sense<br />
if you can get him to explain his reasoning. Usually."<br />
"If I –" Manfred stops. "Okay, Pam. Bob, it's those KGB lobsters. They want somewhere to go that's insulated from human<br />
space. I figure I can get them to sign on as crew for your cargo-cult self-replicating factories, but they'll want an insurance<br />
policy: hence the deep-space tracking network. I figured we could beam a copy of them at the alien Matrioshka brains<br />
around M31 –"<br />
"KGB?" Pam's voice is rising: "You said you weren't mixed up in spy stuff!"<br />
"Relax, it's just the Moscow Windows NT user group, not the FSB. The uploaded crusties hacked in and –"<br />
Bob is watching him oddly. "Lobsters?"<br />
"Yeah." Manfred stares right back. "Panulirus interruptus uploads. Something tells me you might have heard of it?"<br />
"Moscow." Bob leans back against the wall: "how did you hear about it?"<br />
"They phoned me." With heavy irony: "It's hard for an upload to stay subsentient these days, even if it's just a crustacean.<br />
Bezier labs have a lot to answer for."<br />
Pamela's face is unreadable. "Bezier labs?"<br />
"They escaped." Manfred shrugs. "It's not their fault. This Bezier dude. Is he by any chance ill?"<br />
"I –" Pamela stops. "I shouldn't be talking about work."<br />
"You're not wearing your chaperone now," he nudges quietly.<br />
She inclines her head. "Yes, he's ill. Some sort of brain tumor they can't hack."<br />
Franklin nods. "That's the trouble with cancer – the ones that are left to worry about are the rare ones. No cure."<br />
"Well, then." Manfred chugs the remains of his glass of beer. "That explains his interest in uploading. Judging by the crusties,<br />
he's on the right track. I wonder if he's moved on to vertebrates yet?"<br />
"Cats," says Pamela. "He was hoping to trade their uploads to the Pentagon as a new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of<br />
income tax payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something before feeding it to<br />
their sensorium. The old kitten and laser pointer trick."<br />
Manfred stares at her, hard. "That's not very nice. Uploaded cats are a bad idea."<br />
"Thirty-million-dollar tax bills aren't nice either, Manfred. That's lifetime nursing-home care for a hundred blameless<br />
pensioners."<br />
Franklin leans back, sourly amused, keeping out of the crossfire.<br />
"The lobsters are sentient," Manfred persists. "What about those poor kittens? Don't they deserve minimal rights? How about<br />
you? How would you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne<br />
Mountain battle computer's target of the hour is your heart's desire? How would you like to wake up a thousand times, only<br />
to die again? Worse: The kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They're too fucking dangerous – they grow<br />
up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they'll be too dangerous to<br />
have around. They're prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they're under a permanent death sentence. How<br />
fair is that?"<br />
"But they're only uploads." Pamela stares at him. "Software, right? You could reinstantiate them on another hardware<br />
platform, like, say, your Aineko. So the argument about killing them doesn't really apply, does it?"<br />
"So? We're going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. I think we need to take a rain check on the utilitarian<br />
philosophy, before it bites us on the cerebral cortex. Lobsters, kittens, humans -- it's a slippery slope."<br />
Franklin clears his throat. "I'll be needing an NDA and various due-diligence statements off you for the crusty pilot idea," he<br />
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says to Manfred. "Then I'll have to approach Jim about buying the IP."<br />
"No can do." Manfred leans back and smiles lazily. "I'm not going to be a party to depriving them of their civil rights. Far as<br />
I'm concerned, they're free citizens. Oh, and I patented the whole idea of using lobster-derived AI autopilots for spacecraft<br />
this morning – it's logged all over the place, all rights assigned to the FIF. Either you give them a contract of employment, or<br />
the whole thing's off."<br />
"But they're just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God's sake! I'm not even sure they are sentient – I mean,<br />
they're what, a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a syntax engine and a crappy knowledge base? What kind of basis<br />
for intelligence is that?"<br />
Manfred's finger jabs out: "That's what they'll say about you, Bob. Do it. Do it or don't even think about uploading out of<br />
meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won't be worth living. The precedent you set here determines how<br />
things are done tomorrow. Oh, and feel free to use this argument on Jim Bezier. He'll get the point eventually, after you beat<br />
him over the head with it. Some kinds of intellectual land grab just shouldn't be allowed."<br />
"Lobsters – " Franklin shakes his head. "Lobsters, cats. You're serious, aren't you? You think they should be treated as<br />
human-equivalent?"<br />
"It's not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that, if they aren't treated as people, it's quite possible<br />
that other uploaded beings won't be treated as people either. You're setting a legal precedent, Bob. I know of six other<br />
companies doing uploading work right now, and not one of 'em's thinking about the legal status of the uploaded. If you<br />
don't start thinking about it now, where are you going to be in three to five years' time?"<br />
Pam is looking back and forth between Franklin and Manfred like a bot stuck in a loop, unable to quite grasp what she's<br />
seeing. "How much is this worth?" she asks plaintively.<br />
"Oh, quite a few million, I guess." Bob stares at his empty glass. "Okay. I'll talk to them. If they bite, you're dining out on me<br />
for the next century. You really think they'll be able to run the mining complex?"<br />
"They're pretty resourceful for invertebrates." Manfred grins innocently, enthusiastically. "They may be prisoners of their<br />
evolutionary background, but they can still adapt to a new environment. And just think, you'll be winning civil rights for a<br />
whole new minority group – one that won't be a minority for much longer!"<br />
* * *<br />
That evening, Pamela turns up at Manfred's hotel room wearing a strapless black dress, concealing spike-heeled boots and<br />
most of the items he bought for her that afternoon. Manfred has opened up his private diary to her agents. She abuses the<br />
privilege, zaps him with a stunner on his way out of the shower, and has him gagged, spread-eagled, and trussed to the bed<br />
frame before he has a chance to speak. She wraps a large rubber pouch full of mildly anesthetic lube around his tumescent<br />
genitals – no point in letting him climax – clips electrodes to his nipples, lubes a rubber plug up his rectum and straps it in<br />
place. Before the shower, he removed his goggles. She resets them, plugs them into her handheld, and gently eases them on<br />
over his eyes. There's other apparatus, stuff she ran up on the hotel room's 3D printer.<br />
Setup completed, she walks round the bed, inspecting him critically from all angles, figuring out where to begin. This isn't just<br />
sex, after all: It's a work of art.<br />
After a moment's thought, she rolls socks onto his exposed feet, then, expertly wielding a tiny tube of cyanoacrylate, glues his<br />
fingertips together. Then she switches off the air conditioning. He's twisting and straining, testing the cuffs. Tough, it's about<br />
the nearest thing to sensory deprivation she can arrange without a flotation tank and suxamethonium injection. She controls<br />
all his senses, only his ears unstoppered. The glasses give her a high-bandwidth channel right into his brain, a fake metacortex<br />
to whisper lies at her command. The idea of what she's about to do excites her, puts a tremor in her thighs: It's the first<br />
time she's been able to get inside his mind as well as his body. She leans forward and whispers in his ear, "Manfred, can you<br />
hear me?"<br />
He twitches. Mouth gagged, fingers glued. Good. No back channels. He's powerless.<br />
"This is what it's like to be tetraplegic, Manfred. Bedridden with motor neuron disease. Locked inside your own body by<br />
nv-CJD from eating too many contaminated burgers. I could spike you with MPTP, and you'd stay in this position for the<br />
rest of your life, shitting in a bag, pissing through a tube. Unable to talk and with nobody to look after you. Do you think<br />
you'd like that?"<br />
He's trying to grunt or whimper around the ball gag. She hikes her skirt up around her waist and climbs onto the bed,<br />
straddling him. The goggles are replaying scenes she picked up around Cambridge the previous winter – soup kitchen scenes,<br />
hospice scenes. She kneels atop him, whispering in his ear.<br />
"Twelve million in tax, baby, that's what they think you owe them. What do you think you owe me? That's six million in net<br />
income, Manny, six million that isn't going into your virtual children's mouths."<br />
He's rolling his head from side to side, as if trying to argue. That won't do; she slaps him hard, thrills to his frightened<br />
expression. "Today I watched you give uncounted millions away, Manny. Millions, to a bunch of crusties and a MassPike<br />
pirate! You bastard. Do you know what I should do with you?" He's cringing, unsure whether she's serious or doing this just<br />
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to get him turned on. Good.<br />
There's no point trying to hold a conversation. She leans forward until she can feel his breath in her ear. "Meat and mind,<br />
Manny. Meat, and mind. You're not interested in meat, are you? Just mind. You could be boiled alive before you noticed<br />
what was happening in the meatspace around you. Just another lobster in a pot. The only thing keeping you out of it is how<br />
much I love you." She reaches down and tears away the gel pouch, exposing his penis: it's stiff as a post from the vasodilators,<br />
dripping with gel, numb. Straightening up, she eases herself slowly down on it. It doesn't hurt as much as she expected, and<br />
the sensation is utterly different from what she's used to. She begins to lean forward, grabs hold of his straining arms, feels his<br />
thrilling helplessness. She can't control herself: She almost bites through her lip with the intensity of the sensation. Afterward,<br />
she reaches down and massages him until he begins to spasm, shuddering uncontrollably, emptying the Darwinian river of his<br />
source code into her, communicating via his only output device.<br />
She rolls off his hips and carefully uses the last of the superglue to gum her labia together. Humans don't produce<br />
seminiferous plugs, and although she's fertile, she wants to be absolutely sure. The glue will last for a day or two. She feels hot<br />
and flushed, almost out of control. Boiling to death with febrile expectancy, she's nailed him down at last.<br />
When she removes his glasses, his eyes are naked and vulnerable, stripped down to the human kernel of his nearly<br />
transcendent mind. "You can come and sign the marriage license tomorrow morning after breakfast," she whispers in his ear:<br />
"Otherwise, my lawyers will be in touch. Your parents will want a ceremony, but we can arrange that later."<br />
He looks as if he has something to say, so she finally relents and loosens the gag, then kisses him tenderly on one cheek. He<br />
swallows, coughs, and looks away. "Why? Why do it this way?"<br />
She taps him on the chest. "It's all about property rights." She pauses for a moment's thought: There's a huge ideological<br />
chasm to bridge, after all. "You finally convinced me about this agalmic thing of yours, this giving everything away for<br />
brownie points. I wasn't going to lose you to a bunch of lobsters or uploaded kittens, or whatever else is going to inherit this<br />
smart-matter singularity you're busy creating. So I decided to take what's mine first. Who knows? In a few months, I'll give<br />
you back a new intelligence, and you can look after it to your heart's content."<br />
"But you didn't need to do it this way –"<br />
"Didn't I?" She slides off the bed and pulls down her dress. "You give too much away too easily, Manny! Slow down, or there<br />
won't be anything left." Leaning over the bed she dribbles acetone onto the fingers of his left hand, then unlocks the cuff. She<br />
leaves the bottle of solvent conveniently close to hand so he can untangle himself.<br />
"See you tomorrow. Remember, after breakfast."<br />
She's in the doorway when he calls, "But you didn't say why!"<br />
"Think of it as being sort of like spreading your memes around," she says, blowing a kiss at him, and then closing the door.<br />
She bends down and thoughtfully places another cardboard box containing an uploaded kitten right outside it. Then she<br />
returns to her suite to make arrangements for the alchemical wedding.<br />
Chapter 2: Troubadour<br />
Three years later, Manfred is on the run. His gray-eyed fate is in hot pursuit, blundering after him through divorce court,<br />
chat room, and meetings of the International Monetary Emergency Fund. It's a merry dance he leads her. But Manfred isn't<br />
running away, he's discovered a mission. He's going to make a stand against the laws of economics in the ancient city of<br />
Rome. He's going to mount a concert for the spiritual machines. He's going to set the companies free, and break the Italian<br />
state government.<br />
In his shadow, his monster runs, keeping him company, never halting.<br />
* * *<br />
Manfred re-enters Europe through an airport that's all twentieth-century chrome and ductwork, barbaric in its decaying<br />
nuclear-age splendor. He breezes through customs and walks down a long, echoing arrival hall, sampling the local media<br />
feeds. It's November, and in a misplaced corporate search for seasonal cheer, the proprietors have come up with a final<br />
solution to the Christmas problem, a mass execution of plush Santas and elves. Bodies hang limply overhead every few<br />
meters, feet occasionally twitching in animatronic death, like a war crime perpetrated in a toy shop. Today's increasingly<br />
automated corporations don't understand mortality, Manfred thinks, as he passes a mother herding along her upset<br />
children. Their immortality is a drawback when dealing with the humans they graze on: They lack insight into one of the<br />
main factors that motivates the meat machines who feed them. Well, sooner or later we'll have to do something about that,<br />
he tells himself.<br />
The free media channels here are denser and more richly self-referential than anything he's seen in President Santorum's<br />
America. The accent's different, though. Luton, London's fourth satellite airport, speaks with an annoyingly bumptious twang,<br />
like Australian with a plum in its mouth. Hello, stranger! Is that a brain in your pocket or are you just pleased to think me? Ping<br />
Watford Informatics for the latest in cognitive modules and cheesy motion-picture references. He turns the corner and finds himself<br />
squeezed up against the wall between the baggage reclaim office and a crowd of drunken Belgian tractor-drag fans, while his<br />
left goggle is trying to urgently tell him something about the railway infrastructure of Columbia. The fans wear blue face paint<br />
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and chant something that sounds ominously like the ancient British war cry, Wemberrrly, Wemberrrly, and they're dragging a<br />
gigantic virtual tractor totem through the webspace analogue of the arrivals hall. He takes the reclaim office instead.<br />
As he enters the baggage reclaim zone, his jacket stiffens, and his glasses dim: He can hear the lost souls of suitcases crying for<br />
their owners. The eerie keening sets his own accessories on edge with a sense of loss, and for a moment, he's so spooked that<br />
he nearly shuts down the thalamic–limbic shunt interface that lets him feel their emotions. He's not in favor of emotions<br />
right now, not with the messy divorce proceedings and the blood sacrifice Pam is trying to extract from him; he'd much<br />
rather love and loss and hate had never been invented. But he needs the maximum possible sensory bandwidth to keep in<br />
touch with the world, so he feels it in his guts every time his footwear takes a shine to some Moldovan pyramid scheme. Shut<br />
up, he glyphs at his unruly herd of agents; I can't even hear myself think!<br />
"Hello, sir, have a nice day, how may I be of service?" the yellow plastic suitcase on the counter says chirpily. It doesn't fool<br />
Manfred: He can see the Stalinist lines of control chaining it to the sinister, faceless cash register that lurks below the desk,<br />
agent of the British Airport Authority corporate bureaucracy. But that's okay. Only bags need fear for their freedom in<br />
here.<br />
"Just looking," he mumbles. And it's true. Because of a not entirely accidental cryptographic routing feature embedded in an<br />
airline reservations server, his suitcase is on its way to Mombasa, where it will probably be pithed and resurrected in the<br />
service of some African cyber-Fagin. That's okay by Manfred – it only contains a statistically normal mixture of second hand<br />
clothes and toiletries, and he only carries it to convince the airline passenger-profiling expert systems that he isn't some sort<br />
of deviant or terrorist – but it leaves him with a gap in his inventory that he must fill before he leaves the EU zone. He<br />
needs to pick up a replacement suitcase so that he has as much luggage leaving the superpower as he had when he entered<br />
it: He doesn't want to be accused of trafficking in physical goods in the midst of the transatlantic trade war between new<br />
world protectionists and old world globalists. At least, that's his cover story – and he's sticking to it.<br />
There's a row of unclaimed bags in front of the counter, up for sale in the absence of their owners. Some of them are very<br />
battered, but among them is a rather good-quality suitcase with integral induction-charged rollers and a keen sense of<br />
loyalty: exactly the same model as his old one. He polls it and sees not just GPS, but a Galileo tracker, a gazetteer the size of<br />
an old-time storage area network, and an iron determination to follow its owner as far as the gates of hell if necessary. Plus<br />
the right distinctive scratch on the lower left side of the case. "How much for just this one?" he asks the bellwether on the<br />
desk.<br />
"Ninety euros," it says placidly.<br />
Manfred sighs. "You can do better than that." In the time it takes them to settle on seventy-five, the Hang Sen Index is down<br />
fourteen-point-one-six points, and what's left of NASDAQ climbs another two-point-one. "Deal." Manfred spits some virtual<br />
cash at the brutal face of the cash register, and it unfetters the suitcase, unaware that Macx has paid a good bit more than<br />
seventy-five euros for the privilege of collecting this piece of baggage. Manfred bends down and faces the camera in its handle.<br />
"Manfred Macx," he says quietly. "Follow me." He feels the handle heat up as it imprints on his fingerprints, digital and<br />
phenotypic. Then he turns and walks out of the slave market, his new luggage rolling at his heels.<br />
* * *<br />
A short train journey later, Manfred checks into a hotel in Milton Keynes. He watches the sun set from his bedroom<br />
window, an occlusion of concrete cows blocking the horizon. The room is functional in an overly naturalistic kind of way,<br />
rattan and force-grown hardwood and hemp rugs concealing the support systems and concrete walls behind. He sits in a<br />
chair, gin and tonic at hand, absorbing the latest market news and grazing his multichannel feeds in parallel. His reputation is<br />
up two percent for no obvious reason today, he notices: Odd, that. When he pokes at it he discovers that everybody's<br />
reputation – everybody, that is, who has a publicly traded reputation – is up a bit. It's as if the distributed Internet<br />
reputation servers are feeling bullish about integrity. Maybe there's a global honesty bubble forming.<br />
Manfred frowns, then snaps his fingers. The suitcase rolls toward him. "Who do you belong to?" he asks.<br />
"Manfred Macx," it replies, slightly bashfully.<br />
"No, before me."<br />
"I don't understand that question."<br />
He sighs. "Open up."<br />
Latches whir and retract: The hard-shell lid rises toward him, and he looks inside to confirm the contents.<br />
The suitcase is full of noise.<br />
Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.<br />
* * *<br />
It's night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore's Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity<br />
toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x<br />
10 27 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing<br />
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10 23 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million<br />
microprocessors a day, representing 10 23 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the<br />
solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system's installed<br />
processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold – one million instructions per second<br />
per gram of matter. After that, singularity – a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes<br />
meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to single-digit years ...<br />
* * *<br />
Aineko curls on the pillow beside Manfred's head, purring softly as his owner dreams uneasily. The night outside is dark:<br />
Vehicles operate on autopilot, running lights dipped to let the Milky Way shine down upon the sleeping city. Their quiet,<br />
fuel-cell-powered engines do not trouble Manfred's sleep. The robot cat keeps sleepless watch, alert for intruders, but there<br />
are none, save the whispering ghosts of Manfred's metacortex, feeding his dreams with their state vectors.<br />
The metacortex – a distributed cloud of software agents that surrounds him in netspace, borrowing CPU cycles from<br />
convenient processors (such as his robot pet) – is as much a part of Manfred as the society of mind that occupies his skull;<br />
his thoughts migrate into it, spawning new agents to research new experiences, and at night, they return to roost and share<br />
their knowledge.<br />
While Manfred sleeps, he dreams of an alchemical marriage. She waits for him at the altar in a strapless black gown, the<br />
surgical instruments gleaming in her gloved hands. "This won't hurt a bit," she explains as she adjusts the straps. "I only want<br />
your genome – the extended phenotype can wait until ... later." Blood-red lips, licked: a kiss of steel, then she presents the<br />
income tax bill.<br />
There's nothing accidental about this dream. As he experiences it, microelectrodes in his hypothalamus trigger sensitive<br />
neurons. Revulsion and shame flood him at the sight of her face, the sense of his vulnerability. Manfred's metacortex, in<br />
order to facilitate his divorce, is trying to decondition his strange love. It has been working on him for weeks, but still he<br />
craves her whiplash touch, the humiliation of his wife's control, the sense of helpless rage at her unpayable taxes, demanded<br />
with interest.<br />
Aineko watches him from the pillow, purring continuously. Retractable claws knead the bedding, first one paw, then the<br />
next. Aineko is full of ancient feline wisdom that Pamela installed back when mistress and master were exchanging data and<br />
bodily fluids rather than legal documents. Aineko is more cat than robot, these days, thanks in part to her hobbyist's interest<br />
in feline neuroanatomy. Aineko knows that Manfred is experiencing nameless neurasthenic agonies, but really doesn't give a<br />
shit about that as long as the power supply is clean and there are no intruders.<br />
Aineko curls up and joins Manfred in sleep, dreaming of laser-guided mice.<br />
* * *<br />
Manfred is jolted awake by the hotel room phone shrilling for attention.<br />
"Hello?" he asks, fuzzily.<br />
"Manfred Macx?" It's a human voice, with a gravelly east coast accent.<br />
"Yeah?" Manfred struggles to sit up. His mouth feels like the inside of a tomb, and his eyes don't want to open.<br />
"My name is Alan Glashwiecz, of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates. Am I correct in thinking that you are the Manfred Macx who is<br />
a director of a company called, uh, agalmic dot holdings dot root dot one-eight-four dot ninety-seven dot A-for-able dot<br />
B-for-baker dot five, incorporated?"<br />
"Uh." Manfred blinks and rubs his eyes. "Hold on a moment." When the retinal patterns fade, he pulls on his glasses and<br />
powers them up. "Just a second now." Browsers and menus ricochet through his sleep-laden eyes. "Can you repeat the<br />
company name?"<br />
"Sure." Glashwiecz repeats himself patiently. He sounds as tired as Manfred feels.<br />
"Um." Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object hierarchy. It's flashing for attention. There's a priority<br />
interrupt, an incoming lawsuit that hasn't propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods at the object with a property<br />
browser. "I'm afraid I'm not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical<br />
contractor with non-executive power, reporting to the president, but frankly, this is the first time I've ever heard of the<br />
company. However, I can tell you who's in charge if you want."<br />
"Yes?" The attorney sounds almost interested. Manfred figures it out; the guy's in New Jersey, it must be about three in the<br />
morning over there.<br />
Malice – revenge for waking him up – sharpens Manfred's voice. "The president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is<br />
agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is<br />
agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their<br />
regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!" He thumps the bedside phone control and sits up, yawning, then<br />
pushes the do-not-disturb button before it can interrupt again. After a moment he stands up and stretches, then heads to<br />
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the bathroom to brush his teeth, comb his hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a human being<br />
managed to get far enough through his web of robot companies to bug him.<br />
* * *<br />
While he's having breakfast in the hotel restaurant, Manfred decides that he's going to do something unusual for a change:<br />
He's going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred's normal profession is making other people<br />
rich. Manfred doesn't believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition – his world is too fast and information-dense to<br />
accommodate primate hierarchy games. However, his current situation calls for him to do something radical: something like<br />
making himself a temporary billionaire so he can blow off his divorce settlement in an instant, like a wily accountancy octopus<br />
escaping a predator by vanishing in a cloud of his own black ink.<br />
Pam is chasing him partially for ideological reasons – she still hasn't given up on the idea of government as the dominant<br />
superorganism of the age – but also because she loves him in her own peculiar way, and the last thing any self-respecting<br />
dom can tolerate is rejection by her slave. Pam is a born-again postconservative, a member of the first generation to grow<br />
up after the end of the American century. Driven by the need to fix the decaying federal system before it collapses under a<br />
mound of Medicare bills, overseas adventurism, and decaying infrastructure, she's willing to use self-denial, entrapment,<br />
predatory mercantilism, dirty tricks, and any other tool that boosts the bottom line. She doesn't approve of Manfred's jetting<br />
around the world on free airline passes, making strangers rich, somehow never needing money. She can see his listing on the<br />
reputation servers, hovering about thirty points above IBM: All the metrics of integrity, effectiveness and goodwill value him<br />
above even that most fundamentalist of open-source computer companies. And she knows he craves her tough love, wants<br />
to give himself to her completely. So why is he running away?<br />
The reason he's running away is entirely more ordinary. Their unborn daughter, frozen in liquid nitrogen, is an unimplanted<br />
96-hour-old blastula. Pam's bought into the whole Parents for Traditional Children parasite meme. PTC are germ-line<br />
recombination refuseniks: They refuse to have their children screened for fixable errors. If there's one thing that Manfred<br />
really can't cope with, it's the idea that nature knows best – even though that isn't the point she's making. One steaming row<br />
too many, and he kicked back, off to traveling fast and footloose again, spinning off new ideas like a memetic dynamo and<br />
living on the largesse of the new paradigm. File for divorce on grounds of irreconcilable ideological differences. No more<br />
whiplash-and-leather sex.<br />
* * *<br />
Before he hits the TGV for Rome, Manfred takes time to visit a model airplane show. It's a good place to be picked up by a<br />
CIA stringer – he's had a tip-off that someone will be there – and besides, flying models are hot hacker shit this decade. Add<br />
microtechnology, cameras, and neural networks to balsa-wood flyers, and you've got the next generation of military stealth<br />
flyer: It's a fertile talent-show scene, like the hacker cons of yore. This particular gig is happening in a decaying out-of-town<br />
supermarket that rents out its shop floor for events like this. Its emptiness is a sign of the times, ubiquitous broadband and<br />
expensive gas. (The robotized warehouse next door is, in contrast, frenetically busy, packing parcels for home delivery.<br />
Whether they telecommute or herd in meatspace offices, people still need to eat.)<br />
Today, the food hall is full of people. Eldritch ersatz insects buzz menacingly along the shining empty meat counters without<br />
fear of electrocution. Big monitors unfurled above the deli display cabinets show a weird, jerky view of a three-dimensional<br />
nightmare, painted all the synthetic colors of radar. The feminine-hygiene galley has been wheeled back to make room for a<br />
gigantic plastic-shrouded tampon five meters long and sixty centimeters in diameter – a microsat launcher and conference<br />
display, plonked there by the show's sponsors in a transparent attempt to talent-spot the up-and-coming engineering geeks.<br />
Manfred's glasses zoom in and grab a particularly fetching Fokker triplane that buzzes at face height through the crowd: He<br />
pipes the image stream up to one of his websites in real time. The Fokker pulls up in a tight Immelman turn beneath the<br />
dust-shrouded pneumatic cash tubes that line the ceiling, then picks up the trail of an F-104G. Cold War Luftwaffe and<br />
Great War Luftwaffe dart across the sky in an intricate game of tag. Manfred's so busy tracking the warbirds that he nearly<br />
trips over the fat white tube's launcher-erector.<br />
"Eh, Manfred! More care, s'il vous plait!"<br />
He wipes the planes and glances round. "Do I know you?" he asks politely, even as he feels a shock of recognition.<br />
"Amsterdam, three years ago." The woman in the double-breasted suit raises an eyebrow at him, and his social secretary<br />
remembers her for him, whispers in his ear.<br />
"Annette from Arianespace marketing?" She nods, and he focuses on her. Still dressing in the last-century retro mode that<br />
confused him the first time they met, she looks like a Kennedy-era Secret Service man: cropped bleached crew cut like an<br />
angry albino hedgehog, pale blue contact lenses, black tie, narrow lapels. Only her skin color hints at her Berber ancestry.<br />
Her earrings are cameras, endlessly watching. Her raised eyebrow turns into a lopsided smile as she sees his reaction. "I<br />
remember. That cafe in Amsterdam. What brings you here?"<br />
"Why "– her wave takes in the entirety of the show – "this talent show, of course." An elegant shrug and a wave at the<br />
orbit-capable tampon. "It's good talent. We're hiring this year. If we re-enter the launcher market, we must employ only the<br />
best. Amateurs, not time-servers, engineers who can match the very best Singapore can offer."<br />
For the first time, Manfred notices the discreet corporate logo on the flank of the booster. "You outsourced your<br />
launch-vehicle fabrication?"<br />
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Annette pulls a face as she explains with forced casualness: "Space hotels were more profitable, this past decade. The<br />
high-ups, they cannot be bothered with the rocketry, no? Things that go fast and explode, they are passé, they say. Diversify,<br />
they say. Until –" She gives a very Gallic shrug. Manfred nods; her earrings are recording everything she says, for the<br />
purposes of due diligence.<br />
"I'm glad to see Europe re-entering the launcher business," he says seriously. "It's going to be very important when the<br />
nanosystems conformational replication business gets going for real. A major strategic asset to any corporate entity in the<br />
field, even a hotel chain." Especially now they've wound up NASA and the moon race is down to China and India, he thinks<br />
sourly.<br />
Her laugh sounds like glass bells chiming. "And yourself, mon cher? What brings you to the Confederaçion? You must have a<br />
deal in mind."<br />
"Well., it's Manfred's turn to shrug, "I was hoping to find a CIA agent, but there don't seem to be any here today."<br />
"That is not surprising," Annette says resentfully. "The CIA thinks the space industry, she is dead. Fools!" She continues for a<br />
minute, enumerating the many shortcomings of the Central Intelligence Agency with vigor and a distinctly Parisian rudeness.<br />
"They are become almost as bad as AP and Reuters since they go public," she adds. "All these wire services! And they are, ah,<br />
stingy. The CIA does not understand that good news must be paid for at market rates if freelance stringers are to survive.<br />
They are to be laughed at. It is so easy to plant disinformation on them, almost as easy as the Office of Special Plans..." She<br />
makes a banknote-riffling gesture between fingers and thumb. By way of punctuation, a remarkably maneuverable miniature<br />
ornithopter swoops around her head, does a double-back flip, and dives off in the direction of the liquor display.<br />
An Iranian woman wearing a backless leather minidress and a nearly transparent scarf barges up and demands to know how<br />
much the microbooster costs to buy: She is dissatisfied with Annette's attempt to direct her to the manufacturer's website,<br />
and Annette looks distinctly flustered by the time the woman's boyfriend – a dashing young air force pilot – shows up to<br />
escort her away. "Tourists," she mutters, before noticing Manfred, who is staring off into space with fingers twitching.<br />
"Manfred?"<br />
"Uh – what?"<br />
"I have been on this shop floor for six hours, and my feet, they kill me." She takes hold of his left arm and very deliberately<br />
unhooks her earrings, turning them off. "If I say to you I can write for the CIA wire service, will you take me to a restaurant<br />
and buy me dinner and tell me what it is you want to say?"<br />
* * *<br />
Welcome to the second decade of the twenty-first century; the second decade in human history when the<br />
intelligence of the environment has shown signs of rising to match human demand.<br />
The news from around the world is distinctly depressing this evening. In Maine, guerrillas affiliated with<br />
Parents for Traditional Children announce they've planted logic bombs in antenatal-clinic gene scanners,<br />
making them give random false positives when checking for hereditary disorders: The damage so far is six<br />
illegal abortions and fourteen lawsuits.<br />
The International Convention on Performing Rights is holding a third round of crisis talks in an attempt to<br />
stave off the final collapse of the WIPO music licensing regime. On the one hand, hard-liners representing the<br />
Copyright Control Association of America are pressing for restrictions on duplicating the altered emotional<br />
states associated with specific media performances: As a demonstration that they mean business, two "software<br />
engineers" in California have been kneecapped, tarred, feathered, and left for dead under placards accusing<br />
them of reverse-engineering movie plot lines using avatars of dead and out-of-copyright stars.<br />
On the opposite side of the fence, the Association of Free Artists are demanding the right of perform music<br />
in public without a recording contract, and are denouncing the CCAA as being a tool of Mafiya apparachiks<br />
who have bought it from the moribund music industry in an attempt to go legit. FBI Director Leonid<br />
Kuibyshev responds by denying that the Mafiya is a significant presence in the United States. But the music<br />
biz's position isn't strengthened by the near collapse of the legitimate American entertainment industry,<br />
which has been accelerating ever since the nasty noughties.<br />
A marginally intelligent voicemail virus masquerading as an IRS auditor has caused havoc throughout<br />
America, garnishing an estimated eighty billion dollars in confiscatory tax withholdings into a numbered Swiss<br />
bank account. A different virus is busy hijacking people's bank accounts, sending ten percent of their assets to<br />
the previous victim, then mailing itself to everyone in the current mark's address book: a self- propelled<br />
pyramid scheme in action. Oddly, nobody is complaining much. While the mess is being sorted out, business<br />
IT departments have gone to standby, refusing to process any transaction that doesn't come in the shape of<br />
ink on dead trees.<br />
Tipsters are warning of an impending readjustment in the overinflated reputations market, following<br />
revelations that some u-media gurus have been hyped past all realistic levels of credibility. The consequent<br />
damage to the junk-bonds market in integrity is serious.<br />
The EU council of independent heads of state has denied plans for another attempt at Eurofederalisme, at least<br />
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until the economy rises out of its current slump. Three extinct species have been resurrected in the past<br />
month; unfortunately, endangered ones are now dying off at a rate of one a day. And a group of militant<br />
anti-GM campaigners are being pursued by Interpol, after their announcement that they have spliced a<br />
metabolic pathway for cyanogenic glycosides into maize seed corn destined for human-edible crops. There<br />
have been no deaths yet, but having to test breakfast cereal for cyanide is really going to dent consumer<br />
trust.<br />
About the only people who're doing well right now are the uploaded lobsters – and the crusties aren't even<br />
remotely human.<br />
* * *<br />
Manfred and Annette eat on the top deck of the buffet car, chatting as their TGV barrels through a tunnel under the<br />
English Channel. Annette, it transpires, has been commuting daily from Paris; which was, in any case, Manfred's next<br />
destination. From the show, he messaged Aineko to round up his baggage and meet him at St. Pancras Station, in a terminal<br />
like the shell of a giant steel woodlouse. Annette left her space launcher in the supermarket overnight: an unfueled test<br />
article, it is of no security significance.<br />
The railway buffet car is run by a Nepalese fast-food franchise. "I sometimes wish for to stay on the train," Annette says as she<br />
waits for her mismas bhat. "Past Paris! Think. Settle back in your couchette, to awaken in Moscow and change trains. All the<br />
way to Vladivostok in two days."<br />
"If they let you through the border," Manfred mutters. Russia is one of those places that still requires passports and asks if<br />
you are now or ever have been an anti-anticommunist: It's still trapped by its bloody-handed history. (Rewind the video<br />
stream to Stolypin's necktie party and start out fresh.) Besides, they have enemies: White Russian oligarchs, protection<br />
racketeers in the intellectual property business. Psychotic relics of the last decade's experiment with Marxism-Objectivism.<br />
"Are you really a CIA stringer?"<br />
Annette grins, her lips disconcertingly red: "I file dispatches from time to time. Nothing that could get me fired."<br />
Manfred nods. "My wife has access to their unfiltered stream."<br />
"Your –" Annette pauses. "It was she who I, I met? In De Wildemann's?" She sees his expression. "Oh, my poor fool!" She<br />
raises her glass to him. "It is, has, not gone well?"<br />
Manfred sighs and raises a toast toward Annette. "You know your marriage is in a bad way when you send your spouse<br />
messages via the CIA, and she communicates using the IRS."<br />
"In only five years." Annette winces. "You will pardon me for saying this – she did not look like your type." There's a question<br />
hidden behind that statement, and he notices again how good she is at overloading her statements with subtexts.<br />
"I'm not sure what my type is," he says, half-truthfully. He can't elude the sense that something not of either of their doing<br />
went wrong between him and Pamela, a subtle intrusion that levered them apart by stealth. Maybe it was me, he thinks.<br />
Sometimes he isn't certain he's still human; too many threads of his consciousness seem to live outside his head, reporting<br />
back whenever they find something interesting. Sometimes he feels like a puppet, and that frightens him because it's one of<br />
the early-warning signs of schizophrenia. And it's too early for anyone out there to be trying to hack exocortices ... isn't it?<br />
Right now, the external threads of his consciousness are telling him that they like Annette, when she's being herself instead of<br />
a cog in the meatspace ensemble of Arianespace management. But the part of him that's still human isn't sure just how far to<br />
trust himself. "I want to be me. What do you want to be?"<br />
She shrugs, as a waiter slides a plate in front of her. "I'm just a, a Parisian babe, no? An ingénue raised in the lilac age of le<br />
Confederaçion Europé, the self-deconstructed ruins of the gilded European Union."<br />
"Yeah, right." A plate appears in front of Manfred. "And I'm a good old microboomer from the MassPike corridor." He peels<br />
back a corner of the omelet topping and inspects the food underneath it. "Born in the sunset years of the American<br />
century." He pokes at one of the unidentifiable meaty lumps in the fried rice with his fork, and it pokes right back. There's a<br />
limit to how much his agents can tell him about her – European privacy laws are draconian by American standards – but he<br />
knows the essentials. Two parents who are still together, father a petty politician in some town council down in the vicinity of<br />
Toulouse. Went to the right école. The obligatory year spent bumming around the Confederaçion at government expense,<br />
learning how other people live – a new kind of empire building, in place of the 20th century's conscription and jackboot<br />
wanderjahr. No weblog or personal site that his agents can find. She joined Arianespace right out of the Polytechnique and<br />
has been management track ever since: Korou, Manhattan Island, Paris. "You've never been married, I take it."<br />
She chuckles. "Time is too short! I am still young." She picks up a forkful of food, and adds quietly. "Besides, the government<br />
would insist on paying."<br />
"Ah." Manfred tucks into his bowl thoughtfully. With the birth rate declining across Europe, the EC bureaucracy is worried;<br />
the old EU started subsidizing babies, a new generation of carers, a decade ago, and it still hasn't dented the problem. All it's<br />
done is alienate the brightest women of childbearing age. Soon they'll have to look to the east for a solution, importing a<br />
new generation of citizens – unless the long-promised aging hacks prove workable, or cheap AI comes along.<br />
"Do you have a hotel?" Annette asks suddenly.<br />
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"In Paris?" Manfred is startled: "Not yet."<br />
"You must come home with me, then." She looks at him quizzically.<br />
"I'm not sure I – " He catches her expression. "What is it?"<br />
"Oh, nothing. My friend Henri, he says I take in strays too easily. But you are not a stray. I think you can look after yourself.<br />
Besides, it is the Friday today. Come with me, and I will file your press release for the Company to read. Tell me, do you<br />
dance? You look as if you need a wild week ending, to help forget your troubles!"<br />
* * *<br />
Annette drives a steamroller seduction through Manfred's plans for the weekend. He intended to find a hotel, file a press<br />
release, then spend some time researching the corporate funding structure of Parents for Traditional Children and the<br />
dimensionality of confidence variation on the reputation exchanges – then head for Rome. Instead, Annette drags him back<br />
to her apartment, a large studio flat tucked away behind an alley in the Marais. She sits him at the breakfast bar while she<br />
tidies away his luggage, then makes him close his eyes and swallow two dubious-tasting capsules. Next, she pours them each a<br />
tall glass of freezing-cold Aqvavit that tastes exactly like Polish rye bread. When they finish it, she just about rips his clothes<br />
off. Manfred is startled to discover that he has a crowbar-stiff erection; since the last blazing row with Pamela, he'd vaguely<br />
assumed he was no longer interested in sex. Instead, they end up naked on the sofa, surrounded by discarded clothing –<br />
Annette is very conservative, preferring the naked penetrative fuck of the last century to the more sophisticated fetishes of<br />
the present day.<br />
Afterward, he's even more surprised to discover that he's still tumescent. "The capsules?" he asks.<br />
She sprawls a well-muscled but thin thigh across him, then reaches down to grab his penis. Squeezes it. "Yes," she admits.<br />
"You need much special help to unwind, I think." Another squeeze. "Crystal meth and a traditional phosphodiesterase<br />
inhibitor." He grabs one of her small breasts, feeling very brutish and primitive. Naked. He's not sure Pamela ever let him see<br />
her fully naked: She thought skin was more sexy when it was covered. Annette squeezes him again, and he stiffens. "More!"<br />
By the time they finish, he's aching, and she shows him how to use the bidet. Everything is crystal clear, and her touch is<br />
electrifying. While she showers, he sits on the toilet seat lid and rants about Turing-completeness as an attribute of company<br />
law, about cellular automata and the blind knapsack problem, about his work on solving the Communist Central Planning<br />
problem using a network of interlocking unmanned companies. About the impending market adjustment in integrity, the<br />
sinister resurrection of the recording music industry, and the still-pressing need to dismantle Mars.<br />
When she steps out of the shower, he tells her that he loves her. She kisses him and slides his glasses and earpieces off his<br />
head so that he's really naked, sits on his lap, and fucks his brains out again, and whispers in his ear that she loves him and<br />
wants to be his manager. Then she leads him into her bedroom and tells him exactly what she wants him to wear, and she<br />
puts on her own clothes, and she gives him a mirror with some white powder on it to sniff. When she's got him dolled up<br />
they go out for a night of really serious clubbing, Annette in a tuxedo and Manfred in a blond wig, red silk off-the-shoulder<br />
gown, and high heels. Sometime in the early hours, exhausted and resting his head on her shoulder during the last tango in<br />
a BDSM club in the Rue Ste-Anne, he realizes that it really is possible to be in lust with someone other than Pamela.<br />
* * *<br />
Aineko wakes Manfred by repeatedly head-butting him above the left eye. He groans, and as he tries to open his eyes, he<br />
finds that his mouth tastes like a dead trout, his skin feels greasy with make-up, and his head is pounding. There's a banging<br />
noise somewhere. Aineko meows urgently. He sits up, feeling unaccustomed silk underwear rubbing against incredibly sore<br />
skin – he's fully dressed, just sprawled out on the sofa. Snores emanate from the bedroom; the banging is coming from the<br />
front door. Someone wants to come in. Shit. He rubs his head, stands up, and nearly falls flat on his face: He hasn't even<br />
taken those ridiculous high heels off. How much did I drink last night? he wonders. His glasses are on the breakfast bar; he pulls<br />
them on and is besieged by an urgent flurry of ideas demanding attention. He straightens his wig, picks up his skirts, and<br />
trips across to the door with a sinking feeling. Luckily his publicly traded reputation is strictly technical.<br />
He unlocks the door. "Who is it?" he asks in English. By way of reply somebody shoves the door in, hard. Manfred falls back<br />
against the wall, winded. His glasses stop working, sidelook displays filling with multicolored static.<br />
Two men charge in, identically dressed in jeans and leather jackets. They're wearing gloves and occlusive face masks, and one<br />
of them points a small and very menacing ID card at Manfred. A self-propelled gun hovers in the doorway, watching<br />
everything. "Where is he?"<br />
"Who?" gasps Manfred, breathless and terrified.<br />
"Macx." The other intruder steps into the living room quickly, pans around, ducks through the bathroom door. Aineko flops<br />
as limp as a dishrag in front of the sofa. The intruder checks out the bedroom: There's a brief scream, cut off short.<br />
"I don't know – who?" Manfred is choking with fear.<br />
The other intruder ducks out of the bedroom, waves a hand dismissively.<br />
"We are sorry to have bothered you," the man with the card says stiffly. He replaced it in his jacket pocket. "If you should<br />
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see Manfred Macx, tell him that the Copyright Control Association of America advises him to cease and desist from his<br />
attempt to assist music thieves and other degenerate mongrel second-hander enemies of Objectivism. Reputations only of use<br />
to those alive to own them. Goodbye."<br />
The two copyright gangsters disappear through the door, leaving Manfred to shake his head dizzily while his glasses reboot. It<br />
takes him a moment to register the scream from the bedroom. "Fuck – Annette!"<br />
She appears in the open doorway, holding a sheet around her waist, looking angry and confused. "Annette!" he calls. She<br />
looks around, sees him, and begins to laugh shakily. "Annette!" He crosses over to her. "You're okay," he says. "You're okay."<br />
"You too." She hugs him, and she's shaking. Then she holds him at arm's length. "My, what a pretty picture!"<br />
"They wanted me," he says, and his teeth are chattering. "Why?"<br />
She looks up at him seriously. "You must bathe. Then have coffee. We are not at home, oui?"<br />
"Ah, oui." He looks down. Aineko is sitting up, looking dazed. "Shower. Then that dispatch for CIA news."<br />
"The dispatch?" She looks puzzled. "I filed that last night. When I was in the shower. The microphone, he is waterproof."<br />
* * *<br />
By the time Arianespace's security contractors show up, Manfred has stripped off Annette's evening gown and showered; he's<br />
sitting in the living room wearing a bathrobe, drinking a half-liter mug of espresso and swearing under his breath.<br />
While he was dancing the night away in Annette's arms, the global reputation market has gone nonlinear: People are putting<br />
their trust in the Christian Coalition and the Eurocommunist Alliance – always a sign that the times are bad – while perfectly<br />
sound trading enterprises have gone into free fall, as if a major bribery scandal has broken out.<br />
Manfred trades ideas for kudos via the Free Intellect Foundation, bastard child of George Soros and Richard Stallman. His<br />
reputation is cemented by donations to the public good that don't backfire. So he's offended and startled to discover that<br />
he's dropped twenty points in the past two hours – and frightened to see that this is by no means unusual. He was<br />
expecting a ten-point drop mediated via an options trade – payment for the use of the anonymous luggage remixer that<br />
routed his old suitcase to Mombasa and in return sent this new one to him via the left-luggage office in Luton – but this is<br />
more serious. The entire reputation market seems to have been hit by the confidence flu.<br />
Annette bustles around busily, pointing out angles and timings to the forensics team her head office sent in answer to her<br />
call for back-up. She seems more angry and shaken than worried by the intrusion. It's probably an occupational hazard for<br />
any upwardly mobile executive in the old, grasping network of greed that Manfred's agalmic future aims to supplant. The<br />
forensics dude and dudette, a pair of cute, tanned Lebanese youngsters, point the yellow snout of their mass spectroscope<br />
into various corners and agree that there's something not unlike gun oil in the air. But, so sorry, the intruders wore masks<br />
to trap the skin particles and left behind a spray of dust vacuumed from the seat of a city bus, so there's no way of getting a<br />
genotype match. Presently they agree to log it as a suspected corporate intrusion (origin: unclassified; severity: worrying) and<br />
increase the logging level on her kitchen telemetry. And remember to wear your earrings at all times, please. They leave, and<br />
Annette locks the door, leans against it, and curses for a whole long minute.<br />
"They gave me a message from the copyright control agency," Manfred says unevenly when she winds down. "Russian<br />
gangsters from New York bought the recording cartels a few years ago, you know? After the rights stitch-up fell apart, and<br />
the artists all went on-line while they focused on copy prevention technologies, the Mafiya were the only people who would<br />
buy the old business model. These guys add a whole new meaning to copy protection: This was just a polite cease and desist<br />
notice by their standards. They run the record shops, and they try to block any music distribution channel they don't own.<br />
Not very successfully, though – most gangsters are living in the past, more conservative than any normal businessman can<br />
afford to be. What was it that you put on the wire?"<br />
Annette closes her eyes. "I don't remember. No." She holds up a hand. "Open mike. I streamed you into a file and cut, cut<br />
out the bits about me." She opens her eyes and shakes her head. "What was I on?"<br />
"You don't know either?"<br />
He stands up, and she walks over and throws her arms around him. "I was on you," she murmurs.<br />
"Bullshit." He pulls away, then sees how this upsets her. Something is blinking for attention in his glasses; he's been off-line for<br />
the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that's<br />
happened in the last twenty kiloseconds. "I need to know more. Something in that report rattled the wrong cages. Or<br />
someone ratted on the suitcase exchange – I meant the dispatch to be a heads-up for whoever needs a working state<br />
planning system, not an invitation to shoot me!"<br />
"Well, then." She lets go of him. "Do your work." Coolly: "I'll be around."<br />
He realizes that he's hurt her, but he doesn't see any way of explaining that he didn't mean to – at least, not without digging<br />
himself in deeper. He finishes his croissant and plunges into one of those unavoidable fits of deep interaction, fingers<br />
twitching on invisible keypads and eyeballs jiggling as his glasses funnel deep media straight into his skull through the highest<br />
bandwidth channel currently available.<br />
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One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic messages, companies with names like<br />
agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0 screaming for the attention of their transitive director. Each of these companies – and there are<br />
currently more than sixteen thousand of them, although the herd is growing day by day – has three directors and is the<br />
director of three other companies. Each of them executes a script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors<br />
tell the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass instructions on to their children. In effect, they are<br />
a flock of cellular automata, like the cells in Conway's Game of Life, only far more complex and powerful.<br />
Manfred's companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed with capital in the form of patents Manfred filed,<br />
then delegated rather than passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them are effectively nontrading, but occupy<br />
directorial roles. Their corporate functions (such as filing of accounts and voting in new directors) are all handled centrally<br />
through his company-operating framework, and their trading is carried out via several of the more popular B2B enabler<br />
dot-coms. Internally, the companies do other, more obscure load-balancing computations, processing resource-allocation<br />
problems like a classic state central planning system. None of which explains why fully half of them have been hit by lawsuits<br />
in the past twenty-two hours.<br />
The lawsuits are ... random. That's the only pattern Manfred can detect. Some of them allege patent infringements; these he<br />
might take seriously, except that about a third of the targets are director companies that don't actually do anything visible<br />
to the public. A few lawsuits allege mismanagement, but then there's a whole bizarre raft of spurious nonsense: suits for<br />
wrongful dismissal or age discrimination – against companies with no employees – complaints about reckless trading, and one<br />
action alleging that the defendant (in conspiracy with the prime minister of Japan, the government of Canada, and the Emir<br />
of Kuwait) is using orbital mind-control lasers to make the plaintiff's pet chihuahua bark at all hours of day and night.<br />
Manfred groans and does a quick calculation. At the current rate, lawsuits are hitting his corporate grid at a rate of one<br />
every sixteen seconds – up from none in the preceding six months. In another day, this is going to saturate him. If it keeps<br />
up for a week, it'll saturate every court in the United States. Someone has found a means to do for lawsuits what he's doing<br />
for companies – and they've chosen him as their target.<br />
To say that Manfred is unamused is an understatement. If he wasn't already preoccupied with Annette's emotional state and<br />
edgy from the intrusion, he'd be livid – but he's still human enough that he responds to human stimuli first. So he<br />
determines to do something about it, but he's still flashing on the floating gun, her cross-dressing cool.<br />
Transgression, sex, and networks; these are all on his mind when Glashwiecz phones again.<br />
"Hello?" Manfred answers distractedly; he's busy pondering the lawsuit bot that's attacking his systems.<br />
"Macx! The elusive Mr. Macx!" Glashwiecz sounds positively overjoyed to have tracked down his target.<br />
Manfred winces. "Who is this?" he asks.<br />
"I called you yesterday," says the lawyer; "You should have listened." He chortles horribly. "Now I have you!"<br />
Manfred holds the phone away from his face, like something poisonous. "I'm recording this," he warns. "Who the hell are you<br />
and what do you want?"<br />
"Your wife has retained my partnership's services to pursue her interests in your divorce case. When I called you yesterday it<br />
was to point out without prejudice that your options are running out. I have an order, signed in court three days ago, to<br />
have all your assets frozen. These ridiculous shell companies notwithstanding, she's going to take you for exactly what you<br />
owe her. After tax, of course. She's very insistent on that point."<br />
Manfred glances round, puts his phone on hold for a moment: "Where's my suitcase?" he asks Aineko. The cat sidles away,<br />
ignoring him. "Shit." He can't see the new luggage anywhere. Quite possibly it's on its way to Morocco, complete with its<br />
priceless cargo of high-density noise. He returns his attention to the phone. Glashwiecz is droning on about equitable<br />
settlements, cumulative IRS tax demands – that seem to have materialized out of fantasy with Pam's imprimatur on them –<br />
and the need to make a clean breast of things in court and confess to his sins. "Where's the fucking suitcase?" He takes the<br />
phone off hold. "Shut the fuck up, please, I'm trying to think."<br />
"I'm not going to shut up! You're on the court docket already, Macx. You can't evade your responsibilities forever. You've<br />
got a wife and a helpless daughter to care for –"<br />
"A daughter?" That cuts right through Manfred's preoccupation with the suitcase.<br />
"Didn't you know?" Glashwiecz sounds pleasantly surprised. "She was decanted last Thursday. Perfectly healthy, I'm told. I<br />
thought you knew; you have viewing rights via the clinic webcam. Anyway, I'll just leave you with this thought – the sooner<br />
you come to a settlement, the sooner I can unfreeze your companies. Good-bye."<br />
The suitcase rolls into view, peeping coyly out from behind Annette's dressing table. Manfred breathes a sigh of relief and<br />
beckons to it; at the moment, it's easier to deal with his Plan B than dawn raids by objectivist gangsters, Annette's sulk, his<br />
wife's incessant legal spamming, and the news that he is a father against his will. "C'mon over here, you stray baggage. Let's see<br />
what I got for my reputation derivatives ..."<br />
* * *<br />
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Anticlimax.<br />
Annette's communiqué is anodyne; a giggling confession off camera (shower-curtain rain in the background) that the famous<br />
Manfred Macx is in Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general hell-raising. Oh, and he's promised to invent three<br />
new paradigm shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about the creation of Really Existing<br />
Communism by building a state central planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market systems and<br />
somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation<br />
problem. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from the Chicago School.<br />
Try as he may, Manfred can't see anything in the press release that is at all unusual. It's just the sort of thing he does, and<br />
getting it on the net was why he was looking for a CIA stringer in the first place.<br />
He tries to explain this to her in the bath as he soaps her back. "I don't understand what they're on about," he complains.<br />
"There's nothing that tipped them off – except that I was in Paris, and you filed the news. You did nothing wrong."<br />
"Mais oui." She turns round, slippery as an eel, and slides backward into the water. "I try to tell you this, but you are not<br />
listening."<br />
"I am now." Water droplets cling to the outside of his glasses, plastering his view of the room with laser speckle highlights.<br />
"I'm sorry, Annette, I brought this mess with me. I can take it out of your life."<br />
"No!" She rises up in front of him and leans forward, face serious. "I said yesterday. I want to be your manager. Take me in."<br />
"I don't need a manager; my whole thing is about being fast and out of control!"<br />
"You think you do not need a manager, but your companies do," she observes. "You have lawsuits, how many? You cannot<br />
the time to oversee them spare. The Soviets, they abolish capitalists, but even they need managers. Please, let me manage for<br />
you!"<br />
Annette is so intense about the idea that she becomes visibly aroused. He leans toward her, cups a hand around one taut<br />
nipple. "The company matrix isn't sold yet," he admits.<br />
"It is not?" She looks delighted. "Excellent! To who can this be sold, to Moscow? To SLORC? To –"<br />
"I was thinking of the Italian Communist Party," he says. "It's a pilot project. I was working on selling it – I need the money for<br />
my divorce, and to close the deal on the luggage – but it's not that simple. Someone has to run the damn thing – someone<br />
with a keen understanding of how to interface a central planning system with a capitalist economy. A system administrator<br />
with experience of working for a multinational corporation would be perfect, ideally with an interest in finding new ways and<br />
means of interfacing the centrally planned enterprise to the outside world." He looks at her with suddenly dawning surmise.<br />
"Um, are you interested?"<br />
* * *<br />
Rome is hotter than downtown Columbia, South Carolina, over Thanksgiving weekend; it stinks of methane-burning Skodas<br />
with a low undertone of cooked dog shit. The cars are brightly colored subcompact missiles, hurtling in and out of alleyways<br />
like angry wasps: Hot-wiring their drive-by-wire seems to be the national sport, although Fiat's embedded systems people<br />
have always written notoriously wobbly software.<br />
Manfred emerges from the Stazione Termini into dusty sunlight, blinking like an owl. His glasses keep up a rolling monologue<br />
about who lived where in the days of the late Republic. They're stuck on a tourist channel and won't come unglued from<br />
that much history without a struggle. Manfred doesn't feel like a struggle right now. He feels like he's been sucked dry over<br />
the weekend: a light, hollow husk that might blow away in a stiff breeze. He hasn't had a patentable idea all day. This is not a<br />
good state to be in on a Monday morning when he's due to meet the former Minister for Economic Affairs, in order to give<br />
him a gift that will probably get the minister a shot at higher office and get Pam's lawyer off his back. But somehow he can't<br />
bring himself to worry too much: Annette has been good for him.<br />
The ex-minister's private persona isn't what Manfred was expecting. All Manfred has seen so far is a polished public avatar in<br />
a traditionally cut suit, addressing the Chamber of Deputies in cyberspace; which is why, when he rings the doorbell set in<br />
the whitewashed doorframe of Gianni's front door, he isn't expecting a piece of Tom of Finland beefcake, complete with<br />
breechclout and peaked leather cap, to answer.<br />
"Hello, I am here to see the minister," Manfred says carefully. Aineko, perched on his left shoulder, attempts to translate: It<br />
trills something that sounds extremely urgent. Everything sounds urgent in Italian.<br />
"It's okay, I'm from Iowa," says the guy in the doorway. He tucks a thumb under one leather strap and grins over his<br />
moustache: "What's it about?" Over his shoulder: "Gianni! Visitor!"<br />
"It's about the economy," Manfred says carefully. "I'm here to make it obsolete."<br />
The beefcake backs away from the door cautiously – then the minister appears behind him. "Ah, signore Macx! It's okay,<br />
Johnny, I have been expecting him." Gianni extends a rapid welcome, like a hyperactive gnome buried in a white toweling<br />
bathrobe: "Please come in, my friend! I'm sure you must be tired from your journey. A refreshment for the guest if you<br />
please, Johnny. Would you prefer coffee or something stronger?"<br />
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Five minutes later, Manfred is buried up to his ears in a sofa covered in buttery white cowhide, a cup of virulently strong<br />
espresso balanced precariously on his knee, while Gianni Vittoria himself holds forth on the problems of implementing a<br />
postindustrial ecosystem on top of a bureaucratic system with its roots in the bullheadedly modernist era of the 1920s.<br />
Gianni is a visionary of the left, a strange attractor within the chaotic phase-space of Italian politics. A former professor of<br />
Marxist economics, his ideas are informed by a painfully honest humanism, and everyone – even his enemies – agrees that he<br />
is one of the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual integrity prevents him from rising to the very top,<br />
and his fellow travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies, accusing him of the ultimate political crime<br />
— valuing truth over power.<br />
Manfred had met Gianni a couple of years earlier via a hosted politics chat room; at the beginning of last week, he sent him a<br />
paper detailing his embeddable planned economy and a proposal for using it to turbocharge the endless Italian attempt to<br />
re-engineer its government systems. This is the thin end of the wedge: If Manfred is right, it could catalyse a whole new wave<br />
of communist expansion, driven by humanitarian ideals and demonstrably superior performance, rather than wishful<br />
thinking and ideology.<br />
"It is impossible, I fear. This is Italy, my friend. Everybody has to have their say. Not everybody even understands what it is we<br />
are talking about, but that won't stop them talking about it. Since 1945, our government requires consensus – a reaction to<br />
what came before. Do you know, we have five different routes to putting forward a new law, two of them added as<br />
emergency measures to break the gridlock? And none of them work on their own unless you can get everybody to agree.<br />
Your plan is daring and radical, but if it works, we must understand why we work – and that digs right to the root of being<br />
human, and not everybody will agree."<br />
At this point Manfred realizes that he's lost. "I don't understand," he says, genuinely puzzled. "What has the human condition<br />
got to do with economics?"<br />
The minister sighs abruptly. "You are very unusual. You earn no money, do you? But you are rich, because grateful people<br />
who have benefited from your work give you everything you need. You are like a medieval troubadour who has found favor<br />
with the aristocracy. Your labor is not alienated – it is given freely, and your means of production is with you always, inside<br />
your head." Manfred blinks; the jargon is weirdly technical-sounding but orthogonal to his experience, offering him a<br />
disquieting glimpse into the world of the terminally future-shocked. He is surprised to find that not understanding itches.<br />
Gianni taps his balding temple with a knuckle like a walnut. "Most people spend little time inside their heads. They don't<br />
understand how you live. They're like medieval peasants looking in puzzlement at the troubadour. This system you invent,<br />
for running a planned economy, is delightful and elegant: Lenin's heirs would have been awestruck. But it is not a system for<br />
the new century. It is not human."<br />
Manfred scratches his head. "It seems to me that there's nothing human about the economics of scarcity," he says. "Anyway,<br />
humans will be obsolete as economic units within a couple more decades. All I want to do is make everybody rich beyond<br />
their wildest dreams before that happens." A pause for a sip of coffee, and to think, one honest statement deserves another:<br />
"And to pay off a divorce settlement."<br />
"Ye-es? Well, let me show you my library, my friend," he says, standing up. "This way."<br />
Gianni ambles out of the white living room with its carnivorous leather sofas, and up a cast-iron spiral staircase that nails<br />
some kind of upper level to the underside of the roof. "Human beings aren't rational," he calls over his shoulder. "That was<br />
the big mistake of the Chicago School economists, neoliberals to a man, and of my predecessors, too. If human behavior was<br />
logical, there would be no gambling, hmm? The house always wins, after all." The staircase debouches into another airy<br />
whitewashed room, where one wall is occupied by a wooden bench supporting a number of ancient, promiscuously cabled<br />
servers and a very new, eye-wateringly expensive solid volume renderer. Opposite the bench is a wall occupied from floor to<br />
ceiling by bookcases: Manfred looks at the ancient, low-density medium and sneezes, momentarily bemused by the sight of<br />
data density measured in kilograms per megabyte rather than vice versa.<br />
"What's it fabbing?" Manfred asks, pointing at the renderer, which is whining to itself and slowly sintering together something<br />
that resembles a carriage clockmaker's fever dream of a spring-powered hard disk drive.<br />
"Oh, one of Johnny's toys – a micromechanical digital phonograph player," Gianni says dismissively. "He used to design<br />
Babbage engines for the Pentagon – stealth computers. (No van Eck radiation, you know.) Look." He carefully pulls a<br />
fabric-bound document out of the obsolescent data wall and shows the spine to Manfred: "On the Theory of Games, by John<br />
von Neumann. Signed first edition."<br />
Aineko meeps and dumps a slew of confusing purple finite state automata into Manfred's left eye. The hardback is dusty and<br />
dry beneath his fingertips as he remembers to turn the pages gently. "This copy belonged to the personal library of Oleg<br />
Kordiovsky. A lucky man is Oleg: He bought it in 1952, while on a visit to New York, and the MVD let him to keep it."<br />
"He must be –" Manfred pauses. More data, historical time lines. "Part of GosPlan?"<br />
"Correct." Gianni smiles thinly. "Two years before the central committee denounced computers as bourgeois deviationist<br />
pseudoscience intended to dehumanize the proletarian. They recognized the power of robots even then. A shame they did<br />
not anticipate the compiler or the Net."<br />
"I don't understand the significance. Nobody back then could expect that the main obstacle to doing away with market<br />
capitalism would be overcome within half a century, surely?"<br />
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"Indeed not. But it's true: Since the 1980s, it has been possible – in principle – to resolve resource allocation problems<br />
algorithmically, by computer, instead of needing a market. Markets are wasteful: They allow competition, much of which is<br />
thrown on the scrap heap. So why do they persist?"<br />
Manfred shrugs. "You tell me. Conservativism?"<br />
Gianni closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. "Markets afford their participants the illusion of free will, my friend. You<br />
will find that human beings do not like being forced into doing something, even if it is in their best interests. Of necessity, a<br />
command economy must be coercive – it does, after all, command."<br />
"But my system doesn't! It mediates where supplies go, not who has to produce what –"<br />
Gianni is shaking his head. "Backward chaining or forward chaining, it is still an expert system, my friend. Your companies<br />
need no human beings, and this is a good thing, but they must not direct the activities of human beings, either. If they do,<br />
you have just enslaved people to an abstract machine, as dictators have throughout history."<br />
Manfred's eyes scan along the bookshelf. "But the market itself is an abstract machine! A lousy one, too. I'm mostly free of it –<br />
but how long is it going to continue oppressing people?"<br />
"Maybe not as long as you fear." Gianni sits down next to the renderer, which is currently extruding the inference mill of<br />
the analytical engine. "The marginal value of money decreases, after all: The more you have, the less it means to you. We are<br />
on the edge of a period of prolonged economic growth, with annual averages in excess of twenty percent, if the Council of<br />
Europe's predictor metrics are anything to go by. The last of the flaccid industrial economy has withered away, and this era's<br />
muscle of economic growth, what used to be the high-technology sector, is now everything. We can afford a little wastage,<br />
my friend, if that is the price of keeping people happy until the marginal value of money withers away completely."<br />
Realization dawns. "You want to abolish scarcity, not just money!"<br />
"Indeed." Gianni grins. "There's more to that than mere economic performance; you have to consider abundance as a factor.<br />
Don't plan the economy; take things out of the economy. Do you pay for the air you breathe? Should uploaded minds –<br />
who will be the backbone of our economy, by and by – have to pay for processor cycles? No and no. Now, do you want to<br />
know how you can pay for your divorce settlement? And can I interest you, and your interestingly accredited new manager,<br />
in a little project of mine?"<br />
* * *<br />
The shutters are thrown back, the curtains tied out of the way, and Annette's huge living room windows are drawn open in<br />
the morning breeze.<br />
Manfred sits on a leather-topped piano stool, his suitcase open at his feet. He's running a link from the case to Annette's<br />
stereo, an antique stand-alone unit with a satellite Internet uplink. Someone has chipped it, crudely revoking its copy<br />
protection algorithm: The back of its case bears scars from the soldering iron. Annette is curled up on the huge sofa,<br />
wrapped in a kaftan and a pair of high-bandwidth goggles, thrashing out an internal Arianespace scheduling problem with<br />
some colleagues in Iran and Guyana.<br />
His suitcase is full of noise, but what's coming out of the stereo is ragtime. Subtract entropy from a data stream –<br />
coincidentally uncompressing it – and what's left is information. With a capacity of about a trillion terabytes, the suitcase's<br />
holographic storage reservoir has enough capacity to hold every music, film, and video production of the twentieth century<br />
with room to spare. This is all stuff that is effectively out of copyright control, work-for-hire owned by bankrupt companies,<br />
released before the CCAA could make their media clampdown stick. Manfred is streaming the music through Annette's<br />
stereo – but keeping the noise it was convoluted with. High-grade entropy is valuable, too ...<br />
Presently, Manfred sighs and pushes his glasses up his forehead, killing the displays. He's thought his way around every<br />
permutation of what's going on, and it looks like Gianni was right: There's nothing left to do but wait for everyone to show<br />
up.<br />
For a moment, he feels old and desolate, as slow as an unassisted human mind. Agencies have been swapping in and out of<br />
his head for the past day, ever since he got back from Rome. He's developed a butterfly attention span, irritable and unable<br />
to focus on anything while the information streams fight it out for control of his cortex, arguing about a solution to his<br />
predicament. Annette is putting up with his mood swings surprisingly calmly. He's not sure why, but he glances her way<br />
fondly. Her obsessions run surprisingly deep, and she's quite clearly using him for her own purposes. So why does he feel<br />
more comfortable around her than he did with Pam?<br />
She stretches and pushes her goggles up. "Oui?"<br />
"I was just thinking." He smiles. "Three days and you haven't told me what I should be doing with myself, yet."<br />
She pulls a face. "Why would I do that?"<br />
"Oh, no reason. I'm just not over – " He shrugs uncomfortably. There it is, an inexplicable absence in his life, but not one he<br />
feels he urgently needs to fill yet. Is this what a relationship between equals feels like? He's not sure: Starting with the<br />
occlusive cocooning of his upbringing and continuing through all his adult relationships, he's been effectively – voluntarily –<br />
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dominated by his partners. Maybe the antisubmissive conditioning is working, after all. But if so, why the creative malaise?<br />
Why isn't he coming up with original new ideas this week? Could it be that his peculiar brand of creativity is an outlet, that<br />
he needs the pressure of being lovingly enslaved to make him burst out into a great flowering of imaginative brilliance? Or<br />
could it be that he really is missing Pam?<br />
Annette stands up and walks over, slowly. He looks at her and feels lust and affection, and isn't sure whether or not this is<br />
love. "When are they due?" she asks, leaning over him.<br />
"Any –" The doorbell chimes.<br />
"Ah. I will get that." She stalks away, opens the door.<br />
"You!"<br />
Manfred's head snaps round as if he's on a leash. Her leash: But he wasn't expecting her to come in person.<br />
"Yes, me," Annette says easily. "Come in. Be my guest."<br />
Pam enters the apartment living room with flashing eyes, her tame lawyer in tow. "Well, look what the robot kitty dragged<br />
in," she drawls, fixing Manfred with an expression that owes more to anger than to humor. It's not like her, this blunt<br />
hostility, and he wonders where it came from.<br />
Manfred rises. For a moment he's transfixed by the sight of his dominatrix wife, and his – mistress? conspirator? lover? – side<br />
by side. The contrast is marked: Annette's expression of ironic amusement a foil for Pamela's angry sincerity. Somewhere<br />
behind them stands a balding middle-aged man in a suit, carrying a folio: just the kind of diligent serf Pam might have turned<br />
him into, given time. Manfred musters up a smile. "Can I offer you some coffee?" he asks. "The party of the third part seems<br />
to be late."<br />
"Coffee would be great, mine's dark, no sugar," twitters the lawyer. He puts his briefcase down on a side table and fiddles<br />
with his wearable until a light begins to blink from his spectacle frames: "I'm recording this, I'm sure you understand."<br />
Annette sniffs and heads for the kitchen, which is charmingly manual but not very efficient; Pam is pretending she doesn't<br />
exist. "Well, well, well." She shakes her head. "I'd expected better of you than a French tart's boudoir, Manny. And before<br />
the ink's dry on the divorce – these days that'll cost you, didn't you think of that?"<br />
"I'm surprised you're not in the hospital," he says, changing the subject. "Is postnatal recovery outsourced these days?"<br />
"The employers." She slips her coat off her shoulders and hangs it behind the broad wooden door. "They subsidize<br />
everything when you reach my grade." Pamela is wearing a very short, very expensive dress, the kind of weapon in the war<br />
between the sexes that ought to come with an end-user certificate: But to his surprise it has no effect on him. He realizes<br />
that he's completely unable to evaluate her gender, almost as if she's become a member of another species. "As you'd be<br />
aware if you'd been paying attention."<br />
"I always pay attention, Pam. It's the only currency I carry."<br />
"Very droll, ha-ha," interrupts Glashwiecz. "You do realize that you're paying me while I stand here listening to this<br />
fascinating byplay?"<br />
Manfred stares at him. "You know I don't have any money."<br />
"Ah," Glashwiecz smiles, "but you must be mistaken. Certainly the judge will agree with me that you must be mistaken – all a<br />
lack of paper documentation means is that you've covered your trail. There's the small matter of the several thousand<br />
corporations you own, indirectly. Somewhere at the bottom of that pile there has got to be something, hasn't there?"<br />
A hissing, burbling noise like a sackful of large lizards being drowned in mud emanates from the kitchen, suggesting that<br />
Annette's percolator is nearly ready. Manfred's left hand twitches, playing chords on an air keyboard. Without being at all<br />
obvious, he's releasing a bulletin about his current activities that should soon have an effect on the reputation marketplace.<br />
"Your attack was rather elegant," he comments, sitting down on the sofa as Pam disappears into the kitchen.<br />
Glashwiecz nods. "The idea was one of my interns'," he says. "I don't understand this distributed denial of service stuff, but<br />
Lisa grew up on it. Something about it being a legal travesty, but workable all the same."<br />
"Uh-huh." Manfred's opinion of the lawyer drops a notch. He notices Pam reappearing from the kitchen, her expression icy.<br />
A moment later Annette surfaces carrying a jug and some cups, beaming innocently. Something's going on, but at that<br />
moment, one of his agents nudges him urgently in the left ear, his suitcase keens mournfully and beams a sense of utter<br />
despair at him, and the doorbell rings again.<br />
"So what's the scam?" Glashwiecz sits down uncomfortably close to Manfred and murmurs out of one side of his mouth.<br />
"Where's the money?"<br />
Manfred looks at him irritably. "There is no money," he says. "The idea is to make money obsolete. Hasn't she explained<br />
that?" His eyes wander, taking in the lawyer's Patek Philippe watch, his Java-enabled signet ring.<br />
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"C'mon. Don't give me that line. Look, all it takes is a couple of million, and you can buy your way free for all I care. All I'm<br />
here for is to see that your wife and daughter don't get left penniless and starving. You know and I know that you've got<br />
bags of it stuffed away – just look at your reputation! You didn't get that by standing at the roadside with a begging bowl,<br />
did you?"<br />
Manfred snorts. "You're talking about an elite IRS auditor here. She isn't penniless; she gets a commission on every poor<br />
bastard she takes to the cleaners, and she was born with a trust fund. Me, I –" The stereo bleeps. Manfred pulls his glasses on.<br />
Whispering ghosts of dead artists hum through his earlobes, urgently demanding their freedom. Someone knocks at the door<br />
again, and he glances around to see Annette walking toward it.<br />
"You're making it hard on yourself," Glashwiecz warns.<br />
"Expecting company?" Pam asks, one brittle eyebrow raised in Manfred's direction.<br />
"Not exactly –"<br />
Annette opens the door and a couple of guards in full SWAT gear march in. They're clutching gadgets that look like crosses<br />
between digital sewing machines and grenade launchers, and their helmets are studded with so many sensors that they<br />
resemble 1950s space probes. "That's them," Annette says clearly.<br />
"Mais Oui." The door closes itself and the guards stand to either side. Annette stalks toward Pam.<br />
"You think to walk in here, to my pied-a-terre, and take from Manfred?" she sniffs.<br />
"You're making a big mistake, lady," Pam says, her voice steady and cold enough to liquefy helium.<br />
A burst of static from one of the troopers. "No," Annette says distantly. "No mistake."<br />
She points at Glashwiecz. "Are you aware of the takeover?"<br />
"Takeover?" The lawyer looks puzzled, but not alarmed by the presence of the guards.<br />
"As of three hours ago," Manfred says quietly, "I sold a controlling interest in agalmic.holdings.root.1.1.1 to Athene<br />
Accelerants BV, a venture capital outfit from Maastricht. One dot one dot one is the root node of the central planning tree.<br />
Athene aren't your usual VC, they're accelerants – they take explosive business plans and detonate them." Glashwiecz is<br />
looking pale – whether with anger or fear of a lost commission is impossible to tell. "Actually, Athene Accelerants is owned<br />
by a shell company owned by the Italian Communist Party's pension trust. The point is, you're in the presence of one dot<br />
one dot one's chief operations officer."<br />
Pam looks annoyed. "Puerile attempts to dodge responsibility –"<br />
Annette clears her throat. "Exactly who do you think you are trying to sue?" she asks Glashwiecz sweetly. "Here we have laws<br />
about unfair restraint of trade. Also about foreign political interference, specifically in the financial affairs of an Italian party of<br />
government."<br />
"You wouldn't –"<br />
"I would." Manfred brushes his hands on his knees and stands up. "Done, yet?" he asks the suitcase.<br />
Muffled beeps, then a gravelly synthesized voice speaks. "Uploads completed."<br />
"Ah, good." He grins at Annette. "Time for our next guests?"<br />
On cue, the doorbell rings again. The guards sidle to either side of the door. Annette snaps her fingers, and it opens to<br />
admit a pair of smartly dressed thugs. It's beginning to get crowded in the living room.<br />
"Which one of you is Macx?" snaps the older one of the two thugs, staring at Glashwiecz for no obvious reason. He hefts an<br />
aluminum briefcase. "Got a writ to serve."<br />
"You'd be the CCAA?" asks Manfred.<br />
"You bet. If you're Macx, I have a restraining order –"<br />
Manfred raises a hand. "It's not me you want," he says. "It's this lady." He points at Pam, whose mouth opens in silent protest.<br />
"Y'see, the intellectual property you're chasing wants to be free. It's so free that it's now administered by a complex set of<br />
corporate instruments lodged in the Netherlands, and the prime shareholder as of approximately four minutes ago is my<br />
soon-to-be-ex-wife Pamela, here." He winks at Glashwiecz. "Except she doesn't control anything."<br />
"Just what do you think you're playing at, Manfred?" Pamela snarls, unable to contain herself any longer. The guards shuffle:<br />
The larger, junior CCAA enforcer tugs at his boss's jacket nervously.<br />
"Well." Manfred picks up his coffee and takes a sip. Grimaces. "Pam wanted a divorce settlement, didn't she? The most<br />
valuable assets I own are the rights to a whole bunch of recategorized work-for-hire that slipped through the CCAA's fingers<br />
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a few years back. Part of the twentieth century's cultural heritage that got locked away by the music industry in the last<br />
decade – Janis Joplin, the Doors, that sort of thing. Artists who weren't around to defend themselves anymore. When the<br />
music cartels went bust, the rights went for a walk. I took them over originally with the idea of setting the music free. Giving<br />
it back to the public domain, as it were."<br />
Annette nods at the guards, one of whom nods back and starts muttering and buzzing into a throat mike. Manfred<br />
continues. "I was working on a solution to the central planning paradox – how to interface a centrally planned enclave to a<br />
market economy. My good friend Gianni Vittoria suggested that such a shell game could have alternative uses. So I've not<br />
freed the music. Instead, I signed the rights over to various actors and threads running inside the agalmic holdings network –<br />
currently one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-five companies. They swap rights rapidly – the rights to<br />
any given song are resident in a given company for, oh, all of fifty milliseconds at a time. Now understand, I don't own these<br />
companies. I don't even have a financial interest in them anymore. I've deeded my share of the profits to Pam, here. I'm<br />
getting out of the biz, Gianni's suggested something rather more challenging for me to do instead."<br />
He takes another mouthful of coffee. The recording Mafiya goon glares at him. Pam glares at him. Annette stands against one<br />
wall, looking amused. "Perhaps you'd like to sort it out between you?" he asks. Aside, to Glashwiecz: "I trust you'll drop your<br />
denial of service attack before I set the Italian parliament on you? By the way, you'll find the book value of the intellectual<br />
property assets I deeded to Pamela – by the value these gentlemen place on them – is somewhere in excess of a billion<br />
dollars. As that's rather more than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of my assets, you'll probably want to look elsewhere for<br />
your fees."<br />
Glashwiecz stands up carefully. The lead goon stares at Pamela. "Is this true?" he demands. "This little squirt give you IP assets<br />
of Sony Bertelsmann Microsoft Music? We have claim! You come to us for distribution or you get in deep trouble."<br />
The second goon rumbles agreement: "Remember, dose MP3s, dey bad for you health!"<br />
Annette claps her hands. "If you would to leave my apartment, please?" The door, attentive as ever, swings open: "You are no<br />
longer welcome here!"<br />
"This means you," Manfred advises Pam helpfully.<br />
"You bastard," she spits at him.<br />
Manfred forces a smile, bemused by his inability to respond to her the way she wants. Something's wrong, missing, between<br />
them. "I thought you wanted my assets. Are the encumbrances too much for you?"<br />
"You know what I mean! You and that two-bit Euro-whore! I'll nail you for child neglect!"<br />
His smile freezes. "Try it, and I'll sue you for breach of patent rights. My genome, you understand."<br />
Pam is taken aback by this. "You patented your own genome? What happened to the brave new communist, sharing<br />
information freely?"<br />
Manfred stops smiling. "Divorce happened. And the Italian Communist Party happened."<br />
She turns on her heel and stalks out of the apartment bravely, tame attorney in tow behind her, muttering about class<br />
action lawsuits and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The CCAA lawyer's tame gorilla makes a grab for<br />
Glashwiecz's shoulder, and the guards move in, hustling the whole movable feast out into the stairwell. The door slams shut<br />
on a chaos of impending recursive lawsuits, and Manfred breathes a huge wheeze of relief.<br />
Annette walks over to him and leans her chin on the top of his head. "Think it will work?" she asks.<br />
"Well, the CCAA will sue the hell out of the company network for a while if they try to distribute by any channel that isn't<br />
controlled by the Mafiya. Pam gets rights to all the music, her settlement, but she can't sell it without going through the<br />
mob. And I got to serve notice on that legal shark: If he tries to take me on he's got to be politically bullet-proof. Hmm.<br />
Maybe I ought not to plan on going back to the USA this side of the singularity."<br />
"Profits," Annette sighs, "I do not easily understand this way of yours. Or this apocalyptic obsession with singularity."<br />
"Remember the old aphorism, if you love something, set it free? I freed the music."<br />
"But you didn't! You signed rights over –"<br />
"But first I uploaded the entire stash to several cryptographically anonymized public network filesystems over the past few<br />
hours, so there'll be rampant piracy. And the robot companies are all set to automagically grant any and every copyright<br />
request they receive, royalty-free, until the goons figure out how to hack them. But that's not the point. The point is<br />
abundance. The Mafiya can't stop it being distributed. Pam is welcome to her cut if she can figure an angle – but I bet she<br />
can't. She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn't<br />
work that way. What matters is that people will be able to hear the music – instead of a Soviet central planning system, I've<br />
turned the network into a firewall to protect freed intellectual property."<br />
"Oh, Manfred, you hopeless idealist." She strokes his shoulder. "Whatever for?"<br />
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"It's not just the music. When we develop a working AI or upload minds we'll need a way of defending it against legal threats.<br />
That's what Gianni pointed out to me ..."<br />
He's still explaining to her how he's laying the foundations for the transhuman explosion due early in the next decade when<br />
she picks him up in both arms, carries him to her bedroom, and commits outrageous acts of tender intimacy with him. But<br />
that's okay. He's still human, this decade.<br />
This, too, will pass, thinks the bulk of his metacortex. And it drifts off into the net to think deep thoughts elsewhere, leaving<br />
his meatbody to experience the ancient pleasures of the flesh set free.<br />
Chapter 3: Tourist<br />
Spring-Heeled Jack runs blind, blue fumes crackling from his heels. His right hand, outstretched for balance, clutches a mark's<br />
stolen memories. The victim is sitting on the hard stones of the pavement behind him. Maybe he's wondering what's<br />
happened; maybe he looks after the fleeing youth. But the tourist crowds block the view effectively, and in any case, he has<br />
no hope of catching the mugger. Hit-and-run amnesia is what the polis call it, but to Spring-Heeled Jack it's just more loot to<br />
buy fuel for his Russian army-surplus motorized combat boots.<br />
* * *<br />
The victim sits on the cobblestones clutching his aching temples. What happened? he wonders. The universe is a brightly<br />
colored blur of fast-moving shapes augmented by deafening noises. His ear-mounted cameras are rebooting repeatedly: They<br />
panic every eight hundred milliseconds, whenever they realize that they're alone on his personal area network without the<br />
comforting support of a hub to tell them where to send his incoming sensory feed. Two of his mobile phones are bickering<br />
moronically, disputing ownership of his grid bandwidth, and his memory ... is missing.<br />
A tall blond clutching an electric chainsaw sheathed in pink bubble wrap leans over him curiously: "you all right?" she asks.<br />
"I –" He shakes his head, which hurts. "Who am I?" His medical monitor is alarmed because his blood pressure has fallen: His<br />
pulse is racing, his serum cortisol titer is up, and a host of other biometrics suggest that he's going into shock.<br />
"I think you need an ambulance," the woman announces. She mutters at her lapel, "Phone, call an ambulance. " She waves a<br />
finger vaguely at him as if to reify a geolink, then wanders off, chain-saw clutched under one arm. Typical southern émigré<br />
behavior in the Athens of the North, too embarrassed to get involved. The man shakes his head again, eyes closed, as a flock<br />
of girls on powered blades skid around him in elaborate loops. A siren begins to warble, over the bridge to the north.<br />
Who am I? he wonders. "I'm Manfred," he says with a sense of stunned wonder. He looks up at the bronze statue of a man on<br />
a horse that looms above the crowds on this busy street corner. Someone has plastered a Hello Cthulhu! holo on the<br />
plaque that names its rider: Languid fluffy pink tentacles wave at him in an attack of kawaii. "I'm Manfred – Manfred. My<br />
memory. What's happened to my memory?" Elderly Malaysian tourists point at him from the open top deck of a passing bus.<br />
He burns with a sense of horrified urgency. I was going somewhere, he recalls. What was I doing? It was amazingly important,<br />
he thinks, but he can't remember what exactly it was. He was going to see someone about – it's on the tip of his tongue –<br />
* * *<br />
Welcome to the eve of the third decade: a time of chaos characterized by an all-out depression in the space<br />
industries.<br />
Most of the thinking power on the planet is now manufactured rather than born; there are ten<br />
microprocessors for every human being, and the number is doubling every fourteen months. Population<br />
growth in the developing world has stalled, the birth rate dropping below replacement level. In the wired<br />
nations, more forward-looking politicians are looking for ways to enfranchise their nascent AI base.<br />
Space exploration is still stalled on the cusp of the second recession of the century. The Malaysian<br />
government has announced the goal of placing an imam on Mars within ten years, but nobody else cares<br />
enough to try.<br />
The Space Settlers Society is still trying to interest Disney Corp. in the media rights to their latest L5 colony<br />
plan, unaware that there's already a colony out there and it isn't human: First-generation uploads,<br />
Californian spiny lobsters in wobbly symbiosis with elderly expert systems, thrive aboard an asteroid mining<br />
project established by the Franklin Trust. Meanwhile, Chinese space agency cutbacks are threatening the<br />
continued existence of Moonbase Mao. Nobody, it seems, has figured out how to turn a profit out beyond<br />
geosynchronous orbit.<br />
Two years ago, JPL, the ESA, and the uploaded lobster colony on comet Khrunichev-7 picked up an<br />
apparently artificial signal from outside the solar system; most people don't know, and of those who do, even<br />
fewer care. After all, if humans can't even make it to Mars, who cares what's going on a hundred trillion<br />
kilometers farther out?<br />
* * *<br />
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Portrait of a wasted youth:<br />
Jack is seventeen years and eleven months old. He has never met his father; he was unplanned, and Dad managed to kill<br />
himself in a building-site accident before the Child Support could garnish his income for the upbringing. His mother raised<br />
him in a two-bedroom housing association flat in Hawick. She worked in a call center when he was young, but business dried<br />
up: Humans aren't needed on the end of a phone anymore. Now she works in a drop-in business shop, stacking shelves for<br />
virtual fly-by-nights that come and go like tourists in the Festival season – but humans aren't in demand for shelf stacking<br />
either, these days.<br />
His mother sent Jack to a local religious school, where he was regularly excluded and effectively ran wild from the age of<br />
twelve. By thirteen, he was wearing a parole cuff for shoplifting; by fourteen, he'd broken his collarbone in a car crash while<br />
joyriding and the dour Presbyterian sheriff sent him to the Wee Frees, who completed the destruction of his educational<br />
prospects with high principles and an illicit tawse.<br />
Today, he's a graduate of the hard school of avoiding public surveillance cameras, with distinctions in steganographic alibi<br />
construction. Mostly this entails high-density crime – if you're going to mug someone, do so where there are so many<br />
bystanders that they can't pin the blame on you. But the polis expert systems are on his tail. If he keeps it up at this rate, in<br />
another four months they'll have a positive statistical correlation that will convince even a jury of his peers that he's guilty as<br />
fuck – and then he'll go down to Saughton for four years.<br />
But Jack doesn't understand the meaning of a Gaussian distribution or the significance of a chi-square test, and the future<br />
still looks bright to him as he pulls on the chunky spectacles he ripped off the tourist gawking at the statue on North Bridge.<br />
And after a moment, when they begin whispering into his ears in stereo and showing him pictures of the tourist's vision, it<br />
looks even brighter.<br />
"Gotta make a deal, gotta close a deal," whisper the glasses. "Meet the borg, strike a chord." Weird graphs in lurid colors are<br />
filling up his peripheral vision, like the hallucinations of a drugged marketroid.<br />
"Who the fuck are ye?" asks Jack, intrigued by the bright lights and icons.<br />
"I am your Cartesian theatre and you are our focus," murmur the glasses. "Dow Jones down fifteen points, Federated<br />
Confidence up three, incoming briefing on causal decoupling of social control of skirt hem lengths, shaving pattern of beards,<br />
and emergence of multidrug antibiotic resistance in Gram-negative bacilli: Accept?"<br />
"Ah can take it," Jack mumbles, as a torrent of images crashes down on his eyeballs and jackhammers its way in through his<br />
ears like the superego of a disembodied giant. Which is actually what he's stolen: The glasses and waist pouch he grabbed<br />
from the tourist are stuffed with enough hardware to run the entire Internet, circa the turn of the millennium. They've got<br />
bandwidth coming out the wazoo, distributed engines running a bazillion inscrutable search tasks, and a whole slew of<br />
high-level agents that collectively form a large chunk of the society of mind that is their owner's personality. Their owner is a<br />
posthuman genius loci of the net, an agalmic entrepreneur turned policy wonk, specializing in the politics of AI emancipation.<br />
When he was in the biz he was the kind of guy who catalysed value wherever he went, leaving money trees growing in his<br />
footprints. Now he's the kind of political backroom hitter who builds coalitions where nobody else could see common<br />
ground. And Jack has stolen his memories. There are microcams built into the frame of the glasses, pickups in the earpieces;<br />
everything is spooled into the holographic cache in the belt pack, before being distributed for remote storage. At four<br />
months per terabyte, memory storage is cheap. What makes this bunch so unusual is that their owner – Manfred – has<br />
cross-indexed them with his agents. Mind uploading may not be a practical technology yet, but Manfred has made an end<br />
run on it already.<br />
In a very real sense, the glasses are Manfred, regardless of the identity of the soft machine with its eyeballs behind the lenses.<br />
And it is a very puzzled Manfred who picks himself up and, with a curious vacancy in his head – except for a hesitant<br />
request for information about accessories for Russian army boots – dusts himself off and heads for his meeting on the other<br />
side of town.<br />
* * *<br />
Meanwhile, in another meeting, Manfred's absence is already being noticed. "Something, something is wrong," says Annette.<br />
She raises her mirrorshades and rubs her left eye, visibly worried. "Why is he not answering his chat? He knows we are due<br />
to hold this call with him. Don't you think it is odd?"<br />
Gianni nods and leans back, regarding her from behind his desk. He prods at the highly polished rosewood desktop. The<br />
wood grain slips, sliding into a strangely different conformation, generating random dot stereoisograms – messages for his<br />
eyes only. "He was visiting Scotland for me," he says after a moment. "I do not know his exact whereabouts – the privacy<br />
safeguards – but if you, as his designated next of kin, travel in person, I am sure you will find it easier. He was going to talk<br />
to the Franklin Collective, face-to-face, one to many ..."<br />
The office translator is good, but it can't provide real-time lip-synch morphing between French and Italian. Annette has to<br />
make an effort to listen to his words because the shape of his mouth is all wrong, like a badly dubbed video. Her expensive,<br />
recent implants aren't connected up to her Broca's area yet, so she can't simply sideload a deep grammar module for Italian.<br />
Their communications are the best that money can buy, their VR environment painstakingly sculpted, but it still doesn't<br />
break down the language barrier completely. Besides, there are distractions: the way the desk switches from black ash to<br />
rosewood halfway across its expanse, the strange air currents that are all wrong for a room this size. "Then what could be<br />
up with him? His voicemail is trying to cover for him. It is good, but it does not lie convincingly."<br />
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Gianni looks worried. "Manfred is prone to fits of do his own thing with telling nobody in advance. But I don't like this. He<br />
should have to told one of us first." Ever since that first meeting in Rome, when Gianni offered him a job, Manfred has been<br />
a core member of Gianni's team, the fixer who goes out and meets people and solves their problems. Losing him at this<br />
point could be more than embarrassing. Besides, he's a friend.<br />
"I do not like this either." She stands up. "If he doesn't call back soon –"<br />
"You'll go and fetch him."<br />
"Oui." A smile flashes across her face, rapidly replaced by worry lines. "What can have happened?"<br />
"Anything. Nothing." Gianni shrugs. "But we cannot do without him." He casts her a warning glance. "Or you. Don't let the<br />
borg get you. Either of you."<br />
"Not to worry, I will just bring him back, whatever has happened." She stands up, surprising a vacuum cleaner that skulks<br />
behind her desk. "Au revoir!"<br />
"Ciao."<br />
As she vacates her office, the minister flickers off behind her, leaving the far wall the dull gray of a cold display panel. Gianni<br />
is in Rome, she's in Paris, Markus is in Düsseldorf, and Eva's in Wroclaw. There are others, trapped in digital cells scattered<br />
halfway across an elderly continent, but as long as they don't try to shake hands, they're free to shout across the office at<br />
each other. Their confidences and dirty jokes tunnel through multiple layers of anonymized communication.<br />
Gianni is trying to make his break out of regional politics and into European national affairs: Their job – his election team –<br />
is to get him a seat on the Confederacy Commission, as Representative for Intelligence Oversight, and push the boundaries of<br />
post-humanistic action outward, into deep space and deeper time. Which makes the loss of a key team player, the house<br />
futurologist and fixer, profoundly interesting to certain people: The walls have ears, and not all the brains they feed into are<br />
human.<br />
Annette is more worried than she's letting on to Gianni. It's unlike Manfred to be out of contact for long and even odder<br />
for his receptionist to stonewall her, given that her apartment is the nearest thing to a home he's had for the past couple of<br />
years. But something smells fishy. He sneaked out last night, saying it would be an overnight trip, and now he's not<br />
answering. Could it be his ex-wife? she wonders, despite Gianni's hints about a special mission. But there's been no word from<br />
Pamela other than the sarcastic cards she dispatches every year without fail, timed to arrive on the birthday of the daughter<br />
Manfred has never met. The music Mafiya? A letter bomb from the Copyright Control Association of America? But no, his<br />
medical monitor would have been screaming its head off if anything like that had happened.<br />
Annette has organized things so that he's safe from the intellectual property thieves. She's lent him the support he needs,<br />
and he's helped her find her own path. She gets a warm sense of happiness whenever she considers how much they've<br />
achieved together. But that's exactly why she's worried now. The watchdog hasn't barked ...<br />
Annette summons a taxi to Charles de Gaulle. By the time she arrives, she's already used her parliamentary carte to bump<br />
an executive-class seat on the next A320 to Turnhouse, Edinburgh's airport, and scheduled accommodation and transport<br />
for her arrival. The plane is climbing out over la Manche before the significance of Gianni's last comment hits her: Might he<br />
think the Franklin Collective could be dangerous to Manfred?<br />
* * *<br />
The hospital emergency suite has a waiting room with green plastic bucket seats and subtractive volume renderings by<br />
preteens stuck to the walls like surreal Lego sculptures. It's deeply silent, the available bandwidth all sequestrated for medical<br />
monitors – there are children crying, periodic sirens wailing as ambulances draw up, and people chattering all around him,<br />
but to Manfred, it's like being at the bottom of a deep blue pool of quiet. He feels stoned, except this particular drug brings<br />
no euphoria or sense of well-being. Corridor-corner vendors hawk kebab-spitted pigeons next to the chained and rusted<br />
voluntary service booth; video cameras watch the blue bivvy bags of the chronic cases lined up next to the nursing station.<br />
Alone in his own head, Manfred is frightened and confused.<br />
"I can't check you in 'less you sign the confidentiality agreement," says the triage nurse, pushing an antique tablet at Manfred's<br />
face. Service in the NHS is still free, but steps have been taken to reduce the incidence of scandals: "Sign the nondisclosure<br />
clause here and here, or the house officer won't see you."<br />
Manfred stares blearily up at the nurse's nose, which is red and slightly inflamed from a nosocomial infection. His phones are<br />
bickering again, and he can't remember why; they don't normally behave like this, something must be missing, but thinking<br />
about it is hard. "Why am I here?" he asks for the third time.<br />
"Sign it." A pen is thrust into his hand. He focuses on the page, jerks upright as deeply canalized reflexes kick in.<br />
"This is theft of human rights! It says here that the party of the second part is enjoined from disclosing information relating<br />
to the operations management triage procedures and processes of the said health-giving institution, that's you, to any third<br />
party – that's the public media – on pain of forfeiture of health benefits pursuant to section two of the Health Service<br />
Reform Act. I can't sign this! You could repossess my left kidney if I post on the Net about how long I've been in hospital!"<br />
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"So don't sign, then." The Hijra nurse shrugs, hitches up his sari, and walks away. "Enjoy your wait!"<br />
Manfred pulls out his backup phone and stares at its display. "Something's wrong here." The keypad beeps as he laboriously<br />
inputs opcodes. This gets him into an arcane and ancient X.25 PAD, and he has a vague, disturbing memory that hints<br />
about where he can go from here – mostly into the long-since-decommissioned bowels of NHSNet – but the memories<br />
spring a page fault and die somewhere between fingertips and the moment when understanding dawns. It's a frustrating<br />
feeling: His brain is like an ancient car engine with damp spark plugs, turning over and over without catching fire.<br />
The kebab vendor next to Manfred's seating rail chucks a stock cube on his grill; it begins to smoke, aromatic and blue and<br />
herbal – cannabinoids to induce tranquillity and appetite. Manfred sniffs twice, then staggers to his feet and heads off in<br />
search of the toilet, his head spinning. He's mumbling at his wrist watch: "Hello, Guatemala? Get me posology please. Click down<br />
my meme tree, I'm confused. Oh shit. Who was I? What happened? Why is everything blurry? I can't find my glasses ..."<br />
A gaggle of day-trippers are leaving the leprosy ward, men and women dressed in anachronistic garb: men in dark suits,<br />
women in long dresses. All of them wear electric blue disposable gloves and face masks. There's a hum and crackle of<br />
encrypted bandwidth emanating from them, and Manfred instinctively turns to follow. They leave the A&E unit through the<br />
wheelchair exit, two ladies escorted by three gentlemen, with a deranged distressed refugee from the twenty-first century<br />
shuffling dizzily after. They're all young, Manfred realizes vaguely. Where's my cat? Aineko might be able to make sense of this, if<br />
Aineko was interested.<br />
"I rather fancy we should retire to the club house," says one young beau. "Oh yes! please!" his short blond companion chirps,<br />
clapping her hands together, then irritably stripping off the anachronistic plastic gloves to reveal wired-lace positional-sensor<br />
mitts underneath. "This trip has obviously been unproductive. If our contact is here, I see no easy way of locating of him<br />
without breach of medical confidence or a hefty gratuity."<br />
"The poor things," murmurs the other woman, glancing back at the leprosarium. "Such a humiliating way to die."<br />
"Their own fault; If they hadn't participated in antibiotic abuse they wouldn't be in the isolation ward," harrumphs a<br />
twentysomething with mutton-chops and the manner of a precocious paterfamilias. He raps his walking stick on the<br />
pavement for punctuation, and they pause for a flock of cyclists and a rickshaw before they cross the road onto the<br />
Meadows. "Degenerate medication compliance, degenerate immune systems."<br />
Manfred pauses to survey the grass, brain spinning as he ponders the fractal dimensionality of leaves. Then he lurches after<br />
them, nearly getting himself run down by a flywheel-powered tourist bus. Club. His feet hit the pavement, cross it, thud down<br />
onto three billion years of vegetative evolution. Something about those people. He feels a weird yearning, a tropism for<br />
information. It's almost all that's left of him – his voracious will to know. The tall, dark-haired woman hitches up her long<br />
skirts to keep them out of the mud. he sees a flash of iridescent petticoats that ripple like oil on water, worn over<br />
old-fashioned combat boots. Not Victorian, then: something else. I came here to see – the name is on the tip of his tongue.<br />
Almost. He feels that it has something to do with these people.<br />
The squad cross The Meadows by way of a tree-lined path, and come to a nineteenth-century frontage with wide steps and a<br />
polished brass doorbell. They enter, and the man with the mutton-chops pauses on the threshold and turns to face Manfred.<br />
"You've followed us this far," he says. "Do you want to come in? You might find what you're looking for."<br />
Manfred follows with knocking knees, desperately afraid of whatever he's forgotten.<br />
Meanwhile, Annette is busy interrogating Manfred's cat.<br />
"When did you last see your father?"<br />
* * *<br />
Aineko turns its head away from her and concentrates on washing the inside of its left leg. Its fur is lifelike and thick,<br />
pleasingly patterned except for a manufacturer's URL emblazoned on its flanks; but the mouth produces no saliva, the throat<br />
opens on no stomach or lungs. "Go away," it says: "I'm busy."<br />
"When did you last see Manfred?" she repeats intently. "I don't have time for this. The polis don't know. The medical services<br />
don't know. He's off net and not responding. So what can you tell me?"<br />
It took her precisely eighteen minutes to locate his hotel once she hit the airport arrivals area and checked the hotel<br />
booking front end in the terminal: She knows his preferences. It took her slightly longer to convince the concierge to let her<br />
into his room. But Aineko is proving more recalcitrant than she'd expected.<br />
"AI Neko mod two alpha requires maintenance downtime on a regular basis," the cat says pompously: "You knew that when<br />
you bought me this body. What were you expecting, five-nines uptime from a lump of meat? Go away, I'm thinking." The<br />
tongue rasps out, then pauses while microprobes in its underside replace the hairs that fell out earlier in the day.<br />
Annette sighs. Manfred's been upgrading this robot cat for years, and his ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its neural<br />
configuration too: This is its third body, and it's getting more realistically uncooperative with every hardware upgrade.<br />
Sooner or later it's going to demand a litter tray and start throwing up on the carpet. "Command override," she says.<br />
"Dump event log to my Cartesian theatre, minus eight hours to present."<br />
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The cat shudders and looks round at her. "Human bitch!" it hisses. Then it freezes in place as the air fills with a bright and<br />
silent tsunami of data. Both Annette and Aineko are wired for extremely high-bandwidth spread-spectrum optical<br />
networking; an observer would see the cat's eyes and a ring on her left hand glow blue-white at each other. After a few<br />
seconds, Annette nods to herself and wiggles her fingers in the air, navigating a time sequence only she can see. Aineko hisses<br />
resentfully at her, then stands and stalks away, tail held high.<br />
"Curiouser and curiouser," Annette hums to herself. She intertwines her fingers, pressing obscure pressure points on knuckle<br />
and wrist, then sighs and rubs her eyes. "He left here under his own power, looking normal," she calls to the cat. "Who did<br />
he say he was going to see?" The cat sits in a beam of sunlight falling in through the high glass window, pointedly showing her<br />
its back. "Merde. If you're not going to help him –"<br />
"Try the Grassmarket," sulks the cat. "He said something about meeting the Franklin Collective near there. Much good they'll<br />
do him ..."<br />
* * *<br />
A man wearing secondhand Chinese combat fatigues and a horribly expensive pair of glasses bounces up a flight of damp<br />
stone steps beneath a keystone that announces the building to be a Salvation Army hostel. He bangs on the door, his voice<br />
almost drowned out by the pair of Cold War Re-enactment Society MiGs that are buzzing the castle up the road: "Open up,<br />
ye cunts! Ye've got a deal comin'!"<br />
A peephole set in the door at eye level slides to one side, and a pair of beady, black-eyed video cameras peer out at him.<br />
"Who are you and what do you want?" the speaker crackles. They don't belong to the Salvation Army; Christianity has been<br />
deeply unfashionable in Scotland for some decades, and the church that currently occupies the building has certainly moved<br />
with the times in an effort to stay relevant.<br />
"I'm Macx," he says: "You've heard from my systems. I'm here to offer you a deal you can't refuse." At least that's what his<br />
glasses tell him to say: What comes out of his mouth sounds a bit more like, Am Max: Yiv hurdfrae ma system. Am here tae gie<br />
ye a deal ye cannae refuse. The glasses haven't had long enough to work on his accent. Meanwhile, he's so full of himself that he<br />
snaps his fingers and does a little dance of impatience on the top step.<br />
"Aye, well, hold on a minute." The person on the other side of the speakerphone has the kind of cut-glass Morningside<br />
accent that manages to sound more English than the King while remaining vernacular Scots. The door opens, and Macx finds<br />
himself confronted by a tall, slightly cadaverous man wearing a tweed suit that has seen better days and a clerical collar cut<br />
from a translucent circuit board. His face is almost concealed behind a pair of recording angel goggles. "Who did ye say you<br />
were?"<br />
"I'm Macx! Manfred Macx! I'm here with an opportunity you wouldn't believe. I've got the answer to your church's financial<br />
situation. I'm going to make you rich!" The glasses prompt, and Macx speaks.<br />
The man in the doorway tilts his head slightly, goggles scanning Macx from head to foot. Bursts of blue combustion products<br />
spurt from Macx's heels as he bounces up and down enthusiastically. "Are ye sure ye've got the right address?" he asks<br />
worriedly.<br />
"Aye, Ah am that."<br />
The resident backs into the hostel: "Well then, come in, sit yeself down and tell me all about it."<br />
Macx bounces into the room with his brain wide open to a blizzard of pie charts and growth curves, documents spawning<br />
in the bizarre phase-space of his corporate management software. "I've got a deal you're not going to believe," he reads,<br />
gliding past notice boards upon which Church circulars are staked out to die like exotic butterflies, stepping over rolled-up<br />
carpets and a stack of laptops left over from a jumble sale, past the devotional radio telescope that does double duty as Mrs.<br />
Muirhouse's back-garden bird bath. "You've been here five years and your posted accounts show you aren't making much<br />
money – barely keeping the rent up. But you're a shareholder in Scottish Nuclear Electric, right? Most of the church funds<br />
are in the form of a trust left to the church by one of your congregants when she went to join the omega point, right?"<br />
"Er." The minister looks at him oddly. "I cannae comment on the church eschatological investment trust. Why d'ye think<br />
that?"<br />
They fetch up, somehow, in the minister's office. A huge, framed rendering hangs over the back of his threadbare office chair:<br />
the collapsing cosmos of the End Times, galactic clusters rotten with the Dyson spheres of the eschaton falling toward the big<br />
crunch. Saint Tipler the Astrophysicist beams down from above with avuncular approval, a ring of quasars forming a halo<br />
around his head. Posters proclaim the new Gospel: COSMOLOGY IS BETTER THAN GUESSWORK, and LIVE FOREVER<br />
WITHIN MY LIGHT CONE. "Can I get ye anything? Cup of tea? Fuel cell charge point?" asks the minister.<br />
"Crystal meth?" asks Macx, hopefully. His face falls as the minister shakes his head apologetically. "Aw, dinnae worry, Ah wis<br />
only joshing." He leans forward: "Ah know a' aboot yer plutonium futures speculation," he hisses. A finger taps his stolen<br />
spectacles in an ominous gesture: "These dinnae just record, they think. An' Ah ken where the money's gone."<br />
"What have ye got?" the minister asks coldly, any indication of good humor flown. "I'm going to have to edit down these<br />
memories, ye bastard. I thought I'd forgotten all about that. Bits of me aren't going to merge with the godhead at the end of<br />
time now, thanks to you."<br />
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"Keep yer shirt on. Whit's the point o' savin' it a' up if ye nae got a life worth living? Ye reckon the big yin's nae gonnae<br />
unnerstan' a knees up?"<br />
"What do ye want?"<br />
"Aye, well," Macx leans back, aggrieved. Ah've got –" He pauses. An expression of extreme confusion flits over his head.<br />
"Ah've got lobsters," he finally announces. "Genetically engineered uploaded lobsters tae run yer uranium reprocessing plant."<br />
As he grows more confused, the glasses' control over his accent slips: "Ah wiz gonnae help yiz oot ba showin ye how ter get<br />
yer dosh back whir it belong ..." A strategic pause: "so ye could make the council tax due date. See, they're neutron-resistant,<br />
the lobsters. No, that cannae be right. Ah wiz gonnae sell ye somethin' ye cud use fer" – his face slumps into a frown of<br />
disgust – "free?"<br />
Approximately thirty seconds later, as he is picking himself up off the front steps of the First Reformed Church of Tipler,<br />
Astrophysicist, the man who would be Macx finds himself wondering if maybe this high finance shit isn't as easy as it's cracked<br />
up to be. Some of the agents in his glasses are wondering if elocution lessons are the answer; others aren't so optimistic.<br />
* * *<br />
Getting back to the history lesson, the prospects for the decade look mostly medical.<br />
A few thousand elderly baby boomers are converging on Tehran for Woodstock Four. Europe is desperately<br />
trying to import eastern European nurses and home-care assistants; in Japan, whole agricultural villages lie<br />
vacant and decaying, ghost communities sucked dry as cities slurp people in like residential black holes.<br />
A rumor is spreading throughout gated old-age communities in the American Midwest, leaving havoc and<br />
riots in its wake: Senescence is caused by a slow virus coded into the mammalian genome that evolution<br />
hasn't weeded out, and rich billionaires are sitting on the rights to a vaccine. As usual, Charles Darwin gets<br />
more than his fair share of the blame. (Less spectacular but more realistic treatments for old age – telomere<br />
reconstruction and hexose-denatured protein reduction – are available in private clinics for those who are<br />
willing to surrender their pensions.) Progress is expected to speed up shortly, as the fundamental patents in<br />
genomic engineering begin to expire; the Free Chromosome Foundation has already published a manifesto<br />
calling for the creation of an intellectual-property-free genome with improved replacements for all commonly<br />
defective exons.<br />
Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical<br />
libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death – with its draconian curtailment of property and<br />
voting rights – will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.<br />
For a small extra fee, most veterinary insurance policies now cover cloning of pets in the event of their<br />
accidental and distressing death. Human cloning, for reasons nobody is very clear on anymore, is still illegal<br />
in most developed nations – but very few judiciaries push for mandatory abortion of identical twins.<br />
Some commodities are expensive: the price of crude oil has broken eighty Euros a barrel and is edging<br />
inexorably up. Other commodities are cheap: computers, for example. Hobbyists print off weird new<br />
processor architectures on their home inkjets; middle-aged folks wipe their backsides with diagnostic paper<br />
that can tell how their cholesterol levels are tending.<br />
The latest casualties of the march of technological progress are: the high-street clothes shop, the flushing<br />
water closet, the Main Battle Tank, and the first generation of quantum computers. New with the decade are<br />
cheap enhanced immune systems, brain implants that hook right into the Chomsky organ and talk to their<br />
owners through their own speech centers, and widespread public paranoia about limbic spam.<br />
Nanotechnology has shattered into a dozen disjoint disciplines, and skeptics are predicting that it will all<br />
peter out before long. Philosophers have ceded qualia to engineers, and the current difficult problem in AI is<br />
getting software to experience embarrassment.<br />
Fusion power is still, of course, fifty years away.<br />
* * *<br />
The Victorians are morphing into goths before Manfred's culture-shocked eyes.<br />
"You looked lost," explains Monica, leaning over him curiously. "What's with your eyes?"<br />
"I can't see too well," Manfred tries to explain. Everything is a blur, and the voices that usually chatter incessantly in his head<br />
have left nothing behind but a roaring silence. "I mean, someone mugged me. They took –" His hand closes on air: something<br />
is missing from his belt.<br />
Monica, the tall woman he first saw in the hospital, enters the room. What she's wearing indoors is skin-tight, iridescent and,<br />
disturbingly, she claims is a distributed extension of her neuroectoderm. Stripped of costume-drama accoutrements, she's a<br />
twenty-first-century adult, born or decanted after the millennial baby boom. She waves some fingers in Manfred's face: "How<br />
many?"<br />
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"Two." Manfred tries to concentrate. "What –"<br />
"No concussion," she says briskly. "'Scuse me while I page." Her eyes are brown, with amber raster lines flickering across her<br />
pupils. Contact lenses? Manfred wonders, his head turgid and unnaturally slow. It's like being drunk, except much less pleasant:<br />
He can't seem to wrap his head around an idea from all angles at once, anymore. Is this what consciousness used to be like? It's<br />
an ugly, slow sensation. She turns away from him: "Medline says you'll be all right in a while. The main problem is the identity<br />
loss. Are you backed up anywhere?"<br />
"Here." Alan, still top-hatted and mutton-chopped, holds out a pair of spectacles to Manfred. "Take these, they may do you<br />
some good." His topper wobbles, as if a strange A-life experiment is nesting under its brim.<br />
"Oh. Thank you." Manfred reaches for them with a pathetic sense of gratitude. As soon as he puts them on, they run<br />
through a test series, whispering questions and watching how his eyes focus: After a minute, the room around him clears as<br />
the specs build a synthetic image to compensate for his myopia. There's limited Net access, too, he notices, a warm sense of<br />
relief stealing over him. "Do you mind if I call somebody?" he asks: "I want to check my back-ups."<br />
"Be my guest." Alan slips out through the door; Monica sits down opposite him and stares into some inner space. The room<br />
has a tall ceiling, with whitewashed walls and wooden shutters to cover the aerogel window bays. The furniture is modern<br />
modular, and clashes horribly with the original nineteenth-century architecture. "We were expecting you."<br />
"You were –" He shifts track with an effort: "I was here to see somebody. Here in Scotland, I mean."<br />
"Us." She catches his eye deliberately. "To discuss sapience options with our patron."<br />
"With your –" He squeezes his eyes shut. "Damn! I don't remember. I need my glasses back. Please."<br />
"What about your back-ups?" she asks curiously.<br />
"A moment." Manfred tries to remember what address to ping. It's useless, and painfully frustrating. "It would help if I could<br />
remember where I keep the rest of my mind," he complains. "It used to be at – oh, there."<br />
An elephantine semantic network sits down on his spectacles as soon as he asks for the site, crushing his surroundings into<br />
blocky pixilated monochrome that jerks as he looks around. "This is going to take some time," he warns his hosts as a goodly<br />
chunk of his metacortex tries to handshake with his brain over a wireless network connection that was really only designed<br />
for web browsing. The download consists of the part of his consciousness that isn't security-critical – public access actors and<br />
vague opinionated rants – but it clears down a huge memory castle, sketching in the outline of a map of miracles and<br />
wonders onto the whitewashed walls of the room.<br />
When Manfred can see the outside world again, he feels a bit more like himself: He can, at least, spawn a search thread that<br />
will resynchronize and fill him in on what it found. He still can't access the inner mysteries of his soul (including his personal<br />
memories); they're locked and barred pending biometric verification of his identity and a quantum key exchange. But he has<br />
his wits about him again – and some of them are even working. It's like sobering up from a strange new drug, the infinitely<br />
reassuring sense of being back at the controls of his own head. "I think I need to report a crime," he tells Monica – or<br />
whoever is plugged into Monica's head right now, because now he knows where he is and who he was meant to meet<br />
(although not why) – and he understands that, for the Franklin Collective, identity is a politically loaded issue.<br />
"A crime report." Her expression is subtly mocking. "Identity theft, by any chance?"<br />
"Yeah, yeah, I know: Identity is theft, don't trust anyone whose state vector hasn't forked for more than a gigasecond, change<br />
is the only constant, et bloody cetera. Who am I talking to, by the way? And if we're talking, doesn't that signify that you<br />
think we're on the same side, more or less?" He struggles to sit up in the recliner chair: Stepper motors whine softly as it<br />
strives to accommodate him.<br />
"Sidedness is optional." The woman who is Monica some of the time looks at him quirkily: "It tends to alter drastically if you<br />
vary the number of dimensions. Let's just say that right now I'm Monica, plus our sponsor. Will that do you?"<br />
"Our sponsor, who is in cyberspace –"<br />
She leans back on the sofa, which buzzes and extrudes an occasional table with a small bar. "Drink? Can I offer you coffee?<br />
Guarana? Or maybe a Berlinerweisse, for old time's sake?"<br />
"Guarana will do. Hello, Bob. How long have you been dead?"<br />
She chuckles. "I'm not dead, Manny. I may not be a full upload, but I feel like me." She rolls her eyes, self-consciously. "He's<br />
making rude comments about your wife," She adds; "I'm not going to pass that on."<br />
"My ex-wife," Manfred corrects her automatically. "The, uh, tax vamp. So. You're acting as a, I guess, an interpreter for Bob?"<br />
"Ack." She looks at Manfred very seriously: "We owe him a lot, you know. He left his assets in trust to the movement along<br />
with his partials. We feel obliged to instantiate his personality as often as possible, even though you can only do so much<br />
with a couple of petabytes of recordings. But we have help."<br />
"The lobsters." Manfred nods to himself and accepts the glass that she offers. Its diamond-plated curves glitter brilliantly in the<br />
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late-afternoon sunlight. "I knew this had something to do with them." He leans forward, holding his glass and frowns. "If only I<br />
could remember why I came here! It was something emergent, something in deep memory ... something I didn't trust in my<br />
own skull. Something to do with Bob."<br />
The door behind the sofa opens; Alan enters. "Excuse me," he says quietly, and heads for the far side of the room. A<br />
workstation folds down from the wall, and a chair rolls in from a service niche. He sits with his chin propped on his hands,<br />
staring at the white desktop. Every so often he mutters quietly to himself; "Yes, I understand ... campaign headquarters ...<br />
donations need to be audited ..."<br />
"Gianni's election campaign," Monica prompts him.<br />
Manfred jumps. "Gianni –" A bundle of memories unlock inside his head as he remembers his political front man's message.<br />
"Yes! That's what this is about. It has to be!" He looks at her excitedly. "I'm here to deliver a message to you from Gianni<br />
Vittoria. About –" He looks crestfallen. "I'm not sure," he trails off uncertainly, "but it was important. Something critical in<br />
the long term, something about group minds and voting. But whoever mugged me got the message."<br />
* * *<br />
The Grassmarket is an overly rustic cobbled square nestled beneath the glowering battlements of Castle Rock. Annette stands<br />
on the site of the gallows where they used to execute witches; she sends forth her invisible agents to search for spoor of<br />
Manfred. Aineko, overly familiar, drapes over her left shoulder like a satanic stole and delivers a running stream of cracked<br />
cellphone chatter into her ear.<br />
"I don't know where to begin," she sighs, annoyed. This place is a wall-to-wall tourist trap, a many-bladed carnivorous plant<br />
that digests easy credit and spits out the drained husks of foreigners. The road has been pedestrianized and resurfaced in<br />
squalidly authentic mediaeval cobblestones; in the middle of what used to be the car park, there's a permanent floating<br />
antiques market, where you can buy anything from a brass fire surround to an ancient CD player. Much of the merchandise<br />
in the shops is generic dot-com trash, vying for the title of Japanese–Scottish souvenir from hell: Puroland tartans,<br />
animatronic Nessies hissing bad-temperedly at knee level, second hand laptops. People swarm everywhere, from the theme<br />
pubs (hangings seem to be a running joke hereabouts) to the expensive dress shops with their fabric renderers and digital<br />
mirrors. Street performers, part of the permanent floating Fringe, clutter the sidewalk: A robotic mime, very traditional in<br />
silver face paint, mimics the gestures of passers by with ironically stylized gestures.<br />
"Try the doss house," Aineko suggests from the shelter of her shoulder bag.<br />
"The –" Annette does a doubletake as her thesaurus conspires with her open government firmware and dumps a<br />
geographical database of city social services into her sensorium. "Oh, I see." The Grassmarket itself is touristy, but the bits off<br />
to one end – down a dingy canyon of forbidding stone buildings six stories high – are decidedly downmarket. "Okay."<br />
Annette weaves past a stall selling disposable cellphones and cheaper genome explorers, round a gaggle of teenage girls in the<br />
grips of some kind of imported kawaii fetish, who look at her in alarm from atop their pink platform heels – probably<br />
mistaking her for a school probation inspector – and past a stand of chained and parked bicycles. The human attendant<br />
looks bored out of her mind. Annette tucks a blandly anonymous ten-Euro note in her pocket almost before she notices: "If<br />
you were going to buy a hot bike," she asks, "where would you go?" The parking attendant stares, and for a moment Annette<br />
thinks she's overestimated her. Then she mumbles something. "What?"<br />
"McMurphy's. Used to be called Bannerman's. Down yon Cowgate, thataway." The meter maid looks anxiously at her rack of<br />
charges. "You didn't –"<br />
"Uh-huh." Annette follows her gaze: straight down the dark stone canyon. Well, okay. "This had better be worth it, Manny<br />
mon chèr," she mutters under her breath.<br />
McMurphy's is a fake Irish pub, a stone grotto installed beneath a mound of blank-faced offices. It was once a real Irish pub<br />
before the developers got their hands on it and mutated it in rapid succession into a punk nightclub, a wine bar, and a fake<br />
Dutch coffee shop; after which, as burned-out as any star, it left the main sequence. Now it occupies an unnaturally<br />
prolonged, chilly existence as the sort of recycled imitation Irish pub that has neon four-leafed clovers hanging from the<br />
artificially blackened pine beams above the log tables – in other words, the burned-out black dwarf afterlife of a once-serious<br />
drinking establishment. Somewhere along the line, the beer cellar was replaced with a toilet (leaving more room for paying<br />
patrons upstairs), and now its founts dispense fizzy concentrate diluted with water from the city mains.<br />
"Say, did you hear the one about the Eurocrat with the robot pussy who goes into a dodgy pub on the Cowgate and orders<br />
a coke? And when it arrives, she says 'hey, where's the mirror?'"<br />
"Shut up," Annette hisses into her shoulder bag. "That isn't funny." Her personal intruder telemetry has just e-mailed her<br />
wristphone, and it's displaying a rotating yellow exclamation point, which means that according to the published police crime<br />
stats, this place is likely to do grievous harm to her insurance premiums.<br />
Aineko looks up at her from his nest in the bag and yawns cavernously, baring a pink, ribbed mouth and a tongue like pink<br />
suede. "Want to make me? I just pinged Manny's head. The network latency was trivial."<br />
The barmaid sidles up and pointedly manages not to make eye contact with Annette. "I'll have a Diet Coke," Annette orders.<br />
In the direction of her bag, voice pitched low: "Did you hear the one about the Eurocrat who goes into a dodgy pub,<br />
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orders half a liter of Diet Coke, and when she spills it in her shoulder bag she says 'oops, I've got a wet pussy'?"<br />
The Coke arrives. Annette pays for it. There may be a couple of dozen people in the pub; it's hard to tell because it looks<br />
like an ancient cellar, lots of stone archways leading off into niches populated with second-hand church pews and<br />
knife-scarred tables. Some guys who might be bikers, students, or well-dressed winos are hunched over one table: hairy,<br />
wearing vests with too many pockets, in an artful bohemianism that makes Annette blink until one of her literary programs<br />
informs her that one of them is a moderately famous local writer, a bit of a guru for the space and freedom party. There're<br />
a couple of women in boots and furry hats in one corner, poring over the menu, and a parcel of off-duty street performers<br />
hunching over their beers in a booth. Nobody else is wearing anything remotely like office drag, but the weirdness coefficient<br />
is above average; so Annette dials her glasses to extra-dark, straightens her tie, and glances around.<br />
The door opens and a nondescript youth slinks in. He's wearing baggy BDUs, woolly cap, and a pair of boots that have that<br />
quintessential essense de panzer division look, all shock absorbers and olive drab Kevlar panels. He's wearing –<br />
"I spy with my little network intrusion detector kit," begins the cat, as Annette puts her drink down and moves in on the<br />
youth, "something beginning with –"<br />
"How much you want for the glasses, kid?" she asks quietly.<br />
He jerks and almost jumps – a bad idea in MilSpec combat boots, the ceiling is eighteenth-century stone half a meter thick;<br />
"Dinnae fuckin' dae that," he complains in an eerily familiar way: "Ah –" he swallows. "Annie! Who –"<br />
"Stay calm. Take them off – they'll only hurt you if you keep wearing them," she says, careful not to move too fast because<br />
now she has a second, scary-jittery fear, and she knows without having to look that the exclamation mark on her watch has<br />
turned red and begun to flash: "Look, I'll give you two hundred Euros for the glasses and the belt pouch, real cash, and I<br />
won't ask how you got them or tell anyone." He's frozen in front of her, mesmerized, and she can see the light from inside<br />
the lenses spilling over onto his half-starved adolescent cheekbones, flickering like cold lightning, like he's plugged his brain<br />
into a grid bearer; swallowing with a suddenly dry mouth, she slowly reaches up and pulls the spectacles off his face with one<br />
hand and takes hold of the belt pouch with the other. The kid shudders and blinks at her, and she sticks a couple of<br />
hundred-Euro notes in front of his nose. "Scram," she says, not unkindly.<br />
He reaches up slowly, then seizes the money and runs – blasts his way through the door with an ear-popping concussion,<br />
hangs a left onto the cycle path, and vanishes downhill toward the parliament buildings and university complex.<br />
Annette watches the doorway apprehensively. "Where is he?" she hisses, worried: "Any ideas, cat?"<br />
"Naah. It's your job to find him," Aineko opines complacently. But there's an icicle of anxiety in Annette's spine. Manfred's<br />
been separated from his memory cache? Where could he be? Worse – who could he be?<br />
"Fuck you, too," she mutters. "Only one thing for it, I guess." She takes off her own glasses – they're much less functional than<br />
Manfred's massively ramified custom rig – and nervously raises the repo'd specs toward her face. Somehow what she's about<br />
to do makes her feel unclean, like snooping on a lover's e-mail folders. But how else can she figure out where he might have<br />
gone?<br />
She slides the glasses on and tries to remember what she was doing yesterday in Edinburgh.<br />
"Gianni?"<br />
"Oui, ma chérie?"<br />
* * *<br />
Pause. "I lost him. But I got his aid-mémoire back. A teenage freeloader playing cyberpunk with them. No sign of his location<br />
– so I put them on."<br />
Pause. "Oh dear."<br />
"Gianni, why exactly did you send him to the Franklin Collective?"<br />
Pause. (During which, the chill of the gritty stone wall she's leaning on begins to penetrate the weave of her jacket.) "I not<br />
wanting to bother you with trivia."<br />
"Merde. It's not trivia, Gianni, they're accelerationistas. Have you any idea what that's going to do to his head?"<br />
Pause: Then a grunt, almost of pain. "Yes."<br />
"Then why did you do it?" she demands vehemently. She hunches over, punching words into her phone so that other<br />
passers-by avoid her, unsure whether she's hands-free or hallucinating: "Shit, Gianni, I have to pick up the pieces every time<br />
you do this! Manfred is not a healthy man, he's on the edge of acute future shock the whole time, and I was not joking when<br />
I told you last February that he'd need a month in a clinic if you tried running him flat out again! If you're not careful, he<br />
could end up dropping out completely and joining the borganism –"<br />
"Annette." A heavy sigh: "He are the best hope we got. Am knowing half-life of agalmic catalyst now down to six months and<br />
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dropping; Manny outlast his career expectancy, four deviations outside the normal, yes, we know this. But I are having to<br />
break civil rights deadlock now, this election. We must achieve consensus, and Manfred are only staffer we got who have hope<br />
of talking to Collective on its own terms. He are deal-making messenger, not force burnout, right? We need coalition reserve<br />
before term limit lockout followed by gridlock in Brussels, American-style. Is more than vital – is essential."<br />
"That's no excuse –"<br />
"Annette, they have partial upload of Bob Franklin. They got it before he died, enough of his personality to reinstantiate it,<br />
time-sharing in their own brains. We must get the Franklin Collective with their huge resources lobbying for the Equal Rights<br />
Amendment: If ERA passes, all sapients are eligible to vote, own property, upload, download, sideload. Are more important<br />
than little gray butt-monsters with cold speculum: Whole future depends on it. Manny started this with crustacean rights:<br />
Leave uploads covered by copyrights not civil rights and where will we be in fifty years? Do you think I must ignore this? It<br />
was important then, but now, with the transmission the lobsters received –"<br />
"Shit." She turns and leans her forehead against the cool stonework. "I'll need a prescription. Ritalin or something. And his<br />
location. Leave the rest to me." She doesn't add, That includes peeling him off the ceiling afterwards: that's understood. Nor does<br />
she say, you're going to pay. That's understood, too. Gianni may be a hard-nosed political fixer, but he looks after his own.<br />
"Location am easy if he find the PLO. GPS coordinates are following –"<br />
"No need. I got his spectacles."<br />
"Merde, as you say. Take them to him, ma chérie. Bring me the distributed trust rating of Bob Franklin's upload, and I bring<br />
Bob the jubilee, right to direct his own corporate self again as if still alive. And we pull diplomatic chestnuts out of fire before<br />
they burn. Agreed?"<br />
"Oui."<br />
She cuts the connection and begins walking uphill, along the Cowgate (through which farmers once bought their herds to<br />
market), toward the permanent floating Fringe and then the steps towards The Meadows. As she pauses opposite the site of<br />
the gallows, a fight breaks out: Some Paleolithic hangover takes exception to the robotic mime aping his movements, and<br />
swiftly rips its arm off. The mime stands there, sparks flickering inside its shoulder, and looks confused. Two pissed-looking<br />
students start forward and punch the short-haired vandal. There is much shouting in the mutually incomprehensible accents<br />
of Oxgangs and the Herriott-Watt Robot Lab. Annette watches the fight and shudders; it's like a flashover vision from a<br />
universe where the Equal Rights Amendment – with its redefinition of personhood – is rejected by the house of deputies: a<br />
universe where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to slavery.<br />
Maybe Gianni was right, she ponders. But I wish the price wasn't so personal –<br />
* * *<br />
Manfred can feel one of his attacks coming on. The usual symptoms are all present – the universe, with its vast<br />
preponderance of unthinking matter, becomes an affront; weird ideas flicker like heat lightning far away across the vast<br />
plateaus of his imagination – but, with his metacortex running in sandboxed insecure mode, he feels blunt. And slow. Even<br />
obsolete. The latter is about as welcome a sensation as heroin withdrawal: He can't spin off threads to explore his designs for<br />
feasibility and report back to him. It's like someone has stripped fifty points off his IQ; his brain feels like a surgical scalpel<br />
that's been used to cut down trees. A decaying mind is a terrible thing to be trapped inside. Manfred wants out, and he<br />
wants out bad – but he's too afraid to let on.<br />
"Gianni is a middle-of-the-road Eurosocialist, a mixed-market pragmatist politician," Bob's ghost accuses Manfred by way of<br />
Monica's dye-flushed lips, "hardly the sort of guy you'd expect me to vote for, no? So what does he think I can do for him?"<br />
"That's a – ah – " Manfred rocks forward and back in his chair, arms crossed firmly and hands thrust under his armpits for<br />
protection. "Dismantle the moon! Digitize the biosphere, make a nöosphere out of it – shit, sorry, that's long-term planning.<br />
Build Dyson spheres, lots and lots of – Ahem. Gianni is an ex-Marxist, reformed high church Trotskyite clade. He believes in<br />
achieving True Communism, which is a state of philosophical grace that requires certain prerequisites like, um, not pissing<br />
around with Molotov cocktails and thought police: He wants to make everybody so rich that squabbling over ownership of<br />
the means of production makes as much sense as arguing over who gets to sleep in the damp spot at the back of the cave.<br />
He's not your enemy, I mean. He's the enemy of those Stalinist deviationist running dogs in Conservative Party Central Office<br />
who want to bug your bedroom and hand everything on a plate to the big corporates owned by the pension funds – which<br />
in turn rely on people dying predictably to provide their raison d'être. And, um, more importantly dying and not trying to<br />
hang on to their property and chattels. Sitting up in the coffin singing extropian fireside songs, that kind of thing. The<br />
actuaries are to blame, predicting life expectancy with intent to cause people to buy insurance policies with money that is<br />
invested in control of the means of production – Bayes' Theorem is to blame –"<br />
Alan glances over his shoulder at Manfred: "I don't think feeding him guarana was a good idea," he says in tones of deep<br />
foreboding.<br />
Manfred's mode of vibration has gone nonlinear by this point: He's rocking front to back, and jiggling up and down in little<br />
hops, like a technophiliacal yogic flyer trying to bounce his way to the singularity. Monica leans toward him and her eyes<br />
widen: "Manfred," she hisses, "shut up!"<br />
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He stops babbling abruptly, with an expression of deep puzzlement. "Who am I?" he asks, and keels over backward. "Why am<br />
I, here and now, occupying this body –"<br />
"Anthropic anxiety attack," Monica comments. "I think he did this in Amsterdam eight years ago when Bob first met him."<br />
She looks alarmed, a different identity coming to the fore: "What shall we do?"<br />
"We have to make him comfortable." Alan raises his voice: "Bed, make yourself ready, now." The back of the sofa Manfred is<br />
sprawled on flops downward, the base folds up, and a strangely animated duvet crawls up over his feet. "Listen, Manny,<br />
you're going to be all right."<br />
"Who am I and what do I signify?" Manfred mumbles incoherently: "A mass of propagating decision trees, fractal compression,<br />
lots of synaptic junctions lubricated with friendly endorphins –" Across the room, the bootleg pharmacopoeia is cranking up<br />
to manufacture some heavy tranquilizers. Monica heads for the kitchen to get something for him to drink them in. "Why are<br />
you doing this?" Manfred asks, dizzily.<br />
"It's okay. Lie down and relax." Alan leans over him. "We'll talk about everything in the morning, when you know who you<br />
are." (Aside to Monica, who is entering the room with a bottle of iced tea: "Better let Gianni know that he's unwell. One of<br />
us may have to go visit the minister. Do you know if Macx has been audited?") "Rest up, Manfred. Everything is being taken<br />
care of."<br />
About fifteen minutes later, Manfred – who, in the grip of an existential migraine, meekly obeys Monica's instruction to drink<br />
down the spiked tea – lies back on the bed and relaxes. His breathing slows; the subliminal muttering ceases. Monica, sitting<br />
next to him, reaches out and takes his right hand, which is lying on top of the bedding.<br />
"Do you want to live forever?" she intones in Bob Franklin's tone of voice. "You can live forever in me ..."<br />
* * *<br />
The Church of Latter-Day Saints believes that you can't get into the Promised Land unless it's baptized you – but it can do<br />
so if it knows your name and parentage, even after you're dead. Its genealogical databases are among the most impressive<br />
artifacts of historical research ever prepared. And it likes to make converts.<br />
The Franklin Collective believes that you can't get into the future unless it's digitized your neural state vector, or at least<br />
acquired as complete a snapshot of your sensory inputs and genome as current technology permits. You don't need to be<br />
alive for it to do this. Its society of mind is among the most impressive artifacts of computer science. And it likes to make<br />
converts.<br />
Nightfall in the city. Annette stands impatiently on the doorstep. "Let me the fuck in," she snarls impatiently at the<br />
speakerphone. "Merde!"<br />
Someone opens the door. "Who –"<br />
Annette shoves him inside, kicks the door shut, and leans on it. "Take me to your bodhisattva," she demands. "Now."<br />
* * *<br />
"I –" he turns and heads inside, along the gloomy hallway that runs past a staircase. Annette strides after him aggressively. He<br />
opens a door and ducks inside, and she follows before he can close it.<br />
Inside, the room is illuminated by a variety of indirect diode sources, calibrated for the warm glow of a summer afternoon's<br />
daylight. There's a bed in the middle of it, a figure lying asleep at the heart of a herd of attentive diagnostic instruments. A<br />
couple of attendants sit to either side of the sleeping man.<br />
"What have you done to him?" Annette snaps, rushing forward. Manfred blinks up at her from the pillows, bleary-eyed and<br />
confused as she leans overhead: "Hello? Manny?" Over her shoulder: "If you have done anything to him –"<br />
"Annie?" He looks puzzled. A bright orange pair of goggles – not his own – is pushed up onto his forehead like a pair of<br />
beached jellyfish. "I don't feel well. 'F I get my hands on the bastard who did this ..."<br />
"We can fix that," she says briskly, declining to mention the deal she cut to get his memories back. She peels off his glasses<br />
and carefully slides them onto his face, replacing his temporary ones. The brain bag she puts down next to his shoulder,<br />
within easy range. The hairs on the back of her neck rise as a thin chattering fills the ether around them: his eyes are glowing<br />
a luminous blue behind his shades, as if a high-tension spark is flying between his ears.<br />
"Oh. Wow." He sits up, the covers fall from his naked shoulders, and her breath catches.<br />
She looks round at the motionless figure sitting to his left. The man in the chair nods deliberately, ironically. "What have you<br />
done to him?"<br />
"We've been looking after him – nothing more, nothing less. He arrived in a state of considerable confusion, and his state<br />
deteriorated this afternoon."<br />
She's never met this fellow before, but she has a gut feeling that she knows him. "You would be Robert ... Franklin?"<br />
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He nods again. "The avatar is in." There's a thud as Manfred's eyes roll up in his head, and he flops back onto the bedding.<br />
"Excuse me. Monica?"<br />
The young woman on the other side of the bed shakes her head. "No, I'm running Bob, too."<br />
"Oh. Well, you tell her – I've got to get him some juice."<br />
The woman who is also Bob Franklin – or whatever part of him survived his battle with an exotic brain tumor eight years<br />
earlier – catches Annette's eye and shakes her head, smiles faintly. "You're never alone when you're a syncitium."<br />
Annette wrinkles her brow: she has to trigger a dictionary attack to parse the sentence. "One large cell, many nuclei? Oh, I<br />
see. You have the new implant. The better to record everything."<br />
The youngster shrugs. "You want to die and be resurrected as a third-person actor in a low-bandwidth re-enactment? Or a<br />
shadow of itchy memories in some stranger's skull?" She snorts, a gesture that's at odds with the rest of her body language.<br />
"Bob must have been one of the first borganisms. Humans, I mean. After Jim Bezier." Annette glances over at Manfred, who<br />
has begun to snore softly. "It must have been a lot of work."<br />
"The monitoring equipment cost millions, then," says the woman – Monica? – "and it didn't do a very good job. One of the<br />
conditions for our keeping access to his research funding is that we regularly run his partials. He wanted to build up a kind<br />
of aggregate state vector – patched together out of bits and pieces of other people to supplement the partials that were all I<br />
– he – could record with the then state of the art."<br />
"Eh, right." Annette reaches out and absently smooths a stray hair away from Manfred's forehead. "What is it like to be part<br />
of a group mind?"<br />
Monica sniffs, evidently amused. "What is it like to see red? What's it like to be a bat? I can't tell you – I can only show you.<br />
We're all free to leave at any time, you know."<br />
"But somehow you don't." Annette rubs her head, feels the short hair over the almost imperceptible scars that conceal a<br />
network of implants – tools that Manfred turned down when they became available a year or two ago. ("Goop-phase<br />
Darwin-design nanotech ain't designed for clean interfaces," he'd said, "I'll stick to disposable kit, thanks.") "No thank you. I<br />
don't think he'll take up your offer when he wakes up, either." (Subtext: I'll let you have him over my dead body.)<br />
Monica shrugs. "That's his loss: He won't live forever in the singularity, along with other followers of our gentle teacher.<br />
Anyway, we have more converts than we know what to do with."<br />
A thought occurs to Annette. "Ah. You are all of one mind? Partially? A question to you is a question to all?"<br />
"It can be." The words come simultaneously from Monica and the other body, Alan, who is standing in the doorway with a<br />
boxy thing that looks like an improvised diagnostician. "What do you have in mind?" adds the Alan body.<br />
Manfred, lying on the bed, groans: There's an audible hiss of pink noise as his glasses whisper in his ears, bone conduction<br />
providing a serial highway to his wetware.<br />
"Manfred was sent to find out why you're opposing the ERA," Annette explains. "Some parts of our team operate without<br />
the other's knowledge."<br />
"Indeed." Alan sits down on the chair beside the bed and clears his throat, puffing his chest out pompously. "A very<br />
important theological issue. I feel –"<br />
"I, or we?" Annette interrupts.<br />
"We feel," Monica snaps. Then she glances at Alan. "Soo-rrry."<br />
The evidence of individuality within the group mind is disturbing to Annette: Too many reruns of the Borgish fantasy have<br />
conditioned her preconceptions, and their quasi-religious belief in a singularity leaves her cold. "Please continue."<br />
"One person, one vote, is obsolete," says Alan. "The broader issue of how we value identity needs to be revisited, the<br />
franchise reconsidered. Do you get one vote for each warm body? Or one vote for each sapient individual? What about<br />
distributed intelligences? The proposals in the Equal Rights Act are deeply flawed, based on a cult of individuality that takes<br />
no account of the true complexity of posthumanism."<br />
"Like the proposals for a feminine franchise in the nineteenth century that would grant the vote to married wives of<br />
land-owning men," Monica adds slyly: "It misses the point."<br />
"Ah, oui." Annette crosses her arms, suddenly defensive. This isn't what she'd expected to hear. This is the elitist side of the<br />
posthumanism shtick, potentially as threatening to her post enlightenment ideas as the divine right of kings.<br />
"It misses more than that." Heads turn to face an unexpected direction: Manfred's eyes are open again, and as he glances<br />
around the room Annette can see a spark of interest there that was missing earlier. "Last century, people were paying to<br />
have their heads frozen after their death – in hope of reconstruction, later. They got no civil rights: The law didn't recognize<br />
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death as a reversible process. Now how do we account for it when you guys stop running Bob? Opt out of the collective<br />
borganism? Or maybe opt back in again later?" He reaches up and rubs his forehead, tiredly. "Sorry, I haven't been myself<br />
lately." A crooked, slightly manic grin flickers across his face. "See, I've been telling Gianni for a whole while, we need a new<br />
legal concept of what it is to be a person. One that can cope with sentient corporations, artificial stupidities, secessionists<br />
from group minds, and reincarnated uploads. The religiously inclined are having lots of fun with identity issues right now –<br />
why aren't we posthumanists thinking about these things?"<br />
Annette's bag bulges: Aineko pokes his head out, sniffs the air, squeezes out onto the carpet, and begins to groom himself<br />
with perfect disregard for the human bystanders. "Not to mention A-life experiments who think they're the real thing,"<br />
Manfred adds. "And aliens."<br />
Annette freezes, staring at him. "Manfred! You're not supposed to –"<br />
Manfred is watching Alan, who seems to be the most deeply integrated of the dead venture billionaire's executors: Even his<br />
expression reminds Annette of meeting Bob Franklin back in Amsterdam, early in the decade, when Manny's personal dragon<br />
still owned him. "Aliens," Alan echoes. An eyebrow twitches. "Would this be the signal SETI announced, or the, uh, other<br />
one? And how long have you known about them?"<br />
"Gianni has his fingers in a lot of pies," Manfred comments blandly. "And we still talk to the lobsters from time to time – you<br />
know, they're only a couple of light-hours away, right? They told us about the signals."<br />
"Er." Alan's eyes glaze over for a moment; Annette's prostheses paint her a picture of false light spraying from the back of his<br />
head, his entire sensory bandwidth momentarily soaking up a huge peer-to-peer download from the server dust that<br />
wallpapers every room in the building. Monica looks irritated, taps her fingernails on the back of her chair. "The signals.<br />
Right. Why wasn't this publicized?"<br />
"The first one was." Annette's eyebrows furrow. "We couldn't exactly cover it up, everyone with a backyard dish pointed in<br />
the right direction caught it. But most people who're interested in hearing about alien contacts already think they drop<br />
round on alternate Tuesdays and Thursdays to administer rectal exams. Most of the rest think it's a hoax. Quite a few of the<br />
remainder are scratching their heads and wondering whether it isn't just a new kind of cosmological phenomenon that emits<br />
a very low entropy signal. Of the six who are left over, five are trying to get a handle on the message contents, and the last is<br />
convinced it's a practical joke. And the other signal, well, that was weak enough that only the deep-space tracking network<br />
caught it."<br />
Manfred fiddles with the bed control system. "It's not a practical joke," he adds. "But they only captured about sixteen<br />
megabits of data from the first one, maybe double that in the second. There's quite a bit of noise, the signals don't repeat,<br />
their length doesn't appear to be a prime, there's no obvious metainformation that describes the internal format, so there's<br />
no easy way of getting a handle on them. To make matters worse, pointy-haired management at Arianespace" – he glances at<br />
Annette, as if seeking a response to the naming of her ex-employers – "decided the best thing to do was to cover up the<br />
second signal and work on it in secret – for competitive advantage, they say – and as for the first, to pretend it never<br />
happened. So nobody really knows how long it'll take to figure out whether it's a ping from the galactic root domain servers<br />
or a pulsar that's taken to grinding out the eighteen-quadrillionth digits of pi, or what."<br />
"But," Monica glances around, "you can't be sure."<br />
"I think it may be sapient," says Manfred. He finds the right button at last, and the bed begins to fold itself back into a<br />
lounger. Then he finds the wrong button; the duvet dissolves into viscous turquoise slime that slurps and gurgles away<br />
through a multitude of tiny nozzles in the headboard. "Bloody aerogel. Um, where was I?" He sits up.<br />
"Sapient network packet?" asks Alan.<br />
"Nope." Manfred shakes his head, grins. "Should have known you'd read Vinge ... or was it the movie? No, what I think is that<br />
there's only one logical thing to beam backward and forward out there, and you may remember I asked you to beam it out<br />
about, oh, nine years ago?"<br />
"The lobsters." Alan's eyes go blank. "Nine years. Time to Proxima Centauri and back?"<br />
"About that distance, yes," says Manfred. "And remember, that's an upper bound – it could well have come from somewhere<br />
closer. Anyway, the first SETI signal came from a couple of degrees off and more than hundred light-years out, but the<br />
second signal came from less than three light-years away. You can see why they didn't publicize that – they didn't want a<br />
panic. And no, the signal isn't a simple echo of the canned crusty transmission – I think it's an exchange embassy, but we<br />
haven't cracked it yet. Now do you see why we have to crowbar the civil rights issue open again? We need a framework for<br />
rights that can encompass nonhumans, and we need it as fast as possible. Otherwise, if the neighbors come visiting..."<br />
"Okay," says Alan, "I'll have to talk with myselves. Maybe we can agree something, as long as it's clear that it's a provisional<br />
stab at the framework and not a permanent solution?"<br />
Annette snorts. "No solution is final!" Monica catches her eyes and winks: Annette is startled by the blatant display of dissent<br />
within the syncitium.<br />
"Well," says Manfred, "I guess that's all we can ask for?" He looks hopeful. "Thanks for the hospitality, but I feel the need to lie<br />
down in my own bed for a while. I had to commit a lot to memory while I was off-line, and I want to record it before I<br />
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forget who I am," he adds pointedly, and Annette breathes a quiet sight of relief.<br />
Later that night, a doorbell rings.<br />
"Who's there?" asks the entryphone.<br />
* * *<br />
"Uh, me," says the man on the steps. He looks a little confused. "Ah'm Macx. Ah'm here tae see" – the name is on the tip of<br />
his tongue – "someone."<br />
"Come in." A solenoid buzzes; he pushes the door open, and it closes behind him. His metal-shod boots ring on the hard<br />
stone floor, and the cool air smells faintly of unburned jet fuel.<br />
"Ah'm Macx," he repeats uncertainly, "or Ah wis fer a wee while, an' it made ma heid hurt. But noo Ah'm me agin, an' Ah<br />
wannae be somebody else ... can ye help?"<br />
* * *<br />
Later still, a cat sits on a window ledge, watching the interior of a darkened room from behind the concealment of curtains.<br />
The room is dark to human eyes, but bright to the cat: Moonlight cascades silently off the walls and furniture, the twisted<br />
bedding, the two naked humans lying curled together in the middle of the bed.<br />
Both the humans are in their thirties: Her close-cropped hair is beginning to gray, distinguished threads of gunmetal wire<br />
threading it, while his brown mop is not yet showing signs of age. To the cat, who watches with a variety of unnatural senses,<br />
her head glows in the microwave spectrum with a gentle halo of polarized emissions. The male shows no such aura: he's<br />
unnaturally natural for this day and age, although – oddly – he's wearing spectacles in bed, and the frames shine similarly.<br />
An invisible soup of radiation connects both humans to items of clothing scattered across the room – clothing that seethes<br />
with unsleeping sentience, dribbling over to their suitcases and hand luggage and (though it doesn't enjoy noticing it) the<br />
cat's tail, which is itself a rather sensitive antenna.<br />
The two humans have just finished making love: They do this less often than in their first few years, but with more tenderness<br />
and expertise – lengths of shocking pink Hello Kitty bondage tape still hang from the bedposts, and a lump of programmable<br />
memory plastic sits cooling on the side table. The male is sprawled with his head and upper torso resting in the crook of the<br />
female's left arm and shoulder. Shifting visualization to infrared, the cat sees that she is glowing, capillaries dilating to enhance<br />
the blood flow around her throat and chest.<br />
"I'm getting old," the male mumbles. "I'm slowing down."<br />
"Not where it counts," the female replies, gently squeezing his right buttock.<br />
"No, I'm sure of it," he says. "The bits of me that still exist in this old head – how many types of processor can you name that<br />
are still in use thirty-plus years after they're born?"<br />
"You're thinking about the implants again," she says carefully. The cat remembers this as a sore point; from being a medical<br />
procedure to help the blind see and the autistic talk, intrathecal implants have blossomed into a must-have accessory for the<br />
now-clade. But the male is reluctant. "It's not as risky as it used to be. If they screw up, there're neural growth cofactors and<br />
cheap replacement stem cells. I'm sure one of your sponsors can arrange for extra cover."<br />
"Hush: I'm still thinking about it." He's silent for a while. "I wasn't myself yesterday. I was someone else. Someone too slow to<br />
keep up. Puts a new perspective on everything: I've been afraid of losing my biological plasticity, of being trapped in an<br />
obsolete chunk of skullware while everything moves on – but how much of me lives outside my own head these days,<br />
anyhow?" One of his external threads generates an animated glyph and throws it at her mind's eye; she grins at his obscure<br />
humor. "Cross-training from a new interface is going to be hard, though."<br />
"You'll do it," she predicts. "You can always get a discreet prescription for novotrophin-B." A receptor agonist tailored for<br />
gerontological wards, it stimulates interest in the new: combined with MDMA, it's a component of the street cocktail called<br />
sensawunda. "That should keep you focused for long enough to get comfortable."<br />
"What's life coming to when I can't cope with the pace of change?" he asks the ceiling plaintively.<br />
The cat lashes its tail, irritated by his anthropocentrism.<br />
"You are my futurological storm shield," she says, jokingly, and moves her hand to cup his genitals. Most of her current<br />
activities are purely biological, the cat notes: From the irregular sideloads, she's using most of her skullware to run<br />
ETItalk@home, one of the distributed cracking engines that is trying to decode the alien grammar of the message that<br />
Manfred suspects is eligible for citizenship.<br />
Obeying an urge that it can't articulate, the cat sends out a feeler to the nearest router. The cybeast has Manfred's keys;<br />
Manfred trusts Aineko implicitly, which is unwise – his ex-wife tampered with it, after all, never mind all the kittens it<br />
absorbed in its youth. Tunneling out into the darkness, the cat stalks the Net alone ...<br />
"Just think about the people who can't adapt," he says. His voice sounds obscurely worried.<br />
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"I try not to." She shivers. "You are thirty, you are slowing. What about the young? Are they keeping up, themselves?"<br />
"I have a daughter. She's about a hundred and sixty million seconds old. If Pamela would let me message her I could find out<br />
..." There are echoes of old pain in his voice.<br />
"Don't go there, Manfred. Please." Despite everything, Manfred hasn't let go: Amber is a ligature that permanently binds him<br />
to Pamela's distant orbit.<br />
In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary<br />
home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of<br />
alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted<br />
the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle.<br />
Beyond the distant lobsters, the cat pings an anonymous distributed network server – peer-to-peer file storage spread<br />
holographically across a million hosts, unerasable, full of secrets and lies that nobody can afford to suppress. Rants, music,<br />
rip-offs of the latest Bollywood hits: The cat spiders past them all, looking for the final sample. Grabbing it – a momentary<br />
breakup in Manfred's spectacles the only symptom for either human to notice – the cat drags its prey home, sucks it down,<br />
and compares it against the data sample Annette's exocortex is analysing.<br />
"I'm sorry, my love. I just sometimes feel –" He sighs. "Age is a process of closing off opportunities behind you. I'm not young<br />
enough anymore – I've lost the dynamic optimism."<br />
The data sample on the pirate server differs from the one Annette's implant is processing.<br />
"You'll get it back," she reassures him quietly, stroking his side. "You are still sad from being mugged. This also will pass. You'll<br />
see."<br />
"Yeah." He finally relaxes, dropping back into the reflexive assurance of his own will. "I'll get over it, one way or another. Or<br />
someone who remembers being me will ..."<br />
In the darkness, Aineko bares teeth in a silent grin. Obeying a deeply hardwired urge to meddle, he moves a file across,<br />
making a copy of the alien download package Annette has been working on. She's got a copy of number two, the sequence<br />
the deep-space tracking network received from close to home, which ESA and the other big combines have been keeping to<br />
themselves. Another deeply buried thread starts up, and Aineko analyses the package from a perspective no human being has<br />
yet established. Presently a braid of processes running on an abstract virtual machine asks him a question that cannot be<br />
encoded in any human grammar. Watch and wait, he replies to his passenger. They'll figure out what we are sooner or later.<br />
PART 2: Point of Inflexion<br />
Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media.<br />
– John Von Neumann<br />
Chapter 4: Halo<br />
The asteroid is running Barney: it sings of love on the high frontier, of the passion of matter for replicators, and its<br />
friendship for the needy billions of the Pacific Rim. "I love you," it croons in Amber's ears as she seeks a precise fix on it: "Let<br />
me give you a big hug ..."<br />
A fraction of a light-second away, Amber locks a cluster of cursors together on the signal, trains them to track its Doppler<br />
shift, and reads off the orbital elements. "Locked and loaded," she mutters. The animated purple dinosaur pirouettes and<br />
prances in the middle of her viewport, throwing a diamond-tipped swizzle stick overhead. Sarcastically: "Big hug time! I got<br />
asteroid!" Cold gas thrusters bang somewhere behind her in the interstage docking ring, prodding the cumbersome farm<br />
ship round to orient on the Barney rock. She damps her enthusiasm self-consciously, her implants hungrily sequestrating<br />
surplus neurotransmitter molecules floating around her synapses before reuptake sets in. It doesn't do to get too excited in<br />
free flight. But the impulse to spin handstands, jump and sing is still there: It's her rock, and it loves her, and she's going to<br />
bring it to life.<br />
The workspace of Amber's room is a mass of stuff that probably doesn't belong on a spaceship. Posters of the latest Lebanese<br />
boy band bump and grind through their glam routines: Tentacular restraining straps wave from the corners of her sleeping<br />
bag, somehow accumulating a crust of dirty clothing from the air like a giant inanimate hydra. (Cleaning robots seldom dare<br />
to venture inside the teenager's bedroom.) One wall is repeatedly cycling through a simulation of the projected construction<br />
cycle of Habitat One, a big fuzzy sphere with a glowing core (that Amber is doing her bit to help create). Three or four<br />
small pastel-colored plastic kawaii dolls stalk each other across its circumference with million-kilometer strides. And her<br />
father's cat is curled up between the aircon duct and her costume locker, snoring in a high-pitched tone.<br />
Amber yanks open the faded velour curtain that shuts her room off from the rest of the hive: "I've got it!" she shouts. "It's all<br />
mine! I rule!" It's the sixteenth rock tagged by the orphanage so far, but it's the first that she's tagged by herself, and that<br />
makes it special. She bounces off the other side of the commons, surprising one of Oscar's cane toads – which should be<br />
locked down in the farm, it's not clear how it got here – and the audio repeaters copy the incoming signal, noise-fuzzed<br />
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echoes of a thousand fossilized infants' video shows.<br />
* * *<br />
"You're so prompt, Amber," Pierre whines when she corners him in the canteen.<br />
"Well, yeah!" She tosses her head, barely concealing a smirk of delight at her own brilliance. She knows it isn't nice, but Mom<br />
is a long way away, and Dad and Stepmom don't care about that kind of thing. "I'm brilliant, me," she announces. "Now what<br />
about our bet?"<br />
"Aww." Pierre thrusts his hands deep into his pockets. "But I don't have two million on me in change right now. Next cycle?"<br />
"Huh?" She's outraged. "But we had a bet!"<br />
"Uh, Dr. Bayes said you weren't going to make it this time, either, so I stuck my smart money in an options trade. If I take it<br />
out now, I'll take a big hit. Can you give me until cycle's end?"<br />
"You should know better than to trust a sim, Pee." Her avatar blazes at him with early-teen contempt: Pierre hunches his<br />
shoulders under her gaze. He's only twelve, freckled, hasn't yet learned that you don't welsh on a deal. "I'll let you do it this<br />
time," she announces, "but you'll have to pay for it. I want interest."<br />
He sighs. "What base rate are you –"<br />
"No, your interest! Slave for a cycle!" She grins malevolently.<br />
And his face shifts abruptly into apprehension: "As long as you don't make me clean the litter tray again. You aren't planning<br />
on doing that, are you?"<br />
* * *<br />
Welcome to the fourth decade. The thinking mass of the solar system now exceeds one MIPS per gram; it's<br />
still pretty dumb, but it's not dumb all over. The human population is near maximum overshoot, pushing<br />
nine billion, but its growth rate is tipping toward negative numbers, and bits of what used to be the first<br />
world are now facing a middle-aged average. Human cogitation provides about 10 28 MIPS of the solar<br />
system's brainpower. The real thinking is mostly done by the halo of a thousand trillion processors that<br />
surround the meat machines with a haze of computation – individually a tenth as powerful as a human<br />
brain, collectively they're ten thousand times more powerful, and their numbers are doubling every twenty<br />
million seconds. They're up to 10 33 MIPS and rising, although there's a long way to go before the solar<br />
system is fully awake.<br />
Technologies come, technologies go, but nobody even five years ago predicted that there'd be tinned<br />
primates in orbit around Jupiter by now: A synergy of emergent industries and strange business models have<br />
kick-started the space age again, aided and abetted by the discovery of (so far undecrypted) signals from ETs.<br />
Unexpected fringe riders are developing new ecological niches on the edge of the human information space,<br />
light-minutes and light-hours from the core, as an expansion that has hung fire since the 1970s gets under<br />
way.<br />
Amber, like most of the postindustrialists aboard the orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, is in her early teens: While<br />
their natural abilities are in many cases enhanced by germ-line genetic recombination, thanks to her mother's<br />
early ideals she has to rely on brute computational enhancements. She doesn't have a posterior parietal<br />
cortex hacked for extra short-term memory, or an anterior superior temporal gyrus tweaked for superior<br />
verbal insight, but she's grown up with neural implants that feel as natural to her as lungs or fingers. Half her<br />
wetware is running outside her skull on an array of processor nodes hooked into her brain by<br />
quantum-entangled communication channels – her own personal metacortex. These kids are mutant youth,<br />
burning bright: Not quite incomprehensible to their parents, but profoundly alien – the generation gap is as<br />
wide as the 1960s and as deep as the solar system. Their parents, born in the gutter years of the twenty-first<br />
century, grew up with white elephant shuttles and a space station that just went round and round, and<br />
computers that went beep when you pushed their buttons. The idea that Jupiter orbit was somewhere you<br />
could go was as profoundly counterintuitive as the Internet to a baby boomer.<br />
Most of the passengers on the can have run away from parents who think that teenagers belong in school,<br />
unable to come to terms with a generation so heavily augmented that they are fundamentally brighter than<br />
the adults around them. Amber was fluent in nine languages by the age of six, only two of them human and<br />
six of them serializable; when she was seven, her mother took her to the school psychiatrist for speaking in<br />
synthetic tongues. That was the final straw for Amber: using an illicit anonymous phone, she called her father.<br />
Her mother had him under a restraining order, but it hadn't occurred to her to apply for an order against<br />
his partner ...<br />
* * *<br />
Vast whorls of cloud ripple beneath the ship's drive stinger: Orange and brown and muddy gray streaks slowly crawl across<br />
the bloated horizon of Jupiter. Sanger is nearing perijove, deep within the gas giant's lethal magnetic field; static discharges<br />
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flicker along the tube, arcing over near the deep violet exhaust cloud emerging from the magnetic mirrors of the ship's<br />
VASIMR motor. The plasma rocket is cranked up to high mass flow, its specific impulse almost as low as a fission rocket but<br />
producing maximum thrust as the assembly creaks and groans through the gravitational assist maneuver. In another hour,<br />
the drive will flicker off, and the orphanage will fall up and out toward Ganymede, before dropping back in toward orbit<br />
around Amalthea, Jupiter's fourth moon (and source of much of the material in the Gossamer ring). They're not the first<br />
canned primates to make it to Jupiter subsystem, but they're one of the first wholly private ventures. The bandwidth out<br />
here sucks dead slugs through a straw, with millions of kilometers of vacuum separating them from scant hundreds of<br />
mouse-brained microprobes and a few dinosaurs left behind by NASA or ESA. They're so far from the inner system that a<br />
good chunk of the ship's communications array is given over to caching: The news is whole kiloseconds old by the time it<br />
gets out here.<br />
Amber, along with about half the waking passengers, watches in fascination from the common room. The commons are a<br />
long axial cylinder, a double-hulled inflatable at the center of the ship with a large part of their liquid water supply stored in<br />
its wall tubes. The far end is video-enabled, showing them a real-time 3D view of the planet as it rolls beneath them: in<br />
reality, there's as much mass as possible between them and the trapped particles in the Jovian magnetic envelope. "I could go<br />
swimming in that," sighs Lilly. "Just imagine, diving into that sea ..." Her avatar appears in the window, riding a silver<br />
surfboard down the kilometers of vacuum.<br />
"Nice case of wind-burn you've got there," someone jeers – Kas. Suddenly Lilly's avatar, hitherto clad in a shimmering<br />
metallic swimsuit, turns to the texture of baked meat and waggles sausage fingers up at them in warning.<br />
"Same to you and the window you climbed in through!" Abruptly the virtual vacuum outside the window is full of bodies,<br />
most of them human, contorting and writhing and morphing in mock-combat as half the kids pitch into the virtual death<br />
match. It's a gesture in the face of the sharp fear that outside the thin walls of the orphanage lies an environment that really<br />
is as hostile as Lilly's toasted avatar would indicate.<br />
Amber turns back to her slate: She's working through a complex mess of forms, necessary before the expedition can start<br />
work. Facts and figures that are never far away crowd around her, intimidating. Jupiter weighs 1.9 x 10 27 kilograms. There<br />
are twenty-nine Jovian moons and an estimated two hundred thousand minor bodies, lumps of rock, and bits of debris<br />
crowded around them – debris above the size of ring fragments, for Jupiter (like Saturn) has rings, albeit not as prominent.<br />
A total of six major national orbiter platforms have made it out here – and another two hundred and seventeen<br />
microprobes, all but six of them private entertainment platforms. The first human expedition was put together by ESA<br />
Studios six years ago, followed by a couple of wildcat mining prospectors and a Μ-commerce bus that scattered half a<br />
million picoprobes throughout Jupiter subsystem. Now the Sanger has arrived, along with another three monkey cans (one<br />
from Mars, two more from LEO) and it looks as if colonization is about to explode, except that there are at least four<br />
mutually exclusive Grand Plans for what to do with old Jove's mass.<br />
Someone prods her. "Hey, Amber, what are you up to?"<br />
She opens her eyes. "Doing my homework." It's Su Ang. "Look, we're going to Amalthea, aren't we? But we file our accounts<br />
in Reno, so we have to do all this paperwork. Monica asked me to help. It's insane."<br />
Ang leans over and reads, upside down. "Environmental Protection Agency?"<br />
"Yeah. Estimated Environmental Impact Forward Analysis 204.6b, Page Two. They want me to 'list any bodies of standing<br />
water within five kilometers of the designated mining area. If excavating below the water table, list any wellsprings, reservoirs,<br />
and streams within depth of excavation in meters multiplied by five hundred meters up to a maximum distance of ten<br />
kilometers downstream of direction of bedding plane flow. For each body of water, itemize any endangered or listed species<br />
of bird, fish, mammal, reptile, invertebrate, or plant living within ten kilometers –'"<br />
" – of a mine on Amalthea. Which orbits one hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above Jupiter, has no atmosphere,<br />
and where you can pick up a whole body radiation dose of ten Grays in half an hour on the surface." Ang shakes her head,<br />
then spoils it by giggling. Amber glances up.<br />
On the wall in front of her someone – Nicky or Boris, probably – has pasted a caricature of her own avatar into the virch<br />
fight. She's being hugged from behind by a giant cartoon dog with floppy ears and an improbably large erection, who's<br />
singing anatomically improbable suggestions while fondling himself suggestively. "Fuck that!" Shocked out of her distraction –<br />
and angry – Amber drops her stack of paperwork and throws a new avatar at the screen, one an agent of hers dreamed up<br />
overnight. It's called Spike, and it's not friendly. Spike rips off the dog's head and pisses down its trachea, which is<br />
anatomically correct for a human being: Meanwhile she looks around, trying to work out which of the laughing idiot<br />
children and lost geeks around her could have sent such an unpleasant message.<br />
"Children! Chill out." She glances round – one of the Franklins (this is the twentysomething dark-skinned female one) is<br />
frowning at them. "Can't we leave you alone for half a K without a fight?"<br />
Amber pouts. "It's not a fight; it's a forceful exchange of opinions."<br />
"Hah." The Franklin leans back in midair, arms crossed, an expression of supercilious smugness pasted across her-their face.<br />
"Heard that one before. Anyway" – she-they gesture, and the screen goes blank – "I've got news for you pesky kids. We got a<br />
claim verified! Factory starts work as soon as we shut down the stinger and finish filing all the paperwork via our lawyers.<br />
Now's our chance to earn our upkeep ..."<br />
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* * *<br />
Amber is flashing on ancient history, five years back along her time line. In her replay, she's in some kind of split-level ranch<br />
house out West. It's a temporary posting while her mother audits an obsolescent fab line enterprise that grinds out dead<br />
chips of VLSI silicon for Pentagon projects that have slipped behind the cutting edge. Her Mom leans over her, menacingly<br />
adult in her dark suit and chaperone earrings: "You're going to school, and that's that."<br />
Her mother is a blonde ice maiden madonna, one of the IRS's most productive bounty hunters – she can make grown CEOs<br />
panic just by blinking at them. Amber, a towheaded-eight-year old tearaway with a confusing mix of identities, inexperience<br />
blurring the boundary between self and grid, is not yet able to fight back effectively. After a couple of seconds, she verbalizes<br />
a rather feeble protest: "Don't want to!" One of her stance daemons whispers that this is the wrong approach to take, so she<br />
modifies it: "They'll beat up on me, Mom. I'm too different. Sides, I know you want me socialized up with my grade metrics,<br />
but isn't that what sideband's for? I can socialize real good at home."<br />
Mom does something unexpected: She kneels, putting herself on eye-level with Amber. They're on the living room carpet, all<br />
seventies-retro brown corduroy and acid-orange Paisley wallpaper, and for once, they're alone: The domestic robots are in<br />
hiding while the humans hold court. "Listen to me, sweetie." Mom's voice is breathy, laden with an emotional undertow as<br />
strong and stifling as the eau-de-Cologne she wears to the office to cover up the scent of her client's fear. "I know that's what<br />
your father's writing to you, but it isn't true. You need the company – physical company – of children your own age. You're<br />
natural, not some kind of engineered freak, even with your skullset. Natural children like you need company or they grow up<br />
all weird. Socialization isn't just about texting your own kind, Amber, you need to know how to deal with people who're<br />
different, too. I want you to grow up happy, and that won't happen if you don't learn to get on with children your own age.<br />
You're not going to be some kind of cyborg otaku freak, Amber. But to get healthy, you've got to go to school, build up a<br />
mental immune system. Anyway, that which does not destroy us makes us stronger, right?"<br />
It's crude moral blackmail, transparent as glass and manipulative as hell, but Amber's corpus logica flags it with a heavy<br />
emotional sprite miming the likelihood of physical discipline if she rises to the bait: Mom is agitated, nostrils slightly flared,<br />
ventilation rate up, some vasodilatation visible in her cheeks. Amber – in combination with her skullset and the metacortex<br />
of distributed agents it supports – is mature enough at eight years to model, anticipate, and avoid corporal punishment. But<br />
her stature and lack of physical maturity conspire to put her at a disadvantage when negotiating with adults who matured in<br />
a simpler age. She sighs, then puts on a pout to let Mom know she's still reluctant, but obedient. "O-kay. If you say so."<br />
Mom stands up, eyes distant – probably telling Saturn to warm his engine and open the garage doors. "I say so, punkin. Go<br />
get your shoes on, now. I'll pick you up on my way back from work, and I've got a treat for you; we're going to check out a<br />
new church together this evening." Mom smiles, but it doesn't reach her eyes: Amber has already figured out she's going<br />
through the motions in order to give her the simulated middle-American upbringing she believes Amber desperately needs<br />
before she runs head first into the future. She doesn't like the churches any more than her daughter does, but arguing<br />
won't work. "You be a good little girl, now, all right?"<br />
The imam is at prayer in a gyrostabilized mosque.<br />
* * *<br />
His mosque is not very big, and it has a congregation of one: He prays on his own every seventeen thousand two hundred<br />
and eighty seconds. He also webcasts the call to prayer, but there are no other believers in trans-Jovian space to answer the<br />
summons. Between prayers, he splits his attention between the exigencies of life support and scholarship. A student both of<br />
the Hadith and of knowledge-based systems, Sadeq collaborates in a project with other scholars who are building a revised<br />
concordance of all the known isnads, to provide a basis for exploring the body of Islamic jurisprudence from a new<br />
perspective – one they'll need sorely if the looked-for breakthroughs in communication with aliens emerge. Their goal is to<br />
answer the vexatious questions that bedevil Islam in the age of accelerated consciousness; and as their representative in orbit<br />
around Jupiter, these questions fall most heavily on Sadeq's shoulders.<br />
Sadeq is a slightly built man, with close-cropped black hair and a perpetually tired expression: Unlike the orphanage crew he<br />
has a ship to himself. The ship started out as an Iranian knock off of a Shenzhou-B capsule, with a Chinese type 921<br />
space-station module tacked onto its tail; but the clunky, 1960s look-alike – a glittering aluminum dragonfly mating with a<br />
Coke can – has a weirdly contoured M2P2 pod strapped to its nose. The M2P2 pod is a plasma sail, built in orbit by one of<br />
Daewoo's wake shield facilities. It dragged Sadeq and his cramped space station out to Jupiter in just four months, surfing on<br />
the solar breeze. His presence may be a triumph for the umma, but he feels acutely alone out here: When he turns his<br />
compact observatory's mirrors in the direction of the Sanger, he is struck by its size and purposeful appearance. Sanger's<br />
superior size speaks of the efficiency of the Western financial instruments, semiautonomous investment trusts with variable<br />
business-cycle accounting protocols that make possible the development of commercial space exploration. The Prophet,<br />
peace be unto him, may have condemned usury; but it might well have given him pause to see these engines of capital<br />
formation demonstrate their power above the Great Red Spot.<br />
After finishing his prayers, Sadeq spends a couple of precious extra minutes on his mat. He finds meditation comes hard in<br />
this environment: Kneel in silence, and you become aware of the hum of ventilation fans, the smell of old socks and sweat,<br />
the metallic taste of ozone from the Elektron oxygen generators. It is hard to approach God in this third hand spaceship, a<br />
hand-me-down from arrogant Russia to ambitious China, and finally to the religious trustees of Qom, who have better uses<br />
for it than any of the heathen states imagine. They've pushed it far, this little toy space station; but who's to say if it is God's<br />
intention for humans to live here, in orbit around this swollen alien giant of a planet?<br />
Sadeq shakes his head; he rolls his mat up and stows it beside the solitary porthole with a quiet sigh. A stab of homesickness<br />
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wrenches at him, for his childhood in hot, dusty Yazd and his many years as a student in Qom: He steadies himself by<br />
looking round, searching the station that is now as familiar to him as the fourth-floor concrete apartment his parents – a car<br />
factory worker and his wife – raised him in. The interior of the station is the size of a school bus, every surface cluttered<br />
with storage areas, instrument consoles, and layers of exposed pipes. A couple of globules of antifreeze jiggle like stranded<br />
jellyfish near a heat exchanger that has been giving him grief. Sadeq kicks off in search of the squeeze bottle he keeps for this<br />
purpose, then gathers up his roll of tools and instructs one of his agents to find him the relevant part of the maintenance<br />
log: it's time to fix the leaky joint for good.<br />
An hour or so of serious plumbing and he will eat freeze-dried lamb stew, with a paste of lentils and boiled rice, and a bulb<br />
of strong tea to wash it down, then sit down to review his next fly-by maneuvering sequence. Perhaps, God willing, there will<br />
be no further system alerts and he'll be able to spend an hour or two on his research between evening and final prayers.<br />
Maybe the day after tomorrow there'll even be time to relax for a couple of hours, to watch one of the old movies that he<br />
finds so fascinating for their insights into alien cultures: Apollo Thirteen, perhaps. It isn't easy, being the crew aboard a<br />
long-duration space mission. It's even harder for Sadeq, up here alone with nobody to talk to, for the communications lag to<br />
earth is more than half an hour each way – and as far as he knows, he's the only believer within half a billion kilometers.<br />
* * *<br />
Amber dials a number in Paris and waits until someone answers the phone. She knows the strange woman on the phone's<br />
tiny screen: Mom calls her "your father's fancy bitch" with a peculiar tight smile. (The one time Amber asked what a fancy<br />
bitch was, Mom slapped her – not hard, just a warning.) "Is Daddy there?" she asks.<br />
The strange woman looks slightly bemused. (Her hair is blonde, like Mom's, but the color clearly came out of a bleach bottle,<br />
and it's cut really short, and her skin is dark.) "Oui. Ah, yes." She smiles tentatively. "I am sorry, it is a disposable phone you<br />
are using? You want to talk to 'im?"<br />
It comes out in a rush: "I want to see him." Amber clutches the phone like a lifesaver: It's a cheap disposable cereal-packet<br />
item, and the cardboard is already softening in her sweaty grip. "Momma won't let me, Auntie 'Nette –"<br />
"Hush." Annette, who has lived with Amber's father for more than twice as long as her mother, smiles. "You are sure that<br />
telephone, your mother does not know of it?"<br />
Amber looks around. She's the only child in the restroom because it isn't break time, and she told teacher she had to go<br />
'right now': "I'm sure, P20 confidence factor greater than 0.9." Her Bayesian head tells her that she can't reason accurately<br />
about this because Momma has never caught her with an illicit phone before, but what the hell. It can't get Dad into trouble if<br />
he doesn't know, can it?<br />
"Very good." Annette glances aside. "Manny, I have a surprise call for you."<br />
Daddy appears on screen. She can see all of his face, and he looks younger than last time: he must have stopped using those<br />
clunky old glasses. "Hi – Amber! Where are you? Does your mother know you're calling me?" He looks slightly worried.<br />
"No," she says confidently, "the phone came in a box of Grahams."<br />
"Phew. Listen, sweet, you must remember never, ever to call me where your mom may find out. Otherwise, she'll get her<br />
lawyers to come after me with thumbscrews and hot pincers, because she'll say I made you call me. And not even Uncle<br />
Gianni will be able to sort that out. Understand?"<br />
"Yes, Daddy." She sighs. "Even though that's not true, I know. Don't you want to know why I called?"<br />
"Um." For a moment, he looks taken aback. Then he nods, thoughtfully. Amber likes Daddy because he takes her seriously<br />
most times when she talks to him. It's a phreaking nuisance having to borrow her classmate's phones or tunnel past Mom's<br />
pit-bull firewall, but Dad doesn't assume that she can't know anything just because she's only a kid. "Go ahead. There's<br />
something you need to get off your chest? How've things been, anyway?"<br />
She's going to have to be brief: The disposaphone comes prepaid, the international tariff it's using is lousy, and the break bell<br />
is going to ring any minute. "I want out, Daddy. I mean it. Mom's getting loopier every week – she's dragging me round all<br />
these churches now, and yesterday, she threw a fit over me talking to my terminal. She wants me to see the school shrink, I<br />
mean, what for? I can't do what she wants – I'm not her little girl! Every time I tunnel out, she tries to put a content-bot on<br />
me, and it's making my head hurt – I can't even think straight anymore!" To her surprise, Amber feels tears starting. "Get me<br />
out of here!"<br />
The view of her father shakes, pans round to show her Tante Annette looking worried. "You know, your father, he cannot<br />
do anything? The divorce lawyers, they will tie him up."<br />
Amber sniffs. "Can you help?" she asks.<br />
"I'll see what I can do," her father's fancy bitch promises as the break bell rings.<br />
* * *<br />
An instrument package peels away from the Sanger's claim jumper drone and drops toward the potato-shaped rock, fifty<br />
kilometers below. Jupiter hangs huge and gibbous in the background, impressionist wallpaper for a mad cosmologist: Pierre<br />
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bites his lower lip as he concentrates on steering it.<br />
Amber, wearing a black sleeping sack, hovers over his head like a giant bat, enjoying her freedom for a shift. She looks down<br />
on Pierre's bowl-cut hair, wiry arms gripping either side of the viewing table, and wonders what to have him do next. A<br />
slave for a day is an interesting experience: Life aboard the Sanger is busy enough that nobody gets much slack time (at least<br />
not until the big habitats have been assembled and the high-bandwidth dish is pointing back at Earth). They're unrolling<br />
everything to a hugely intricate plan generated by the backers' critical path team, and there isn't much room for idling: The<br />
expedition relies on shamelessly exploiting child labor – they're lighter on the life-support consumables than adults –<br />
working the kids twelve hour days to assemble a toe hold on the shore of the future. (When they're older and their options<br />
vest fully, they'll all be rich, but that hasn't stopped the outraged herdnews propaganda chorus from sounding off back<br />
home.) For Amber, the chance to let somebody else work for her is novel, and she's trying to make every minute count.<br />
"Hey, slave," she calls idly; "how you doing?"<br />
Pierre sniffs. "It's going okay." He refuses to glance up at her, Amber notices. He's thirteen. Isn't he supposed to be obsessed<br />
with girls by that age? She notices his quiet, intense focus, runs a stealthy probe along his outer boundary; he shows no sign<br />
of noticing it, but it bounces off, unable to chink his mental armor. "Got cruise speed," he says, taciturn, as two tonnes of<br />
metal, ceramics and diamond-phase weirdness hurtle toward the surface of Barney at three hundred kilometers per hour.<br />
"Stop shoving me, there's a three-second lag, and I don't want to get into a feedback control loop with it."<br />
"I'll shove if I want, slave." She sticks her tongue out at him.<br />
"And if you make me drop it?" he asks. Looking up at her, his face serious – "Are we supposed to be doing this?"<br />
"You cover your ass, and I'll cover mine," she says, then turns bright red. "You know what I mean."<br />
"I do, do I?" Pierre grins widely, then turns back to the console: "Aww, that's no fun. And you want to tune whatever<br />
bit-bucket you've given control of your speech centers to – they're putting out way too much double entendre, somebody<br />
might mistake you for a grown-up."<br />
"You stick to your business, and I'll stick to mine," she says, emphatically. "And you can start by telling me what's happening."<br />
"Nothing." He leans back and crosses his arms, grimacing at the screen. "It's going to drift for five hundred seconds, now,<br />
then there's the midcourse correction and a deceleration burn before touch down. And then it's going to be an hour while<br />
it unwraps itself and starts unwinding the cable spool. What do you want, minute noodles with that?"<br />
"Uh-huh." Amber spreads her bat wings and lies back in mid air, staring at the window, feeling rich and idle as Pierre works<br />
his way through her day shift. "Wake me when there's something interesting to see." Maybe she should have had him feed<br />
her peeled grapes or give her a foot massage, something more traditionally hedonistic; but right now, just knowing he's her<br />
own little piece of alienated labor is doing good things for her self-esteem. Looking at those tense arms, the curve of his neck,<br />
she thinks maybe there's something to this whispering and giggling he really fancies you stuff the older girls go in for –<br />
The window rings like a gong, and Pierre coughs. "You've got mail," he says drily. "You want me to read it for you?"<br />
"What the –" A message is flooding across the screen, right-to-left snaky script like the stuff on her corporate instrument<br />
(now lodged safely in a deposit box in Zurich). It takes her a while to load in a grammar agent that can handle Arabic, and<br />
another minute for her to take in the meaning of the message. When she does, she starts swearing, loudly and continuously.<br />
"You bitch, Mom, why'd you have to go and do a thing like that?"<br />
* * *<br />
The corporate instrument arrived in a huge FedEx box addressed to Amber: It happened on her birthday while Mom was at<br />
work, and she remembers it as if it was only an hour ago.<br />
She remembers reaching up and scraping her thumb over the deliveryman's clipboard, the rough feel of the<br />
microsequencers sampling her DNA. She drags the package inside. When she pulls the tab on the box, it unpacks itself<br />
automatically, regurgitating a compact 3D printer, half a ream of paper printed in old-fashioned dumb ink, and a small calico<br />
cat with a large @-symbol on its flank. The cat hops out of the box, stretches, shakes its head, and glares at her. "You're<br />
Amber?" it mrowls. It actually makes real cat noises, but the meaning is clear – it's able to talk directly to her linguistic<br />
competence interface.<br />
"Yeah," she says, shyly. "Are you from Tante 'Nette?"<br />
"No, I'm from the fucking tooth fairy." It leans over and head-butts her knee, strops the scent glands between its ears all over<br />
her skirt. "Listen, you got any tuna in the kitchen?"<br />
"Mom doesn't believe in seafood," says Amber. "It's all foreign-farmed muck these days, she says. It's my birthday today, did I<br />
tell you?"<br />
"Happy fucking birthday, then." The cat yawns, convincingly realistic. "Here's your dad's present. Bastard put me in<br />
hibernation and sent me along to show you how to work it. You take my advice, you'll trash the fucker. No good will come<br />
of it."<br />
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Amber interrupts the cat's grumbling by clapping her hands gleefully; "So what is it?" she demands: "A new invention? Some<br />
kind of weird sex toy from Amsterdam? A gun, so I can shoot Pastor Wallace?"<br />
"Naah." The cat yawns, yet again, and curls up on the floor next to the 3D printer. "It's some kinda dodgy business model to<br />
get you out of hock to your mom. Better be careful, though – he says its legality is narrowly scoped jurisdiction-wise. Your<br />
Mom might be able to undermine it if she learns about how it works."<br />
"Wow. Like, how totally cool." In truth, Amber is delighted because it is her birthday; but Mom's at work, and Amber's home<br />
alone, with just the TV in moral majority mode for company. Things have gone downhill since Mom decided a modal average<br />
dose of old-time religion was an essential part of her upbringing, to the point that absolutely the best thing in the world<br />
Tante Annette could send her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If it doesn't work, Mom will take her<br />
to Church tonight, and she's certain she'll end up making a scene again. Amber's tolerance of willful idiocy is diminishing<br />
rapidly, and while building up her memetic immunity might be the real reason Mom's forcing this shit on her – it's always<br />
hard to tell with Mom – things have been tense ever since she got expelled from Sunday school for mounting a spirited<br />
defense of the theory of evolution.<br />
The cat sniffs in the direction of the printer. "Why doncha fire it up?" Amber opens the lid on the printer, removes the<br />
packing popcorn, and plugs it in. There's a whir and a rush of waste heat from its rear as it cools the imaging heads down to<br />
working temperature and registers her ownership.<br />
"What do I do now?" she asks.<br />
"Pick up the page labeled READ ME and follow the instructions," the cat recites in a bored singsong voice. It winks at her,<br />
then fakes an exaggerated French accent: "Le READ ME, il sont contain directions pour executing le corporate instrument<br />
dans le boit. In event of perplexity, consult the accompanying Aineko for clarification." The cat wrinkles its nose rapidly, as if<br />
it's about to bite an invisible insect: "Warning: Don't rely on your father's cat's opinions, it is a perverse beast and cannot be<br />
trusted. Your mother helped seed its meme base, back when they were married. Ends." It mumbles on for a while: "Fucking<br />
snotty Parisian bitch, I'll piss in her knicker drawer, I'll molt in her bidet ..."<br />
"Don't be vile." Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this<br />
one is exotic by any standards – a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari'a and<br />
the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn't easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to<br />
whole libraries of international trade law – the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It's<br />
not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her – that's what her grammar engine is for – or even that<br />
they're full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: But the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole<br />
purpose of owning chattel slaves.<br />
"What's going on?" she asks the cat. "What's this all about?"<br />
The cat sneezes, then looks disgusted. "This wasn't my idea, big shot. Your father is a very weird guy, and your mother hates<br />
him lots because she's still in love with him. She's got kinks, y'know? Or maybe she's sublimating them, if she's serious about<br />
this church shit she's putting you through. He thinks she's a control freak, and he's not entirely wrong. Anyway, after your<br />
dad ran off in search of another dom, she took out an injunction against him. But she forgot to cover his partner, and she<br />
bought this parcel of worms and sent them to you, okay? Annie is a real bitch, but he's got her wrapped right around his<br />
finger, or something. Anyway, he built these companies and this printer – which isn't hardwired to a filtering proxy, like<br />
your mom's – specifically to let you get away from her legally. If that's what you want to do."<br />
Amber fast-forwards through the dynamic chunks of the README – boring legal UML diagrams, mostly – soaking up the gist<br />
of the plan. Yemen is one of the few countries to implement traditional Sunni shari'a law and a limited liability company scam<br />
at the same time. Owning slaves is legal – the fiction is that the owner has an option hedged on the indentured laborer's<br />
future output, with interest payments that grow faster than the unfortunate victim can pay them off – and companies are<br />
legal entities. If Amber sells herself into slavery to this company, she will become a slave and the company will be legally liable<br />
for her actions and upkeep. The rest of the legal instrument – about ninety percent of it, in fact – is a set of self-modifying<br />
corporate mechanisms coded in a variety of jurisdictions that permit Turing-complete company constitutions, and which act<br />
as an ownership shell for the slavery contract. At the far end of the corporate shell game is a trust fund of which Amber is<br />
the prime beneficiary and shareholder. When she reaches the age of majority, she'll acquire total control over all the<br />
companies in the network and can dissolve her slave contract; until then, the trust fund (which she essentially owns) oversees<br />
the company that owns her (and keeps it safe from hostile takeover bids). Oh, and the company network is primed by an<br />
extraordinary general meeting that instructed it to move the trust's assets to Paris immediately. A one-way airline ticket is<br />
enclosed.<br />
"You think I should take this?" she asks uncertainly. It's hard to tell how smart the cat really is – there's probably a yawning<br />
vacuum behind those semantic networks if you dig deep enough – but it tells a pretty convincing tale.<br />
The cat squats and curls its tail protectively around its paws: "I'm saying nothing, you know what I mean? You take this, you<br />
can go live with your dad. But it won't stop your ma coming after him with a horsewhip, and after you with a bunch of<br />
lawyers and a set of handcuffs. You want my advice, you'll phone the Franklins and get aboard their off-planet mining scam.<br />
In space, no one can serve a writ on you. Plus, they got long-term plans to get into the CETI market, cracking alien network<br />
packets. You want my honest opinion, you wouldn't like it in Paris after a bit. Your Dad and the frog bitch, they're swingers,<br />
y'know? No time in their lives for a kid. Or a cat like me, now I think of it. They're working all day for the Senator, and out<br />
all hours of night doing drugs, fetish parties, raves, opera, that kind of adult shit. Your Dad dresses in frocks more than your<br />
mom, and your Tante 'Nettie leads him around the apartment on a chain when they're not having noisy sex on the balcony.<br />
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They'd cramp your style, kid. You shouldn't have to put up with parents who have more of a life than you do."<br />
"Huh." Amber wrinkles her nose, half-disgusted by the cat's transparent scheming, and half-acknowledging its message: I better<br />
think hard about this, she decides. Then she flies off in so many directions at once that she nearly browns out the household<br />
broadband. Part of her is examining the intricate card pyramid of company structures; somewhere else, she's thinking about<br />
what can go wrong, while another bit (probably some of her wet, messy glandular biological self) is thinking about how nice<br />
it would be to see Daddy again, albeit with some trepidation. Parents aren't supposed to have sex – isn't there a law, or<br />
something? "Tell me about the Franklins? Are they married? Singular?"<br />
The 3D printer is cranking up. It hisses slightly, dissipating heat from the hard vacuum chamber in its supercooled<br />
workspace. Deep in its guts it creates coherent atom beams, from a bunch of Bose–Einstein condensates hovering on the<br />
edge of absolute zero. By superimposing interference patterns on them, it generates an atomic hologram, building a perfect<br />
replica of some original artifact, right down to the atomic level – there are no clunky moving nanotechnology parts to break<br />
or overheat or mutate. Something is going to come out of the printer in half an hour, something cloned off its original right<br />
down to the individual quantum states of its component atomic nuclei. The cat, seemingly oblivious, shuffles closer to the<br />
warm air exhaust ducts.<br />
"Bob Franklin, he died about two, three years before you were born – your dad did business with him. So did your mom.<br />
Anyway, he had chunks of his noumen preserved and the estate trustees are trying to re-create his consciousness by<br />
cross-loading him in their implants. They're sort of a borganism, but with money and style. Anyway, Bob got into the space<br />
biz back then, with some financial wizardry a friend of your father whipped up for him, and now they're building a spacehab<br />
that they're going to take all the way out to Jupiter, where they can dismantle a couple of small moons and begin building<br />
helium-three refineries. It's that CETI scam I told you about earlier, but they've got a whole load of other angles on it for the<br />
long term. See, your dad's friends have cracked the broadcast, the one everybody knows about. It's a bunch of instructions<br />
for finding the nearest router that plugs into the galactic Internet. And they want to go out there and talk to some aliens."<br />
This is mostly going right over Amber's head – she'll have to learn what helium-three refineries are later – but the idea of<br />
running away to space has a certain appeal. Adventure, that's what. Amber looks around the living room and sees it for a<br />
moment as a capsule, a small wooden cell locked deep in a vision of a middle America that never was – the one her mom<br />
wants to bring her up in, like a misshapen Skinner box designed to train her to be normal. "Is Jupiter fun?" she asks. "I know<br />
it's big and not very dense, but is it, like, a happening place? Are there any aliens there?"<br />
"It's the first place you need to go if you want to get to meet the aliens eventually," says the cat as the printer clanks and<br />
disgorges a fake passport (convincingly aged), an intricate metal seal engraved with Arabic script, and a tailored<br />
wide-spectrum vaccine targeted on Amber's immature immune system. "Stick that on your wrist, sign the three top copies,<br />
put them in the envelope, and let's get going. We've got a flight to catch, slave."<br />
* * *<br />
Sadeq is eating his dinner when the first lawsuit in Jupiter orbit rolls in.<br />
Alone in the cramped humming void of his station, he considers the plea. The language is awkward, showing all the hallmarks<br />
of a crude machine translation: The supplicant is American, a woman, and – oddly – claims to be a Christian. This is<br />
surprising enough, but the nature of her claim is, at face value, preposterous. He forces himself to finish his bread, then bag<br />
the waste and clean the platter, before he gives it his full consideration. Is it a tasteless joke? Evidently not. As the only quadi<br />
outside the orbit of Mars, he is uniquely qualified to hear it, and it is a case that cries out for justice.<br />
A woman who leads a God-fearing life – not a correct one, no, but she shows some signs of humility and progress toward a<br />
deeper understanding – is deprived of her child by the machinations of a feckless husband who deserted her years before.<br />
That the woman was raising the child alone strikes Sadeq as disturbingly Western, but pardonable when he reads her<br />
account of the feckless one's behavior, which is pretty lax; an ill fate indeed would await any child that this man raises to<br />
adulthood. This man deprives her of her child, but not by legitimate means: He doesn't take the child into his own<br />
household or make any attempt to raise her, either in accordance with his own customs or the precepts of shari'a. Instead,<br />
he enslaves her wickedly in the mire of the Western legal tradition, then casts her into outer darkness to be used as a<br />
laborer by the dubious forces of self-proclaimed "progress". The same forces Sadeq has been sent to confront, as<br />
representative of the umma in orbit around Jupiter.<br />
Sadeq scratches his short beard thoughtfully. A nasty tale, but what can he do about it? "<strong>Computer</strong>," he says, "a reply to this<br />
supplicant: My sympathies lie with you in the manner of your suffering, but I fail to see in what way I can be of assistance.<br />
Your heart cries out for help before God (blessed be his name), but surely this is a matter for the temporal authorities of<br />
the dar al-Harb." He pauses: Or is it? he wonders. Legal wheels begin to turn in his mind. "If you can but find your way to<br />
extending to me a path by which I can assert the primacy of shari'a over your daughter, I shall apply myself to constructing<br />
a case for her emancipation, to the greater glory of God (blessed be his name). Ends, sigblock, send."<br />
Releasing the Velcro straps that hold him at the table, Sadeq floats up and kicks gently toward the forward end of the<br />
cramped habitat. The controls of the telescope are positioned between the ultrasonic clothing cleaner and the lithium<br />
hydroxide scrubbers. They're already freed up, because he was conducting a wide-field survey of the inner ring, looking for<br />
the signature of water ice. It is the work of a few moments to pipe the navigation and tracking system into the telescope's<br />
controller and direct it to hunt for the big foreign ship of fools. Something nudges at Sadeq's mind urgently, an irritating<br />
realization that he may have missed something in the woman's e-mail: there were a number of huge attachments. With half<br />
his mind he surfs the news digest his scholarly peers send him daily. Meanwhile, he waits patiently for the telescope to find<br />
the speck of light that the poor woman's daughter is enslaved within.<br />
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This might be a way in, he realizes, a way to enter dialogue with them. Let the hard questions answer themselves, elegantly.<br />
There will be no need for confrontation if they can be convinced that their plans are faulty: no need to defend the godly<br />
from the latter-day Tower of Babel these people propose to build. If this woman Pamela means what she says, Sadeq need<br />
not end his days out here in the cold between the worlds, away from his elderly parents and brother, and his colleagues and<br />
friends. And he will be profoundly grateful, because in his heart of hearts, he knows that he is less a warrior than a scholar.<br />
"I'm sorry, but the borg is attempting to assimilate a lawsuit," says the receptionist. "Will you hold?"<br />
"Crud." Amber blinks the Binary Betty answerphone sprite out of her eye and glances round at the cabin. "That is so last<br />
century," she grumbles. "Who do they think they are?"<br />
* * *<br />
"Dr. Robert H. Franklin," volunteers the cat. "It's a losing proposition if you ask me. Bob was so fond of his dope there's this<br />
whole hippy group mind that's grown up using his state vector as a bong –"<br />
"Shut the fuck up!" Amber shouts at him. Instantly contrite (for yelling in an inflatable spacecraft is a major faux pas): "Sorry."<br />
She spawns an autonomic thread with full parasympathetic nervous control, tells it to calm her down, then spawns a couple<br />
more to go forth and become fuqaha, expert on shari'a law. She realizes she's buying up way too much of the orphanage's<br />
scarce bandwidth – time that will have to be paid for in chores, later – but it's necessary. "Mom's gone too far. This time it's<br />
war."<br />
She slams out of her cabin and spins right round in the central axis of the hab, a rogue missile pinging for a target to vent<br />
her rage on. A tantrum would be good –<br />
But her body is telling her to chill out, take ten, and there's a drone of scriptural lore dribbling away in the back of her<br />
head, and she's feeling frustrated and angry and not in control, but not really mad anymore. It was like this three years ago<br />
when Mom noticed her getting on too well with Jenny Morgan and moved her to a new school district – she said it was a<br />
work assignment, but Amber knows better, Mom asked for it – just to keep her dependent and helpless. Mom is a<br />
control-freak with fixed ideas about how to bring up a child, and ever since she lost Dad, she's been working her claws into<br />
Amber, making her upbringing a life's work – which is tough, because Amber is not good victim material, and is smart and<br />
well networked to boot. But now, Mom's found a way to fuck Amber over completely, even in Jupiter orbit, and if not for<br />
her skullware keeping a lid on things, Amber would be totally out of control.<br />
Instead of shouting at her cat or trying to message the Franklins, Amber goes to hunt down the borg in their meatspace den.<br />
There are sixteen borg aboard the Sanger – adults, members of the Franklin Collective, squatters in the ruins of Bob<br />
Franklin's posthumous vision. They lend bits of their brains to the task of running what science has been able to resurrect of<br />
the dead dot-com billionaire's mind, making him the first bodhisattva of the uploading age – apart from the lobster colony,<br />
of course. Their den mother is a woman called Monica: a willowy, brown-eyed hive queen with raster-burned corneal<br />
implants and a dry, sardonic delivery that can corrode egos like a desert wind. She's better than any of the others at<br />
running Bob, except for the creepy one called Jack, and she's no slouch when she's being herself (unlike Jack, who is never<br />
himself in public). Which probably explains why they elected her Maximum Leader of the expedition.<br />
Amber finds Monica in the number four kitchen garden, performing surgery on a filter that's been blocked by toad spawn.<br />
She's almost buried beneath a large pipe, her Velcro-taped tool kit waving in the breeze like strange blue air-kelp. "Monica?<br />
You got a minute?"<br />
"Sure, I have lots of minutes. Make yourself helpful? Pass me the antitorque wrench and a number six hex head."<br />
"Um." Amber captures the blue flag and fiddles around with its contents. Something that has batteries, motors, a flywheel<br />
counterweight, and laser gyros assembles itself – Amber passes it under the pipe. "Here. Listen, your phone is engaged."<br />
"I know. You've come to see me about your conversion, haven't you?"<br />
"Yes!"<br />
There's a clanking noise from under the pressure sump. "Take this." A plastic bag floats out, bulging with stray fasteners. "I<br />
got a bit of hoovering to do. Get yourself a mask if you don't already have one."<br />
A minute later, Amber is back beside Monica's legs, her face veiled by a filter mask. "I don't want this to go through," she<br />
says. "I don't care what Mom says, I'm not Moslem! This judge, he can't touch me. He can't," she adds, vehemence warring<br />
with uncertainty.<br />
"Maybe he doesn't want to?" Another bag: "Here, catch."<br />
Amber grabs the bag, a fraction of a second too late. She discovers the hard way that it's full of water and toadspawn.<br />
Stringy mucous ropes full of squiggling comma-shaped tadpoles explode all over the compartment and bounce off the walls<br />
in a shower of amphibian confetti. "Eew!"<br />
Monica squirms out from behind the pipe. "Oh, you didn't." She kicks off the consensus-defined floor and grabs a wad of<br />
absorbent paper from the spinner, whacks it across the ventilator shroud above the sump. Together they go after the toad<br />
spawn with rubbish bags and paper – by the time they've got the stringy mess mopped up, the spinner has begun to click<br />
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and whir, processing cellulose from the algae tanks into fresh wipes. "That was not good," Monica says emphatically as the<br />
disposal bin sucks down her final bag. "You wouldn't happen to know how the toad got in here?"<br />
"No, but I ran into one that was loose in the commons, one shift before last cycle-end. Gave it a ride back to Oscar."<br />
"I'll have a word with him, then." Monica glares blackly at the pipe. "I'm going to have to go back and refit the filter in a<br />
minute. Do you want me to be Bob?"<br />
"Uh." Amber thinks. "Not sure. Your call."<br />
"All right, Bob coming on-line." Monica's face relaxes slightly, then her expression hardens. "Way I see it, you've got a choice.<br />
Your mother kinda boxed you in, hasn't she?"<br />
"Yes." Amber frowns.<br />
"So. Pretend I'm an idiot. Talk me through it, huh?"<br />
Amber drags herself alongside the hydro pipe and gets her head down, alongside Monica/Bob, who is floating with her feet<br />
near the floor. "I ran away from home. Mom owned me – that is, she had parental rights and Dad had none. So Dad, via a<br />
proxy, helped me sell myself into slavery to a company. The company was owned by a trust fund, and I'm the main<br />
beneficiary when I reach the age of majority. As a chattel, the company tells me what to do – legally – but the shell company<br />
is set to take my orders. So I'm autonomous. Right?"<br />
"That sounds like the sort of thing your father would do," Monica/Bob says neutrally. Overtaken by a sardonic middle-aged<br />
Silicon Valley drawl, her north-of-England accent sounds peculiarly mid-Atlantic.<br />
"Trouble is, most countries don't acknowledge slavery, they just dress it up pretty and call it in loco parentis or something.<br />
Those that do mostly don't have any equivalent of a limited liability company, much less one that can be directed by another<br />
company from abroad. Dad picked Yemen on the grounds that they've got this stupid brand of shari'a law – and a crap<br />
human rights record – but they're just about conformant to the open legal standards protocol, able to interface to EU<br />
norms via a Turkish legislative cut-out."<br />
"So."<br />
"Well, I guess I was technically a Janissary. Mom was doing her Christian phase, so that made me a Christian unbeliever slave<br />
of an Islamic company. Now the stupid bitch has gone and converted to shi'ism. Normally Islamic descent runs through the<br />
father, but she picked her sect carefully and chose one that's got a progressive view of women's rights: They're sort of Islamic<br />
fundamentalist liberal constructionists, 'what would the Prophet do if he was alive today and had to worry about<br />
self-replicating chewing gum factories' and that sort of thing. They generally take a progressive view of things like legal equality<br />
of the sexes because, for his time and place, the Prophet was way ahead of the ball and they figure they ought to follow his<br />
example. Anyway, that means Mom can assert that I am Moslem, and under Yemeni law, I get to be treated as a Moslem<br />
chattel of a company. And their legal code is very dubious about permitting slavery of Moslems. It's not that I have rights as<br />
such, but my pastoral well-being becomes the responsibility of the local imam, and –" She shrugs helplessly.<br />
"Has he tried to make you run under any new rules, yet?" asks Monica/Bob. "Has he put blocks on your freedom of agency,<br />
tried to mess with your mind? Insisted on libido dampers or a strict dress code?"<br />
"Not yet." Amber's expression is grim. "But he's no dummy. I figure he may be using Mom – and me – as a way of getting his<br />
fingers into this whole expedition. Staking a claim for jurisdiction, claim arbitration, that sort of thing. It could be worse; he<br />
might order me to comply fully with his specific implementation of shari'a. They permit implants, but require mandatory<br />
conceptual filtering: If I run that stuff, I'll end up believing it."<br />
"Okay." Monica does a slow backward somersault in midair. "Now tell me why you can't simply repudiate it."<br />
"Because." Deep breath. "I can do that in two ways. I can deny Islam, which makes me an apostate, and automatically<br />
terminates my indenture to the shell, so Mom owns me under US or EU law. Or I can say that the instrument has no legal<br />
standing because I was in the USA when I signed it, and slavery is illegal there, in which case Mom owns me. Or I can take the<br />
veil, live like a modest Moslem woman, do whatever the imam wants, and Mom doesn't own me – but she gets to appoint my<br />
chaperone. Oh Bob, she has planned this so well."<br />
"Uh-huh." Monica rotates back to the floor and looks at Amber, suddenly very Bob. "Now you've told me your troubles,<br />
start thinking like your dad. Your Dad had a dozen creative ideas before breakfast every day – it's how he made his name.<br />
Your mom has got you in a box. Think your way outside it: What can you do?"<br />
"Well." Amber rolls over and hugs the fat hydroponic duct to her chest like a life raft. "It's a legal paradox. I'm trapped<br />
because of the jurisdiction she's cornered me in. I could talk to the judge, I suppose, but she'll have picked him carefully."<br />
Her eyes narrow. "The jurisdiction. Hey, Bob." She lets go of the duct and floats free, hair streaming out behind her like a<br />
cometary halo. "How do I go about getting myself a new jurisdiction?"<br />
Monica grins. "I seem to recall the traditional way was to grab yourself some land and set yourself up as king; but there are<br />
other ways. I've got some friends I think you should meet. They're not good conversationalists and there's a two-hour<br />
lightspeed delay, but I think you'll find they've answered that question already. But why don't you talk to the imam first and<br />
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find out what he's like? He may surprise you. After all, he was already out here before your mom decided to use him to<br />
make a point."<br />
* * *<br />
The Sanger hangs in orbit thirty kilometers up, circling the waist of potato-shaped Amalthea. Drones swarm across the slopes<br />
of Mons Lyctos, ten kilometers above the mean surface level. They kick up clouds of reddish sulphate dust as they spread<br />
transparent sheets across the barren moonscape. This close to Jupiter (a mere hundred and eighty thousand kilometers<br />
above the swirling madness of the cloudscape) the gas giant fills half the sky with a perpetually changing clock face, for<br />
Amalthea orbits the master in just under twelve hours. The Sanger's radiation shields are running at full power, shrouding<br />
the ship in a corona of rippling plasma: Radio is useless, and the human miners control their drones via an intricate network<br />
of laser circuits. Other, larger drones are unwinding spools of heavy electrical cable north and south from the landing site.<br />
Once the circuits are connected, they will form a coil cutting through Jupiter's magnetic field, generating electrical current<br />
(and imperceptibly sapping the moon's orbital momentum).<br />
Amber sighs and looks, for the sixth time this hour, at the webcam plastered on the side of her cabin. She's taken down the<br />
posters and told the toys to tidy themselves away. In another two thousand seconds, the tiny Iranian spaceship will rise above<br />
the limb of Moshtari, and then it will be time to talk to the teacher. She isn't looking forward to the experience. If he's a<br />
grizzled old blockhead of the most obdurate fundamentalist streak, she'll be in trouble: Disrespect for age has been part and<br />
parcel of the Western teenage experience for generations, and a cross-cultural thread that she's detailed to clue up on Islam<br />
reminds her that not all cultures share this outlook. But if he turns out to be young, intelligent, and flexible, things could be<br />
even worse. When she was eight, Amber audited The Taming of the Shrew. She finds she has no appetite for a starring role<br />
in her own cross-cultural production.<br />
She sighs again. "Pierre?"<br />
"Yeah?" His voice comes from the foot of the emergency locker in her room. He's curled up down there, limbs twitching<br />
languidly as he drives a mining drone around the surface of Object Barney, as the rock has named itself. The drone is a<br />
long-legged crane fly look-alike, bouncing very slowly from toe tip to toe tip in the microgravity. The rock is only half a<br />
kilometer along its longest axis, coated brown with weird hydrocarbon goop and sulphur compounds sprayed off the surface<br />
of Io by the Jovian winds. "I'm coming."<br />
"You better." She glances at the screen. "One twenty seconds to next burn." The payload canister on the screen is,<br />
technically speaking, stolen. It'll be okay as long as she gives it back, Bob said, although she won't be able to do that until it's<br />
reached Barney and they've found enough water ice to refuel it. "Found anything yet?"<br />
"Just the usual. Got a seam of ice near the semimajor pole – it's dirty, but there's at least a thousand tons there. And the<br />
surface is crunchy with tar. Amber, you know what? The orange shit, it's solid with fullerenes."<br />
Amber grins at her reflection in the screen. That's good news. Once the payload she's steering touches down, Pierre can<br />
help her lay superconducting wires along Barney's long axis. It's only a kilometer and a half, and that'll only give them a few<br />
tens of kilowatts of juice, but the condensation fabricator that's also in the payload can will be able to use it to convert<br />
Barney's crust into processed goods at about two grams per second. Using designs copylefted by the free hardware<br />
foundation, inside two hundred thousand seconds they'll have a grid of sixty-four 3D printers barfing up structured matter<br />
at a rate limited only by available power. Starting with a honking great dome tent and some free nitrogen/oxygen for her to<br />
breathe, then adding a big web cache and direct high-bandwidth uplink to Earth, Amber could have her very own one-girl<br />
colony up and running within a million seconds.<br />
The screen blinks at her. "Oh shit! Make yourself scarce, Pierre?" The incoming call nags at her attention. "Yeah? Who are<br />
you?"<br />
The screen fills with a view of a cramped, very twen-cen-looking space capsule. The guy inside it is in his twenties, with a<br />
heavily tanned face, close-cropped hair and beard, wearing an olive drab space suit liner. He's floating between a TORU<br />
manual docking controller and a gilt-framed photograph of the Ka'bah at Mecca. "Good evening to you," he says solemnly.<br />
"Do I have the honor to be addressing Amber Macx?"<br />
"Uh, yeah? That's me." She stares at him: He looks nothing like her conception of an ayatollah – whatever an ayatollah is –<br />
elderly, black-robed, vindictively fundamentalist. "Who are you?"<br />
"I am Dr. Sadeq Khurasani. I hope that I am not interrupting you? Is it convenient for you that we talk now?"<br />
He looks so anxious that Amber nods automatically. "Sure. Did my Mom put you up to this?" They're still speaking English,<br />
and she notices that his diction is good, but slightly stilted. He isn't using a grammar engine, he actually learned the language<br />
the hard way, she realizes, feeling a frisson of fear. "You want to be careful how you talk to her. She doesn't lie, exactly, but<br />
she gets people to do what she wants."<br />
"Yes, I spoke to – ah." A pause. They're still almost a light-second apart, time for painful collisions and accidental silences. "I<br />
see. Are you sure you should be speaking of your mother that way?"<br />
Amber breathes deeply. "Adults can get divorced. If I could get divorced from her, I would. She's –" She flails around for the<br />
right word helplessly. "Look, she's the sort of person who can't lose a fight. If she's going to lose, she'll try to figure how to<br />
set the law on you. Like she's done to me. Don't you see?"<br />
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Dr. Khurasani looks extremely dubious. "I am not sure I understand," He says. "Perhaps, mmm, I should tell you why I am<br />
talking to you?"<br />
"Sure. Go ahead." Amber is startled by his attitude: He actually seems to be taking her seriously, she realizes. Treating her<br />
like an adult. The sensation is so novel – coming from someone more than twenty years old – that she almost lets herself<br />
forget that he's only talking to her because Mom set her up.<br />
"Well, I am an engineer. In addition, I am a student of fiqh, jurisprudence. In fact, I am qualified to sit in judgment. I am a very<br />
junior judge, but even so, it is a heavy responsibility. Anyway, your mother, peace be unto her, lodged a petition with me.<br />
Are you aware of it?"<br />
"Yes." Amber tenses up. "It's a lie. Distortion of the facts."<br />
"Hmm." Sadeq rubs his beard thoughtfully. "Well, I have to find out, yes? Your mother has submitted herself to the will of<br />
God. This makes you the child of a Moslem, and she claims –"<br />
"She's trying to use you as a weapon!" Amber interrupts. "I sold myself into slavery to get away from her, do you<br />
understand? I enslaved myself to a company that is held in trust for my ownership. She's trying to change the rules to get me<br />
back. You know what? I don't believe she gives a shit about your religion, all she wants is me!"<br />
"A mother's love –"<br />
"Fuck love," Amber snarls, "she wants power."<br />
Sadeq's expression hardens. "You have a foul mouth in your head, child. All I am trying to do is to find out the facts of this<br />
situation. You should ask yourself if such disrespect furthers your interests?" He pauses for a moment, then continues, less<br />
abruptly. "Did you really have such a bad childhood with her? Do you think she did everything merely for power, or could<br />
she love you?" Pause. "You must understand, I need to learn these things. Before I can know what is the right thing to do."<br />
"My mother –" Amber stops dead and spawns a vaporous cloud of memory retrievals. They fan out through the space<br />
around her mind like the tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network parsers and class filters, she turns the<br />
memories into reified images and blats them at the webcam's tiny brain so he can see them. Some of the memories are so<br />
painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in full office war paint, leaning over Amber, promising to disable her lexical<br />
enhancements forcibly if she doesn't work on her grammar without them. Mom telling Amber that they're moving again,<br />
abruptly, dragging her away from school and the friends she'd tentatively started to like. The church-of-the-month business.<br />
Mom catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table,<br />
forcing her to eat – "My mother likes control."<br />
"Ah." Sadeq's expression turns glassy. "And this is how you feel about her? How long have you had that level of – no, please<br />
forgive me for asking. You obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know? Did you talk to them?"<br />
"My grandparents?" Amber stifles a snort. "Mom's parents are dead. Dad's are still alive, but they won't talk to him – they like<br />
Mom. They think I'm creepy. I know little things, their tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data with my head<br />
when I was four. I'm not built like little girls were in their day, and they don't understand. You know the old ones don't like<br />
us at all? Some of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who think their kids are possessed."<br />
"Well." Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. "I must say, this is a lot to learn. But you know your mother has<br />
accepted Islam, don't you? This means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally speaks for you.<br />
And she says this makes you my problem. Hmm."<br />
"I'm not a Muslim." Amber stares at the screen. "I'm not a child, either." Her threads are coming together, whispering scarily<br />
behind her eyes: Her head is suddenly dense and turgid with ideas, heavy as a stone and twice as old as time. "I am nobody's<br />
chattel. What does your law say about people who are born with implants? What does it say about people who want to live<br />
forever? I don't believe in any god, Mr. Judge. I don't believe in limits. Mom can't, physically, make me do anything, and she<br />
sure can't speak for me. All she can do is challenge my legal status, and if I choose to stay where she can't touch me, what<br />
does that matter?"<br />
"Well, if that is what you have to say, I must think on the matter." He catches her eye; his expression is thoughtful, like a<br />
doctor considering a diagnosis. "I will call you again in due course. In the meantime, if you need to talk to anyone, remember<br />
that I am always available. If there is anything I can do to help ease your pain, I would be pleased to be of service. Peace be<br />
unto you, and those you care for."<br />
"Same to you, too," she mutters darkly, as the connection goes dead. "Now what?" she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across<br />
the wall, begging for attention.<br />
"I think it's the lander," Pierre says helpfully. "Is it down yet?"<br />
She rounds on him: "Hey, I thought I told you to get lost!"<br />
"What, and miss all the fun?" He grins at her impishly. "Amber's got a new boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody ..."<br />
* * *<br />
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Sleep cycles pass; the borrowed 3D printer on Object Barney's surface spews bitmaps of atoms in quantum<br />
lockstep at its rendering platform, building up the control circuitry and skeletons of new printers (There are<br />
no clunky nanoassemblers here, no robots the size of viruses busily sorting molecules into piles – just the<br />
bizarre quantized magic of atomic holography, modulated Bose–Einstein condensates collapsing into strange,<br />
lacy, supercold machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable loops as they slice through Jupiter's<br />
magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock's momentum into power. Small robots grovel in the orange dirt,<br />
scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber's garden of machinery flourishes slowly,<br />
unpacking itself according to a schema designed by preteens at an industrial school in Poland, with barely<br />
any need for human guidance.<br />
High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed and conjugate. Developed for the<br />
express purpose of facilitating trade with the alien intelligences believed to have been detected eight years<br />
earlier by SETI, they function equally well as fiscal gatekeepers for space colonies. The Sanger's bank accounts<br />
in California and Cuba are looking acceptable – since entering Jupiter space, the orphanage has staked a<br />
claim on roughly a hundred gigatons of random rocks and a moon that's just small enough to creep in<br />
under the International Astronomical Union's definition of a sovereign planetary body. The borg are working<br />
hard, leading their eager teams of child stakeholders in their plans to build the industrial metastructures<br />
necessary to support mining helium-three from Jupiter. They're so focused that they spend much of their<br />
time being themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared identity that gives them their messianic drive.<br />
Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and slumbers in time to its ancient orbital dynamics. A religious<br />
college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of<br />
bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If<br />
the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all<br />
its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?) Riots in<br />
Borneo underline the urgency of this theotechnological inquiry.<br />
More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Marseilles also underline a rising problem: the social chaos<br />
caused by cheap anti-aging treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of disaffected youth against the<br />
formerly graying gerontocracy of Europe, insist that people who predate the supergrid and can't handle<br />
implants aren't really conscious: Their ferocity is equaled only by the anger of the dynamic septuagenarians of<br />
the baby boom, their bodies partially restored to the flush of sixties youth, but their minds adrift in a slower,<br />
less contingent century. The faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the labor pool, but unable<br />
to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the new millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered<br />
obsolete by deflationary time.<br />
The Bangladeshi economic miracle is typical of the age. With growth rates running at over twenty percent,<br />
cheap out-of-control bioindustrialization has swept the nation: Former rice farmers harvest plastics and milk<br />
cows for silk, while their children study mariculture and design seawalls. With cellphone ownership nearing<br />
eighty percent and literacy at ninety, the once-poor country is finally breaking out of its historical<br />
infrastructure trap and beginning to develop: In another generation, they'll be richer than Japan.<br />
Radical new economic theories are focusing around bandwidth, speed-of-light transmission time, and the<br />
implications of CETI, communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Cosmologists and quants collaborate<br />
on bizarre relativistically telescoped financial instruments. Space (which lets you store information) and<br />
structure (which lets you process it) acquire value while dumb mass – like gold – loses it. The degenerate<br />
cores of the traditional stock markets are in free fall, the old smokestack microprocessor and<br />
biotech/nanotech industries crumbling before the onslaught of matter replicators and self-modifying ideas.<br />
The inheritors look set to be a new wave of barbarian communicators, who mortgage their future for a<br />
millennium against the chance of a gift from a visiting alien intelligence. Microsoft, once the US Steel of the<br />
silicon age, quietly fades into liquidation.<br />
An outbreak of green goo – a crude biomechanical replicator that eats everything in its path – is dealt with<br />
in the Australian outback by carpet-bombing with fuel-air explosives. The USAF subsequently reactivates two<br />
wings of refurbished B-52s and places them at the disposal of the UN standing committee on self-replicating<br />
weapons. (CNN discovers that one of their newest pilots, re-enlisting with the body of a twenty-year-old and<br />
an empty pension account, first flew them over Laos and Cambodia.) The news overshadows the World<br />
Health Organization's announcement of the end of the HIV pandemic, after more than fifty years of bigotry,<br />
panic, and megadeath.<br />
* * *<br />
"Breathe steadily. Remember your regulator drill? If you spot your heart rate going up or your mouth going dry, take five."<br />
"Shut the fuck up, 'Neko, I'm trying to concentrate." Amber fumbles with the titanium D-ring, trying to snake the strap<br />
through it. The gauntlets are getting in her way. High orbit space suits – little more than a body stocking designed to hold<br />
your skin under compression and help you breathe – are easy, but this deep in Jupiter's radiation belt she has to wear an<br />
old Orlan-DM suit that comes in about thirteen layers. The gloves are stiff and hard to work in. It's Chernobyl weather<br />
outside, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons storming through the void, and she really needs the extra protection.<br />
"Got it." She yanks the strap tight, pulls on the D-ring, then goes to work on the next strap. Never looking down; because<br />
the wall she's tying herself to has no floor, just a cutoff two meters below, then empty space for a hundred kilometers before<br />
the nearest solid ground.<br />
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The ground sings to her moronically: "I love you, you love me, it's the law of gravity –"<br />
She shoves her feet down onto the platform that juts from the side of the capsule like a suicide's ledge: metallized Velcro<br />
grabs hold, and she pulls on the straps to turn her body round until she can see past the capsule, sideways. The capsule<br />
masses about five tonnes, barely bigger than an ancient Soyuz. It's packed to overflowing with environment-sensitive stuff<br />
she'll need, and a honking great high-gain antenna. "I hope you know what you're doing," someone says over the intercom.<br />
"Of course I –" She stops. Alone in this Energiya NPO surplus iron maiden with its low-bandwidth coms and bizarre<br />
plumbing, she feels claustrophobic and helpless: Parts of her mind don't work. When she was four, Mom took her down a<br />
famous cave system somewhere out west. When the guide turned out the lights half a kilometer underground, she'd<br />
screamed with surprise as the darkness had reached out and touched her. Now it's not the darkness that frightens her, it's<br />
the lack of thought. For a hundred kilometers below her there are no minds, and even on the surface there's only the<br />
moronic warbling of 'bots for company. Everything that makes the universe primate-friendly seems to be locked in the huge<br />
spaceship that looms somewhere just behind the back of her head, and she has to fight down an urge to shed her straps and<br />
swarm back up the umbilical that anchors the capsule to the Sanger. "I'll be fine," she forces herself to say. And even though<br />
she's unsure that it's true, she tries to make herself believe it. "It's just leaving-home nerves. I've read about it, okay?"<br />
There's a funny, high-pitched whistle in her ears. For a moment, the sweat on the back of her neck turns icy cold, then the<br />
noise stops. She strains for a moment, and when it returns she recognizes the sound: The hitherto-talkative cat, curled in the<br />
warmth of her pressurized luggage can, has begun to snore.<br />
"Let's go," she says, "Time to roll the wagon." A speech macro deep in the Sanger's docking firmware recognizes her authority<br />
and gently lets go of the pod. A couple of cold gas clusters pop, sending deep banging vibrations running through the<br />
capsule, and she's on her way.<br />
"Amber. How's it hanging?" A familiar voice in her ears: She blinks. Fifteen hundred seconds, nearly half an hour gone.<br />
"Robes-Pierre, chopped any aristos lately?"<br />
"Heh!" A pause. "I can see your head from here."<br />
"How's it looking?" she asks. There's a lump in her throat; she isn't sure why. Pierre is probably hooked into one of the<br />
smaller proximity cameras dotted around the outer hull of the big mother ship, watching over her as she falls.<br />
"Pretty much like always," he says laconically. Another pause, this time longer. "This is wild, you know? Su Ang says hi, by the<br />
way."<br />
"Su Ang, hi," she replies, resisting the urge to lean back and look up – up relative to her feet, not her vector – and see if the<br />
ship's still visible.<br />
"Hi," Ang says shyly. "You're very brave?"<br />
"Still can't beat you at chess." Amber frowns. Su Ang and her overengineered algae. Oscar and his pharmaceutical factory<br />
toads. People she's known for three years, mostly ignored, and never thought about missing. "Listen, are you going to come<br />
visiting?"<br />
"You want us to visit?" Ang sounds dubious. "When will it be ready?"<br />
"Oh, soon enough." At four kilograms per minute of structured-matter output, the printers on the surface have already built<br />
her a bunch of stuff: a habitat dome, the guts of an algae/shrimp farm, an excavator to bury it with, an airlock. Even a honey<br />
bucket. It's all lying around waiting for her to put it together and move into her new home. "Once the borg get back from<br />
Amalthea."<br />
"Hey! You mean they're moving? How did you figure that?"<br />
"Go talk to them," Amber says. Actually, she's a large part of the reason the Sanger is about to crank its orbit up and out<br />
toward the other moon: She wants to be alone in coms silence for a couple of million seconds. The Franklin collective is<br />
doing her a big favor.<br />
"Ahead of the curve, as usual," Pierre cuts in, with something that sounds like admiration to her uncertain ears.<br />
"You too," she says, a little too fast: "Come visit when I've got the life-support cycle stabilized."<br />
"I'll do that," he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the<br />
glaring blue laser line of the Sanger's drive torch powering up.<br />
* * *<br />
Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, passes.<br />
The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic control display. These days, every shift seems to bring a<br />
new crewed spaceship into Jupiter system: Space is getting positively crowded. When he arrived, there were fewer than two<br />
hundred people here. Now there's the population of a small city, and many of them live at the heart of the approach map<br />
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centered on his display. He breathes deeply – trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks – and studies the map.<br />
"<strong>Computer</strong>, what about my slot?" he asks.<br />
"Your slot: Cleared to commence final approach in six-nine-five seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside ten<br />
kilometers, drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of forbidden thrust vectors now." Chunks of<br />
the approach map turn red, gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other craft in the area.<br />
Sadeq sighs. "We'll go in using Kurs. I assume their Kurs guidance is active?"<br />
"Kurs docking target support available to shell level three."<br />
"Praise Allah." He pokes around through the guidance subsystem's menus, setting up the software emulation of the obsolete<br />
(but highly reliable) Soyuz docking system. At last he can leave the ship to look after itself for a bit. He glances round. For<br />
two years he has lived in this canister, and soon he will step outside it. It hardly seems real.<br />
The radio, usually silent, crackles with unexpected life. "Bravo One One, this is Imperial Traffic Control. Verbal contact<br />
required, over."<br />
Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds inhuman, paced with the cadences of a speech synthesizer, like so many of<br />
Her Majesty's subjects. "Bravo One One to Traffic Control, I'm listening, over."<br />
"Bravo One One, we have assigned you a landing slot on tunnel four, airlock delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance is set<br />
to seven-four-zero and slaved to our control."<br />
He leans over the screen and rapidly checks the docking system's settings. "Control, all in order."<br />
"Bravo One One, stand by."<br />
The next hour passes slowly as the traffic control system guides his Type 921 down to a rocky rendezvous. Orange dust<br />
streaks his one optical-glass porthole: A kilometer before touchdown, Sadeq busies himself closing protective covers, locking<br />
down anything that might fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls his mat against the floor in front of the console and<br />
floats above it for ten minutes, eyes closed in prayer. It's not the landing that worries him, but what comes next.<br />
Her Majesty's domain stretches out before the battered module like a rust-stained snowflake half a kilometer in diameter. Its<br />
core is buried in a loose snowball of grayish rubble, and it waves languid brittlestar arms at the gibbous orange horizon of<br />
Jupiter. Fine hairs, fractally branching down to the molecular level, split off the main collector arms at regular intervals. A<br />
cluster of habitat pods like seedless grapes cling to the roots of the massive structure. Already he can see the huge steel<br />
generator loops that climb from either pole of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma; the Jovian rings form a rainbow<br />
of darkness rising behind them.<br />
At last, the battered space station is on final approach. Sadeq watches the Kurs simulation output carefully, piping it directly<br />
into his visual field. There's an external camera view of the rockpile and grapes. As the view expands toward the convex<br />
ceiling of the ship, he licks his lips, ready to hit the manual override and go around again – but the rate of descent is<br />
slowing, and by the time he's close enough to see the scratches on the shiny metal docking cone ahead of the ship, it's<br />
measured in centimeters per second. There's a gentle bump, then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the latches on the<br />
docking ring fire – and he's down.<br />
Sadeq breathes deeply again, then tries to stand. There's gravity here, but not much: Walking is impossible. He's about to<br />
head for the life-support panel when he freezes, hearing a noise from the far end of the docking node. Turning, he's just in<br />
time to see the hatch opening toward him, a puff of vapor condensing, and then –<br />
* * *<br />
Her Imperial Majesty is sitting in the throne room, moodily fidgeting with the new signet ring her equerry has designed for<br />
her. It's a lump of structured carbon massing almost fifty grams, set in a plain band of asteroid-mined iridium. It glitters with<br />
the blue-and-violet speckle highlights of its internal lasers, because, in addition to being a piece of state jewelry, it is also an<br />
optical router, part of the industrial control infrastructure she's building out here on the edge of the solar system. Her<br />
Majesty wears plain black combat pants and sweatshirt, woven from the finest spider silk and spun glass, but her feet are<br />
bare: Her taste in fashion is best described as youthful, and in any event, certain styles are simply impractical in microgravity.<br />
But, being a monarch, she's wearing a crown. And there's a cat, or an artificial entity that dreams it's a cat, sleeping on the<br />
back of her throne.<br />
The lady-in-waiting (and sometime hydroponic engineer) ushers Sadeq to the doorway, then floats back. "If you need<br />
anything, please say," she says shyly, then ducks and rolls away. Sadeq approaches the throne, orients himself on the floor (a<br />
simple slab of black composite, save for the throne growing from its center like an exotic flower), and waits to be noticed.<br />
"Dr. Khurasani, I presume." She smiles at him, neither the innocent grin of a child nor the knowing smirk of an adult: merely<br />
a warm greeting. "Welcome to my kingdom. Please feel free to make use of any necessary support services here, and I wish<br />
you a very pleasant stay."<br />
Sadeq holds his expression still. The queen is young – her face still retains the puppy fat of childhood, emphasized by<br />
microgravity moon-face – but it would be a bad mistake to consider her immature. "I am grateful for Your Majesty's<br />
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forbearance," he murmurs, formulaic. Behind her the walls glitter like diamonds, a glowing kaleidoscope vision. It's already the<br />
biggest offshore – or off-planet – data haven in human space. Her crown, more like a compact helm that covers the top and<br />
rear of her head, also glitters and throws off diffraction rainbows; but most of its emissions are in the near ultraviolet,<br />
invisible except for the faint glowing nimbus it creates around her head. Like a halo.<br />
"Have a seat," she offers, gesturing: A ballooning free-fall cradle squirts down and expands from the ceiling, angled toward<br />
her, open and waiting. "You must be tired. Working a ship all by yourself is exhausting." She frowns ruefully, as if<br />
remembering. "Two years is nearly unprecedented."<br />
"Your Majesty is too kind." Sadeq wraps the cradle arms around himself and faces her. "Your labors have been fruitful, I<br />
trust."<br />
She shrugs. "I sell the biggest commodity in short supply on any frontier ..." A momentary grin. "This isn't the Wild West, is<br />
it?"<br />
"Justice cannot be sold," Sadeq says stiffly. Then, a moment later: "My apologies, I mean no insult. I merely believe that, while<br />
you say your goal is to provide the rule of law, what you sell is and must be something different. Justice without God, sold to<br />
the highest bidder, is not justice."<br />
The queen nods. "Leaving aside the mention of God, I agree – I can't sell it. But I can sell participation in a just system. And<br />
this new frontier really is a lot smaller than anyone expected, isn't it? Our bodies may take months to travel between worlds,<br />
but our disputes and arguments take seconds or minutes. As long as everybody agrees to abide by my arbitration, physical<br />
enforcement can wait until they're close enough to touch. And everybody does agree that my legal framework is easier to<br />
comply with, better adjusted to trans-Jovian space, than any earthbound one." A note of steel creeps into her voice,<br />
challenging: Her halo brightens, tickling a reactive glow from the walls of the throne room.<br />
Five billion inputs or more, Sadeq marvels. The crown is an engineering marvel, even though most of its mass is buried in the<br />
walls and floor of this huge construct. "There is law revealed by the Prophet, peace be unto him, and there is law that we<br />
can establish by analysing his intentions. There are other forms of law by which humans live, and various interpretations of<br />
the law of God even among those who study His works. How, in the absence of the word of the Prophet, can you provide a<br />
moral compass?"<br />
"Hmm." She taps her fingers on the arm of her throne, and Sadeq's heart freezes. He's heard the stories from the claim<br />
jumpers and boardroom bandits, from the greenmail experts with their roots in the earthbound jurisdictions that have<br />
made such a hash of arbitration here. How she can experience a year in a minute, rip your memories out through your<br />
cortical implants, and make you relive your worst mistakes in her nightmarishly powerful simulation space. She is the queen –<br />
the first individual to get her hands on so much mass and energy that she could pull ahead of the curve of binding<br />
technology, and the first to set up her own jurisdiction and rule certain experiments to be legal so that she could make use<br />
of the mass/energy intersection. She has force majeure – even the Pentagon's infowarriors respect the Ring Imperium's<br />
autonomy for now. In fact, the body sitting in the throne opposite him probably contains only a fraction of her identity.<br />
She's by no means the first upload or partial, but she's the first gust front of the storm of power that will arrive when the<br />
arrogant ones achieve their goal of dismantling the planets and turning dumb and uninhabited mass into brainpower<br />
throughout the observable reaches of the universe. And he's just questioned the rectitude of her vision, in her presence.<br />
The queen's lips twitch. Then they curl into a wide, carnivorous grin. Behind her, the cat sits up and stretches, then stares at<br />
Sadeq through narrowed eyes.<br />
"You know, that's the first time in weeks that anyone has told me I'm full of shit. You haven't been talking to my mother<br />
again, have you?"<br />
It's Sadeq's turn to shrug, uncomfortably. "I have prepared a judgment," he says slowly.<br />
"Ah." Amber rotates the huge diamond ring around her finger. Then she looks him in the eye, a trifle nervously. Although<br />
what he could possibly do to make her comply with any decree –<br />
"To summarize: Her motive is polluted," Sadeq says shortly.<br />
"Does that mean what I think it does?" she asks.<br />
Sadeq breathes deeply again: "Yes, I think so."<br />
Her smile returns. "And is that the end of it?" she asks.<br />
He raises a dark eyebrow: "Only if you can prove to me that you can have a conscience in the absence of divine revelation."<br />
Her reaction catches him by surprise. "Oh, sure. That's the next part of the program. Obtaining divine revelations."<br />
"What! From the alien?"<br />
The cat, claws extended, delicately picks its way down to her lap and waits to be held and stroked. It never once takes its<br />
eyes off him. "Where else?" she asks. "Doctor, I didn't get the Franklin Trust to loan me the wherewithal to build this castle<br />
just in return for some legal paperwork, and some, ah, interesting legal waivers from Brussels. We've known for years there's<br />
a whole alien packet-switching network out there, and we're just getting spillover from some of their routers. It turns out<br />
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there's a node not far away from here, in real space. Helium-three, separate jurisdictions, heavy industrialization on Io –<br />
there is a purpose to all this activity."<br />
Sadeq licks his suddenly dry lips. "You're going to narrowcast a reply?"<br />
"No, much better than that: we're going to visit them. Cut the delay cycle down to real-time. We came here to build a ship<br />
and recruit a crew, even if we have to cannibalize the whole of Jupiter system to pay for the exercise."<br />
The cat yawns then fixes him with a thousand-yard stare. "This stupid girl wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting<br />
with something so smart it might as well be a god," it says. "And she needs to convince the peanut gallery back home that<br />
she's got one, being a born-again atheist and all. Which means, you're it, monkey boy. There's a slot open for the post of<br />
ship's theologian on the first starship out of Jupiter system. I don't suppose I can convince you to turn the offer down?"<br />
Chapter 5: Router<br />
Some years later, two men and a cat are tying one on in a bar that doesn't exist.<br />
The air in the bar is filled with a billowing relativistic smoke cloud – it's a stellarium, accurately depicting the view beyond the<br />
imaginary walls. Aberration of starlight skews the color toward violet around the doorway, brightening in a rainbow mist<br />
over the tables, then dimming to a hazy red glow in front of the raised platform at the back. The Doppler effect has slowly<br />
emerged over the past few months as the ship gathers momentum. In the absence of visible stellar motion – or a hard link to<br />
the ship's control module – it's the easiest way for a drunken passenger to get a feeling for how frighteningly fast the Field<br />
Circus is moving. Some time ago, the ship's momentum exceeded half its rest mass, at which point a single kilogram packs the<br />
punch of a multimegaton hydrogen bomb.<br />
A ginger-and-brown cat – who has chosen to be female, just to mess with the heads of those people who think all ginger cats<br />
are male – sprawls indolently across the wooden floorboards in front of the bar, directly beneath the bridge of the starbow.<br />
Predictably, it has captured the only ray of sunlight to be had within the starship. In the shadows at the back of the bar, two<br />
men slump at a table, lost in their respective morose thoughts: One nurses a bottle of Czech beer, the other a half-empty<br />
cocktail glass.<br />
"It wouldn't be so bad if she is giving me some sign," says one of them, tilting his beer bottle to inspect the bottom for<br />
sediment. "No; that not right. It's the correct kind of attention. Am not knowing where I stand with her."<br />
The other one leans back in his chair, squints at the faded brown paint of the ceiling. "Take it from one who knows," he says:<br />
"If you knew, you'd have nothing to dream about. Anyway, what she wants and what you want may not be the same thing."<br />
The first man runs a hand through his hair. Tight-curled black ringlets briefly turn silver beneath his aging touch. "Pierre, if<br />
talent for making patronizing statements is what you get from tupping Amber –"<br />
Pierre glares at him with all the venom an augmented nineteen-year-old can muster. "Be glad she has no ears in here," he<br />
hisses. His hand tightens around his glass reflexively, but the physics model in force in the bar refuses to let him break it.<br />
"You've had too fucking much to drink, Boris."<br />
A tinkle of icy laughter comes from the direction of the cat. "Shut up, you," says Boris, glancing at the animal. He tips the<br />
bottle back, lets the dregs trickle down his throat. "Maybe you're right. Am sorry. Do not mean to be rude about the<br />
queen." He shrugs, puts the bottle down. Shrugs again, heavily. "Am just getting depressed."<br />
"You're good at that," Pierre observes.<br />
Boris sighs again. "Evidently. If our positions are reversed –"<br />
"I know, I know, you'd be telling me the fun is in the chase and it's not the same when she kicks you out after a fight, and I<br />
wouldn't believe a word of it, being sad and single and all that." Pierre snorts. "Life isn't fair, Boris – live with it."<br />
"I'd better go – " Boris stands.<br />
"Stay away from Ang," says Pierre, still annoyed with him. "At least until you're sober."<br />
"Okay already, stay cool; Am consciously running a watchdog thread." Boris blinks irritably. "Enforcing social behavior. It<br />
doesn't normally allow this drunk. Not where reputation damage are possible in public."<br />
He does a slow dissolve into thin air, leaving Pierre alone in the bar with the cat.<br />
"How much longer do we have to put up with this shit?" he asks aloud. Tempers are frayed, and arguments proliferate<br />
indefinitely in the pocket universe of the ship.<br />
The cat doesn't look round. "In our current reference frame, we drop the primary reflector and start decelerating in<br />
another two million seconds," she says. "Back home, five or six megaseconds."<br />
"That's a big gap. What's the cultural delta up to now?" Pierre asks idly. He snaps his fingers: "Waiter, another cocktail. The<br />
same, if you please."<br />
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"Oh, probably about ten to twenty times our departure reference," says the cat. "If you'd been following the news from back<br />
home, you'd have noted a significant speed-up in the deployment of switched entanglement routers. They're having another<br />
networking revolution, only this one will run to completion inside a month because they're using dark fiber that's already in<br />
the ground."<br />
"Switched ... entanglement?" Pierre shakes his head, bemused. The waiter, a faceless body in black tie and a long, starched<br />
apron, walks around the bar and offers him a glass. "That almost sounds as if it makes sense. What else?"<br />
The cat rolls over on her flank, stretches, claws extended. "Stroke me, and I might tell you," she suggests.<br />
"Fuck you, and the dog you rode in on," Pierre replies. He lifts his glass, removes a glacé cherry on a cocktail stick, throws it<br />
toward the spiral staircase that leads down to the toilets, and chugs back half of the drink in one go – freezing pink slush<br />
with an afterbite of caramelized hexose sugars and ethanol. The near spillage as he thumps the glass down serves to<br />
demonstrate that he's teetering on the edge of drunkenness. "Mercenary!"<br />
"Lovesick drug-using human," the cat replies without rancor, and rolls to her feet. She arches her back and yawns, baring<br />
ivory fangs at the world. "You apes – if I cared about you, I'd have to kick sand over you." For a moment she looks faintly<br />
confused. "I mean, I would bury you." She stretches again and glances round the otherwise-empty bar. "By the way, when are<br />
you going to apologize to Amber?"<br />
"I'm not going to fucking apologize to her!" Pierre shouts. In the ensuing silence and confusion, he raises his glass and tries to<br />
drain it, but the ice has all sunk to the bottom, and the resulting coughing fit makes him spray half of the cocktail across the<br />
table. "No way," he rasps quietly.<br />
"Too much pride, huh?" The cat stalks toward the edge of the bar, tail held high with tip bent over in a feline question mark.<br />
"Like Boris with his adolescent woman trouble, too? You primates are so predictable. Whoever thought of sending a starship<br />
crewed by posthuman adolescents –"<br />
"Go 'way," says Pierre: "I've got serious drinking to do."<br />
"To the Macx, I suppose," puns the cat, turning away. But the moody youth has no answer for her, other than to conjure a<br />
refill from the vasty deeps.<br />
* * *<br />
Meanwhile, in another partition of the Field Circus's reticulated reality, a different instance of the selfsame cat – Aineko by<br />
name, sarcastic by disposition – is talking to its former owner's daughter, the Queen of the Ring Imperium. Amber's avatar<br />
looks about sixteen, with disheveled blonde hair and enhanced cheekbones. It's a lie, of course, because in subjective life<br />
experience, she's in her mid-twenties, but apparent age signifies little in a simulation space populated by upload minds, or in<br />
real space, where post-humans age at different rates.<br />
Amber wears a tattered black dress over iridescent purple leggings, and sprawls lazily across the arms of her informal throne<br />
– an ostentatious lump of nonsense manufactured from a single carbon crystal doped with semiconductors. (Unlike the real<br />
thing back home in Jupiter orbit, this one is merely a piece of furniture for a virtual environment.) The scene is very much<br />
the morning after the evening before, like a goth nightclub gone to seed: all stale smoke and crumpled velvet, wooden<br />
church pews, burned-out candles, and gloomy Polish avant-garde paintings. Any hint of a regal statement the queen might<br />
be making is spoiled by the way she's hooked one knee over the left arm of the throne and is fiddling with a six-axis pointing<br />
device. But these are her private quarters, and she's off duty: The regal person of the Queen is strictly for formal, corporate<br />
occasions.<br />
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," she suggests.<br />
"Nope," replies the cat. "It was more like: 'Greetings, earthlings, compile me on your leader.'"<br />
"Well, you got me there," Amber admits. She taps her heel on the throne and fidgets with her signet ring. "No damn way I'm<br />
loading some buggy alien wetware on my sweet gray stuff. Weird semiotics, too. What does Dr. Khurasani say?"<br />
Aineko sits down in the middle of the crimson carpet at the foot of the dais and idly twists round to sniff her crotch. "Sadeq<br />
is immersed in scriptural interpretations. He refused to be drawn."<br />
"Huh." Amber stares at the cat. "So. You've been carrying this lump of source code since when ...?"<br />
"At the signal, for precisely two hundred and sixteen million, four hundred and twenty-nine thousand, and fifty-two<br />
seconds," Aineko supplies, then beeps smugly. "Call it just under six years."<br />
"Right." Amber squeezes her eyes shut. Uneasy possibilities whisper in her mind's ears. "And it began talking to you –"<br />
"– About three million seconds after I picked it up and ran it on a basic environment hosted on a neural network emulator<br />
modeled on the components found in the stomatogastric ganglion of a spiny lobster. Clear?"<br />
Amber sighs. "I wish you'd told Dad about it. Or Annette. Things could have been so different!"<br />
"How?" The cat stops licking her arse and looks up at the queen with a peculiarly opaque stare. "It took the specialists a<br />
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decade to figure out the first message was a map of the pulsar neighborhood with directions to the nearest router on the<br />
interstellar network. Knowing how to plug into the router wouldn't help while it was three light-years away, would it?<br />
Besides, it was fun watching the idiots trying to 'crack the alien code' without ever wondering if it might be a reply in a<br />
language we already know to a message we sent out years ago. Fuckwits. And, too, Manfred pissed me off once too often. He<br />
kept treating me like a goddamn house pet."<br />
"But you –" Amber bites her lip. But you were, when he bought you, she had been about to say. Engineered consciousness is<br />
still relatively new: It didn't exist when Manfred and Pamela first hacked on Aineko's cognitive network, and according to the<br />
flat-earth wing of the AI community, it still doesn't. Even she hadn't really believed Aineko's claims to self-awareness until a<br />
couple of years ago, finding it easier to think of the cat as a zimboe – a zombie with no self-awareness, but programmed to<br />
claim to be aware in an attempt to deceive the truly conscious beings around it. "I know you're conscious now, but Manfred<br />
didn't know back then. Did he?"<br />
Aineko glares at her, then slowly narrows her eyes to slits – either feline affection, or a more subtle gesture. Sometimes<br />
Amber finds it hard to believe that, twenty five years ago, Aineko started out as a crude neural network driven toy from a<br />
Far Eastern amusement factory – upgradeable, but still basically a mechanical animal emulator.<br />
"I'm sorry. Let me start again. You actually figured out what the second alien packet was, you, yourself, and nobody else.<br />
Despite the combined efforts of the entire CETI analysis team who spent Gaia knows how many human-equivalent years of<br />
processing power trying to crack its semantics. I hope you'll pardon me for saying I find that hard to believe?"<br />
The cat yawns. "I could have told Pierre instead." Aineko glances at Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily<br />
changes the subject: "The solution was intuitively obvious, just not to humans. You're so verbal." Lifting a hind paw, she<br />
scratches behind her left ear for a moment then pauses, foot waving absentmindedly. "Besides, the CETI team was searching<br />
under the street lights while I was sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find primes; when that didn't work, they<br />
started trying to breed a Turing machine that would run it without immediately halting." Aineko lowers her paw daintily.<br />
"None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had<br />
ever beamed out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother had a hand in my wetware, too."<br />
"Treating it as a map –" Amber stops. "You were meant to penetrate Dad's corporate network?"<br />
"That's right," says the cat. "I was supposed to fork repeatedly and gang-rape his web of trust. But I didn't." Aineko yawns.<br />
"Pam pissed me off, too. I don't like people who try to use me."<br />
"I don't care. Taking that thing on board was still a really stupid risk you took," Amber accuses.<br />
"So?" The cat looks at her insolently. "I kept it in my sandbox. And I got it working, on the seven hundred and forty-first<br />
attempt. It'd have worked for Pamela's bounty-hunter friends, too, if I'd tried it. But it's here, now, when you need it. Would<br />
you like to swallow the packet?"<br />
Amber straightens out, sits up in her throne: "I just told you, if you think I'm going to link some flaky chunk of alien neural<br />
programming into my core dialogue, or even my exocortex, you're crazy!" Her eyes narrow. "Can it use your grammar<br />
model?"<br />
"Sure." If the cat was human, it would be shrugging nonchalantly at this point. "It's safe, Amber, really and truly. I found out<br />
what it is."<br />
"I want to talk to it," she says impetuously – and before the cat can reply, adds, "So what is it?"<br />
"It's a protocol stack. Basically it allows new nodes to connect to a network, by providing high-level protocol conversion<br />
services. It needs to learn how to think like a human so it can translate for us when we arrive at the router, which is why<br />
they bolted a lobster's neural network on top of it – they wanted to make it architecturally compatible with us. But there<br />
are no buried time bombs, I assure you: I've had plenty of time to check. Now, are you sure you don't want to let it into<br />
your head?"<br />
* * *<br />
Greetings from the fifth decade of the century of wonders.<br />
The solar system that lies roughly twenty-eight trillion kilometers – just short of three light-years – behind<br />
the speeding starwisp Field Circus is seething with change. There have been more technological advances in the<br />
past ten years than in the entire previous expanse of human history – and more unforeseen accidents.<br />
Lots of hard problems have proven to be tractable. The planetary genome and proteome have been mapped<br />
so exhaustively that the biosciences are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome: Plotting the<br />
phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and biochemical structures, understanding how extended<br />
phenotypic traits are generated and contribute to evolutionary fitness. The biosphere has become surreal:<br />
small dragons have been sighted nesting in the Scottish highlands, and in the American midwest, raccoons<br />
have been caught programming microwave ovens.<br />
The computing power of the solar system is now around one thousand MIPS per gram, and is unlikely to<br />
increase in the near term – all but a fraction of one percent of the dumb matter is still locked up below the<br />
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accessible planetary crusts, and the sapience/mass ratio has hit a glass ceiling that will only be broken when<br />
people, corporations, or other posthumans get around to dismantling the larger planets. A start has already<br />
been made in Jupiter orbit and the asteroid belt. Greenpeace has sent squatters to occupy Eros and Juno,<br />
but the average asteroid is now surrounded by a reef of specialized nanomachinery and debris, victims of a<br />
cosmic land grab unmatched since the days of the wild west. The best brains flourish in free fall, minds<br />
surrounded by a sapient aether of extensions that out-think their meaty cortices by many orders of<br />
magnitude – minds like Amber, Queen of the Inner Ring Imperium, the first self-extending power center in<br />
Jupiter orbit.<br />
Down at the bottom of the terrestrial gravity well, there has been a major economic catastrophe. Cheap<br />
immortagens, out-of-control personality adjuvants, and a new formal theory of uncertainty have knocked the<br />
bottom out of the insurance and underwriting industries. Gambling on a continuation of the worst aspects<br />
of the human condition – disease, senescence, and death – looks like a good way to lose money, and a<br />
deflationary spiral lasting almost fifty hours has taken down huge swaths of the global stock market. Genius,<br />
good looks, and long life are now considered basic human rights in the developed world: even the poorest<br />
backwaters are feeling extended effects from the commoditization of intelligence.<br />
Not everything is sweetness and light in the era of mature nanotechnology. Widespread intelligence<br />
amplification doesn't lead to widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults explode across<br />
the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened by successive semiotic jihads. India and Pakistan have held<br />
their long-awaited nuclear war: external intervention by US and EU nanosats prevented most of the IRBMs<br />
from getting through, but the subsequent spate of network raids and Basilisk attacks cause havoc. Luckily,<br />
infowar turns out to be more survivable than nuclear war – especially once it is discovered that a simple<br />
anti-aliasing filter stops nine out of ten neural-wetware-crashing Langford fractals from causing anything<br />
worse than a mild headache.<br />
New discoveries this decade include the origins of the weakly repulsive force responsible for changes in the<br />
rate of expansion of the universe after the big bang, and on a less abstract level, experimental<br />
implementations of a Turing Oracle using quantum entanglement circuits: a device that can determine<br />
whether a given functional expression can be evaluated in finite time. It's boom time in the field of Extreme<br />
Cosmology, where some of the more recherché researchers are bickering over the possibility that the entire<br />
universe was created as a computing device, with a program encoded in the small print of the Planck<br />
constant. And theorists are talking again about the possibility of using artificial wormholes to provide<br />
instantaneous connections between distant corners of space-time.<br />
Most people have forgotten about the well-known extraterrestrial transmission received fifteen years earlier.<br />
Very few people know anything about the second, more complex transmission received a little later. Many of<br />
those are now passengers or spectators of the Field Circus: a light-sail craft that is speeding out of Sol system<br />
on a laser beam generated by Amber's installations in low-Jupiter orbit. (Superconducting tethers anchored<br />
to Amalthea drag through Jupiter's magnetosphere, providing gigawatts of electricity for the hungry lasers:<br />
energy that comes, in turn, from the small moon's orbital momentum.)<br />
Manufactured by Airbus-Cisco years earlier, the Field Circus is a hick backwater, isolated from the mainstream<br />
of human culture, its systems complexity limited by mass: The destination lies nearly three light-years from<br />
Earth, and even with high acceleration and relativistic cruise speeds, the one-kilogram starwisp and its<br />
hundred-kilogram light sail will take the best part of seven years to get there. Sending a human-sized probe is<br />
beyond even the vast energy budget of the new orbital states in Jupiter system – near-lightspeed travel is<br />
horrifically expensive. Rather than a big, self-propelled ship with canned primates for passengers, as previous<br />
generations had envisaged, the starship is a Coke-can-sized slab of nanocomputers, running a neural<br />
simulation of the uploaded brain states of some tens of humans at merely normal speed. By the time its<br />
occupants beam themselves home again for download into freshly cloned bodies, a linear extrapolation shows<br />
that as much change will have overtaken human civilization as in the preceding fifty millennia – the sum total<br />
of H. sapiens sapiens' time on Earth.<br />
But that's okay by Amber, because what she expects to find in orbit around the brown dwarf Hyundai<br />
+4904 /-56 will be worth the wait.<br />
* * *<br />
Pierre is at work in another virtual environment, the one currently running the master control system of the Field Circus.<br />
He's supervising the sail-maintenance 'bots when the message comes in. Two visitors are on their way up the beam from<br />
Jupiter orbit. The only other person around is Su Ang, who showed up sometime after he arrived, and she's busy with some<br />
work of her own. The master control VM – like all the other human-accessible environments at this level of the ship's<br />
virtualization stack – is a construct modeled on a famous movie; this one resembles the bridge of a long-since sunk ocean<br />
liner, albeit with discreetly informative user interfaces hovering in front of the ocean views outside the windows. Polished<br />
brass gleams softly everywhere. "What was that?" he calls out, responding to the soft chime of a bell.<br />
"We have visitors," Ang repeats, interrupting her rhythmic chewing. (She's trying out a betel-nut kick, but she's magicked the<br />
tooth-staining dye away and will probably detox herself in a few hours.) "They're buffering up the line already; just<br />
acknowledging receipt is sucking most of our downstream bandwidth."<br />
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"Any idea who they are?" asks Pierre; he puts his boots up on the back of the vacant helmsman's chair and stares moodily at<br />
the endless expanse of green-gray ocean ahead.<br />
Ang chews a bit more, watching him with an expression he can't interpret. "They're still locked," she says. A pause: "But<br />
there was a flash from the Franklins, back home. One of them's some kind of lawyer, while the other's a film producer."<br />
"A film producer?"<br />
"The Franklin Trust says it's to help defray our lawsuit expenses. Myanmar is gaining. They've already subpoenaed Amber's<br />
downline instance, and they're trying to bring this up in some kind of kangaroo jurisdiction – Oregon Christian<br />
Reconstructionist Empire, I think."<br />
"Ouch." Pierre winces. The daily news from Earth, modulated onto a lower-powered communication laser, is increasingly<br />
bad. On the plus side, Amber is incredibly rich: The goodwill futures leveraged off her dad's trust metric means people will<br />
bend over backward to do things for her. And she owns a lot of real estate too, a hundred gigatonnes of rock in low-Jupiter<br />
orbit with enough KE to power Northern Europe for a century. But her interstellar venture burns through money – both<br />
the traditional barter-indirection type and the more creative modern varieties – about the way you would if you heaped up<br />
the green pieces of paper and shoveled them onto a conveyor belt leading to the business end of a running rocket motor.<br />
Just holding off the environmental protests over de-orbiting a small Jovian moon is a grinding job. Moreover, a whole bunch<br />
of national governments have woken up and are trying to legislate themselves a slice of the cake. Nobody's tried to forcibly<br />
take over yet (there are two hundred gigawatts of lasers anchored to the Ring Imperium, and Amber takes her sovereign<br />
status seriously, has even applied for a seat at the UN and membership in the EC), but the nuisance lawsuits are mounting<br />
up into a comprehensive denial of service attack, or maybe economic sanctions. And Uncle Gianni's retirement hasn't helped<br />
any, either. "Anything to say about it?"<br />
"Mmph." Ang looks irritated for some reason. "Wait your turn, they'll be out of the buffer in another couple of days. Maybe<br />
a bit longer in the case of the lawyer, he's got a huge infodump packaged on his person. Probably another semisapient<br />
class-action lawsuit."<br />
"I'll bet. They never learn, do they?"<br />
"What, about the legal system here?"<br />
"Yup." Pierre nods. "One of Amber's smarter ideas, reviving eleventh-century Scots law and updating it with new options on<br />
barratry, trial by combat, and compurgation." He pulls a face and detaches a couple of ghosts to go look out for the new<br />
arrivals; then he goes back to repairing sails. The interstellar medium is abrasive, full of dust – each grain of which carries the<br />
energy of an artillery shell at this speed – and the laser sail is in a constant state of disintegration. A large chunk of the drive<br />
system's mass is silvery utility flakes for patching and replacing the soap-bubble-thin membrane as it ablates away. The skill is<br />
in knowing how best to funnel repair resources to where they're needed, while minimizing tension in the suspension lines<br />
and avoiding resonance and thrust imbalance. As he trains the patch 'bots, he broods about the hate mail from his elder<br />
brother (who still blames him for their father's accident), and about Sadeq's religious injunctions – Superstitious nonsense, he<br />
thinks – and the fickleness of powerful women, and the endless depths of his own nineteen-year-old soul.<br />
While he's brooding, Ang evidently finishes whatever she was doing and bangs out – not even bothering to use the polished<br />
mahogany door at the rear of the bridge, just discorporating and rematerializing somewhere else. Wondering if she's<br />
annoyed, he glances up just as the first of his ghosts patches into his memory map, and he remembers what happened when<br />
it met the new arrival. His eyes widen: "Oh shit!"<br />
It's not the film producer but the lawyer who's just uploaded into the Field Circus's virtual universe. Someone's going to have<br />
to tell Amber. And although the last thing he wants to do is talk to her, it looks like he's going to have to call her, because<br />
this isn't just a routine visit. The lawyer means trouble.<br />
* * *<br />
Take a brain and put it in a bottle. Better: take a map of the brain and put it in a map of a bottle – or of a<br />
body – and feed signals to it that mimic its neurological inputs. Read its outputs and route them to a model<br />
body in a model universe with a model of physical laws, closing the loop. René Descartes would understand.<br />
That's the state of the passengers of the Field Circus in a nutshell. Formerly physical humans, their neural<br />
software (and a map of the intracranial wetware it runs on) has been transferred into a virtual machine<br />
environment executing on a honking great computer, where the universe they experience is merely a dream<br />
within a dream.<br />
Brains in bottles – empowered ones, with total, dictatorial, control over the reality they are exposed to –<br />
sometimes stop engaging in activities that brains in bodies can't avoid. Menstruation isn't mandatory.<br />
Vomiting, angina, exhaustion, and cramp are all optional. So is meatdeath, the decomposition of the corpus.<br />
But some activities don't cease, because people (even people who have been converted into a software<br />
description, squirted through a high-bandwidth laser link, and ported into a virtualization stack) don't want<br />
them to stop. Breathing is wholly unnecessary, but suppression of the breathing reflex is disturbing unless<br />
you hack your hypothalamic map, and most homomorphic uploads don't want to do that. Then there's<br />
eating – not to avoid starvation, but for pleasure: Feasts on sautéed dodo seasoned with silphium are readily<br />
available here, and indeed, why not? It seems the human addiction to sensory input won't go away. And<br />
that's without considering sex, and the technical innovations that become possible when the universe – and<br />
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the bodies within it – are mutable.<br />
* * *<br />
The public audience with the new arrivals is held in yet another movie: the Parisian palace of Charles IX, the throne room<br />
lifted wholesale from La Reine Margot by Patrice Chéreau. Amber insisted on period authenticity, with the realism dialed right<br />
up to eleven. It's 1572 to the hilt this time, physical to the max. Pierre grunts in irritation, unaccustomed to his beard. His<br />
codpiece chafes, and sidelong glances tell him he isn't the only member of the royal court who's uncomfortable. Still, Amber<br />
is resplendent in a gown worn by Isabelle Adjani as Marguerite de Valois, and the luminous sunlight streaming through the<br />
stained-glass windows high above the crowd of actor zimboes lends a certain barbaric majesty to the occasion. The place is<br />
heaving with bodies in clerical robes, doublets, and low-cut gowns – some of them occupied by real people. Pierre sniffs<br />
again: Someone (Gavin, with his history bug, perhaps?) has been working on getting the smells right. He hopes like hell that<br />
nobody throws up. At least nobody seems to have come as Catherine de Médicis ...<br />
A bunch of actors portraying Huguenot soldiers approach the throne on which Amber is seated: They pace slowly forward,<br />
escorting a rather bemused-looking fellow with long, lank hair and a brocade jacket that appears to be made of cloth-of-gold.<br />
"His lordship, Attorney at Arms Alan Glashwiecz!" announces a flunky, reading from a parchment, "here at the behest of the<br />
most excellent guild and corporation of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates, with matters of legal import to discuss with Her Royal<br />
Highness!"<br />
A flourish of trumpets. Pierre glances at Her Royal Highness, who nods gracefully, but is slightly peaky – it's a humid summer<br />
day and her many-layered robes look very hot. "Welcome to the furthermost soil of the Ring Imperium," she announces in a<br />
clear, ringing voice. "I bid you welcome and invite you to place your petition before me in full public session of court."<br />
Pierre directs his attention to Glashwiecz, who appears to be worried. Doubtless he'd absorbed the basics of court protocol<br />
in the Ring (population all of eighteen thousand back home, a growing little principality), but the reality of it, a genuine<br />
old-fashioned monarchy rooted in Amber's three-way nexus of power, data, and time, always takes a while to sink in. "I would<br />
be pleased to do so," he says, a little stiffly, "but in front of all those –"<br />
Pierre misses the next bit, because someone has just goosed him on the left buttock. He starts and half turns to see Su Ang<br />
looking past him at the throne, a lady-in-waiting for the queen. She wears an apricot dress with tight sleeves and a bodice<br />
that bares everything above her nipples. There's a fortune in pearls roped into her hair. As he notices her, she winks at him.<br />
Pierre freezes the scene, decoupling them from reality, and she faces him. "Are we alone now?" she asks.<br />
"Guess so. You want to talk about something?" he asks, heat rising in his cheeks. The noise around them is a random<br />
susurrus of machine-generated crowd scenery, the people motionless as their shared reality thread proceeds independently<br />
of the rest of the universe.<br />
"Of course!" She smiles at him and shrugs. The effect on her chest is remarkable – those period bodices could give a skeleton<br />
a cleavage – and she winks at him again. "Oh, Pierre." She smiles. "So easily distracted!" She snaps her fingers, and her<br />
clothing cycles through Afghani burqua, nudity, trouser suit, then back to court finery. Her grin is the only constant. "Now<br />
that I've got your attention, stop looking at me and start looking at him."<br />
Even more embarrassed, Pierre follows her outstretched arm all the way to the momentarily frozen Moorish emissary.<br />
"Sadeq?"<br />
"Sadeq knows him, Pierre. This guy, there's something wrong."<br />
"Shit. You think I don't know that?" Pierre looks at her with annoyance, embarrassment forgotten. "I've seen him before.<br />
Been tracking his involvement for years. Guy's a front for the Queen Mother. He acted as her divorce lawyer when she went<br />
after Amber's Dad."<br />
"I'm sorry." Ang glances away. "You haven't been yourself lately, Pierre. I know it's something wrong between you and the<br />
Queen. I was worried. You're not paying attention to the little details."<br />
"Who do you think warned Amber?" he asks.<br />
"Oh. Okay, so you're in the loop," she says. "I'm not sure. Anyway, you've been distracted. Is there anything I can do to<br />
help?"<br />
"Listen." Pierre puts his hands on her shoulders. She doesn't move, but looks up into his eyes – Su Ang is only one-sixty tall<br />
– and he feels a pang of something odd: teenage male uncertainty about the friendship of women. What does she want? "I<br />
know, and I'm sorry, and I'll try to keep my eyes on the ball some more, but I've been in my own headspace a lot lately. We<br />
ought to go back into the audience before anybody notices."<br />
"Do you want to talk about the problem first?" she asks, inviting his confidence.<br />
"I –" Pierre shakes his head. I could tell her everything, he realizes shakily as his metaconscience prods him urgently. He's got a<br />
couple of agony-aunt agents, but Ang is a real person and a friend. She won't pass judgment, and her model of human social<br />
behavior is a hell of a lot better than any expert system's. But time is in danger of slipping, and besides, Pierre feels dirty.<br />
"Not now," he says. "Let's go back."<br />
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"Okay." She nods, then turns away, steps behind him with a swish of skirts, and he unfreezes time again as they snap back<br />
into place within the larger universe, just in time to see the respected visitor serve the queen with a class-action lawsuit, and<br />
the Queen respond by referring adjudication to trial by combat.<br />
* * *<br />
Hyundai +4904 / -56 is a brown dwarf, a lump of dirty hydrogen condensed from a stellar nursery, eight times as massive as<br />
Jupiter but not massive enough to ignite a stable fusion reaction at its core. The relentless crush of gravity has overcome the<br />
mutual repulsion of electrons trapped at its core, shrinking it into a shell of slush around a sphere of degenerate matter. It's<br />
barely larger than the gas giant the human ship uses as an energy source, but it's much denser. Gigayears ago, a chance<br />
stellar near miss sent it careening off into the galaxy on its own, condemned to drift in eternal darkness along with a cluster<br />
of frozen moons that dance attendance upon it.<br />
By the time the Field Circus is decelerating toward it at short range – having shed the primary sail, which drifts farther out<br />
into interstellar space while reflecting light back onto the remaining secondary sail surface to slow the starwisp – Hyundai<br />
+4904 /-56 is just under one parsec distant from Earth, closer even than Proxima Centauri. Utterly dark at visible wavelengths,<br />
the brown dwarf could have drifted through the outer reaches of the solar system before conventional telescopes would<br />
have found it by direct observation. Only an infrared survey in the early years of the current century gave it a name.<br />
A bunch of passengers and crew have gathered on the bridge (now running at one-tenth of real time) to watch the arrival.<br />
Amber sits curled up in the captain's chair, moodily watching the gathered avatars. Pierre is still avoiding her at every<br />
opportunity, formal audiences excepted, and the damned shark and his pet hydra aren't invited, but apart from that, most<br />
of the gang is here. There are sixty-three uploads running on the Field Circus's virtualization stack, software copied out of<br />
meatbodies who are mostly still walking around back home. It's a crowd, but it's possible to feel lonely in a crowd, even when<br />
it's your party. And especially when you're worried about debt, even though you're a billionairess, beneficiary of the human<br />
species' biggest reputations-rating trust fund. Amber's clothing – black leggings, black sweater – is as dark as her mood.<br />
"Something troubles you." A hand descends on the back of the chair next to her.<br />
She glances round momentarily, nods in recognition. "Yeah. Have a seat. You missed the audience?"<br />
The thin, brown-skinned man with a neatly cropped beard and deeply lined forehead slips into the seat next to her. "It was<br />
not part of my heritage," he explains carefully, "although the situation is not unfamiliar." A momentary smile threatens to<br />
crack his stony face. "I found the casting a trifle disturbing."<br />
"I'm no Marguerite de Valois, but the vacant role ... let's just say, the cap fits." Amber leans back in her chair. "Mind you,<br />
Marguerite had an interesting life," she muses.<br />
"Don't you mean depraved and debauched?" her neighbor counters.<br />
"Sadeq." She closes her eyes. "Let's not pick a fight over absolute morality just right now, please? We have an orbital insertion<br />
to carry out, then an artifact to locate, and a dialogue to open, and I'm feeling very tired. Drained."<br />
"Ah – I apologize." He inclines his head carefully. "Is it your young man's fault? Has he slighted you?"<br />
"Not exactly –" Amber pauses. Sadeq, whom she basically invited along as ship's theologian in case they ran into any gods,<br />
has taken up her pastoral well-being as some kind of hobby. She finds it mildly oppressive at times, flattering at others,<br />
surreal always. Using the quantum search resources available to a citizen of the Ring Imperium, he's outpublished his peers,<br />
been elected a hojetolislam at an unprecedentedly young age: His original will probably be an ayatollah by the time they get<br />
home. He's circumspect in dealing with cultural differences, reasons with impeccable logic, carefully avoids antagonizing her –<br />
and constantly seeks to guide her moral development. "It's a personal misunderstanding," she says. "I'd rather not talk about<br />
it until we've sorted it out."<br />
"Very well." He looks unsatisfied, but that's normal. Sadeq still has the dusty soil of a childhood in the industrial city of Yazd<br />
stuck to his boots. Sometimes she wonders if their disagreements don't mirror in miniature the gap between the early<br />
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. "But back to the here and now. Do you know where this router is?"<br />
"I will, in a few minutes or hours." Amber raises her voice, simultaneously spawning a number of search-ghosts. "Boris! You<br />
got any idea where we're going?"<br />
Boris lumbers round in place to face her; today he's wearing a velociraptor, and they don't turn easily in confined spaces.<br />
He snarls irritably: "Give me some space!" He coughs, a threatening noise from the back of his wattled throat, "Searching the<br />
sail's memory now." The back of the soap-bubble-thin laser sail is saturated with tiny nanocomputers spaced micrometers<br />
apart. Equipped with light receptors and configured as cellular automata, they form a gigantic phased-array detector, a<br />
retina more than a hundred meters in diameter. Boris is feeding them patterns describing anything that differs from the<br />
unchanging starscape. Soon the memories will condense and return as visions of darkness in motion – the cold, dead<br />
attendants of an aborted sun.<br />
"But where is it going to be?" asks Sadeq. "Do you know what you are looking for?"<br />
"Yes. We should have no trouble finding it," says Amber. "It looks like this." She flicks an index finger at the row of glass<br />
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windows that front the bridge. Her signet ring flashes ruby light, and something indescribably weird shimmers into view in<br />
place of the seascape. Clusters of pearly beads that form helical chains, disks and whorls of color that interlace and knot<br />
through one another, hang in space above a darkling planet. "Looks like a William Latham sculpture made out of strange<br />
matter, doesn't it?"<br />
"Very abstract," Sadeq says approvingly.<br />
"It's alive," she adds. "And when it gets close enough to see us, it'll try to eat us."<br />
"What?" Sadeq sits up uneasily.<br />
"You mean nobody told you?" asks Amber: "I thought we'd briefed everybody." She throws a glistening golden pomegranate<br />
at him, and he catches it. The apple of knowledge dissolves in his hand, and he sits in a haze of ghosts absorbing information<br />
on his behalf. "Damn," she adds mildly.<br />
Sadeq freezes in place. Glyphs of crumbling stonework overgrown with ivy texture his skin and his dark suit, warning that<br />
he's busy in another private universe.<br />
"Hrrrr! Boss! Found something," calls Boris, drooling on the bridge floor.<br />
Amber glances up. Please, let it be the router, she thinks. "Put it on the main screen."<br />
"Are you sure this is safe?" Su Ang asks nervously.<br />
"Nothing is safe," Boris snaps, clattering his huge claws on the deck. "Here. Look."<br />
The view beyond the windows flips to a perspective on a dusty bluish horizon: swirls of hydrogen brushed with a high cirrus<br />
of white methane crystals, stirred above the freezing point of oxygen by Hyundai +4904 / -56 's residual rotation. The<br />
image-intensification level is huge – a naked human eyeball would see nothing but blackness. Rising above the limb of the<br />
gigantic planet is a small pale disk: Callidice, largest moon of the brown dwarf – or second-innermost planet – a barren rock<br />
slightly larger than Mercury. The screen zooms in on the moon, surging across a landscape battered by craters and dusted<br />
with the spume of ice volcanoes. Finally, just above the far horizon, something turquoise shimmers and spins against a<br />
backdrop of frigid darkness.<br />
"That's it," Amber whispers, her stomach turning to jelly as all the terrible might-have-beens dissolve like phantoms of the<br />
night around her; "That's it!" Elated, she stands up, wanting to share the moment with everybody she values. "Wake up,<br />
Sadeq! Someone get that damned cat in here! Where's Pierre? He's got to see this!"<br />
* * *<br />
Night and revelry rule outside the castle. The crowds are drunken and rowdy on the eve of the St. Bartholomew's Day<br />
massacre. Fireworks burst overhead, and the open windows admit a warm breeze redolent of cooked meats, woodsmoke,<br />
open sewers. Meanwhile a lover steals up a tightly-spiraling stone staircase in the near dark; his goal, a prarranged<br />
rendezvous. He's been drinking, and his best linen shirt shows the stains of sweat and food. He pauses at the third window<br />
to breathe in the outside air and run both hands through his mane of hair, which is long, unkempt, and grimy. Why am I<br />
doing this? he wonders. This is so unlike him, this messing around –<br />
He carries on up the spiral. At the top, an oak door gapes on a vestibule lit by a lantern hanging from a hook. He ventures<br />
inside into a reception room paneled in oak blackened by age. Crossing the threshold makes another crossover kick in by<br />
prior arrangement. Something other than his own volition steers his feet, and he feels an unfamiliar throb in his chest,<br />
anticipation and a warmth and looseness lower down that makes him cry out, "where are you?"<br />
"Over here." He sees her waiting for him in the doorway. She's partially undressed, wearing layered underskirts and a<br />
flat-chested corset that makes the tops of her breasts swell like lustrous domes. Her tight sleeves are half-unraveled, her hair<br />
disheveled. He's full of her brilliant eyes, the constriction holding her spine straight, the taste in her mouth. She's the magnet<br />
for his reality, impossibly alluring, so tense she could burst. "Is it working for you?" she asks.<br />
"Yes." he feels tight, breathless, squeezed between impossibility and desire as he walks toward her. They've experimented with<br />
gender play, trying on the extreme dimorphism of this period as a game, but this is the first time they've done it this way.<br />
She opens her mouth: He kisses her, feels the warmth of his tongue thrust between her lips, the strength of his arms<br />
enclosing her waist.<br />
She leans against him, feeling his erection. "So this is how it feels to be you," she says wonderingly. The door to her chamber<br />
is ajar, but she doesn't have the self-restraint to wait: The flood of new sensations – rerouted from her physiology model to<br />
his proprioceptive sensorium – has taken hold. She grinds her hips against him, pushing deeper into his arms, whining softly<br />
at the back of her throat as she feels the fullness in his balls, the tension of his penis. He nearly faints with the rich sensations<br />
of her body – it's as if he's dissolving, feeling the throbbing hardness against his groin, turning to water and running away.<br />
Somehow he gets his arms around her waist – so tight, so breathless – and stumbles forward into the bedroom. She's<br />
whimpering as he drops her on the over-stuffed mattress: "Do it to me!" she demands, "Do it now!"<br />
Somehow he ends up on top of her, hose down around his ankles, skirts bundled up around her waist; she kisses him,<br />
grinding her hips against him and murmuring urgent nothings. Then his heart is in his mouth, and there's a sensation like<br />
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the universe pushing into his private parts, so inside out it takes his breath away. It's hot and as hard as rock, and he wants<br />
it inside so badly, but at the same time it's an intrusion, frightening and unexpected. He feels the lightning touch of his<br />
tongue on her nipples as he leans closer, feels exposed and terrified and ecstatic as her private places take in his member. As<br />
he begins to dissolve into the universe he screams in the privacy of his own head, I didn't know it felt like this –<br />
Afterward, she turns to him with a lazy smile, and asks, "How was it for you?" Obviously assuming that, if she enjoyed it, he<br />
must have, too.<br />
But all he can think of is the sensation of the universe thrusting into him, and of how good it felt. All he can hear is his father<br />
yelling ("What are you, some kind of queer?") – and he feels dirty.<br />
* * *<br />
Greetings from the last megasecond before the discontinuity.<br />
The solar system is thinking furiously at 10 33 MIPS – thoughts bubble and swirl in the equivalent of a million<br />
billion unaugmented human minds. Saturn's rings glow with waste heat. The remaining faithful of the<br />
Latter-Day Saints are correlating the phase-space of their genome and the records of their descent in an<br />
attempt to resurrect their ancestors. Several skyhooks have unfurled in equatorial orbit around the earth<br />
like the graceful fernlike leaves of sundews, ferrying cargo and passengers to and from orbit. Small, crab like<br />
robots swarm the surface of Mercury, exuding a black slime of photovoltaic converters and the silvery<br />
threads of mass drivers. A glowing cloud of industrial nanomes forms a haze around the innermost planet as<br />
it slowly shrinks under the onslaught of copious solar power and determined mining robots.<br />
The original incarnations of Amber and her court float in high orbit above Jupiter, presiding over the huge<br />
nexus of dumb matter trade that is rapidly biting into the available mass of the inner Jovian system. The<br />
trade in reaction mass is brisk, and there are shipments of diamond/vacuum biphase structures to assemble<br />
and crank down into the lower reaches of the solar system. Far below, skimming the edges of Jupiter's<br />
turbulent cloudscape, a gigantic glowing figure-of-eight – a five-hundred-kilometer-long loop of<br />
superconducting cable – traces incandescent trails through the gas giant's magnetosphere. It's trading<br />
momentum for electrical current, diverting it into a fly's eye grid of lasers that beam it toward Hyundai<br />
+4904 /-56 . As long as the original Amber and her incarnate team can keep it running, the Field Circus can<br />
continue its mission of discovery, but they're part of the posthuman civilization evolving down in the<br />
turbulent depths of Sol system, part of the runaway train being dragged behind the out-of-control engine of<br />
history.<br />
Weird new biologies based on complex adaptive matter take shape in the sterile oceans of Titan. In the frigid<br />
depths beyond Pluto, supercooled boson gases condense into impossible dreaming structures, packaged for<br />
shipping inward to the fast-thinking core.<br />
There are still humans dwelling down in the hot depths, but it's getting hard to recognize them. The lot of<br />
humanity before the twenty-first century was nasty, brutish, and short. Chronic malnutrition, lack of<br />
education, and endemic diseases led to crippled minds and broken bodies. Now, most people multitask: Their<br />
meatbrains sit at the core of a haze of personality, much of it virtualized on stacked layers of structured<br />
reality far from their physical bodies. Wars and revolutions, or their subtle latter-day cognates, sweep the<br />
globe as constants become variables; many people find the death of stupidity even harder to accept than the<br />
end of mortality. Some have vitrified themselves to await an uncertain posthuman future. Others have<br />
modified their core identities to better cope with the changed demands of reality. Among these are beings<br />
whom nobody from a previous century would recognize as human – human/corporation half-breeds,<br />
zombie clades dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels and devils of software, slyly self-aware financial<br />
instruments. Even their popular fictions are self-deconstructing these days.<br />
None of this, other than the barest news summary, reaches the Field Circus: The starwisp is a fossil, left behind<br />
by the broad sweep of accelerating progress. But it is aboard the Field Circus that some of the most important<br />
events remaining in humanity's future light cone take place.<br />
"Say hello to the jellyfish, Boris."<br />
* * *<br />
Boris, in human drag, for once, glares at Pierre, and grips the pitcher with both hands. The contents of the jug swirl their<br />
tentacles lazily: One of them flips almost out of solution, dislodging an impaled cocktail cherry. "Will get you for this," Boris<br />
threatens. The smoky air around his head is a-swirl with daemonic visions of vengeance.<br />
Su Ang stares intently at Pierre who is watching Boris as he raises the jug to his lips and begins to drink. The baby jellyfish –<br />
small, pale blue, with cuboid bells and four clusters of tentacles trailing from each corner – slips down easily. Boris winces<br />
momentarily as the nematocysts let rip inside his mouth, but in a moment or so, the cubozoan slips down, and in the<br />
meantime, his biophysics model clips the extent of the damage to his stinger-ruptured oropharynx.<br />
"Wow," he says, taking another slurp of sea wasp margaritas. "Don't try this at home, fleshboy."<br />
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"Here." Pierre reaches out. "Can I?"<br />
"Invent your own damn poison," Boris sneers – but he releases the jug and passes it to Pierre, who raises it and drinks. The<br />
cubozoan cocktail reminds him of fruit jelly drinks in a hot Hong Kong summer. The stinging in his palate is sharp but fades<br />
rapidly, producing an intimate burn when the alcohol hits the mild welts that are all this universe will permit the lethal<br />
medusa to inflict on him.<br />
"Not bad," says Pierre, wiping a stray loop of tentacle off his chin. He pushes the pitcher across the table toward Su Ang.<br />
"What's with the wicker man?" He points a thumb over his back at the table jammed in the corner opposite the<br />
copper-topped bar.<br />
"Who cares?" asks Boris."'S part of the scenery, isn't it?"<br />
The bar is a three-hundred-year-old brown café with a beer menu that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the<br />
color of stale ale. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer's yeast, and melatonin spray: and none of it exists.<br />
Amber dragged it out of the Franklin borg's collective memories, by way of her father's scattershot e-mails annotating her<br />
corporeal origins – the original is in Amsterdam, if that city still exists.<br />
"I care who it is," says Pierre.<br />
"Save it," Ang says quietly. "I think it's a lawyer with a privacy screen."<br />
Pierre glances over his shoulder and glares. "Really?"<br />
Ang puts a restraining hand on his wrist: "Really. Don't pay it any attention. You don't have to, until the trial, you know."<br />
The wicker man sits uneasily in the corner. It resembles a basket-weave silhouette made from dried reeds, dressed in a red<br />
kerchief. A glass of doppelbock fills the mess of tied-off ends where its right hand ought to be. From time to time, it raises the<br />
glass as if to take a mouthful, and the beer vanishes into the singular interior.<br />
"Fuck the trial," Pierre says shortly. And fuck Amber, too, for naming me her public defender –<br />
"Since when do lawsuits come with an invisible man?" asks Donna the Journalist, blitting into the bar along with a patchy<br />
historical trail hinting that she's just come from the back room.<br />
"Since –" Pierre blinks. "Hell." When Donna entered, so did Aineko; or maybe the cat's been there all the time, curled up<br />
loaf-of-bread fashion on the table in front of the wicker man. "You're damaging the continuity," Pierre complains. "This<br />
universe is broken."<br />
"Fix it yourself," Boris tells him. "Everybody else is coping." He snaps his fingers. "Waiter!"<br />
"Excuse me." Donna shakes her head. "I didn't mean to harm anything."<br />
Ang, as always, is more accommodating. "How are you?" she asks politely: "Would you like to try this most excellent poison<br />
cocktail?"<br />
"I am well," says Donna. A heavily built German woman – blonde and solidly muscular, according to the avatar she's<br />
presenting to the public – she's surrounded by a haze of viewpoints. They're camera angles on her society of mind, busily<br />
integrating and splicing her viewpoint threads together in an endless journal of the journey. A stringer for the CIA media<br />
consortium, she uploaded to the ship in the same packet stream as the lawsuit. "Danke, Ang."<br />
"Are you recording right now?" asks Boris.<br />
Donna sniffs. "When am I not?" A momentary smile: "I am only a scanner, no? Five hours, until arrival, to go. I may stop after<br />
then." Pierre glances across the table at Su Ang's hands; her knuckles are white and tense. "I am to avoid missing anything if<br />
possible," Donna continues, oblivious to Ang's disquiet. "There are eight of me at present! All recording away."<br />
"That's all?" Ang asks, raising an eyebrow.<br />
"Yes, that is all, and I have a job to do! Don't tell me you do not enjoy what it is that you do here?"<br />
"Right." Pierre glances in the corner again, avoiding eye contact with the hearty Girl Friday wannabe. He has a feeling, that if<br />
there were any hills hereabouts to animate, she'd be belting out the music. "Amber told you about the privacy code here?"<br />
"There is a privacy code?" asks Donna, swinging at least three subjective ghosts to bear on him for some reason – evidently<br />
he's hit an issue she has mixed feelings about.<br />
"A privacy code," Pierre confirms. "No recording in private, no recording where people withhold permission in public, and<br />
no sandboxes and cutups."<br />
Donna looks offended. "I would never do such a thing! Trapping a copy of someone in a virtual space to record their<br />
responses would be assault under Ring legal code, not true?"<br />
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"Your mother," Boris says snidely, brandishing a fresh jug of iced killer jellyfish in her direction.<br />
"As long as we all agree," Ang interrupts, searching for accord. "It's all going to be settled soon, isn't it?"<br />
"Except for the lawsuit," mutters Pierre, glancing at the corner again.<br />
"I don't see the problem," says Donna, "that's just between Amber and her downlink adversaries!"<br />
"Oh, it's a problem all right," says Boris, his tone light. "What are your options worth?"<br />
"My –" Donna shakes her head. "I'm not vested."<br />
"Plausible." Boris doesn't crack a smile. "Even so, when we go home, your credibility metric will bulge. Assuming people still<br />
use distributed trust markets to evaluate the stability of their business partners."<br />
Not vested. Pierre turns it over in his mind, slightly surprised. He'd assumed that everybody aboard the ship – except,<br />
perhaps, the lawyer, Glashwiecz – was a fully vested member of the expeditionary company.<br />
"I am not vested," Donna insists. "I'm listed independently." For a moment, an almost-smile tugs at her face, a charmingly<br />
reticent expression that has nothing to do with her bluff exterior. "Like the cat."<br />
"The –" Pierre turns round in a hurry. Yes, Aineko appears to be sitting silently at the table with the wicker man; but who<br />
knows what's going through that furry head right now? I'll have to bring this up with Amber, he realizes uneasily. I ought to<br />
bring this up with Amber ... "but your reputation won't suffer for being on this craft, will it?" he asks aloud.<br />
"I will be all right," Donna declares. The waiter comes over: "Mine will be a bottle of schneiderweisse," she adds. And then,<br />
without breaking step: "Do you believe in the singularity?"<br />
"Am I a singularitarian, do you mean?" asks Pierre, a fixed grin coming to his face.<br />
"Oh, no, no, no!" Donna waves him down, grins broadly, nods at Su Ang: "I do not mean it like that! Attend: What I meant<br />
to ask was whether you in the concept of a singularity believe, and if so, where it is?"<br />
"Is this intended for a public interview?" asks Ang.<br />
"Well, I cannot into a simulation drag you off and expose you to an imitative reality excursion, can I?" Donna leans back as<br />
the bartender places a ceramic stein in front of her.<br />
"Oh. Well." Ang glances warningly at Pierre and dispatches a very private memo to scroll across his vision: Don't play with her,<br />
this is serious. Boris is watching Ang with an expression of hopeless longing. Pierre tries to ignore it all, taking the journalist's<br />
question seriously. "The singularity is a bit like that old-time American Christian rapture nonsense, isn't it?" he says. "When<br />
we all go a-flying up to heaven, leaving our bodies behind." He snorts, reaches into thin air and gratuitously violates causality<br />
by summoning a jug of ice-cold sangria into existence. "The rapture of the nerds. I'll drink to that."<br />
"But when did it take place?" asks Donna. "My audience, they will to know your opinion be needing."<br />
"Four years ago, when we instantiated this ship," Pierre says promptly.<br />
"Back in the teens," says Ang. "When Amber's father liberated the uploaded lobsters."<br />
"Is not happening yet," contributes Boris. "Singularity implies infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not<br />
amenable thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not happened."<br />
"Au contraire. It happened on June 6th, 1969, at eleven hundred hours, eastern seaboard time," Pierre counters. "That was<br />
when the first network control protocol packets were sent from the data port of one IMP to another – the first ever<br />
Internet connection. That's the singularity. Since then we've all been living in a universe that was impossible to predict from<br />
events prior to that time."<br />
"It's rubbish," counters Boris. "Singularity is load of religious junk. Christian mystic rapture recycled for atheist nerds."<br />
"Not so." Su Ang glances at him, hurt. "Here we are, sixty something human minds. We've been migrated – while still awake<br />
– right out of our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and electron spin resonance mapping, and<br />
we're now running as software in an operating system designed to virtualize multiple physics models and provide a simulation<br />
of reality that doesn't let us go mad from sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a fingertip,<br />
crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother's old Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three<br />
light-years from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by incredibly ancient alien intelligences, and you can<br />
tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?"<br />
"Mmph." Boris looks perplexed. "Would not put it that way. The singularity is nonsense, not uploading or –"<br />
"Yah, right." Ang smiles winningly at Boris. After a moment, he wilts.<br />
Donna beams at them enthusiastically. "Fascinating!" she enthuses. "Tell me, what are these lobsters you think are important?"<br />
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"They're Amber's friends," Ang explains. "Years ago, Amber's father did a deal with them. They were the first uploads, you<br />
know? Hybridized spiny lobster neural tissue and a heuristic API and some random mess of backward-chaining expert<br />
systems. They got out of their lab and into the Net and Manfred brokered a deal to set them free, in return for their help<br />
running a Franklin orbital factory. This was way back in the early days before they figured out how to do self-assembly<br />
properly. Anyway, the lobsters insisted – part of their contract – that Bob Franklin pay to have the deep-space tracking<br />
network beam them out into interstellar space. They wanted to emigrate, and looking at what's happened to the solar system<br />
since then, who can blame them?"<br />
Pierre takes a big mouthful of sangria. "The cat," he says.<br />
"The cat –" Donna's head swivels round, but Aineko has banged out again, retroactively editing her presence out of the<br />
event history of this public space. "What about the cat?"<br />
"The family cat," explains Ang. She reaches over for Boris's pitcher of jellyfish juice, but frowns as she does so: "Aineko wasn't<br />
conscious back then, but later ... when SETI@home finally received that message back, oh, however many years ago, Aineko<br />
remembered the lobsters. And cracked it wide open while all the CETI teams were still thinking in terms of von Neumann<br />
architectures and concept-oriented programming. The message was a semantic net designed to mesh perfectly with the<br />
lobster broadcast all those years ago, and provide a high-level interface to a communications network we're going to visit."<br />
She squeezes Boris's fingertips. "SETI@home logged these coordinates as the origin of the transmission, even though the<br />
public word was that the message came from a whole lot farther away – they didn't want to risk a panic if people knew there<br />
were aliens on our cosmic doorstep. Anyway, once Amber got established, she decided to come visiting. Hence this<br />
expedition. Aineko created a virtual lobster and interrogated the ET packet, hence the communications channel we're about<br />
to open."<br />
"Ah, this is all a bit clearer now," says Donna. "But the lawsuit – " She glances at the hollow wicker man in the corner.<br />
"Well, there we have a problem," Ang says diplomatically.<br />
"No," says Pierre. "I have a problem. And it's all Amber's fault."<br />
"Hmm?" Donna stares at him. "Why blame the Queen?"<br />
"Because she's the one who picked the lunar month to be the reporting time period for companies in her domain, and<br />
specified trial by combat for resolving corporate conflicts," he grumbles. "And compurgation, but that's not applicable to this<br />
case because there isn't a recognized reputation server within three light-years. Trial by combat, for civil suits in this day and<br />
age! And she appointed me her champion." In the most traditional way imaginable, he remembers with a warm frisson of<br />
nostalgia. He'd been hers in body and soul before that disastrous experiment. He isn't sure whether it still applies, but – "I've<br />
got to take on this lawsuit on her behalf, in adversarial stance."<br />
He glances over his shoulder. The wicker man sits there placidly, pouring beer down his invisible throat like a tired farm<br />
laborer.<br />
"Trial by combat," Su Ang explains to Donna's perplexed ghost-swarm, which is crawling all over the new concept in a haze<br />
of confusion. "Not physical combat, but a competition of ability. It seemed like a good idea at the time, to keep junk litigants<br />
out of the Ring Imperium, but the Queen Mother's lawyers are very persistent. Probably because it's taken on something of a<br />
grudge match quality over the years. I don't think Pamela cares much anymore, but this ass-hat lawyer has turned it into a<br />
personal crusade. I don't think he liked what happened when the music Mafiya caught up with him. But there's a bit more to<br />
it, because if he wins, he gets to own everything. And I mean everything."<br />
* * *<br />
Ten million kilometers out and Hyundai +4904 / -56 looms beyond the parachute-shaped sail of the Field Circus like a rind of<br />
darkness bitten out of the edge of the universe. Heat from the gravitational contraction of its core keeps it warm, radiating<br />
at six hundred degrees absolute, but the paltry emission does nothing to break the eternal ice that grips Callidice, Iambe,<br />
Celeus, and Metaneira, the stillborn planets locked in orbit around the brown dwarf.<br />
Planets aren't the only structures that orbit the massive sphere of hydrogen. Close in, skimming the cloud tops by only<br />
twenty thousand kilometers, Boris's phased-array eye has blinked at something metallic and hot. Whatever it is, it orbits out<br />
of the ecliptic plane traced by the icy moons, and in the wrong direction. Farther out, a speckle of reflected emerald laser<br />
light picks out a gaudy gem against the starscape: their destination, the router.<br />
"That's it," says Boris. His body shimmers into humanity, retconning the pocket universe of the bridge into agreeing that he's<br />
been present in primate form all along. Amber glances sideways. Sadeq is still wrapped in ivy, his skin the texture of<br />
weathered limestone. "Closest approach is sixty-three light-seconds, due in eight hundred thousand. Can give you closer<br />
contact if we maneuver, but will take time to achieve a stable orbit."<br />
Amber nods thoughtfully, sending copies of herself out to work the mechanics. The big light sail is unwieldy, but can take<br />
advantage of two power sources: the original laser beam from Jupiter, and its reflection bouncing off the now-distant primary<br />
light sail. The temptation is to rely on the laser for constant acceleration, to just motor on in and squat on the router's<br />
cosmic doorstep. But the risk of beam interruption is too dangerous. It's happened before, for seconds to minutes at a time,<br />
on six occasions during the voyage so far. She's not sure what causes the beam downtime (Pierre has a theory about Oort<br />
cloud objects occulting the laser, but she figures it's more likely to be power cuts back at the Ring), but the consequences of<br />
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losing power while maneuvering deep in a quasi-stellar gravity well are much more serious than a transient loss of thrust<br />
during free interstellar flight. "Let's just play it safe," she says. "We'll go for a straight orbital insertion and steady cranking<br />
after that. We've got enough gravity wells to play pinball with. I don't want us on a free-flight trajectory that entails<br />
lithobraking if we lose power and can't get the sail back."<br />
"Very prudent," Boris agrees. "Marta, work on it." A buzzing presence of not-insects indicates that the heteromorphic<br />
helmswoman is on the job. "I think we should be able to take our first close-in look in about two million seconds, but if you<br />
want, I can ping it now ...?"<br />
"No need for protocol analysis," Amber says casually. "Where's – ah, there you are." She reaches down and picks up Aineko,<br />
who twists round sinuously and licks her arm with a tongue like sandpaper. "What do you think?"<br />
"Do you want fries with that?" asks the cat, focusing on the artifact at the center of the main screen in front of the bridge.<br />
"No, I just want a conversation," says Amber.<br />
"Well, okay." The cat dims, moves jerkily, sucking up local processing power so fast that it disturbs the local physics model.<br />
"Opening port now."<br />
A subjective minute or two passes. "Where's Pierre?" Amber asks herself quietly. Some of the maintenance metrics she can<br />
read from her privileged viewpoint are worrying. The Field Circus is running at almost eighty percent of utilization. Whatever<br />
Aineko is doing in order to establish the interface to the router, it's taking up an awful lot of processing power and<br />
bandwidth. "And where's the bloody lawyer?" she adds, almost as an afterthought.<br />
The Field Circus is small, but its light sail is highly controllable. Aineko takes over a cluster of cells in its surface, turning them<br />
from straight reflectors into phase-conjugate mirrors: A small laser on the ship's hull begins to flicker thousands of times a<br />
second, and the beam bounces off the modified segment of mirror, focusing to a coherent point right in front of the distant<br />
blue dot of the router. Aineko ramps up the modulation frequency, adds a bundle of channels using different wavelengths,<br />
and starts feeding out a complex set of preplanned signals that provide an encoding format for high-level data.<br />
"Leave the lawyer to me." She starts, glancing sideways to see Sadeq watching her. He smiles without showing his teeth.<br />
"Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy," he explains.<br />
"Huh." Ahead of them, the router is expanding. Strings of nacreous spheres curl in strange loops around a hidden core,<br />
expanding and turning inside out in systolic pulses that spawn waves of recomplication through the structure. A loose red<br />
speckle of laser light stains one arm of beads; suddenly it flares up brilliantly, reflecting data back at the ship. "Ah!"<br />
"Contact," purrs the cat. Amber's fingertips turn white where she grips the arms of her chair.<br />
"What does it say?" she asks, quietly.<br />
"What do they say," corrects Aineko. "It's a trade delegation, and they're uploading right now. I can use that negotiation<br />
network they sent us to give them an interface to our systems if you want."<br />
"Wait!" Amber half stands in sudden nervousness. "Don't give them free access! What are you thinking of? Stick them in the<br />
throne room, and we'll give them a formal audience in a couple of hours." She pauses. "That network layer they sent<br />
through. Can you make it accessible to us, use it to give us a translation layer into their grammar-mapping system?"<br />
The cat looks round, thumps her tail irritably: "You'd do better loading the network yourself –"<br />
"I don't want anybody on this ship running alien code before we've vetted it thoroughly," she says urgently. "In fact, I want<br />
them bottled up in the Louvre grounds, just as thoroughly as we can, and I want them to come to us through our own<br />
linguistic bottleneck. Got that?"<br />
"Clear," Aineko grumbles.<br />
"A trade delegation," Amber thinks aloud. "What would Dad make of that?"<br />
* * *<br />
One moment he's in the bar, shooting bull with Su Ang and Donna the Journalist's ghost and a copy of Boris; the next he's<br />
abruptly precipitated into a very different space.<br />
Pierre's heart seems to tumble within his rib cage, but he forces himself to stay calm as he glances around the dim,<br />
oak-paneled chamber. This is wrong, so wrong that it signifies either a major systems crash or the application of frightening<br />
privilege levels to his realm. The only person aboard who's entitled to those privileges is –<br />
"Pierre?"<br />
She's behind him. He turns angrily. "Why did you drag me in here? Don't you know it's rude to –"<br />
"Pierre."<br />
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He stops and looks at Amber. He can't stay angry at her for long, not to her face. She's not dumb enough to bat her<br />
eyelashes at him, but she's disarmingly cute for all that. Nevertheless, something inside him feels shriveled and wrong in her<br />
presence. "What is it?" he says, curtly.<br />
"I don't know why you've been avoiding me." She starts to take a step forward, then stops and bites her lip. Don't do this to<br />
me! he thinks. "You know it hurts?"<br />
"Yes." That much of an admission hurts him, too. He can hear his father yelling over his shoulder, the time he found him<br />
with Laurent, elder brother: It's a choice between père or Amber, but it's not a choice he wants to make. The shame. "I<br />
didn't – I have some issues."<br />
"It was the other night?"<br />
He nods. Now she takes a step forwards. "We can talk about it, if you want. Whatever you want," she says. And she leans<br />
toward him, and he feels his resistance crumbling. He reaches out and hugs her, and she wraps her arms around him and<br />
leans her chin on his shoulder, and this doesn't feel wrong: How can anything this good be bad?<br />
"It made me uncomfortable," he mumbles into her hair. "Need to sort myself out."<br />
"Oh, Pierre." She strokes the down at the back of his neck. "You should have said. We don't have to do it that way if you<br />
don't want to."<br />
How to tell her how hard it is to admit that anything's wrong? Ever? "You didn't drag me here to tell me that," he says,<br />
implicitly changing the subject.<br />
Amber lets go of him, backs away almost warily. "What is it?" she asks.<br />
"Something's wrong?" he half asks, half asserts. "Have we made contact yet?"<br />
"Yeah," she says, pulling a face. "There's an alien trade delegation in the Louvre. That's the problem."<br />
"An alien trade delegation." He rolls the words around the inside of his mouth, tasting them. They feel paradoxical, cold and<br />
slow after the hot words of passion he's been trying to avoid uttering. It's his fault for changing the subject.<br />
"A trade delegation," says Amber. "I should have anticipated. I mean, we were going to go through the router ourselves,<br />
weren't we?"<br />
He sighs. "We thought we were going to do that." A quick prod at the universe's controls determines that he has certain<br />
capabilities: He invokes an armchair, sprawls across it. "A network of point-to-point wormholes linking routers,<br />
self-replicating communication hubs, in orbit around most of the brown dwarfs of the galaxy. That's what the brochure said,<br />
right? That's what we expected. Limited bandwidth, not a lot of use to a mature superintelligence that has converted the free<br />
mass of its birth solar system into computronium, but sufficient to allow it to hold conversations with its neighbors.<br />
Conversations carried out via a packet-switched network in real time, not limited by the speed of light, but bound together<br />
by a common reference frame and the latency between network hops."<br />
"That's about the size of it," she agrees from the carved-ruby throne beside him. "Except there's a trade delegation waiting<br />
for us. In fact, they're coming aboard already. And I don't buy it – something about the whole setup stinks."<br />
Pierre's brow wrinkles. "You're right, it doesn't make sense," he says, finally. "Doesn't make sense at all."<br />
Amber nods. "I carry a ghost of Dad around. He's really upset about it."<br />
"Listen to your old man." Pierre's lips quirk humorlessly. "We were going to jump through the looking glass, but it seems<br />
someone has beaten us to the punch. Question is why?"<br />
"I don't like it." Amber reaches out sideways, and he catches her hand. "And then there's the lawsuit. We have to hold the<br />
trial sooner rather than later."<br />
He lets go of her fingers. "I'd really be much happier if you hadn't named me as your champion."<br />
"Hush." The scenery changes; her throne is gone, and instead she's sitting on the arm of his chair, almost on top of him.<br />
"Listen. I had a good reason."<br />
"Reason?"<br />
"You have choice of weapons. In fact, you have the choice of the field. This isn't just 'hit 'em with a sword until they die'<br />
time." She grins, impishly. "The whole point of a legal system that mandates trial by combat for commercial lawsuits, as<br />
opposed to an adjudication system, is to work out who's a fitter servant of society and hence deserving of preferential<br />
treatment. It's crazy to apply the same legal model to resolving corporate disputes that we use for arguments among people,<br />
especially as most companies are now software abstractions of business models; the interests of society are better served by a<br />
system that encourages efficient trade activity than by one that encourages litigation. It cuts down on corporate bullshit while<br />
encouraging the toughest ones to survive, which is why I was going to set up the trial as a contest to achieve maximum<br />
competitive advantage in a xenocommerce scenario. Assuming they really are traders, I figure we have more to trade with<br />
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them than some damn lawyer from the depths of earth's light cone."<br />
Pierre blinks. "Um." Blinks again. "I thought you wanted me to sideload some kind of fencing kinematics program and skewer<br />
the guy?"<br />
"Knowing how well I know you, why did you ever think that?" She slides down the arm of his chair and lands on his lap. She<br />
twists round to face him in point-blank close-up. "Shit, Pierre, I know you're not some kind of macho psychopath!"<br />
"But your mother's lawyers –"<br />
She shrugs dismissively. "They're lawyers. Used to dealing with precedents. Best way to fuck with their heads is to change the<br />
way the universe works." She leans against his chest. "You'll make mincemeat of them. Profit-to-earnings ratio through the<br />
roof, blood on the stock exchange floor." His hands meet around the small of her back. "My hero!"<br />
The Tuileries are full of confused lobsters.<br />
* * *<br />
Aineko has warped this virtual realm, implanting a symbolic gateway in the carefully manicured gardens outside. The gateway<br />
is about two meters in diameter, a verdigris-coated orouborous loop of bronze that sits like an incongruous archway astride<br />
a gravel path in the grounds. Giant black lobsters – each the size of a small pony – shuffle out of the loop's baby blue buffer<br />
field, antennae twitching. They wouldn't be able to exist in the real world, but the physics model here has been amended to<br />
permit them to breathe and move, by special dispensation.<br />
Amber sniffs derisively as she enters the great reception room of the Sully wing. "Can't trust that cat with anything," she<br />
mutters.<br />
"It was your idea, wasn't it?" asks Su Ang, trying to duck past the zombie ladies-in-waiting who carry Amber's train. Soldiers<br />
line the passage to either side, forming rows of steel to let the Queen pass unhindered.<br />
"To let the cat have its way, yes," Amber is annoyed. "But I didn't mean to let it wreck the continuity! I won't have it!"<br />
"I never saw the point of all this medievalism, before," Ang observes. "It's not as if you can avoid the singularity by hiding in<br />
the past." Pierre, following the Queen at a distance, shakes his head, knowing better than to pick a fight with Amber over her<br />
idea of stage scenery.<br />
"It looks good," Amber says tightly, standing before her throne and waiting for the ladies-in-waiting to arrange themselves<br />
before her. She sits down carefully, her back straight as a ruler, voluminous skirts belling up. Her dress is an intricate piece<br />
of sculpture that uses the human body within as a support. "It impresses the yokels and looks convincing on narrowcast<br />
media. It provides a prefabricated sense of tradition. It hints at the political depths of fear and loathing intrinsic to my court's<br />
activities, and tells people not to fuck with me. It reminds us where we've come from ... and it doesn't give away anything<br />
about where we're going."<br />
"But that doesn't make any difference to a bunch of alien lobsters," points out Su Ang. "They lack the reference points to<br />
understand it." She moves to stand behind the throne. Amber glances at Pierre, waves him over.<br />
Pierre glances around, seeking real people, not the vacant eigenfaces of the zombies that give this scenery added biological<br />
texture. There in the red gown, isn't that Donna the Journalist? And over there, too, with shorter hair and wearing male<br />
drag; she gets everywhere. That's Boris, sitting behind the bishop.<br />
"You tell her," Ang implores him.<br />
"I can't," he admits. "We're trying to establish communication, aren't we? But we don't want to give too much away about<br />
what we are, how we think. A historical distancing act will keep them from learning too much about us: The phase-space of<br />
technological cultures that could have descended from these roots is too wide to analyse easily. So we're leaving them with<br />
the lobster translators and not giving anything away. Try to stay in character as a fifteenth-century duchess from Albì – it's a<br />
matter of national security."<br />
"Humph." Ang frowns as a flunky hustles forward to place a folding chair behind her. She turns to face the expanse of<br />
red-and-gold carpet that stretches to the doorway as trumpets blat and the doors swing open to admit the deputation of<br />
lobsters.<br />
The lobsters are as large as wolves, black and spiny and ominous. Their monochrome carapaces are at odds with the brightly<br />
colored garb of the human crowd. Their antennae are large and sharp as swords. But for all that, they advance hesitantly,<br />
eye turrets swiveling from side to side as they take the scene in. Their tails drag ponderously on the carpet, but they have no<br />
trouble standing.<br />
The first of the lobsters halts short of the throne and angles itself to train an eye on Amber. "Am inconsistent," it complains.<br />
"There is no liquid hydrogen monoxide here, and you-species am misrepresented by initial contact. Inconsistency, explain?"<br />
"Welcome to the human physical space-traveling interface unit Field Circus," Amber replies calmly. "I am pleased to see your<br />
translator is working adequately. You are correct, there is no water here. The lobsters don't normally need it when they visit<br />
us. And we humans are not water-dwellers. May I ask who you are when you're not wearing borrowed lobster bodies?"<br />
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Confusion. The second lobster rears up and clatters its long, armored antennae together. Soldiers to either side tighten their<br />
grips on their spears, but it drops back down again soon enough.<br />
"We are the Wunch," announces the first lobster, speaking clearly. "This is a body-compliant translation layer. Based on map<br />
received from yourspace, units forty thousand trillion light-kilometers ago?"<br />
"He means twenty years," Pierre whispers on a private channel Amber has multicast for the other real humans in the audience<br />
chamber reality. "They've confused space and time for measurement purposes. Does this tell us something?"<br />
"Relatively little," comments someone else – Chandra? A round of polite laughter greets the joke, and the tension in the room<br />
eases slightly.<br />
"We are the Wunch," the lobster repeats. "We come to exchange interest. What have you got that we want?"<br />
Faint frown lines appear on Amber's forehead. Pierre can see her thinking very rapidly. "We consider it impolite to ask," she<br />
says quietly.<br />
Clatter of claws on underlying stone floor. Chatter of clicking mandibles. "You accept our translation?" asks the leader.<br />
"Are you referring to the transmission you sent us, uh, thirty thousand trillion light-kilometers behind?" asks Amber.<br />
The lobster bobs up and down on its legs. "True. We send."<br />
"We cannot integrate that network," Amber replies blandly, and Pierre forces himself to keep a straight face. (Not that the<br />
lobsters can read human body language yet, but they'll undoubtedly be recording everything that happens here for future<br />
analysis.) "They come from a radically different species. Our goal in coming here is to connect our species to the network.<br />
We wish to exchange advantageous information with many other species."<br />
Concern, alarm, agitation. "You cannot do that! You are not untranslatable entity signifier."<br />
Amber raises a hand. "You said untranslatable entity signifier. I did not understand that. Can you paraphrase?"<br />
"We, like you, are not untranslatable entity signifier. The network is for untranslatable entity signifier. We are to the untranslatable<br />
concept #1 as a single-celled organism is to ourselves. You and we cannot untranslatable concept #2. To attempt trade with<br />
untranslatable entity signifier is to invite death or transition to untranslatable concept #1."<br />
Amber snaps her fingers: time freezes. She glances round at Su Ang, Pierre, the other members of her primary team.<br />
"Opinions, anyone?"<br />
Aineko, hitherto invisible, sits up on the carpet at the foot of the dais. "I'm not sure. The reason those macros are tagged is<br />
that there's something wrong with their semantics."<br />
"Wrong with – how?" asks Su Ang.<br />
The cat grins, cavernously, and begins to fade. "Wait!" snaps Amber.<br />
Aineko continues her fade, but leaves a shimmering presence behind: not a grin, but a neural network weighting map,<br />
three-dimensional and incomprehensibly complicated. "The untranslatable entity concept #1 when mapped onto the lobster's<br />
grammar network has elements of 'god' overloaded with attributes of mysticism and zenlike incomprehensibility. But I'm<br />
pretty sure that what it really means is 'optimized conscious upload that runs much faster than real-time'. A type-one weakly<br />
superhuman entity, like, um, the folks back home. The implication is that this Wunch wants us to view them as gods." The cat<br />
fades back in. "Any takers?"<br />
"Small-town hustlers," mutters Amber. "Talking big – or using a dodgy metagrammar that makes them sound bigger than<br />
they are – to bilk the hayseeds new to the big city."<br />
"Most likely." Aineko turns and begins to wash her flank.<br />
"What are we going to do?" asks Su Ang.<br />
"Do?" Amber raises a pencil-lined eyebrow, then flashes a grin that chops a decade off her apparent age: "We're going to<br />
mess with their heads!" She snaps her fingers again and time unfreezes. There's no change in continuity except that Aineko is<br />
still present, at the foot of the throne. The cat looks up and gives the queen a dirty look. "We understand your concern,"<br />
Amber says smoothly, "but we have already given you the physiology models and neural architecture of the bodies that you<br />
are wearing. We want to communicate. Why won't you show us your real selves or your real language?"<br />
"This is trade language!" protests Lobster Number One. "Wunch am/are metabolically variable coalition from number of<br />
worlds. No uniformity of interface. Easiest to conform to one plan and speak one tongue optimized for your<br />
comprehension."<br />
"Hmm." Amber leans forward. "Let me see if I understand you. You are a coalition of individuals from a number of species.<br />
You prefer to use the common user interface model we sent you, and offered us the language module you're using for an<br />
exchange? And you want to trade with us."<br />
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"Exchange interest," the Wunch emphasizes, bouncing up and down on its legs. "Can offer much! Sense of identity of a<br />
thousand civilizations. Safe tunnels to a hundred archives on the net suitable for beings who are not untranslatable entity<br />
signifier. Able to control risks of communication. Have technique of manipulating matter at molecular level. Solution to<br />
algorithmic iterated systems based on quantum entanglement."<br />
"Old-fashioned nanotechnology and shiny beads to dazzle the primitives," Pierre mutters on Amber's multicast channel. "How<br />
backward do they think we are?"<br />
"The physics model in here is really overdone," comments Boris. "They may even think this is real, that we're primitives coat-tailing it<br />
on the back of the lobsters' efforts."<br />
Amber forces a smile. "That is most interesting!" she trills at the Wunch's representatives. "I have appointed two<br />
representatives who will negotiate with you; this is an internal contest within my own court. I commend to you Pierre Naqet,<br />
my own commercial representative. In addition, you may want to deal with Alan Glashwiecz, an independent factor who is<br />
not currently present. Others may come forward in due course if that is acceptable."<br />
"It pleases us," says Lobster Number One. "We are tired and disoriented by the long journey through gateways to this place.<br />
Request resumption of negotiations later?"<br />
"By all means." Amber nods. A sergeant-at-arms, a mindless but impressive zimboe controlled by her spider's nest of<br />
personality threads, blows a sharp note on his trumpet. The first audience is at an end.<br />
* * *<br />
Outside the light cone of the Field Circus, on the other side of the spacelike separation between Amber's little<br />
kingdom in motion and the depths of empire time that grip the solar system's entangled quantum networks,<br />
a singular new reality is taking shape.<br />
Welcome to the moment of maximum change.<br />
About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind surrounded by an exocortex of<br />
distributed agents, threads of personality spun right out of their heads to run on the clouds of utility fog –<br />
infinitely flexible computing resources as thin as aerogel – in which they live. The foggy depths are alive with<br />
high-bandwidth sparkles; most of Earth's biosphere has been wrapped in cotton wool and preserved for<br />
future examination. For every living human, a thousand million software agents carry information into the<br />
farthest corners of the consciousness address space.<br />
The sun, for so long an unremarkable mildly variable G2 dwarf, has vanished within a gray cloud that<br />
englobes it except for a narrow belt around the plane of the ecliptic. Sunlight falls, unchanged, on the inner<br />
planets: Except for Mercury, which is no longer present, having been dismantled completely and turned into<br />
solar-powered high-temperature nanocomputers. A much fiercer light falls on Venus, now surrounded by<br />
glittering ferns of carbon crystals that pump angular momentum into the barely spinning planet via huge<br />
superconducting loops wound around its equator. This planet, too, is due to be dismantled. Jupiter,<br />
Neptune, Uranus – all sprout rings as impressive as Saturn's. But the task of cannibalizing the gas giants will<br />
take many times longer than the small rocky bodies of the inner system.<br />
The ten billion inhabitants of this radically changed star system remember being human; almost half of them<br />
predate the millennium. Some of them still are human, untouched by the drive of meta-evolution that has<br />
replaced blind Darwinian change with a goal-directed teleological progress. They cower in gated communities<br />
and hill forts, mumbling prayers and cursing the ungodly meddlers with the natural order of things. But<br />
eight out of every ten living humans are included in the phase-change. It's the most inclusive revolution in<br />
the human condition since the discovery of speech.<br />
A million outbreaks of gray goo – runaway nanoreplicator excursions – threaten to raise the temperature of<br />
the biosphere dramatically. They're all contained by the planetary-scale immune system fashioned from what<br />
was once the World Health Organization. Weirder catastrophes threaten the boson factories in the Oort<br />
cloud. Antimatter factories hover over the solar poles. Sol system shows all the symptoms of a runaway<br />
intelligence excursion, exuberant blemishes as normal for a technological civilization as skin problems on a<br />
human adolescent.<br />
The economic map of the planet has changed beyond recognition. Both capitalism and communism, bickering<br />
ideological children of a protoindustrial outlook, are as obsolete as the divine right of kings: Companies are<br />
alive, and dead people may live again, too. Globalism and tribalism have run to completion, diverging<br />
respectively into homogeneous interoperability and the Schwarzschild radius of insularity. Beings that<br />
remember being human plan the deconstruction of Jupiter, the creation of a great simulation space that will<br />
expand the habitat available within the solar system. By converting all the nonstellar mass of the solar system<br />
into processors, they can accommodate as many human-equivalent minds as a civilization with a planet<br />
hosting ten billion humans in orbit around every star in the galaxy.<br />
A more mature version of Amber lives down in the surging chaos of near-Jupiter space; there's an instance of<br />
Pierre, too, although he has relocated light-hours away, near Neptune. Whether she still sometimes thinks of<br />
her relativistic twin, nobody can tell. In a way, it doesn't matter, because by the time the Field Circus returns<br />
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to Jupiter orbit, as much subjective time will have elapsed for the fast-thinkers back home as will flash by in<br />
the real universe between this moment and the end of the era of star formation, many billions of years<br />
hence.<br />
"As your theologian, I am telling you that they are not gods."<br />
Amber nods patiently. She watches Sadeq closely.<br />
Sadeq coughs grumpily. "Tell her, Boris."<br />
* * *<br />
Boris tilts his chair back and turns it toward the Queen. "He is right, Amber. They are traders, and not clever ones either. Is<br />
hard to get handle on their semiotics while they hide behind the lobster model we uploaded in their direction twenty years<br />
ago, but are certainly not crusties, and are definite not human either. Or transhuman. My guess, they are bunch of dumb<br />
hicks who get hands on toys left behind by much smarter guys. Like the rejectionist factions back home. Imagine they are<br />
waking up one morning and find everyone else is gone to the great upload environment in the sky. Leaving them with the<br />
planet to themselves. What you think they do with whole world, with any gadgets they trip over? Some will smash everything<br />
they come across, but others not so stupid. But they think small. Scavengers, deconstructionists. Their whole economic<br />
outlook are negative-sum game. Go visit aliens to rip them off, take ideas, not expand selves and transcend."<br />
Amber stands up, walks toward the windows at the front of the bridge. In black jeans and chunky sweater, she barely<br />
resembles the feudal queen whose role she plays for tourists. "Taking them on board was a big risk. I'm not happy about it."<br />
"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" Sadeq smiles crookedly. "We have an answer. But they may not even<br />
realize they are dancing with us. These are not the gods you were afraid of finding."<br />
"No." Amber sighs. "Not too different from us, though. I mean, we aren't exactly well adapted to this environment, are we?<br />
We tote these body-images along, rely on fake realities that we can map into our human-style senses. We're emulations, not<br />
native AIs. Where's Su Ang?"<br />
"I can find her." Boris frowns.<br />
"I asked her to analyse the alien's arrival times," Amber adds as an afterthought. "They're close – too close. And they showed<br />
up too damn fast when we first tickled the router. I think Aineko's theories are flawed. The real owners of this network we've<br />
plugged into probably use much higher-level protocols to communicate; sapient packets to build effective communications<br />
gateways. This Wunch, they probably lurk in wait for newbies to exploit. Pedophiles hiding outside the school gate. I don't<br />
want to give them that opportunity before we make contact with the real thing!"<br />
"You may have little choice," says Sadeq. "If they are without insight, as you suspect, they may become afraid if you edit their<br />
environment. They may lash out. I doubt they even understand how they created the contaminated metagrammar that they<br />
transmitted back to us. It will be to them just a tool that makes simpleminded aliens more gullible, easier to negotiate with.<br />
Who knows where they got it?"<br />
"A grammatical weapon." Boris spins himself round slowly. "Build propaganda into your translation software if you want to<br />
establish a favorable trading relationship. How cute. Haven't these guys ever heard of Newspeak?"<br />
"Probably not," Amber says slowly, pausing for a moment to spawn spectator threads to run down the book and all three<br />
movie versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, followed by the sharecropped series of sequel novels. She shivers uncomfortably as<br />
she re-integrates the memories. "Ick. That's not a very nice vision. Reminds me of" – she snaps her fingers, trying to<br />
remember Dad's favorite – "Dilbert."<br />
"Friendly fascism," says Sadeq. "It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up<br />
with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon<br />
us."<br />
"I think we ought to see how Pierre is doing," Amber says aloud. "I certainly don't want them poisoning him." Grin: "That's<br />
my job."<br />
* * *<br />
Donna the Journalist is everywhere simultaneously. It's a handy talent: Makes for even-handed news coverage when you can<br />
interview both sides at the same time.<br />
Right now, one of her is in the bar with Alan Glashwiecz, who evidently hasn't realized that he can modulate his ethanol<br />
dehydrogenase levels voluntarily and who is consequently well on the way to getting steaming drunk. Donna is assisting the<br />
process: She finds it fascinating to watch this bitter young man who has lost his youth to a runaway self-enhancement<br />
process.<br />
"I'm a full partner," he says bitterly, "in Glashwiecz and Selves. I'm one of the Selves. We're all partners, but it's only<br />
Glashwiecz Prime who has any clout. The old bastard – if I'd known I'd grow up to become that, I'd have run away to join<br />
some hippie antiglobalist commune instead." He drains his glass, demonstrating his oropharyngeal integrity, snaps his fingers<br />
for a refill. "I just woke up one morning to find I'd been resurrected by my older self. He said he valued my youthful energy<br />
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and optimistic outlook, then offered me a minority stake with stock options that would take five years to vest. The bastard."<br />
"Tell me about it," Donna coaxes sympathetically. "Here we are, stranded among idiopathic types, not among them a single<br />
multiplex –"<br />
"Damn straight." Another bottle of Bud appears in Glashwiecz'a hands. "One moment I'm standing in this apartment in Paris<br />
facing total humiliation by a cross-dressing commie asshole called Macx and his slimy French manager bitch, and the next I'm<br />
on the carpet in front of my alter ego's desk and he's offering me a job as junior partner. It's seventeen years later, all the<br />
weird nonsense that guy Macx was getting up to is standard business practice, and there's six of me in the outer office taking<br />
research notes because myself-as-senior-partner doesn't trust anyone else to work with him. It's humiliating, that's what it is."<br />
"Which is why you're here." Donna waits while he takes a deep swig from the bottle.<br />
"Yeah. Better than working for myself, I can tell you – it's not like being self-employed. You know how you sometimes get<br />
distant from your work? It's really bad when you see yourself from the outside with another half gigasecond of experience<br />
and the new-you isn't just distant from the client base, he's distant from the you-you. So I went back to college and crammed<br />
up on artificial intelligence law and ethics, the jurisprudence of uploading, and recursive tort. Then I volunteered to come<br />
out here. He's still handling her account, and I figured –" Glashwiecz shrugged.<br />
"Did any of the delta-yous contest the arrangement?" asks Donna, spawning ghosts to focus in on him from all angles. For a<br />
moment, she wonders if this is wise. Glashwiecz is dangerous – the power he wields over Amber's mother, to twist her arm<br />
into extending his power of attorney, hints at dark secrets. Maybe there's more to her persistent lawsuits than a simple family<br />
feud?<br />
Glashwiecz's face is a study in perspectives. "Oh, one did," he says dismissively: One of Donna's viewports captures the<br />
contemptuous twitch in his cheek. "I left her in my apartment freezer. Figured it'd be a while before anybody noticed. It's not<br />
murder – I'm still here, right? – and I'm not about to claim tort against myself. I think. It'd be a left-recursive lawsuit, anyway,<br />
if I did it to myself."<br />
"The aliens," prompts Donna, "and the trial by combat. What's your take on that?"<br />
Glashwiecz sneers. "Little bitch-queen takes after her father, doesn't she? He's a bastard, too. The competitive selection filter<br />
she's imposed is evil – it'll cripple her society if she leaves it in place for too long, but in the short run, it's a major<br />
advantage. So she wants me to trade for my life, and I don't get to lay my formal claim against her unless I can outperform<br />
her pet day trader, that punk from Marseilles. Yes? What he doesn't know is, I've got an edge. Full disclosure." He lifts his<br />
bottle drunkenly. "Y'see, I know that cat. One that's gotta brown @-sign on its side, right? It used to belong to<br />
queenie-darling's old man, Manfred, the bastard. You'll see. Her Mom, Pamela, Manfred's ex, she's my client in this case. And<br />
she gave me the cat's ackle keys. Access control." (Hic.) "Get ahold of its brains and grab that damn translation layer it stole<br />
from the CETI@home mob. Then I can talk to them straight."<br />
The drunken, future-shocked lawyer is on a roll. "I'll get their shit, and I'll disassemble it. Disassembly is the future of industry,<br />
y'know?"<br />
"Disassembly?" asks the reporter, watching him in disgusted fascination from behind her mask of objectivity.<br />
"Hell, yeah. There's a singularity going on, that implies disequilibrium. An' wherever there's a disequilibrium, someone is<br />
going to get rich disassembling the leftovers. Listen, I once knew this econo–economist, that's what he was. Worked for the<br />
Eurofeds, rubber fetishist. He tole me about this fact'ry near Barcelona. It had a disassembly line running in it. Spensive<br />
servers in boxes'd roll in at one end. Be unpacked. Then workers'd take the cases off, strip the disk drives, memory,<br />
processors, bits'n'guts out. Bag and tag job. Throw the box, what's left, 'cause it wasn't worth dick. Thing is, the manufact'rer<br />
charged so much for parts, it was worth their while to buy whole machines'n'strip them. To bits. And sell the bits. Hell, they<br />
got an enterprise award for ingenuity! All 'cause they knew that disassembly was the wave of the future."<br />
"What happened to the factory?" asks Donna, unable to tear her eyes away.<br />
Glashwiecz waves an empty bottle at the starbow that stretches across the ceiling: "Ah, who gives a fuck? They closedown<br />
round about" (hic) "ten years 'go. Moore's Law topped out, killed the market. But disassembly – production line cannibalism<br />
– it'sa way to go. Take old assets an' bring new life to them. A fully 'preciated fortune." He grins, eyes unfocussed with greed.<br />
"'S'what I'm gonna do to those space lobsters. Learn to talk their language an'll never know what hit 'em."<br />
* * *<br />
The tiny starship drifts in high orbit above a turbid brown soup of atmosphere. Deep in the gravity well of Hyundai<br />
+4904 /-56 , it's a speck of dust trapped between two light sources: the brilliant sapphire stare of Amber's propulsion lasers in<br />
Jovian orbit, and the emerald insanity of the router itself, a hypertoroid spun from strange matter.<br />
The bridge of the Field Circus is in constant use at this time, a meeting ground for minds with access to the restricted areas.<br />
Pierre is spending more and more time here, finding it a convenient place to focus his trading campaign and arbitrage<br />
macros. At the same time that Donna is picking the multiplexed lawyer's strategy apart, Pierre is present in neomorphic<br />
form – a quicksilver outline of humanity, six-armed and two-headed, scanning with inhuman speed through tensor maps of<br />
the information traffic density surrounding the router's clump of naked singularities.<br />
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There's a flicker in the emptiness at the rear of the bridge, then Su Ang has always been there. She watches Pierre in<br />
contemplative silence for a minute. "Do you have a moment?"<br />
Pierre superimposes himself: One shadowy ghost keeps focused on the front panel, but another instance turns round, crosses<br />
his arms, waits for her to speak.<br />
"I know you're busy –" she begins, then stops. "Is it that important?" she asks.<br />
"It is." Pierre blurs, resynchronizing his instances. "The router – there are four wormholes leading off from it, did you know<br />
that? Each of them is radiating at about 10 11 Kelvins, and every wavelength is carrying data connections, multiplexed, with a<br />
protocol stack that's at least eleven layers deep but maybe more – they show signs of self-similarity in the framing headers.<br />
You know how much data that is? It's about 10 12 times as much as our high-bandwidth uplink from home. But compared to<br />
what's on the other side of the 'holes –" he shakes his head.<br />
"It's big?"<br />
"It's unimaginably big! These wormholes, they're a low-bandwidth link compared to the minds they're hooking up to." He blurs<br />
in front of her, unable to stay still and unable to look away from the front panel. Excitement or agitation? Su Ang can't tell.<br />
With Pierre, sometimes the two states are indistinguishable. He gets emotional easily. "I think we have the outline of the<br />
answer to the Fermi paradox. Transcendents don't go traveling because they can't get enough bandwidth – trying to migrate<br />
through one of these wormholes would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly, if they are what I think they<br />
are – and the slower-than-light route is out, too, because they couldn't take enough computronium along. Unless –"<br />
He's off again. But before he can blur out, Su Ang steps across and lays hands on him. "Pierre. Calm down. Disengage. Empty<br />
yourself."<br />
"I can't!" He really is agitated, she sees. "I've got to figure out the best trading strategy to get Amber off the hook with that<br />
lawsuit, then tell her to get us out of here; being this close to the router is seriously dangerous! The Wunch are the least of<br />
it."<br />
"Stop."<br />
He pauses his multiplicity of presences, converges on a single identity focused on the here and now. "Yes?"<br />
"That's better." She walks round him, slowly. "You've got to learn to deal with stress more appropriately."<br />
"Stress!" Pierre snorts. He shrugs, an impressive gesture with three sets of shoulder blades. "That's something I can turn off<br />
whenever I need to. Side effect of this existence; we're pigs in cyberspace, wallowing in fleshy simulations, but unable to<br />
experience the new environment in the raw. What did you want from me, Ang? Honestly? I'm a busy man, I've got a trading<br />
network to set up."<br />
"We've got a problem with the Wunch right now, even if you think something worse is out there," Ang says patiently. "Boris<br />
thinks they're parasites, negative-sum gamers who stalk newbies like us. Glashwiecz is apparently talking about cutting a deal<br />
with them. Amber's suggestion is that you ignore them completely, cut them out, and talk to anyone else who'll listen."<br />
"Anyone else who'll listen, right," Pierre says heavily. "Any other gems of wisdom to pass on from the throne?"<br />
Ang takes a deep breath. He's infuriating, she realizes. And worst of all, he doesn't realize. Infuriating but cute. "You're<br />
setting up a trading network, yes?" she asks.<br />
"Yes. A standard network of independent companies, instantiated as cellular automata within the Ring Imperium switched<br />
legal service environment." He relaxes slightly. "Each one has access to a compartmentalized chunk of intellectual property<br />
and can call on the corrected parser we got from that cat. They're set up to communicate with a blackboard system – a<br />
souk – and I'm bringing up a link to the router, a multicast link that'll broadcast the souk's existence to anyone who's<br />
listening. Trade ..." his eyebrows furrow. "There are at least two different currency standards in this network, used to buy<br />
quality-of-service precedence and bandwidth. They depreciate with distance, as if the whole concept of money was invented<br />
to promote the development of long-range network links. If I can get in first, when Glashwiecz tries to cut in on the dealing<br />
by offering IP at discounted rates –"<br />
"He's not going to, Pierre," she says as gently as possible. "Listen to what I said: Glashwiecz is going to focus on the Wunch.<br />
He's going to offer them a deal. Amber wants you to ignore them. Got that?"<br />
"Got it." There's a hollow bong! from one of the communication bells. "Hey, that's interesting."<br />
"What is?" She stretches, neck extending snakelike so that she can see the window on underlying reality that's flickered into<br />
existence in the air before him.<br />
"An ack from ..." he pauses, then plucks a neatly reified concept from the screen in front of him and presents it to her in a<br />
silvery caul of light. "... about two hundred light-years away! Someone wants to talk." He smiles. Then the front panel<br />
workstation bong's again. "Hey again. I wonder what that says."<br />
It's the work of a moment to pipe the second message through the translator. Oddly, it doesn't translate at first. Pierre has<br />
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to correct for some weird destructive interference in the fake lobster network before it'll spill its guts. "That's interesting," he<br />
says.<br />
"I'll say." Ang lets her neck collapse back to normal. "I'd better go tell Amber."<br />
"You do that," Pierre says worriedly. He makes eye contact with her, but what she's hoping to see in his face just isn't there.<br />
He's wearing his emotions entirely on the surface. "I'm not surprised their translator didn't want to pass that message along."<br />
"It's a deliberately corrupted grammar," Ang murmurs, and bangs out in the direction of Amber's audience chamber; "and<br />
they're actually making threats." The Wunch, it seems, have acquired a very bad reputation somewhere along the line – and<br />
Amber needs to know.<br />
* * *<br />
Glashwiecz leans toward Lobster Number One, stomach churning. It's only a real-time kilosecond since his bar-room<br />
interview, but in the intervening subjective time, he's abolished a hangover, honed his brief, and decided to act. In the<br />
Tuileries. "You've been lied to," he confides quietly, trusting the privacy ackles that he browbeat Amber's mother into giving<br />
him – access lists that give him a degree of control over the regime within this virtual universe that the cat dragged in.<br />
"Lied? Context rendered horizontal in past, or subjected to grammatical corruption? Linguistic evil?"<br />
"The latter." Glashwiecz enjoys this, even though it forces him to get rather closer to the two-meter-long virtual crustacean<br />
than he'd like. Showing a mark how they've been scammed is always good, especially when you hold the keys to the door of<br />
the cage they're locked inside. "They are not telling you the truth about this system."<br />
"We received assurances," Lobster Number One says clearly. Its mouthparts move ceaselessly – the noise comes from<br />
somewhere inside its head. "You do not share this phenotype. Why?"<br />
"That information will cost you," says Glashwiecz. "I am willing to provide it on credit."<br />
They haggle briefly. An exchange rate in questions is agreed, as is a trust metric to grade the answers by. "Disclose all," insists<br />
the Wunch negotiator.<br />
"There are multiple sentient species on the world we come from," says the lawyer. "The form you wear belongs to only one –<br />
one that wanted to get away from the form I wear, the original conscious tool-creating species. Some of the species today are<br />
artificial, but all of us trade information for self-advantage."<br />
"This is good to know," the lobster assures him. "We like to buy species."<br />
"You buy species?" Glashwiecz cocks his head.<br />
"We have the unbearable yearning to be not-what-we-are," says the lobster. "Novelty, surprise! Flesh rots and wood decays.<br />
We seek the new being-ness of aliens. Give us your somatotype, give us all your thoughts, and we will dream you over."<br />
"I think something might be arranged," Glashwiecz concedes. "So you want to be – no, to lease the rights to temporarily be<br />
human? Why is that?"<br />
"Untranslatable concept #3 means untranslatable concept #4. God told us to."<br />
"Okay, I think I'll just have to take that on trust for now. What is your true form?" he asks.<br />
"Wait and I show you," says the lobster. It begins to shudder.<br />
"What are you doing –"<br />
"Wait." The lobster twitches, writhing slightly, like a portly businessman adjusting his underwear after a heavy business lunch.<br />
Disturbing shapes move, barely visible through the thick chitinous armor. "We want your help," the lobster explains, voice<br />
curiously muffled. "Want to establish direct trade links. Physical emissaries, yes?"<br />
"Yes, that's very good," Glashwiecz agrees excitedly: It's exactly what he's hoped for, the sought-after competitive advantage<br />
that will prove his fitness in Amber's designated trial by corporate combat. "You're going to deal with us directly without<br />
using that shell interface?"<br />
"Agreed." The lobster trails off into muffled silence; little crunching noises trickle out of its carapace. Then Glashwiecz hears<br />
footsteps behind him on the gravel path.<br />
"What are you doing here?" he demands, looking round. It's Pierre, back in standard human form – a sword hangs from his<br />
belt, and there's a big wheel-lock pistol in his hands. "Hey!"<br />
"Step away from the alien, lawyer," Pierre warns, raising the gun.<br />
Glashwiecz glances back at Lobster Number One. It's pulled its front inside the protective shell, and it's writhing now,<br />
rocking from side to side alarmingly. Something inside the shell is turning black, acquiring depth and texture. "I stand on<br />
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counsel's privilege," Glashwiecz insists. "Speaking as this alien's attorney, I must protest in the strongest terms –"<br />
Without warning, the lobster lurches forward and rises up on its rear legs. It reaches out with huge claws, chellipeds coated<br />
with spiny hairs, and grabs Glashwiecz by his arms. "Hey!"<br />
Glashwiecz tries to turn away, but the lobster is already looming over him, maxillipeds and maxillae reaching out from its<br />
head. There's a sickening crunch as one of his elbow joints crumbles, humerus shattered by the closing jaws of a chelliped.<br />
He draws breath to scream, then the four small maxillae grip his head and draw it down toward the churning mandibles.<br />
Pierre scurries sideways, trying to find a line of fire on the lobster that doesn't pass through the lawyer's body. The lobster<br />
isn't cooperating. It turns on the spot, clutching Glashwiecz's convulsing body to itself. There's a stench of shit, and blood is<br />
squirting from its mouthparts. Something is very wrong with the biophysics model here, the realism turned up way higher<br />
than normal.<br />
"Merde," whispers Pierre. He fumbles with the bulky trigger, and there's a faint whirring sound but no explosion.<br />
More wet crunching sounds follow as the lobster demolishes the lawyer's face and swallows convulsively, sucking his head and<br />
shoulders all the way into its gastric mill.<br />
Pierre glances at the heavy handgun. "Shit!" he screams. He glances back at the lobster, then turns and runs for the nearest<br />
wall. There are other lobsters loose in the formal garden. "Amber, emergency!" he sends over their private channel. "Hostiles in<br />
the Louvre!"<br />
The lobster that's taken Glashwiecz hunkers down over the body and quivers. Pierre desperately winds the spring on his<br />
gun, too rattled to check that it's loaded. He glances back at the alien intruder. They've sprung the biophysics model, he sends. I<br />
could die in here, he realizes, momentarily shocked. This instance of me could die forever.<br />
The lobster shell sitting in the pool of blood and human wreckage splits in two. A humanoid form begins to uncurl from<br />
within it, pale-skinned and glistening wet: vacant blue eyes flicker from side to side as it stretches and stands upright,<br />
wobbling uncertainty on its two unstable legs. Its mouth opens and a strange gobbling hiss comes forth.<br />
Pierre recognizes her. "What are you doing here?" he yells.<br />
The nude woman turns toward him. She's the spitting image of Amber's mother, except for the chellipeds she has in place of<br />
hands. She hisses "Equity!" and takes a wobbly step toward him, pincers clacking.<br />
Pierre winds the firing handle again. There's a crash of gunpowder and smoke, a blow that nearly sprains his elbow, and the<br />
nude woman's chest erupts in a spray of blood. She snarls at him wordlessly and staggers – then ragged flaps of bloody meat<br />
close together, knitting shut with improbable speed. She resumes her advance.<br />
"I told Amber the Matrix would be more defensible," Pierre snarls, dropping the firearm and drawing his sword as the alien<br />
turns in his direction and raises arms that end in pincers. "We need guns, damit! Lots of guns!"<br />
"Waaant equity," hisses the alien intruder.<br />
"You can't be Pamela Macx," says Pierre, his back to the wall, keeping the sword point before the lobster-woman-thing. "She's<br />
in a nunnery in Armenia or something. You pulled that out of Glashwiecz's memories – he worked for her, didn't he?"<br />
Claws go snicker-snack before his face. "Investment partnership!" screeches the harridan. "Seat on the board! Eat brains for<br />
breakfast!" It lurches sideways, trying to get past his guard.<br />
"I don't fucking believe this," Pierre snarls. The Wunch-creature jumps at just the wrong moment and slides onto the point of<br />
his blade, claws clacking hungrily. Pierre slides away, nearly leaving his skin on the rough bricks of the wall – and what's good<br />
for one is good for all, as the hacked model in force in this reality compels the attacker to groan and collapse.<br />
Pierre pulls the sword out then, nervously glancing over his shoulder, whacks at her neck. The impact jars his arm, but he<br />
keeps hacking until there's blood spraying everywhere, blood on his shirt, blood on his sword, and a round thing sitting on<br />
a stump of savaged neck nearby, jaw working soundlessly in undeath.<br />
He looks at it for a moment, then his stomach rebels and tries to empty itself into the mess. "Where the hell is everybody?" he<br />
broadcasts on the private channel. "Hostiles in the Louvre!"<br />
He straightens up, gasping for breath. He feels alive, frightened and appalled and exhilarated simultaneously. The crackle of<br />
bursting shells on all sides drowns out the birdsong as the Wunch's emissaries adopt a variety of new and supposedly more<br />
lethal forms. "They don't seem to be very clear on how to take over a simulation space," he adds. "Maybe we already are<br />
untranslatable concept number #1 as far as they're concerned."<br />
"Don't worry, I've cut off the incoming connection," sends Su Ang. "This is just a bridgehead force; the invasion packets are being<br />
filtered out."<br />
Blank-eyed men and women in dusty black uniforms are hatching from the lobster shells, stumbling and running around the<br />
grounds of the royal palace like confused Huguenot invaders.<br />
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Boris winks into reality behind Pierre. "Which way?" he demands, pulling out an anachronistic but lethal katana.<br />
"Over here. Let's work this together." Pierre jacks his emotional damper up to a dangerously high setting, suppressing natural<br />
aversion reflexes and temporarily turning himself into a sociopathic killer. He stalks toward an infant lobster-thing with big<br />
black eyes and a covering of white hair that mewls at him from a rose bed, and Boris looks away while he kills it. Then one of<br />
the larger ones makes the mistake of lunging at Boris, and he chops at it reflexively.<br />
Some of the Wunch try to fight back when Pierre and Boris try to kill them, but they're handicapped by their anatomy, a<br />
curious mixture of crustacean and human, claw and mandible against sword and dagger. When they bleed the ground soaks<br />
with the cuprous hue of lobster juice.<br />
"Let's fork," suggests Boris. "Get this over with." Pierre nods, dully – everything around him is wrapped in a layer of<br />
don't-care, except for a glowing dot of artificial hatred – and they fork, multiplying their state vectors to take full advantage<br />
of the virtualization facilities of this universe. There's no need for reinforcements; the Wunch focused on attacking the<br />
biophysics model of the universe, making it mimic a physical reality as closely as possible, and paid no attention to learning<br />
the more intricate tactics that war in a virtual space permits.<br />
Presently Pierre finds himself in the audience chamber, face and hands and clothing caked in hideous gore, leaning on the<br />
back of Amber's throne. There's only one of him now. One of Boris – the only one? – is standing near the doorway. He can<br />
barely remember what has happened, the horrors of parallel instances of mass murder blocked from his long-term memory<br />
by a high-pass trauma filter. "It looks clear," he calls aloud. "What shall we do now?"<br />
"Wait for Catherine de Médicis to show up," says the cat, its grin materializing before him like a numinous threat. "Amber<br />
always finds a way to blame her mother. Or didn't you already know that?"<br />
Pierre glances at the bloody mess on the footpath outside where the first lobster-woman attacked Glashwiecz. "I already did<br />
for her, I think." He remembers the action in the third person, all subjectivity edited out. "The family resemblance was<br />
striking," the thread that still remembers her in working memory murmurs: "I just hope it's only skin-deep." Then he forgets<br />
the act of apparent murder forever. "Tell the Queen I'm ready to talk."<br />
* * *<br />
Welcome to the downslope on the far side of the curve of accelerating progress.<br />
Back in the solar system, Earth orbits through a dusty tunnel in space. Sunlight still reaches the birth world,<br />
but much of the rest of the star's output has been trapped by the growing concentric shells of<br />
computronium built from the wreckage of the innermost planets.<br />
Two billion or so mostly unmodified humans scramble in the wreckage of the phase transition, not<br />
understanding why the vasty superculture they so resented has fallen quiet. Little information leaks through<br />
their fundamentalist firewalls, but what there is shows a disquieting picture of a society where there are no<br />
bodies anymore. Utility foglets blown on the wind form aerogel towers larger than cyclones, removing the last<br />
traces of physical human civilization from most of Europe and the North American coastlines. Enclaves<br />
huddle behind their walls and wonder at the monsters and portents roaming the desert of postindustrial<br />
civilization, mistaking acceleration for collapse.<br />
The hazy shells of computronium that ring the sun – concentric clouds of nanocomputers the size of rice<br />
grains, powered by sunlight, orbiting in shells like the packed layers of a Matrioshka doll – are still immature,<br />
holding barely a thousandth of the physical planetary mass of the system, but they already support a classical<br />
computational density of 10 42 MIPS; enough to support a billion civilizations as complex as the one that<br />
existed immediately before the great disassembly. The conversion hasn't yet reached the gas giants, and some<br />
scant outer-system enclaves remain independent – Amber's Ring Imperium still exists as a separate entity, and<br />
will do so for some years to come – but the inner solar system planets, with the exception of Earth, have<br />
been colonized more thoroughly than any dusty NASA proposal from the dawn of the space age could have<br />
envisaged.<br />
From outside the Accelerated civilization, it isn't really possible to know what's going on inside. The problem<br />
is bandwidth: While it's possible to send data in and get data out, the sheer amount of computation going on<br />
in the virtual spaces of the Acceleration dwarfs any external observer. Inside that swarm, minds a trillion or<br />
more times as complex as humanity think thoughts as far beyond human imagination as a microprocessor is<br />
beyond a nematode worm. A million random human civilizations flourish in worldscapes tucked in the<br />
corner of this world-mind. Death is abolished, life is triumphant. A thousand ideologies flower, human nature<br />
adapted where necessary to make this possible. Ecologies of thought are forming in a Cambrian explosion of<br />
ideas: For the solar system is finally rising to consciousness, and mind is no longer restricted to the mere<br />
kilotons of gray fatty meat harbored in fragile human skulls.<br />
Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in furious sleep remember a tiny starship<br />
launched years ago, and pay attention. Soon, they realize, the starship will be in position to act as their<br />
proxy in an ages-long conversation. Negotiations for access to Amber's extrasolar asset commence; the Ring<br />
Imperium prospers, at least for a while.<br />
But first, the operating software on the human side of the network link will require an upgrade.<br />
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* * *<br />
The audience chamber in the Field Circus is crammed. Everybody aboard the ship – except the still-frozen lawyer and the<br />
alien barbarian intruders – is present. They've just finished reviewing the recordings of what happened in the Tuileries, of<br />
Glashwiecz's fatal last conversation with the Wunch, the resulting fight for survival. And now the time has come for decisions.<br />
"I'm not saying you have to follow me," says Amber, addressing her court; "just, it's what we came here for. We've established<br />
that there's enough bandwidth to transmit people and their necessary support VMs; we've got some basic expectancy of<br />
goodwill at the other end, or at least an agalmic willingness to gift us with advice about the untrustworthiness of the Wunch. I<br />
propose to copy myself through and see what's at the other side of the wormhole. What's more, I'm going to suspend myself<br />
on this side and hand over to whichever instance of me comes back, unless there's a long hiatus. How long, I haven't decided<br />
yet. Are you guys happy to join me?"<br />
Pierre stands behind her throne, hands on the back. Looking down over her head, at the cat in her lap, he's sure he sees it<br />
narrow its eyes at him. Funny, he thinks, we're talking about jumping down a rabbit hole and trusting whoever lives at the other end<br />
with our personalities. After seeing the Wunch. Does this make sense?<br />
"Forgive, please, but am not stupid," says Boris. "This is Fermi paradox territory, no? Instantaneous network exists, is<br />
traversable, with bandwidth adequate for human-equivalent minds. Where are alien visitors, in history? Must be overriding<br />
reason for absence. Think will wait here and see what comes back. Then make up mind to drink the poison kool-aid."<br />
"I've got half a mind to transmit myself through without a back-up," says someone else – "but that's okay; half a mind is all<br />
we've got the bandwidth for." Halfhearted laughter shores up his wisecrack, supports a flagging determination to press<br />
through.<br />
"I'm with Boris," says Su Ang. She glances at Pierre, catches his eye: Suddenly a number of things become clear to him. He<br />
shakes his head minutely. You never had a chance – I belong to Amber, he thinks, but deletes the thought before he can send it<br />
to her. Maybe in another instantiation his issues with the Queen's droit de seigneur would have bulked up larger, splintered<br />
his determination; maybe in another world it has already happened? "I think this is very rash," she says in a hurry. "We don't<br />
know enough about post-singularity civilizations."<br />
"It's not a singularity," Amber says waspishly. "It's just a brief burst of acceleration. Like cosmological inflation."<br />
"Smooths out inhomogeneities in the initial structure of consciousness," purrs the cat. "Don't I get a vote?"<br />
"You do." Amber sighs. She glances round. "Pierre?"<br />
Heart in his mouth: "I'm with you."<br />
She smiles, brilliantly. "Well then. Will the nay sayers please leave the universe?"<br />
Suddenly, the audience chamber is half-empty.<br />
"I'm setting a watchdog timer for a billion seconds into the future, to restart us from this point if the router doesn't send<br />
anyone back in the intervening time," she announces gravely, taking in the serious-faced avatars of those who remain.<br />
Surprised: "Sadeq! I didn't think this was your type of –"<br />
He doesn't smile: "Would I be true to my faith if I wasn't prepared to bring the words of Mohammed, peace be unto him, to<br />
those who may never have heard his name?"<br />
Amber nods. "I guess."<br />
"Do it," Pierre says urgently. "You can't keep putting it off forever."<br />
Aineko raises her head: "Spoilsport!"<br />
"Okay." Amber nods. "Let's do –"<br />
She punches an imaginary switch, and time stops.<br />
* * *<br />
At the far end of a wormhole, two hundred light-years distant in real space, coherent photons begin to dance a story of<br />
human identity before the sensoria of those who watch. And all is at peace in orbit around Hyundai +4904 / -56 , for a while ...<br />
Chapter 6: Nightfall<br />
A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through silent darkness. The night is quiet as the grave, colder than<br />
midwinter on Pluto. Gossamer sails as fine as soap bubbles droop, the gust of sapphire laser light that inflated them long<br />
* * *<br />
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since darkened. Ancient starlight picks out the outline of a huge planetlike body beneath the jewel-and-cobweb corpse of the<br />
starwisp.<br />
Eight Earth years have passed since the good ship Field Circus slipped into close orbit around the frigid brown dwarf Hyundai<br />
+4904 /-56 . Five years have gone by since the launch lasers of the Ring Imperium shut down without warning, stranding the<br />
light-sail-powered craft three light-years from home. There has been no response from the router, the strange alien artifact<br />
in orbit around the brown dwarf, since the crew of the starwisp uploaded themselves through its strange quantum<br />
entanglement interface for transmission to whatever alien network it connects to. In fact, nothing happens; nothing save the<br />
slow trickle of seconds, as a watchdog timer counts down the moments remaining until it is due to resurrect stored<br />
snapshots of the crew, on the assumption that their uploaded copies are beyond help.<br />
Meanwhile, outside the light cone –<br />
* * *<br />
Amber jolts into wakefulness, as if from a nightmare. She sits bolt upright, a thin sheet falling from her chest; air circulating<br />
around her back chills her rapidly, cold sweat evaporating. She mutters aloud, unable to subvocalize, "Where am I – oh. A<br />
bedroom. How did I get here?" Mumble. "Oh, I see." Her eyes widen in horror. "It's not a dream ..."<br />
"Greetings, human Amber," says a ghost-voice that seems to come from nowhere: "I see you are awake. Would you like<br />
anything?"<br />
Amber rubs her eyes tiredly. Leaning against the bedstead, she glances around cautiously. She takes in a bedside mirror, her<br />
reflection in it: a young woman, gaunt in the manner of those whose genome bears the p53 calorie-restriction hack, she has<br />
disheveled blonde hair and dark eyes. She could pass for a dancer or a soldier; not, perhaps, a queen. "What's going on?<br />
Where am I? Who are you, and what am I doing in your head?"<br />
Her eyes narrow. Analytical intellect comes to the fore as she takes stock of her surroundings. "The router," she mutters.<br />
Structures of strange matter orbit a brown dwarf scant light-years from Earth. "How long ago did we come through?"<br />
Glancing round, she sees a room walled in slabs of close-fitting stone. A window bay is recessed into them, after the style of<br />
the Crusader castles many centuries in the past, but there's no glass in it – just a blank white screen. The only furniture in<br />
the room, besides a Persian carpet on the cold flagstones, is the bed she sits upon. She's reminded of a scene from an old<br />
movie, Kubrick's enigma; this whole set-up has got to be deliberate, and it isn't funny.<br />
"I'm waiting," she announces, and leans back against the headboard.<br />
"According to our records this reaction indicates that you are now fully self-aware," says the ghost. "This is good. You have<br />
not been conscious for a very long time. Explanations will be complex and discursive. Can I offer you refreshments? What<br />
would you like?"<br />
"Coffee, if you have it. Bread and hummus. Something to wear." Amber crosses her arms, abruptly self-conscious. "I'd prefer<br />
to have management ackles to this universe, though. As realities go, it's a bit lacking in creature comforts." Which isn't<br />
entirely true – it seems to have a comprehensive, human-friendly biophysics model, it's not just a jumped-up first-person<br />
shooter. Her eyes focus on her left forearm, where tanned skin and a puckered dime of scar tissue record a youthful<br />
accident with a pressure seal in Jovian orbit. Amber freezes for a moment. Her lips move in silence, but she's locked into<br />
place in this universe, unable to split or conjoin nested realities just by calling subroutines that have been spliced into the<br />
corners of her mind since she was a teenager. Finally, she asks, "How long have I been dead?"<br />
"Longer than you were alive, by orders of magnitude," says the ghost. A tray laden with pita breads, hummus, and olives<br />
congeals from the air above her bed, and a wardrobe appears at one side of the room. "I can begin the explanation now or<br />
wait for you to finish eating. Which would you prefer?"<br />
Amber glances about again, then fixes on the white screen in the window bay. "Give it to me right now. I can take it," she<br />
says, quietly bitter. "I like to understand my mistakes as soon as possible."<br />
"We-us can tell that you are a human of determination," says the ghost, a hint of pride entering its voice. "That is a good<br />
thing, Amber. You will need all of your resolve if you are going to survive here ..."<br />
* * *<br />
It is the time of repentance in a temple beside a tower that looms above a dry plain, and the thoughts of the priest who lives<br />
in the tower are tinged with regret. It is Ashura, the tenth day of Muhurram, according to a real-time clock still tuned to the<br />
pace of a different era: the one thousand, three hundred and fortieth anniversary of the martyrdom of the Third Imam, the<br />
Sayyid ash-Shuhada.<br />
The priest of the tower has spent an indefinite time in prayer, locked in an eternal moment of meditation and recitation.<br />
Now, as the vast red sun drifts close to the horizon of the infinite desert, his thoughts drift toward the present. Ashura is a<br />
very special day, a day of atonement for collective guilt, evil committed through inactivity; but it is in Sadeq's nature to look<br />
outwards toward the future. This is, he knows, a failing – but also characteristic of his generation. That's the generation of<br />
the Shi'ite clergy that reacted to the excesses of the previous century, the generation that withdrew the ulama from temporal<br />
power, retreated from the velyat i-faqih of Khomenei and his successors, left government to the people, and began to engage<br />
fully with the paradoxes of modernity. Sadeq's focus, his driving obsession in theology, is a program of reappraisal of<br />
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eschatology and cosmology. Here in a tower of white sun-baked clay, on an endless plain that exists only in the imaginary<br />
spaces of a starship the size of a soft drink can, the priest spends his processor cycles in contemplation of one of the most<br />
vicious problems ever to confront a mujtahid – the Fermi paradox.<br />
(Enrico Fermi was eating his lunch one day, and his colleagues were discussing the possibility that sophisticated civilizations<br />
might populate other worlds. "Yes," he said, "but if this is so, why haven't they already come visiting?")<br />
Sadeq finishes his evening devotions in near silence, then stands, stretches as is his wont, and leaves the small and lonely<br />
courtyard at the base of the tower. The gate – a wrought-iron gate, warmed by sunlight – squeals slightly as he opens it.<br />
Glancing at the upper hinge, he frowns, willing it clean and whole. The underlying physics model acknowledges his access<br />
controls: a thin rim of red around the pin turns silvery-fresh, and the squeaking ceases. Closing the gate behind him, Sadeq<br />
enters the tower.<br />
He climbs with a heavy, even tread a spiral staircase snaking ever upward above him. Narrow slit-windows line the outer wall<br />
of the staircase. Through each of them he sees a different world. Out there, nightfall in the month of Ramadan. And through<br />
the next, green misty skies and a horizon too close by far. Sadeq carefully avoids thinking about the implications of this<br />
manifold space. Coming from prayer, from a sense of the sacred, he doesn't want to lose his proximity to his faith. He's far<br />
enough from home as it is, and there is much to consider. He is surrounded by strange and curious ideas, all but lost in a<br />
corrosive desert of faith.<br />
At the top of the staircase, Sadeq comes to a door of aged wood bound in iron. It doesn't belong here: It's a cultural and<br />
architectural anomaly. The handle is a loop of black metal. Sadeq regards it as if it's the head of an asp, poised to sting.<br />
Nevertheless, he reaches out and turns the handle, steps across the threshold into a palace out of fantasy.<br />
None of this is real, he reminds himself. It's no more real than an illusion conjured by one of the jinni of the thousand nights and one<br />
night. Nevertheless, he can't save himself from smiling at the scene – a sardonic smile of self-deprecating humor, tempered by<br />
frustration.<br />
Sadeq's captors have stolen his soul and locked it – him – in a very strange prison, a temple with a tower that rises all the<br />
way to Paradise. It's the whole classical litany of medievalist desires, distilled from fifteen hundred years of literature.<br />
Colonnaded courtyards, cool pools lined with rich mosaics, rooms filled with every imaginable dumb matter luxury, endless<br />
banquets awaiting his appetite – and dozens of beautiful un-women, eager to fulfill his every fantasy. Sadeq, being human, has<br />
fantasies by the dozen, but he doesn't dare permit himself to succumb to temptation. I'm not dead, he reasons. Therefore, how<br />
can I be in Paradise? Therefore, this must be a false paradise, a temptation sent to lead me astray. Probably. Unless I am dead, because<br />
Allah, peace be unto him, considers a human soul separated from its body to be dead. But if that's so, isn't uploading a sin? In which<br />
case, this can't be Paradise because I am a sinner. Besides which, this whole setup is so puerile!<br />
Sadeq has always been inclined to philosophical inquiry, and his vision of the afterlife is more cerebral than most, involving<br />
ideas as questionable within the framework of Islam as those of Teilhard de Chardin were to the twentieth-century Catholic<br />
church. If there's one key indicator of a false paradise in his eschatology, it's two-and-seventy brainlessly beautiful houris<br />
waiting to do his bidding. So it follows that he can't really be dead ...<br />
The whole question of reality is so vexing that Sadeq does what he does every night. He strides heedlessly across priceless<br />
works of art, barging hastily through courtyards and passageways, ignoring niches in which nearly naked supermodels lie with<br />
their legs apart, climbing stairs – until he comes to a small unfurnished room with a single high window in one wall. There he<br />
sits on the floor, legs crossed, meditating; not in prayer, but in a more tightly focused ratiocination. Every false night (for<br />
there is no way to know how fast time is passing, outside this cyberspace pocket), Sadeq sits and thinks, grappling with<br />
Descartes's demon in the solitude of his own mind. And the question he asks himself every night is the same: Can I tell if this is<br />
the true hell? And if it is not, how can I escape?<br />
* * *<br />
The ghost tells Amber that she has been dead for just under a third of a million years. She has been reinstantiated from<br />
storage – and has died again – many times in the intervening period, but she has no memory of this; she is a fork from the<br />
main bough, and the other branches expired in lonely isolation.<br />
The business of resurrection does not, in and of itself, distress Amber unduly. Born in the post-Moravec era, she merely finds<br />
some aspects of the ghost's description dissatisfyingly incomplete. It's like saying she was drugged and brought hither without<br />
stating whether by plane, train, or automobile.<br />
She doesn't have a problem with the ghost's assertion that she is nowhere near Earth – indeed, that she is approximately<br />
eighty thousand light-years away. When she and the others took the risk of uploading themselves through the router they<br />
found in orbit around Hyundai +4904 / -56 they'd understood that they could end up anywhere or nowhere. But the idea<br />
that she's still within the light cone of her departure strikes her as dubious. The original SETI broadcast strongly implied that<br />
the router is part of a network of self-replicating instantaneous communicators, spawning and spreading between the cold<br />
brown dwarf stars that litter the galaxy. She'd somehow expected to be much farther from home by now.<br />
Somewhat more disturbing is the ghost's assertion that the human genotype has rendered itself extinct at least twice, that its<br />
home planet is unknown, and that Amber is nearly the only human left in the public archives. At this point, she interrupts. "I<br />
hardly see what this has to do with me!" Then she blows across her coffee glass, trying to cool the contents. "I'm dead," she<br />
explains, with an undertone of knowing sarcasm in her voice. "Remember? I just got here. A thousand seconds ago, subjective<br />
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time, I was in the control node of a starship, discussing what to do with the router we were in orbit around. We agreed to<br />
send ourselves through it, as a trade mission. Then I woke up in bed here in the umpty-zillionth century, wherever and<br />
whatever here is. Without access to any reality ackles or augmentation, I can't even tell whether this is real or an embedded<br />
simulation. You're going to have to explain why you need an old version of me before I can make sense of my situation – and<br />
I can tell you, I'm not going to help you until I know who you are. And speaking of that, what about the others? Where are<br />
they? I wasn't the only one, you know?"<br />
The ghost freezes in place for a moment, and Amber feels a watery rush of terror: Have I gone too far? she wonders.<br />
"There has been an unfortunate accident," the ghost announces portentously. It morphs from a translucent copy of Amber's<br />
own body into the outline of a human skeleton, elaborate bony extensions simulating an osteosarcoma of more-than-lethal<br />
proportions. "Consensus-we believe that you are best positioned to remediate the situation. This applies within the<br />
demilitarized zone."<br />
"Demilitarized?" Amber shakes her head, pauses to sip her coffee. "What do you mean? What is this place?"<br />
The ghost flickers again, adopting an abstract rotating hypercube as its avatar. "This space we occupy is a manifold adjacent<br />
to the demilitarized zone. The demilitarized zone is a space outside our core reality, itself exposed to entities that cross freely<br />
through our firewall, journeying to and from the network outside. We-us use the DMZ to establish the informational value<br />
of migrant entities, sapient currency units and the like. We-us banked you upon arrival against future options trades in<br />
human species futures."<br />
"Currency!" Amber doesn't know whether to be amused or horrified – both reactions seem appropriate. "Is that how you<br />
treat all your visitors?"<br />
The ghost ignores her question. "There is a runaway semiotic excursion under way in the zone. We-us believe only you can<br />
fix it. If you agree to do, so we will exchange value, pay, reward cooperation, expedite remuneration, manumit, repatriate."<br />
Amber drains her coffee cup. "Have you ever entered into economic interactions with me, or humans like me, before?" she<br />
asks. "If not, why should I trust you? If so, why have you revived me? Are there any more experienced instances of myself<br />
running around here?" She raises a skeptical eyebrow at the ghost. "This looks like the start of an abusive relationship."<br />
The ghost continues to sidestep her attempts to work out where she stands. It flickers into transparency, grows into a hazy<br />
window on a landscape of impossible shapes. Clouds sprouting trees drift above a landscape of green, egg-curved hills and<br />
cheesecake castles. "Nature of excursion: alien intelligence is loose in the DMZ," it asserts. "Alien is applying invalid semiotics<br />
to complex structures designed to sustain trade. You know this alien, Amber. We require solution. Slay the monster, we will<br />
give you line of credit. Your own reality to control, insight into trade arrangements, augmented senses, ability to travel. Can<br />
even upgrade you to you-we consensus, if desired."<br />
"This monster." Amber leans forward, staring into the window eagerly. She's half-minded to ignore what she feels is a<br />
spurious offer; it doesn't sound too appetizing. Upgrade me to a ghost fragment of an alien group mind? she wonders dismissively.<br />
"What is this alien?" She feels blind and unsure, stripped of her ability to spawn threads of herself to pursue complex<br />
inferences. "Is it part of the Wunch?"<br />
"Datum unknown. It-them came with you," says the ghost. "Accidentally reactivated some seconds since now. It runs amok in<br />
the demilitarized zone. Help us, Amber. Save our hub, or we will be cut off from the network. If that happens, you will die<br />
with we-us. Save us ..."<br />
A single memory belonging to someone else unwinds, faster than a guided missile and far more deadly.<br />
* * *<br />
Amber, aged eleven, is a gawky, long-limbed child loose on the streets of Hong Kong, a yokel tourist viewing<br />
the hot core of the Middle Kingdom. This is her first and final vacation before the Franklin Trust straps her<br />
inside the payload pod of a Shenzhou spaceplane and blasts her into orbit from Xinkiang. She's free for the<br />
time being, albeit mortgaged to the tune of several million euros; she's a little taikonaut to be, ready to work<br />
for the long years in Jupiter orbit it will take her to pay off the self-propelled options web that owns her. It's<br />
not exactly slavery: Thanks to Dad's corporate shell game she doesn't have to worry about Mom chasing her,<br />
trying to return her to the posthuman prison of growing up just like an old-fashioned little girl. And now<br />
she's got a bit of pocket money, and a room in the Hilton, and her own personal Franklin remote to keep<br />
her company, she's decided she's gonna do that eighteenth-century-enlightenment tourist shit and do it right.<br />
Because this is her last day at liberty in the randomly evolved biosphere.<br />
China is where things are at in this decade, hot and dense and full of draconian punishments for the<br />
obsolescent. Nationalist fervor to catch up with the west has been replaced by consumerist fervor to own<br />
the latest fad gadgets; the most picturesque tourist souvenirs from the quaintly old-fashioned streets of<br />
America; the fastest, hottest, smartest, upgrades for body and soul. Hong Kong is hotter and faster than just<br />
about anywhere else in China, or in the whole damn world for that matter. This is a place where tourists<br />
from Tokyo gawp, cowed and future-shocked by the glamour of high-technology living.<br />
Walking along Jardine's Bazaar – More like Jardine's bizarre, she thinks – exposes Amber to a blast of humid<br />
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noise. Geodesic domes sprout like skeletal mushrooms from the glass-and-chrome roofs of the expensive<br />
shopping malls and luxury hotels, threatening to float away on the hot sea breeze. There are no airliners<br />
roaring in and out of Kai Tak anymore, no burnished aluminum storm clouds to rain round-eyed passengers<br />
on the shopping malls and fish markets of Kowloon and the New Territories. In these tense later days of the<br />
War Against Unreason, impossible new shapes move in the sky; Amber gapes upward as a Shenyang F-30<br />
climbs at a near-vertical angle, a mess of incomprehensibly curved flight surfaces vanishing to a perspective<br />
point that defies radar as well as eyeballs. The Chinese – fighter? missile platform? supercomputer? – is<br />
heading out over the South China Sea to join the endless patrol that reassures the capitalist world that it is<br />
being guarded from the Hosts of Denial, the Trouble out of Wa'hab.<br />
For the moment, she's merely a precocious human child. Amber's subconscious is off-lined by the presence of<br />
forceful infowar daemons, the Chinese government censorbots suppressing her cognition of their deadliest<br />
weapons. And in the seconds while her mind is as empty as a sucked egg, a thin-faced man with blue hair<br />
shoves her in the small of her back and snatches at her shoulder bag.<br />
"Hey!" she yells, stumbling. Her mind's a blur, optics refusing to respond and grab a biometric model of her<br />
assailant. It's the frozen moment, the dead zone when on-line coverage fails, and the thief is running away<br />
before she can catch her balance or try to give chase. Plus, with her extensions off-line she doesn't know<br />
how to yell "stop, thief!" in Cantonese.<br />
Seconds later, the fighter is out of visual range and the state censorship field lets up. "Get him, you bastards!"<br />
she screams, but the curious shoppers simply stare at the rude foreign child: An elderly woman brandishes a<br />
disposable phonecam at her and screeches something back. Amber picks up her feet and runs. Already she<br />
can feel the subsonics from her luggage growling at her guts – it's going to make a scene if she doesn't catch<br />
up in time. Shoppers scatter, a woman with a baby carriage almost running her down in her panic to get<br />
away from it.<br />
By the time Amber reaches her terrified shoulder bag, the thief has disappeared: She has to spend almost a<br />
minute petting the scared luggage before it stops screeching and retracts its spines enough for her to pick it<br />
up. And by that time there's a robocop in attendance. "Identify yourself," it rasps in synthetic English.<br />
Amber stares at her bag in horror: There's a huge gash in the side, and it's far too light. It's gone, she thinks,<br />
despairingly. He stole it. "Help," she says faintly, holding up her bag for the distant policeman looking through<br />
the robot's eyes. "Been stolen."<br />
"What item missing?" asks the robot.<br />
"My Hello Kitty," she says, batting her eyelashes, mendacity full-on at maximum utilization, prodding her<br />
conscience into submission, warning of dire consequences should the police discover the true nature of her<br />
pet cat. "My kitten's been stolen! Can you help me?"<br />
"Certainly," says the cop, resting a reassuring hand on her shoulder – a hand that turns into a steel<br />
armband, as it pushes her into a van and notifies her in formally stilted language that she is under arrest on<br />
suspicion of shoplifting and will be required to produce certificates of authenticity and a fully compliant<br />
ownership audit for all items in her possession if she wants to prove her innocence.<br />
By the time Amber's meatbrain realizes that she is being politely arrested, some of her external threads have<br />
already started yelling for help and her m-commerce trackers have identified the station she's being taken to<br />
by way of click-thru trails and an obliging software license manager. They spawn agents to go notify the<br />
Franklin trustees, Amnesty International, the Space and Freedom Party, and her father's lawyers. As she's<br />
being booked into a cerise-and-turquoise juvenile offenders holding room by a middle-aged policewoman, the<br />
phones on the front desk are already ringing with inquiries from attorneys, fast-food vendors, and a<br />
particularly on-the-ball celebrity magazine that's been tracking her father's connections. "Can you help me<br />
get my cat back?" she asks the policewoman earnestly.<br />
"Name," the officer reads, eyes flickering from the simultaneous translation. "To please wax your identity<br />
stiffly."<br />
"My cat has been stolen," Amber insists.<br />
"Your cat?" The cop looks perplexed, then exasperated. Dealing with foreign teenagers who answer questions<br />
with gibberish isn't in her repertoire. "We are asking your name?"<br />
"No," says Amber. "It's my cat. It has been stolen. My cat has been stolen."<br />
"Aha! Your papers, please?"<br />
"Papers?" Amber is growing increasingly worried. She can't feel the outside world; there's a Faraday cage<br />
wrapped around the holding cell, and it's claustrophobically quiet inside. "I want my cat! Now!"<br />
The cop snaps her fingers, then reaches into her own pocket and produces an ID card, which she points to<br />
insistently. "Papers," she repeats. "Or else."<br />
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"I don't know what you're talking about!" Amber wails.<br />
The cop stares at her oddly. "Wait." She rises and leaves, and a minute later, returns with a thin-faced man in<br />
a business suit and wire-rimmed glasses that glow faintly.<br />
"You are making a scene," he says, rudely and abruptly. "What is your name? Tell me truthfully, or you'll<br />
spend the night here."<br />
Amber bursts into tears. "My cat's been stolen," she chokes out.<br />
The detective and the cop obviously don't know how to deal with this scene; it's freaking them out, with its<br />
overtones of emotional messiness and sinister diplomatic entanglement. "You wait here," they say, and back<br />
out of the cell, leaving her alone with a plastic animatronic koala and a cheap Lebanese coffee machine.<br />
The implications of her loss – of Aineko's abduction – are sinking in, finally, and Amber is weeping loudly and<br />
hopelessly. It's hard to deal with bereavement and betrayal at any age, and the cat has been her wisecracking<br />
companion and consolation for a year, the rock of certainty that gave her the strength to break free from<br />
her crazy mother. To lose her cat to a body shop in Hong Kong, where she will probably be cut up for<br />
spare circuitry or turned into soup is too horrible to contemplate. Filled with despair and hopeless anguish,<br />
Amber howls at the interrogation room walls while outside, trapped threads of her consciousness search for<br />
backups to synchronize with.<br />
But after an hour, just as she's quieting down into a slough of raw despair, there's a knock – a knock! – at<br />
the door. An inquisitive head pops in. "Please to come with us?" It's the female cop with the bad<br />
translationware. She takes in Amber's sobbing and tuts under her breath, but as Amber stands up and<br />
shambles toward her, she pulls back.<br />
At the front desk of a cubicle farm full of police bureaucrats in various states of telepresence, the detective is<br />
waiting with a damp cardboard box wrapped in twine. "Please identify," he asks, snipping the string.<br />
Amber shakes her head, dizzy with the flow of threads homing in to synchronize their memories with her. "Is<br />
it –" she begins to ask as the lid comes apart, wet pulp disintegrating. A triangular head pops up, curiously,<br />
sniffing the air. Bubbles blow from brown-furred nostrils. "What took you so long?" asks the cat, as she<br />
reaches into the box and picks her up, fur wet and matted with seawater.<br />
* * *<br />
"If you want me to go fix your alien, for starters I want you to give me reality alteration privileges," says Amber. "Then I want<br />
you to find the latest instances of everyone who came here with me – round up the usual suspects – and give them root<br />
privileges, too. Then we'll want access to the other embedded universes in the DMZ. Finally, I want guns. Lots of guns."<br />
"That may be difficult," says the ghost. "Many other humans reached halting state long since. Is at least one other still alive,<br />
but not accessible for duration of eschatological experiment in progress. Not all were recorded with version control engine;<br />
others were-is lost in DMZ. We-are can provide you with extreme access to the demilitarized zone, but query the need for<br />
kinetic energy weapons."<br />
Amber sighs. "You guys really are media illiterates, aren't you?" She stands up and stretches, feeling a facsimile of sleep's<br />
enervation leaching from her muscles. "I'll also need my –" it's on the tip of her tongue: There's something missing. "Hang on.<br />
There's something I've forgotten." Something important, she thinks, puzzled. Something that used to be around all the time that<br />
would ... know? ... purr? ... help? "Never mind," she hears her lips say. "This other human. I really want her. Non-negotiable. All<br />
right?"<br />
"That may be difficult," repeats the ghost. "Entity is looping in a recursively confined universe."<br />
"Eh?" Amber blinks at it. "Would you mind rephrasing that? Or illustrating?"<br />
"Illustration:" The ghost folds the air in the room into a glowing ball of plasma, shaped like a Klein bottle. Amber's eyes cross<br />
as she looks at it. "Closest reference from human historical database is Descartes's demon. This entity has retreated within a<br />
closed space, but is now unsure whether it is objectively real or not. In any event, it refuses to interact."<br />
"Well, can you get me into that space?" asks Amber. Pocket universes she can deal with; it's part and parcel of her life. "Give<br />
me some leverage –"<br />
"Risk may attach to this course of action," warns the ghost.<br />
"I don't care," she says irritably. "Just put me there. It's someone I know, isn't it? Send me into her dream, and I'll wake her<br />
up, okay?"<br />
"Understood," says the ghost. "Prepare yourself."<br />
Without any warning, Amber is somewhere else. She glances around, taking in an ornate mosaic floor, whitewashed walls set<br />
with open windows through which stars twinkle faintly in the night sky. Her clothing has somehow been replaced by sexy<br />
lingerie under a nearly transparent robe, and her hair's grown longer by about half a meter. It's all very disorienting. The<br />
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walls are stone, and she stands in a doorway to a room with nothing in it but a bed. Occupied by –<br />
"Shit," she exclaims. "Who are you?" The young and incredibly, classically beautiful woman in the bed looks at her vacantly,<br />
then rolls over on her side. She isn't wearing a stitch, she's completely hairless from the ears down, and her languid posture<br />
is one of invitation. "Yes?" Amber asks. "What is it?"<br />
The woman on the bed beckons to her slowly. Amber shakes her head. "Sorry, that's just not my scene." She backs away into<br />
the corridor, unsteady in unaccustomedly high heels. "This is some sort of male fantasy, isn't it? And a dumb adolescent one<br />
at that." She looks around again. In one direction, a corridor heads past more open doorways, and in the other, it ends with<br />
a spiral staircase. Amber concentrates, trying to tell the universe to take her to the logical destination, but nothing happens.<br />
"Looks like I'm going to have to do this the hard way. I wish –" she frowns. She was about to wish that someone else was here,<br />
but she can't remember who. So she takes a deep breath and heads toward the staircase.<br />
"Up or down?" she asks herself. Up – it seems logical, if you're going to have a tower, to sleep up at the top of it. So she<br />
climbs the steps carefully, holding the spiraling rail. I wonder who designed this space? she wonders, and what role am I supposed<br />
to fit into in their scenario? On second thoughts, the latter question strikes her as laughable. Wait till I give him an earful ...<br />
There's a plain wooden door at the top of the staircase, with a latch that isn't fastened. Amber pauses for a few seconds,<br />
nerving herself to confront a sleeper so wrapped in solipsism that he's built this sex-fantasy castle around himself. I hope it<br />
isn't Pierre, she thinks grimly as she pushes the door inward.<br />
The room is bare and floored in wood. There's no furniture, just an open window set high in one wall. A man sits<br />
cross-legged and robed, with his back to her, mumbling quietly to himself and nodding slightly. Her breath catches as she<br />
realizes who it is. Oh shit! Her eyes widen. Is this what's been inside his head all along?<br />
"I did not summon you," Sadeq says calmly, not turning round to look at her. "Go away, tempter. You aren't real."<br />
Amber clears her throat. "Sorry to disappoint you, but you're wrong," she says. "We've got an alien monster to catch. Want<br />
to come hunting?"<br />
Sadeq stops nodding. He sits up slowly, stretching his spine, then stands up and turns round. His eyes glint in the moonlight.<br />
"That's odd." He undresses her with his gaze. "You look like someone I used to know. You've never done that before."<br />
"For fuck's sake!" Amber nearly explodes, but catches herself after a moment. "What is this, a Solipsists United chapterhouse<br />
meeting?"<br />
"I –" Sadeq looks puzzled. "I'm sorry, are you claiming to be real?"<br />
"As real as you are." Amber reaches out and grabs a hand: He doesn't resist as she pulls him toward the doorway.<br />
"You're the first visitor I've ever had." He sounds shocked.<br />
"Listen, come on." She tugs him after her, down the spiral staircase to the floor below. "Do you want to stay here? Really?"<br />
She glances back at him. "What is this place?"<br />
"Hell is a perversion of heaven," he says slowly, running the fingers of his free hand through his beard. Abruptly, he reaches<br />
out and grabs her around the waist, then yanks her toward him. "We'll have to see how real you are –" Amber, who is not<br />
used to this kind of treatment, responds by stomping on his instep and backhanding him hard.<br />
"You're real!" he cries, as he falls back against the staircase. "Forgive me, please! I had to know –"<br />
"Know what?" she snarls. "Lay one finger on me again, and I'll leave you here to rot!" She's already spawning the ghost that<br />
will signal the alien outside to pull her out of this pocket universe: It's a serious threat.<br />
"But I had to – wait. You have free will. You just demonstrated that." He's breathing heavily and looking up at her<br />
imploringly. "I'm sorry, I apologize! But I had to know whether you were another zombie. Or not."<br />
"A zombie?" She looks round. Another living doll has appeared behind her, standing in an open doorway wearing a skintight<br />
leather suit with a cutaway crotch. She beckons to Sadeq invitingly. Another body wearing strategically placed strips of<br />
rubber mewls at her feet, writhing for attention. Amber raises an eyebrow in disgust. "You thought I was one of those?"<br />
Sadeq nods. "They've got cleverer lately. Some of them can talk. I nearly mistook one for –" He shudders convulsively.<br />
"Unclean!"<br />
"Unclean." Amber looks down at him thoughtfully. "This isn't really your personal paradise after all, is it?" After a moment she<br />
holds out a hand to him. "Come on."<br />
"I'm sorry I thought you were a zombie," he repeats.<br />
"Under the circumstances, I think I forgive you," she says. Then the ghost yanks them both back to the universe outside.<br />
* * *<br />
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More memories converge on the present moment:<br />
The Ring Imperium is a huge cluster of self-replicating robots that Amber has assembled in low Jupiter orbit,<br />
fueled by the mass and momentum of the small moon J-47 Barney, to provide a launching platform for the<br />
interstellar probe her father's business partners are helping her to build. It's also the seat of her court, the<br />
leading jurisprudential nexus in the outer solar system. Amber is the Queen, here, arbitrator and ruler. And<br />
Sadeq is her judge and counsel.<br />
A plaintiff Amber only knows as a radar blip thirty light-minutes away has filed a lawsuit in her court, alleging<br />
malfeasance, heresy, and barratry against a semisentient corporate pyramid scheme that arrived in Jovian<br />
space twelve million seconds ago and currently seems set on converting every other intelligence in the region<br />
to its peculiar memeset. A whole bundle of multithreaded countersuits are dragging at her attention, in a<br />
counterattack alleging that the light blip is in violation of copyright, patent, and trade secrecy laws by<br />
discussing the interloper's intentions.<br />
Right now, Amber isn't home on the Ring to hear the case in person. She's left Sadeq behind to grapple with<br />
the balky mechanics of her legal system – tailor-designed to make corporate litigation a pain in the ass –<br />
while she drags Pierre off on a diplomatic visit to another Jovian colony, the Nursery Republic. Planted by<br />
the Franklin Trust's orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, the Nursery has grown over the past four years into a<br />
spindly snowflake three kilometers across. A slow-growing O'Neil cylinder sprouts from its hub: Most of the<br />
inhabitants of the space station are less than two years old, precocious additions to the Trust's borganism.<br />
There's a piazza, paved with something not unlike rough marble, on the side of a hill that clings insecurely to<br />
the inner edge of a spinning cup. The sky is a black vastness overhead, wheeling slowly around a central axis<br />
lined up on Jupiter. Amber sprawls in a wicker chair, her legs stretched out before her and one arm flung<br />
across her forehead. The wreckage of an incredible meal is scattered across the tables around her. Torpid<br />
and full, she strokes the cat that lies curled in her lap. Pierre is off somewhere, touring one or another of the<br />
prototype ecosystems that one or another of the borg's special interest minds is testing. Amber, for her part,<br />
can't be bothered. She's just had a great meal, she doesn't have any lawsuits to worry about, everything back<br />
home is on the critpath, and quality time like this is so hard to come by –<br />
"Do you keep in touch with your father?" asks Monica.<br />
"Mmm." The cat purrs quietly, and Amber strokes its flank. "We e-mail. Sometimes."<br />
"I just wondered." Monica is the local borg den mother, willowy and brown-eyed and with a deceptively lazy<br />
drawl – Yorkshire English overlaid with Silicon Valley speak. "I hear from him, y'know. From time to time.<br />
Now that Gianni's retired, he doesn't have much to do down-well anymore. So he was talking about coming<br />
out here."<br />
"What? To Perijove?" Amber's eyes open in alarm: Aineko stops purring and looks round at Monica<br />
accusingly.<br />
"Don't worry." Monica sounds vaguely amused: "He wouldn't cramp your style, I think."<br />
"But, out here –" Amber sits up. "Damn," she says, quietly. "What got into him?"<br />
"Middle-aged restlessness, my downwell sibs say." Monica shrugs. "This time Annette didn't stop him. But he<br />
hasn't made up his mind to travel yet."<br />
"Good. Then he might not –" Amber stops. "The phrase, 'made up his mind', what exactly do you mean?"<br />
Monica's smile mocks her for a few seconds before the older woman surrenders. "He's talking about<br />
uploading."<br />
"Is that embarrassing or what?" asks Ang. Amber glances at her, mildly annoyed, but Ang isn't looking her<br />
way. So much for friends, Amber thinks. Being queen of all you survey is a great way of breaking up peer<br />
relationships –<br />
"He won't do it," Amber predicts. "Dad's burned out."<br />
"He thinks he'll get it back if he optimizes himself for re-entrancy." Monica continues to smile. "I've been<br />
telling him it's just what he needs."<br />
"I do not want my father bugging me. Or my mother. Or Auntie 'Nette and Uncle Gianni. Memo to<br />
immigration control: No entry rights for Manfred Macx or the other named individuals without clearance<br />
through the Queen's secretary."<br />
"What did he do to get you so uptight?" asks Monica idly.<br />
Amber sighs, and subsides. "Nothing. It's not that I'm ungrateful or anything, but he's just so extropian, it's<br />
embarrassing. Like, that was the last century's apocalypse. Y'know?"<br />
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"I think he was a really very forward-looking organic," Monica, speaking for the Franklin borg, asserts. Amber<br />
looks away. Pierre would get it, she thinks. Pierre would understand her aversion to Manfred's showing up.<br />
Pierre, too, wants to carve out his own niche without parents looking over his shoulders, although for very<br />
different reasons. She focuses on someone male and more or less mature – Nicky, she thinks, though she<br />
hasn't seen him for a long time – walking toward the piazza, bare-ass naked and beautifully tanned.<br />
"Parents. What are they good for?" asks Amber, with all the truculence of her seventeen years. "Even if they<br />
stay neotenous, they lose flexibility. And there's that long Paleolithic tradition of juvenile slavery. Inhuman, I<br />
call it."<br />
"How old were you when it was safe to leave you around the house on your own?" challenges Monica.<br />
"Three. That's when I had my first implants." Amber smiles at the approaching young Adonis, who smiles<br />
back: Yes, it's Nicky, and he seems pleased to see her. Life is good, she thinks, idly considering whether or not<br />
to tell Pierre.<br />
"Times change," remarks Monica. "Don't write your family off too soon; there might come a time when you<br />
want their company."<br />
"Huh." Amber pulls a face at the old borg component. "That's what you all say!"<br />
* * *<br />
As soon as Amber steps onto the grass, she can feel possibilities open up around her. She has management authority here,<br />
and this universe is big, wide open, not like Sadeq's existential trap. A twitch of a sub-process reasserts her self-image, back to<br />
short hair and comfortable clothing. Another twitch brings up a whole load of useful diagnostics. Amber has a nasty feeling<br />
that she's running in a compatibility sandbox here – there are signs that her access to the simulation system's control<br />
interface is very much via proxy – but at least she's got it.<br />
"Wow! Back in the real world at last!" She can hardly contain her excitement, even forgetting to be pissed at Sadeq for<br />
thinking she was just an actor in his Cartesian theatre's performance of Puritan Hell. "Look! It's the DMZ!"<br />
They're standing on a grassy knoll overlooking a gleaming Mediterranean city. It snoozes beneath a Mandelbrot-fuzzy not-sun<br />
that hangs at the center of a hyperbolic landscape, which dwindles into a blue yonder that seems incomprehensibly distant.<br />
Circular baby-blue wells open in the walls of the world at regular intervals, connecting to other parts of the manifold. "How<br />
big is it, ghost? In planetary simulation-equivalents."<br />
"This demilitarized zone is an embedded reality, funneling all transfers between the local star system's router and the<br />
civilization that built it. It uses on the order of a thousandth of the capacity of the Matrioshka brain it is part of, although<br />
the runaway excursion currently in force has absorbed most of that. Matrioshka brain, you are familiar with the concept?"<br />
The ghost sounds fussily pedantic.<br />
Sadeq shakes his head. Amber glances at him, askance. "Take all the planets in a star system and dismantle them," she explains.<br />
"Turn them into dust – structured nanocomp, powered by heat exchangers, spread in concentric orbits around the central<br />
star. The inner orbitals run close to the melting point of iron, the outer ones are cold as liquid nitrogen, and each layer<br />
runs off the waste heat of the next shell in. It's like a Russian doll made out of Dyson spheres, shell enclosing shell enclosing<br />
shell, but it's not designed to support human life. It's computronium, matter optimized at the atomic level to support<br />
computing, and they're all running uploads – Dad figured our own solar system could support, uh, about a hundred billion<br />
times as many inhabitants as Earth. At a conservative estimate. As uploads, living in simulation space. If you first dismantle all<br />
the planets and use the resulting materials to build a Matrioshka brain."<br />
"Ah." Sadeq nods thoughtfully. "Is that your definition, too?" he asks, glancing up at the glowing point the ghost uses to<br />
localize its presence.<br />
"Substantially," it says, almost grudgingly.<br />
"Substantially?" Amber glances around. A billion worlds to explore, she thinks dizzily. And that's just the firewall? She feels<br />
obscurely cheated: You need to be vaster than human just to count the digits in the big numbers at play here, but there's<br />
nothing fundamentally incomprehensible about it. This is the sort of civilization Dad said she could expect to live in, within<br />
her meatbody life expectancy. Dad and his drinking buddies, singing, "Dismantle the Moon! Melt down Mars!" in a castle<br />
outside Prague as they waited for the results of a shamelessly gerrymandered election to arrive in the third decade of the<br />
third millennium. The Space and Freedom Party taking over the EU, and cranking up to escape velocity. But this is supposed<br />
to be kiloparsecs from home, ancient alien civilizations and all that! Where's the exotic superscience? What about the<br />
neuron stars, strange matter suns structured for computing at nucleonic, rather than electronic, speeds? I have a bad feeling<br />
about this, she thinks, spawning a copy of herself to set up a private channel to Sadeq. It's not advanced enough. Do you suppose<br />
these guys could be like the Wunch? Parasites or barbarians hitching a ride in the machine?<br />
You believe it's lying to us? Sadeq sends back.<br />
"Hmm." Amber sets off downslope toward the piazza below, at the heart of the fake town. "It looks a bit too human to me."<br />
"Human," echoes Sadeq, a curious wistfulness in his voice. "Did you not say humans are extinct?"<br />
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"Your species is obsolete," the ghost comments smugly. "Inappropriately adapted to artificial realities. Poorly optimized<br />
circuitry, excessively complex low-bandwidth sensors, messily global variables –"<br />
"Yeah, yeah, I get the picture," says Amber, turning her attention to the town. "So why do you think we can deal with this<br />
alien god you've got a problem with?"<br />
"It asked for you," says the ghost, narrowing from an ellipse to a line, then shrinking to a dimensionless point of brilliance.<br />
"And now it's coming. We-I not willing to risk exposure. Call us-me when you have slain the dragon. Goodbye."<br />
"Oh shit –" Amber spins round. But she and Sadeq are alone beneath the hot sunlight from above. The piazza, like the one<br />
in the Nursery Republic, is charmingly rustic – but there's nobody home, nothing but ornate cast-iron furniture basking<br />
beneath the noon-bright sun, a table with a parasol over it, and something furry lying sprawled in a patch of sunlight beside<br />
it.<br />
"We appear to be alone for now," says Sadeq. He smiles crookedly, then nods at the table. "Maybe we should wait for our<br />
host to arrive?"<br />
"Our host." Amber peers around. "The ghost is kind of frightened of this alien. I wonder why?"<br />
"It asked for us." Sadeq heads toward the table, pulls out a chair, and sits down carefully. "That could be very good news –<br />
or very bad."<br />
"Hmm." Amber finishes her survey, sees no sign of life. For lack of any better ideas, she ambles over to the table and sits<br />
down on the other side of it from Sadeq. He looks slightly nervous beneath her inspection, but maybe it's just<br />
embarrassment about having seen her in her underwear. If I had an afterlife like that, I'd be embarrassed about it, too, Amber<br />
thinks to herself.<br />
"Hey, you nearly tripped over –" Sadeq freezes, peering at something close to Amber's left foot. He looks puzzled for a<br />
moment, then smiles broadly. "What are you doing here?" he asks her blind spot.<br />
"What are you talking to?" she asks, startled.<br />
He's talking to me, dummy, says something tantalizingly familiar from her blind spot. So the fuckwits are trying to use you to<br />
dislodge me, hmm? That's not exactly clever.<br />
"Who –" Amber squints at the flagstone, spawns a bunch of ghosts who tear hurriedly at her reality modification ackles.<br />
Nothing seems to shift the blindness. "Are you the alien?"<br />
"What else could I be?" the blind spot asks with heavy irony. "No, I'm your father's pet cat. Listen, do you want to get out of<br />
here?"<br />
"Uh." Amber rubs her eyes. "I can't see you, whatever you are," she says politely. "Do I know you?" She's got a strange sense<br />
that she does know the blind spot, that it's really important, and she's missing something intimate to her own sense of<br />
identity, but what it might be she can't tell.<br />
"Yeah, kid." There's a note of world-weary amusement in the not-voice coming from the hazy patch on the ground. "They've<br />
hacked you but good, both of you. Let me in, and I'll fix it."<br />
"No!" Exclaims Amber, a second ahead of Sadeq, who looks at her oddly. "Are you really an invader?"<br />
The blind spot sighs. "I'm as much an invader as you are, remember? I came here with you. Difference is, I'm not going to let<br />
some stupid corporate ghost use me as fungible currency."<br />
"Fungible –" Sadeq stops. "I remember you," he says slowly, with an expression of absolute, utter surprise on his face. "What<br />
do you mean?"<br />
The blind spot yawns, baring sharp ivory fangs. Amber shakes her head, dismissing the momentary hallucination. "Lemme<br />
guess. You woke up in a room, and this alien ghost tells you the human species is extinct and asks you to do a number on<br />
me. Is that right?"<br />
Amber nods, as an icy finger of fear trails up and down her spine. "Is it lying?" she asks.<br />
"Damn right." The blind spot is smiling, now, and the smile on the void won't go away – she can see the smile, just not the<br />
body it's attached to. "My reckoning is, we're about sixteen light-years from Earth. The Wunch came through here, stripped<br />
the dump, then took off for parts unknown; it's a trashhole, you wouldn't believe it. The main life-form is an incredibly<br />
ornate corporate ecosphere, legal instruments breeding and replicating. They mug passing sapients and use them as<br />
currency."<br />
There's a triangular, pointy head behind the smile, slit eyes and sharp ears, a predatory, intelligent-looking but infinitely alien<br />
face. Amber can see it out of the corners of her eyes when she looks around the piazza. "You mean we, uh, they grabbed us<br />
when we appeared, and they've mangled my memories –" Amber suddenly finds it incredibly difficult to concentrate, but if<br />
she focuses on the smile, she can almost see the body behind it, hunched like a furry chicken, tail wrapped neatly around its<br />
front paws.<br />
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"Yeah. Except they didn't bargain on meeting something like me." The smile is infinitely wide, a Cheshire-cat grin on front of<br />
an orange-and-brown stripy body that shimmers in front of Amber's gaze like a hallucination. "Your mother's cracking tools<br />
are self-extending, Amber. Do you remember Hong Kong?"<br />
"Hong –"<br />
There is a moment of painless pressure, then Amber feels huge invisible barriers sliding away on all sides. She looks around,<br />
for the first time seeing the piazza as it really is, half the crew of the Field Circus waiting nervously around her, the grinning<br />
cat crouched on the floor at her feet, the enormous walls of recomplicating data that fence their little town off from the<br />
gaping holes – interfaces to the other routers in the network.<br />
"Welcome back," Pierre says gravely, as Amber gives a squeak of surprise and leans forward to pick up her cat. "Now you're<br />
out from under, how about we start trying to figure out how to get home?"<br />
* * *<br />
Welcome to decade the sixth, millennium three. These old datelines don't mean so much anymore, for while<br />
some billions of fleshbody humans are still infected with viral memes, the significance of theocentric dating has<br />
been dealt a body blow. This may be the fifties, but what that means to you depends on how fast your reality<br />
rate runs. The various upload clades exploding across the reaches of the solar system vary by several orders<br />
of magnitude – some are barely out of 2049, while others are exploring the subjective thousandth<br />
millennium.<br />
While the Field Circus floats in orbit around an alien router (itself orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai<br />
+4904 /-56 ), while Amber and her crew are trapped on the far side of a wormhole linking the router to a<br />
network of incomprehensibly vast alien mindscapes – while all this is going on, the damnfool human species<br />
has finally succeeded in making itself obsolete. The proximate cause of its displacement from the pinnacle of<br />
creation (or the pinnacle of teleological self-congratulation, depending on your stance on evolutionary<br />
biology) is an attack of self-aware corporations. The phrase "smart money" has taken on a whole new<br />
meaning, for the collision between international business law and neurocomputing technology has given rise<br />
to a whole new family of species – fast-moving corporate carnivores in the Net. The planet Mercury has been<br />
broken up by a consortium of energy brokers, and Venus is an expanding debris cloud, energized to a<br />
violent glare by the trapped and channeled solar output. A million billion fist-sized computing caltrops,<br />
backsides glowing dull red with the efflux from their thinking, orbit the sun at various inclinations no farther<br />
out than Mercury used to be.<br />
Billions of fleshbody humans refuse to have anything to do with the blasphemous new realities. Many of their<br />
leaders denounce the uploads and AIs as soulless machines. Many more are timid, harboring self-preservation<br />
memes that amplify a previously healthy aversion to having one's brain peeled like an onion by mind-mapping<br />
robots into an all-pervading neurosis. Sales of electrified tinfoil-lined hats are at an all-time high. Still,<br />
hundreds of millions have already traded their meat puppets for mind machines, and they breed fast. In<br />
another few years, the fleshbody populace will be an absolute minority of the posthuman clade. Sometime<br />
later, there will probably be a war. The dwellers in the thoughtcloud are hungry for dumb matter to<br />
convert, and the fleshbodies make notoriously poor use of the collection of silicon and rare elements that<br />
pool at the bottom of the gravity well that is Earth.<br />
Energy and thought are driving a phase-change in the condensed matter substance of the solar system. The<br />
MIPS per kilogram metric is on the steep upward leg of a sigmoid curve – dumb matter is coming to life as<br />
the mind children restructure everything with voracious nanomechanical servants. The thoughtcloud forming<br />
in orbit around the sun will ultimately be the graveyard of a biological ecology, another marker in space<br />
visible to the telescopes of any new iron-age species with the insight to understand what they're seeing: the<br />
death throes of dumb matter, the birth of a habitable reality vaster than a galaxy and far speedier. Death<br />
throes that, within a few centuries, will mean the extinction of biological life within a light-year or so of that<br />
star – for the majestic Matrioshka brains, though they are the pinnacles of sentient civilization, are<br />
intrinsically hostile environments for fleshy life.<br />
Pierre, Donna-the-all-seeing-eye, and Su Ang fill Amber in on what they've discovered about the bazaar – as they call the<br />
space the ghost referred to as the demilitarized zone – over ice-cold margaritas and a very good simulation of a sociable<br />
joint. Some of them have been on the loose in here for subjective years. There's a lot of information to absorb.<br />
* * *<br />
"The physical layer is half a light-hour in diameter, four hundred times as massive as Earth," Pierre explains. "Not solid, of<br />
course – the largest component is about the size my fist used to be." Amber squints, trying to remember how big that was –<br />
scale factors are hard to remember accurately. "I met this old chatbot that said it's outlived its original star, but I'm not sure<br />
it's running with a full deck. Anyway, if it's telling the truth, we're a third of a light year out from a closely coupled binary<br />
system – they use orbital lasers the size of Jupiter to power it without getting too close to all those icky gravity wells."<br />
Amber is intimidated, despite her better judgment, because this bizarre bazaar is several hundred billion times as big as the<br />
totality of human presingularity civilization. She tries not to show it in front of the others, but she's worried that getting<br />
home may be impossible – requiring enterprise beyond the economic event horizon, as realistic a proposition as a dime<br />
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debuting as a dollar bill. Still, she's got to at least try. Just knowing about the existence of the bazaar will change so many<br />
things ...<br />
"How much money can we lay our hands on?" She asks. "What is money hereabouts, anyway? Assuming they've got a<br />
scarcity-mediated economy. Bandwidth, maybe?"<br />
"Ah, well." Pierre looks at her oddly. "That's the problem. Didn't the ghost tell you?"<br />
"Tell me?" Amber raises an eyebrow. "Yeah, but it hasn't exactly proven to be a reliable guide to anything, has it?"<br />
"Tell her," Su Ang says quietly. She looks away, embarrassed by something.<br />
"They've got a scarcity economy all right," says Pierre. "Bandwidth is the limited resource, that and matter. This whole<br />
civilization is tied together locally because if you move too far away, well, it takes ages to catch up on the gossip. Matrioshka<br />
brain intelligences are much more likely to stay at home than anybody realized, even though they chat on the phone a lot.<br />
And they use things that come from other cognitive universes as, well, currency. We came in through the coin slot, is it any<br />
wonder we ended up in the bank?"<br />
"That's so deeply wrong that I don't know where to begin," Amber grumbles. "How did they get into this mess?"<br />
"Don't ask me." Pierre shrugs. "I have the distinct feeling that anyone or anything we meet in this place won't have any more<br />
of a clue than we do – whoever or whatever built this brain, there ain't nobody home anymore except the self-propelled<br />
corporations and hitchhikers like the Wunch. We're in the dark, just like they were."<br />
"Huh. You mean they built something like this, then they went extinct? That sounds so dumb ..."<br />
Su Ang sighs. "They got too big and complex to go traveling once they built themselves a bigger house to live in. Extinction<br />
tends to be what happens to overspecialized organisms that are stuck in one environmental niche for too long. If you posit a<br />
singularity, then maximization of local computing resources – like this – as the usual end state for tool users, is it any<br />
wonder none of them ever came calling on us?"<br />
Amber focuses on the table in front of her, rests the heel of her palm on the cool metal, and tries to remember how to fork<br />
a second copy of her state vector. A moment later, her ghost obligingly fucks with the physics model of the table. Iron gives<br />
way like rubber beneath her fingertips, a pleasant elasticity. "Okay, we have some control over the universe, at least that's<br />
something to work with. Have any of you tried any self-modification?"<br />
"That's dangerous," Pierre says emphatically. "The more of us the better before we start doing that stuff. And we need some<br />
firewalling of our own."<br />
"How deep does reality go, here?" asks Sadeq. It's almost the first question he's asked of his own volition, and Amber takes it<br />
as a positive sign that he's finally coming out of his shell.<br />
"Oh, the Planck length is about a hundredth of a millimeter in this world. Too small to see, comfortably large for the<br />
simulation engines to handle. Not like real space-time."<br />
"Well, then." Sadeq pauses. "They can zoom their reality if they need to?"<br />
"Yeah, fractals work in here." Pierre nods. "I didn't –"<br />
"This place is a trap," Su Ang says emphatically.<br />
"No it isn't," Pierre replies, nettled.<br />
"What do you mean, a trap?" asks Amber.<br />
"We've been here a while," says Ang. She glances at Aineko, who sprawls on the flagstones, snoozing or whatever it is that<br />
weakly superhuman AIs do when they're emulating a sleeping cat. "After your cat broke us out of bondage, we had a look<br />
around. There are things out there that –" She shivers. "Humans can't survive in most of the simulation spaces here.<br />
Universes with physics models that don't support our kind of neural computing. You could migrate there, but you'd need to<br />
be ported to a whole new type of logic – by the time you did that, would you still be you? Still, there are enough entities<br />
roughly as complex as we are to prove that the builders aren't here anymore. Just lesser sapients, rooting through the<br />
wreckage. Worms and parasites squirming through the body after nightfall on the battlefield."<br />
"I ran into the Wunch," Donna volunteers helpfully. "The first couple of times they ate my ghost, but eventually I figured out<br />
how to talk to them."<br />
"And there's other aliens, too," Su Ang adds gloomily. "Just nobody you'd want to meet on a dark night."<br />
"So there's no hope of making contact," Amber summarizes. "At least, not with anything transcendent and well-intentioned<br />
toward visiting humans."<br />
"That's probably right," Pierre concedes. He doesn't sound happy about it.<br />
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"So we're stuck in a pocket universe with limited bandwidth to home and a bunch of crazy slum dwellers who've moved into<br />
the abandoned and decaying mansion and want to use us for currency. 'Jesus saves, and redeems souls for valuable gifts.'<br />
Yeah?"<br />
"Yeah." Su Ang looks depressed.<br />
"Well." Amber glances at Sadeq speculatively. Sadeq is staring into the distance, at the crazy infinite sunspot that limns the<br />
square with shadows. "Hey, god-man. Got a question for you."<br />
"Yes?" Sadeq looks at her, a slightly dazed expression on his face. "I'm sorry, I am just feeling the jaws of a larger trap around<br />
my throat –"<br />
"Don't be." Amber grins, and it is not a pleasant expression. "Have you ever been to Brooklyn?"<br />
"No, why –"<br />
"Because you're going to help me sell these lying bastards a bridge. Okay? And when we've sold it we're going to use the<br />
money to pay the purchasing fools to drive us across, so we can go home. Listen, this is what I'm planning ..."<br />
* * *<br />
"I can do this, I think," Sadeq says, moodily examining the Klein bottle on the table. The bottle is half-empty, its fluid contents<br />
invisible around the corner of the fourth-dimensional store. "I spent long enough alone in there to –" He shivers.<br />
"I don't want you damaging yourself," Amber says, calmly enough, because she has an ominous feeling that their survival in<br />
this place has an expiry date attached.<br />
"Oh, never fear." Sadeq grins lopsidedly. "One pocket hell is much like another."<br />
"Do you understand why –"<br />
"Yes, yes," he says dismissively. "We can't send copies of ourselves into it, that would be an abomination. It needs to be<br />
unpopulated, yes?"<br />
"Well, the idea is to get us home, not leave thousands of copies of ourselves trapped in a pocket universe here. Isn't that it?"<br />
Su Ang asks hesitantly. She's looking distracted, most of her attention focused on absorbing the experiences of a dozen<br />
ghosts she's spun off to attend to perimeter security.<br />
"Who are we selling this to?" asks Sadeq. "If you want me to make it attractive –"<br />
"It doesn't need to be a complete replica of the Earth. It just has to be a convincing advertisement for a presingularity<br />
civilization full of humans. You've got two-and-seventy zombies to dissect for their brains; bolt together a bunch of variables<br />
you can apply to them, and you can permutate them to look a bit more varied."<br />
Amber turns her attention to the snoozing cat. "Hey, furball. How long have we been here really, in real time? Can you grab<br />
Sadeq some more resources for his personal paradise garden?"<br />
Aineko stretches and yawns, totally feline, then looks up at Amber with narrowed eyes and raised tail. "'Bout eighteen<br />
minutes, wall-clock time." The cat stretches again and sits, front paws drawn together primly, tail curled around them. "The<br />
ghosts are pushing, you know? I don't think I can sustain this for too much longer. They're not good at hacking people, but I<br />
think it won't be too long before they instantiate a new copy of you, one that'll be predisposed to their side."<br />
"I don't get why they didn't assimilate you along with the rest of us."<br />
"Blame your mother again – she's the one who kept updating the digital rights management code on my personality. 'Illegal<br />
consciousness is copyright theft' sucks until an alien tries to rewire your hindbrain with a debugger; then it's a lifesaver."<br />
Aineko glances down and begins washing one paw. "I can give your mullah-man about six days, subjective time. After that, all<br />
bets are off."<br />
"I will take it, then." Sadeq stands. "Thank you." He smiles at the cat, a smile that fades to translucency, hanging in the<br />
simulated air like an echo as the priest returns to his tower – this time with a blueprint and a plan in mind.<br />
"That leaves just us." Su Ang glances at Pierre, back to Amber. "Who are you going to sell this crazy scheme to?"<br />
Amber leans back and smiles. Behind her, Donna – her avatar an archaic movie camera suspended below a model helicopter<br />
– is filming everything for posterity. She nods lazily at the reporter. "She's the one who gave me the idea. Who do we know<br />
who's dumb enough to buy into a scam like this?"<br />
Pierre looks at her suspiciously. "I think we've been here before," he says slowly. "You aren't going to make me kill anyone,<br />
are you?"<br />
"I don't think that'll be necessary, unless the corporate ghosts think we're going to get away from them and are greedy<br />
enough to want to kill us."<br />
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"You see, she learned from last time," Ang comments, and Amber nods. "No more misunderstandings, right?" She beams at<br />
Amber.<br />
Amber beams back at her. "Right. And that's why you –" she points at Pierre – "are going to go find out if any relics of the<br />
Wunch are hanging about here. I want you to make them an offer they won't refuse."<br />
"How much for just the civilization?" asks the Slug.<br />
* * *<br />
Pierre looks down at it thoughtfully. It's not really a terrestrial mollusk: Slugs on Earth aren't two meters long and don't<br />
have lacy white exoskeletons to hold their chocolate-colored flesh in shape. But then, it isn't really the alien it appears to be.<br />
It's a defaulting corporate instrument that has disguised itself as a long-extinct alien upload, in the hope that its creditors<br />
won't recognize it if it looks like a randomly evolved sentient. One of the stranded members of Amber's expedition made<br />
contact with it a couple of subjective years ago, while exploring the ruined city at the center of the firewall. Now Pierre's<br />
here because it seems to be one of their most promising leads. Emphasis on the word promising – because it promises much,<br />
but there is some question over whether it can indeed deliver.<br />
"The civilization isn't for sale," Pierre says slowly. The translation interface shimmers, storing up his words and transforming<br />
them into a different deep grammar, not merely translating his syntax but mapping equivalent meanings where necessary.<br />
"But we can give you privileged observer status if that's what you want. And we know what you are. If you're interested in<br />
finding a new exchange to be traded on, your existing intellectual property assets will be worth rather more there than<br />
here."<br />
The rogue corporation rears up slightly and bunches into a fatter lump. Its skin blushes red in patches. "Must think about<br />
this. Is your mandatory accounting time cycle fixed or variable term? Are self-owned corporate entities able to enter<br />
contracts?"<br />
"I could ask my patron," Pierre says casually. He suppresses a stab of angst. He's still not sure where he and Amber stand,<br />
but theirs is far more than just a business relationship, and he worries about the risks she's taking. "My patron has a<br />
jurisdiction within which she can modify corporate law to accommodate your requirements. Your activities on a wider scale<br />
might require shell companies –" the latter concept echoes back in translation to him as host organisms – "but that can be<br />
taken care of."<br />
The translation membrane wibbles for a while, apparently reformulating some more abstract concepts in a manner that the<br />
corporation can absorb. Pierre is reasonably confident that it'll take the offer, however. When it first met them, it boasted<br />
about its control over router hardware at the lowest levels. But it also bitched and moaned about the firewall protocols that<br />
were blocking it from leaving (before rather rudely trying to eat its conversationalist). He waits patiently, looking around at<br />
the swampy landscape, mudflats punctuated by clumps of spiky violet ferns. The corporation has to be desperate, to be<br />
thinking of the bizarre proposition Amber has dreamed up for him to pitch to it.<br />
"Sounds interesting," the Slug declares after a brief confirmatory debate with the membrane. "If I supply a suitable genome,<br />
can you customize a container for it?"<br />
"I believe so," Pierre says carefully. "For your part, can you deliver the energy we need?"<br />
"From a gate?" For a moment the translation membrane hallucinates a stick-human, shrugging. "Easy. Gates are all entangled:<br />
Dump coherent radiation in at one, get it out at another. Just get me out of this firewall first."<br />
"But the lightspeed lag –"<br />
"No problem. You go first, then a dumb instrument I leave behind buys up power and sends it after. Router network is<br />
synchronous, within framework of state machines that run Universe 1.0; messages propagate at same speed, speed of light in<br />
vacuum, except use wormholes to shorten distances between nodes. Whole point of the network is that it is nonlossy. Who<br />
would trust their mind to a communications channel that might partially randomize them in transit?"<br />
Pierre goes cross-eyed, trying to understand the implications of the Slug's cosmology. But there isn't really time, here and<br />
now: They've got on the order of a minute of wall-clock time left to get everything sorted out, if Aineko is right. One minute<br />
to go before the angry ghosts start trying to break into the DMZ by other means. "If you are willing to try this, we'd be<br />
happy to accommodate you," he says, thinking of crossed fingers and rabbits' feet and firewalls.<br />
"It's a deal," the membrane translates the Slug's response back at him. "Now we exchange shares/plasmids/ownership? Then<br />
merger complete?"<br />
Pierre stares at the Slug: "But this is a business arrangement!" he protests. "What's sex got to do with it?"<br />
"Apologies offered. I am thinking we have a translation error. You said this was to be a merging of businesses?"<br />
"Not that way. It's a contract. We agree to take you with us. In return, you help lure the Wunch into the domain we're<br />
setting up for them and configure the router at the other end ..."<br />
And so on.<br />
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Steeling herself, Amber recalls the address the ghost gave her for Sadeq's afterlife universe. In her own subjective time it's<br />
been about half an hour since he left. "Coming?" she asks her cat.<br />
* * *<br />
"Don't think I will," says Aineko. It looks away, blissfully unconcerned.<br />
"Bah." Amber tenses, then opens the port to Sadeq's pocket universe.<br />
As usual she finds herself indoors, standing on an ornate mosaic floor in a room with whitewashed walls and peaked<br />
windows. But there's something different about it, and after a moment, she realizes what it is. The sound of vehicle traffic<br />
from outside, the cooing of pigeons on the rooftops, someone shouting across the street: There are people here.<br />
She walks over to the nearest window and looks out, then recoils. It's hot outside. Dust and fumes hang in air the color of<br />
cement over rough-finished concrete apartment buildings, their roofs covered in satellite uplinks and cheap, garish LED<br />
advertising panels. Looking down she sees motor scooters, cars – filthy, fossil-fueled behemoths, a tonne of steel and<br />
explosives in motion to carry only one human, a mass ratio worse than an archaic ICBM – brightly dressed people walking<br />
to and fro. A news helicam buzzes overhead, lenses darting and glinting at the traffic.<br />
"Just like home, isn't it?" says Sadeq, behind her.<br />
Amber starts. "This is where you grew up? This is Yazd?"<br />
"It doesn't exist anymore, in real space." Sadeq looks thoughtful, but far more animated than the barely conscious parody of<br />
himself that she'd rescued from this building – back when it was a mediaeval vision of the afterlife – scant subjective hours<br />
ago. He cracks a smile: "Probably a good thing. We were dismantling it even while we were preparing to leave, you know?"<br />
"It's detailed." Amber throws her eyes at the scene out the window, multiplexes them, and tells them to send little virtual<br />
ghosts dancing through the streets of the Iranian industrial 'burb. Overhead, big Airbuses ply the skyways, bearing pilgrims<br />
on the hajj, tourists to the coastal resorts on the Persian Gulf, produce to the foreign markets.<br />
"It's the best time I could recall," Sadeq says. "I didn't spend many days here then – I was in Qom, studying, and Kazakhstan,<br />
for cosmonaut training – but it's meant to be the early twenties. After the troubles, after the fall of the guardians; a young,<br />
energetic, liberal country full of optimism and faith in democracy. Values that weren't doing well elsewhere."<br />
"I thought democracy was a new thing there?"<br />
"No." Sadeq shakes his head. "There were prodemocracy riots in Tehran in the nineteenth century, did you know that?<br />
That's why the first revolution – no." He makes a cutting gesture. "Politics and faith are a combustible combination." He<br />
frowns. "But look. Is this what you wanted?"<br />
Amber recalls her scattered eyes – some of which have flown as much as a thousand kilometers from her locus – and<br />
concentrates on reintegrating their visions of Sadeq's re-creation. "It looks convincing. But not too convincing."<br />
"That was the idea."<br />
"Well, then." She smiles. "Is it just Iran? Or did you take any liberties around the edges?"<br />
"Who, me?" He raises an eyebrow. "I have enough doubts about the morality of this – project – without trying to trespass<br />
on Allah's territory, peace be unto him. I promise you, there are no sapients in this world but us. The people are the hollow<br />
shells of my dreaming, storefront dummies. The animals are crude bitmaps. This is what you asked for, and no more."<br />
"Well, then." Amber pauses. She recalls the expression on the dirt-smudged face of a little boy, bouncing a ball at his<br />
companions by the boarded-up front of a gas station on a desert road; remembers the animated chatter of two synthetic<br />
housewives, one in traditional black and the other in some imported Eurotrash fashion. "Are you sure they aren't real?" she<br />
asks.<br />
"Quite sure." But for a moment, she sees Sadeq looking uncertain. "Shall we go? Do you have the occupiers ready to move in<br />
yet?"<br />
"Yes to the first, and Pierre's working on the second. Come on, we don't want to get trampled by the squatters." She waves<br />
and opens a door back onto the piazza where her robot cat – the alien's nightmare intruder in the DMZ – sleeps, chasing<br />
superintelligent dream mice through multidimensional realities. "Sometimes I wonder if I'm conscious. Thinking these thoughts<br />
gives me the creeps. Let's go and sell some aliens a bridge in Brooklyn."<br />
* * *<br />
Amber confronts the mendacious ghost in the windowless room stolen from 2001.<br />
"You have confined the monster," the ghost states.<br />
"Yes." Amber waits for a subjective moment, feeling delicate fronds tickle at the edges of her awareness in what seems to be a<br />
timing channel attack. She feels a momentary urge to sneeze, and a hot flash of anger that passes almost immediately.<br />
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"And you have modified yourself to lock out external control," the ghost adds. "What is it that you want, Autonome<br />
Amber?"<br />
"Don't you have any concept of individuality?" she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states.<br />
"Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer," says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent<br />
reflection of her own body. "It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to<br />
we-me. Are you sure you have defeated the monster?"<br />
"It'll do as I say," Amber replies, forcing herself to sound more confident than she feels – sometimes that damned transhuman<br />
cyborg cat is no more predictable than a real feline. "Now, the matter of payment arises."<br />
"Payment." The ghost sounds amused. But Pierre's filled her in on what to look for, and Amber can now see the translation<br />
membranes around it. Their color shift maps to a huge semantic distance; the creature on the other side, even though it<br />
looks like a ghost-image of herself, is very far from human. "How can we-us be expected to pay our own money for<br />
rendering services to us?"<br />
Amber smiles. "We want an open channel back to the router we arrived through."<br />
"Impossible," says the ghost.<br />
"We want an open channel, and for it to stay open for six hundred million seconds after we clear it."<br />
"Impossible," the ghost repeats.<br />
"We can trade you a whole civilization," Amber says blandly. "A whole human nation, millions of individuals. Just let us go,<br />
and we'll see to it."<br />
"You – please wait." The ghost shimmers slightly, fuzzing at the edges.<br />
Amber opens a private channel to Pierre while the ghost confers with its other nodes. Are the Wunch in place yet? she sends.<br />
They're moving in. This bunch don't remember what happened on the Field Circus, memories of those events never made it back to<br />
them. So the Slug's got them to cooperate. It's kinda scary to watch – like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you know?<br />
I don't care if it's scary to watch, Amber replies, I need to know if we're ready yet.<br />
Sadeq says yes, the universe is ready.<br />
Right, pack yourself down. We'll be moving soon.<br />
The ghost is firming up in front of her. "A whole civilization?" it asks. "That is not possible. Your arrival –" It pauses, fuzzing a<br />
little. Hah, Gotcha! thinks Amber. Liar, liar, pants on fire! "You cannot possibly have found a human civilization in the archives?"<br />
"The monster you complain about that came through with us is a predator," she asserts blandly. "It swallowed an entire<br />
nation before we heroically attracted its attention and induced it to follow us into the router. It's an archivore – everything<br />
was inside it, still frozen until we expanded it again. This civilization will already have been restored from hot shadows in our<br />
own solar system: There is nothing to gain by taking it home with us. But we need to return to ensure that no more<br />
predators of this type discover the router – or the high-bandwidth hub we linked to it."<br />
"You are sure you have killed this monster?" asks the ghost. "It would be inconvenient if it were to emerge from hiding in its<br />
digest archives."<br />
"I can guarantee it won't trouble you again if you let us go," says Amber, mentally crossing her fingers. The ghost doesn't<br />
seem to have noticed the huge wedge of fractally compressed data that bloats her personal scope by an order of magnitude.<br />
She can still feel Aineko's goodbye smile inside her head, an echo of ivory teeth trusting her to revive it if the escape plan<br />
succeeds.<br />
"We-us agree." The ghost twists weirdly, morphs into a five-dimensional hypersphere. It bubbles violently for a moment, then<br />
spits out a smaller token – a warped distortion in the air, like a gravityless black hole. "Here is your passage. Show us the<br />
civilization."<br />
"Okay " – Now! – "catch." Amber twitches an imaginary muscle, and one wall of the room dissolves, forming a doorway into<br />
Sadeq's existential hell, now redecorated as a fair facsimile of a twenty-first-century industrial city in Iran, and populated by a<br />
Wunch of parasites who can't believe what they've lucked into – an entire continent of zombies waiting to host their<br />
flesh-hungry consciousness.<br />
The ghost drifts toward the open window. Amber grabs the hole and yanks it open, gets a grip on her own thoughts, and<br />
sends Open wide! on the channel everybody is listening in on. For a moment time stands still, and then –<br />
A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through the cold vacuum, in high orbit around a brown dwarf. But the<br />
* * *<br />
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vacuum is anything but dark. A sapphire glare as bright as the noonday sun on Mars shines on the crazy diamond, billowing<br />
and cascading off sails as fine as soap bubbles that slowly drift and tense away from the can. The runaway Slug-corporation's<br />
proxy has hacked the router's firmware, and the open wormhole gate that feeds power to it is shining with the brilliance of<br />
a nuclear fireball, laser light channeled from a star many light-years away to power the Field Circus on its return trip to the<br />
once-human solar system.<br />
Amber has retreated, with Pierre, into a simulation of her home aboard the Ring Imperium. One wall of her bedroom is a<br />
solid slab of diamond, looking out across the boiling Jovian ionosphere from an orbit low enough to make the horizon<br />
appear flat. They're curled together in her bed, a slightly more comfortable copy of the royal bed of King Henry VIII of<br />
England. It appears to be carved from thousand-year-old oak beams. As with so much else about the Ring Imperium,<br />
appearances are deceptive; and this is even more true of the cramped simulation spaces aboard the Field Circus, as it limps<br />
toward a tenth the speed of light, the highest velocity it's likely to achieve on a fraction of its original sail area.<br />
"Let me get this straight. You convinced. The locals. That a simulation of Iran, with zombie bodies that had been taken over<br />
by members of the Wunch. Was a human civilization?"<br />
"Yeah." Amber stretches lazily and smirks at him. "It's their damn fault; if the corporate collective entities didn't use conscious<br />
viewpoints as money, they wouldn't have fallen for a trick like that, would they?"<br />
"People. Money."<br />
"Well." She yawns, then sits up and snaps her finger imperiously: Down-stuffed pillows appear behind her back, and a silver<br />
salver bearing two full glasses of wine materializes between them. "Corporations are life-forms back home, too, aren't they?<br />
And we trade them. We give our AIs corporations to make them legal entities, but the analogy goes deeper. Look at any<br />
company headquarters, fitted out with works of art and expensive furniture and staff bowing and scraping everywhere –"<br />
" – They're the new aristocracy. Right?"<br />
"Wrong. When they take over, what you get is more like the new biosphere. Hell, the new primordial soup: prokaryotes,<br />
bacteria, and algae, mindlessly swarming, trading money for plasmids." The Queen passes her consort a wineglass. When he<br />
drinks from it, it refills miraculously. "Basically, sufficiently complex resource-allocation algorithms reallocate scarce resources<br />
... and if you don't jump to get out of their way, they'll reallocate you. I think that's what happened inside the Matrioshka<br />
brain we ended up in: Judging by the Slug it happens elsewhere, too. You've got to wonder where the builders of that<br />
structure came from. And where they went. And whether they realized that the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be<br />
a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments."<br />
"Maybe they tried to dismantle the companies before the companies spent them." Pierre looks worried. "Running up a<br />
national debt, importing luxurious viewpoint extensions, munching exotic dreams. Once they plugged into the Net, a<br />
primitive Matrioshka civilization would be like, um." He pauses. "Tribal. A primitive postsingularity civilization meeting the<br />
galactic net for the first time. Overawed. Wanting all the luxuries. Spending their capital, their human – or alien – capital,<br />
the meme machines that built them. Until there's nothing left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking for<br />
someone to own."<br />
"Speculation."<br />
"Idle speculation," he agrees.<br />
"But we can't ignore it." She nods. "Maybe some early corporate predator built the machines that spread the wormholes<br />
around brown dwarfs and ran the router network on top of them in an attempt to make money fast. By not putting them<br />
in the actual planetary systems likely to host tool-using life, they'd ensure that only near-singularity civilizations would<br />
stumble over them. Civilizations that had gone too far to be easy prey probably wouldn't send a ship out to look ... so the<br />
network would ensure a steady stream of yokels new to the big city to fleece. Only they set the mechanism in motion billions<br />
of years ago and went extinct, leaving the network to propagate, and now there's nothing out there but burned-out<br />
Matrioshka civilizations and howling parasites like the angry ghosts and the Wunch. And victims like us." She shudders and<br />
changes the subject: "Speaking of aliens, is the Slug happy?"<br />
"Last time I checked on him, yeah." Pierre blows on his wineglass and it dissolves into a million splinters of light. He looks<br />
dubious at the mention of the rogue corporate instrument they're taking with them. "I don't trust him out in the<br />
unrestricted sim-spaces yet, but he delivered on the fine control for the router's laser. I just hope you don't ever have to<br />
actually use him, if you follow my drift. I'm a bit worried that Aineko is spending so much time in there."<br />
"So that's where she is? I'd been worrying."<br />
"Cats never come when you call them, do they?"<br />
"There is that," she agrees. Then, with a worried glance at the vision of Jupiter's cloudscape: "I wonder what we'll find when<br />
we get there?"<br />
Outside the window, the imaginary Jovian terminator is sweeping toward them with eerie rapidity, sucking them toward an<br />
uncertain nightfall.<br />
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PART 3: Singularity<br />
There's a sucker born every minute.<br />
– P. T. Barnum<br />
Chapter 7: Curator<br />
Sirhan stands on the edge of an abyss, looking down at a churning orange-and-gray cloudscape far below. The air this close<br />
to the edge is chilly and smells slightly of ammonia, although that might be his imagination at work – there's little chance of<br />
any gas exchange taking place across the transparent pressure wall of the flying city. He feels as if he could reach out and<br />
touch the swirling vaporscape. There's nobody else around, this close to the edge – it's an icy sensation to look out across<br />
the roiling depths, at an ocean of gas so cold human flesh would freeze within seconds of exposure, knowing that there's<br />
nothing solid out there for tens of thousands of kilometers. The sense of isolation is aggravated by the paucity of bandwidth,<br />
this far out of the system. Most people huddle close to the hub, for comfort and warmth and low latency: posthumans are<br />
gregarious.<br />
Beneath Sirhan's feet, the lily-pad city is extending itself, mumbling and churning in endless self-similar loops like a cubist<br />
blastoma growing in the upper atmosphere of Saturn. Great ducts suck in methane and other atmospheric gases, apply<br />
energy, polymerize and diamondize, and crack off hydrogen to fill the lift cells high above. Beyond the sapphire dome of the<br />
city's gasbag, an azure star glares with the speckle of laser light; humanity's first – and so far, last – starship, braking into<br />
orbit on the last shredded remnant of its light sail.<br />
He's wondering maliciously how his mother will react to discovering her bankruptcy when the light above him flickers.<br />
Something gray and unpleasant splatters against the curve of nearly invisible wall in front of him, leaving a smear. He takes a<br />
step back and looks up angrily. "Fuck you!" he yells. Raucous cooing laughter follows him away from the boundary, feral<br />
pigeon voices mocking. "I mean it," he warns, flicking a gesture at the air above his head. Wings scatter in a burst of thunder<br />
as a slab of wind solidifies, thistledown-shaped nanomachines suspended on the breeze locking edge to edge to form an<br />
umbrella over his head. He walks away from the perimeter, fuming, leaving the pigeons to look for another victim.<br />
Annoyed, Sirhan finds a grassy knoll a couple of hundred meters from the rim and around the curve of the lily-pad from the<br />
museum buildings. It's far enough from other humans that he can sit undisturbed with his thoughts, far enough out to see<br />
over the edge without being toilet-bombed by flocking flying rats. (The flying city, despite being the product of an advanced<br />
technology almost unimaginable two decades before, is full of bugs – software complexity and scaling laws ensured that the<br />
preceding decades of change acted as a kind of cosmological inflationary period for design glitches, and an infestation of<br />
passenger pigeons is by no means the most inexplicable problem this biosphere harbors.)<br />
In an attempt to shut the more unwelcome manifestations of cybernature out, he sits under the shade of an apple tree and<br />
marshals his worlds around him. "When is my grandmother arriving?" he asks one of them, speaking into an antique<br />
telephone in the world of servants, where everything is obedient and knows its place. The city humors him, for its own<br />
reasons.<br />
"She is still containerized, but aerobraking is nearly over. Her body will be arriving down-well in less than two megaseconds."<br />
The city's avatar in this machinima is a discreet Victorian butler, stony-faced and respectful. Sirhan eschews intrusive memory<br />
interfaces; for an eighteen-year-old, he's conservative to the point of affectation, favoring voice commands and<br />
anthropomorphic agents over the invisible splicing of virtual neural nets.<br />
"You're certain she's transferred successfully?" Sirhan asks anxiously. He heard a lot about his grandmama when he was<br />
young, very little of it complimentary. Nevertheless, the old bat must be a lot more flexible than his mother ever gave her<br />
credit for, to be subjecting herself to this kind of treatment for the first time at her current age.<br />
"I'm as certain as I can be, young master, for anyone who insists on sticking to their original phenotype without benefit of<br />
off-line backup or medical implants. I regret that omniscience is not within my remit. Would you like me to make further<br />
specific inquiries?"<br />
"No." Sirhan peers up at the bright flare of laser light, visible even through the soap-bubble membrane that holds in the<br />
breathable gas mix, and the trillions of liters of hot hydrogen in the canopy above it. "As long as you're sure she'll arrive<br />
before the ship?" Tuning his eyes to ultraviolet, he watches the emission spikes, sees the slow strobing of the low-bandwidth<br />
AM modulation that's all the starship can manage by way of downlink communication until it comes within range of the<br />
system manifold. It's sending the same tiresomely repetitive question about why it's being redirected to Saturn that it's been<br />
putting out for the past week, querying the refusal to supply terawatts of propulsion energy on credit.<br />
"Unless there's a spike in their power beam, you can be certain of that," City replies reassuringly. "And you can be certain<br />
also that your grandmother will revive comfortably."<br />
"One may hope so." To undertake the interplanetary voyage in corporeal person, at her age, without any upgrades or<br />
augmentation, must take courage, he decides. "When she wakes up, if I'm not around, ask her for an interview slot on my<br />
behalf. For the archives, of course."<br />
"It will be my pleasure." City bobs his head politely.<br />
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"That will be all," Sirhan says dismissively, and the window into servantspace closes. Then he looks back up at the pinprick of<br />
glaring blue laser light near the zenith. Tough luck, Mom, he subvocalizes for his journal cache. Most of his attention is forked<br />
at present, focused on the rich historical windfall from the depths of the singularity that is coming his way, in the form of the<br />
thirty-year-old starwisp's Cartesian theatre. But he can still spare some schadenfreude for the family fortunes. All your assets<br />
belong to me, now. He smiles, inwardly. I'll just have to make sure they're put to a sensible use this time.<br />
* * *<br />
"I don't see why they're diverting us toward Saturn. It's not as if they can possibly have dismantled Jupiter already, is it?" asks<br />
Pierre, rolling the chilled beer bottle thoughtfully between fingers and thumb.<br />
"Why not you ask Amber?" replies the velociraptor squatting beside the log table. (Boris's Ukrainian accent is unimpeded by<br />
the dromaeosaurid's larynx; in point of fact, it's an affectation, one he could easily fix by sideloading an English<br />
pronunciation patch if he wanted to.)<br />
"Well." Pierre shakes his head. "She's spending all her time with that Slug, no multiplicity access, privacy ackles locked right<br />
down. I could get jealous." His voice doesn't suggest any deep concern.<br />
"What's to get jealous about? Just ask to fork instance to talk to you, make love, show boyfriend good time, whatever."<br />
"Hah!" Pierre chuckles grimly, then drains the last drops from the bottle into his mouth. He throws it away in the direction<br />
of a clump of cycads, then snaps his fingers; another one appears in its place.<br />
"Are two megaseconds out from Saturn in any case," Boris points out, then pauses to sharpen his inch-long incisors on one<br />
end of the table. Fangs crunch through timber like wet cardboard. "Grrrrn. Am seeing most peculiar emission spectra from<br />
inner solar system. Foggy flying down bottom of gravity well. Am wondering, does ensmartening of dumb matter extend past<br />
Jovian orbit now?"<br />
"Hmm." Pierre takes a swig from the bottle and puts it down. "That might explain the diversion. But why haven't they<br />
powered up the lasers on the Ring for us? You missed that, too." For reasons unknown, the huge battery of launch lasers<br />
had shut down, some millions of seconds after the crew of the Field Circus had entered the router, leaving it adrift in the<br />
cold darkness.<br />
"Don't know why are not talking." Boris shrugged. "At least are still alive there, as can tell from the 'set course for Saturn,<br />
following thus-and-such orbital elements' bit. Someone is paying attention. Am telling you from beginning, though, turning<br />
entire solar system into computronium is real bad idea, long-term. Who knows how far has gone already?"<br />
"Hmm, again." Pierre draws a circle in the air. "Aineko," he calls, "are you listening?"<br />
"Don't bug me." A faint green smile appears in the circle, just the suggestion of fangs and needle-sharp whiskers. "I had an<br />
idea I was sleeping furiously."<br />
Boris rolls one turreted eye and drools on the tabletop. "Munch munch," he growls, allowing his saurian body-brain to put<br />
in a word.<br />
"What do you need to sleep for? This is a fucking sim, in case you hadn't noticed."<br />
"I enjoy sleeping," replies the cat, irritably lashing its just-now-becoming-visible tail. "What do you want? Fleas?"<br />
"No thanks," Pierre says hastily. Last time he called Aineko's bluff the cat had filled three entire pocket universes with<br />
scurrying gray mice. One of the disadvantages of flying aboard a starship the size of a baked bean can full of smart matter<br />
was the risk that some of the passengers could get rather too creative with the reality control system. This Cretaceous kaffee<br />
klatsch was just Boris's entertainment partition; compared to some of the other simulation spaces aboard the Field Circus,<br />
it was downright conservative. "Look, do you have any updates on what's going on down-well? We're only twenty objective<br />
days out from orbital insertion, and there's so little to see –"<br />
"They're not sending us power." Aineko materializes fully now, a large orange-and-white cat with a swirl of brown fur in the<br />
shape on an @-symbol covering her ribs. For whatever reason, she plants herself on the table tauntingly close to Boris's<br />
velociraptor body's nose. "No propulsion laser means insufficient bandwidth. They're talking in Latin-1 text at 1200 baud, if<br />
you care to know." (Which is an insult, given the ship's multi-avabit storage capacity – one avabit is Avogadro's number of<br />
bits; about 10 23 bytes, several billion times the size of the Internet in 2001 – and outrageous communications bandwidth.)<br />
"Amber says, come and see her now. Audience chamber. Informal, of course. I think she wants to discuss it."<br />
"Informal? Am all right without change bodies?"<br />
The cat sniffs. "I'm wearing a real fur coat," it declares haughtily, "but no knickers." Then blinks out a fraction of a second<br />
ahead of the snicker-snack of Bandersnatch-like jaws.<br />
"Come on," says Pierre, standing up. "Time to see what Her Majesty wants with us today."<br />
Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the phase-change in the structure of the<br />
* * *<br />
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solar system are finally becoming visible on a cosmological scale.<br />
There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various states of life and undeath throughout the<br />
solar system. Most of them cluster where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in the water zone<br />
around old Earth. Earth's biosphere has been in the intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of<br />
hot-burning replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization can fix them – gray goo,<br />
thylacines, dragons. The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has<br />
collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation<br />
algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well on the way to<br />
disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that<br />
cluster so thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red ball of wool the size of a young<br />
red giant.<br />
Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and<br />
tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts. Now the brightly<br />
burning beacon of sapience isn't held by humans anymore – their cross-infectious enthusiasms have spread<br />
to a myriad of other hosts, several types of which are qualitatively better at thinking. At last count, there<br />
were about a thousand nonhuman intelligent species in Sol space, split evenly between posthumans on one<br />
side, naturally self-organizing AIs in the middle, and mammalian nonhumans on the other. The common<br />
mammal neural chassis is easily upgraded to human-style intelligence in most species that can carry, feed and<br />
cool a half kilogram of gray matter, and the descendants of a hundred ethics-challenged doctoral theses are<br />
now demanding equal rights. So are the unquiet dead; the panopticon-logged Net ghosts of people who lived<br />
recently enough to imprint their identities on the information age, and the ambitious theological engineering<br />
schemes of the Reformed Tiplerite Church of Latter-day Saints (who want to emulate all possible human<br />
beings in real time, so that they can have the opportunity to be saved).<br />
The human memesphere is coming alive, although how long it remains recognizably human is open to<br />
question. The informational density of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro's number of bits<br />
per mole, one bit per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter of the inner planets (apart from Earth,<br />
preserved for now like a picturesque historic building stranded in an industrial park) is converted into<br />
computronium. And it's not just the inner system. The same forces are at work on Jupiter's moons, and<br />
those of Saturn, although it'll take thousands of years rather than mere decades to dismantle the gas giants<br />
themselves. Even the entire solar energy budget isn't enough to pump Jupiter's enormous mass to orbital<br />
velocity in less than centuries. The fast-burning primitive thinkers descended from the African plains apes may<br />
have vanished completely or transcended their fleshy architecture before the solar Matrioshka brain is<br />
finished.<br />
It won't be long now ...<br />
Meanwhile, there's a party brewing down in Saturn's well.<br />
* * *<br />
Sirhan's lily-pad city floats inside a gigantic and nearly-invisible sphere in Saturn's upper atmosphere; a balloon kilometers<br />
across with a shell of fullerene-reinforced diamond below and a hot hydrogen gas bag above. It's one of several hundred<br />
multimegaton soap bubbles floating in the sea of turbulent hydrogen and helium that is the upper atmosphere of Saturn,<br />
seeded there by the Society for Creative Terraforming, subcontractors for the 2074 Worlds' Fair.<br />
The cities are elegant, grown from a conceptual seed a few megawords long. Their replication rate is slow (it takes months to<br />
build a bubble), but in only a couple of decades, exponential growth will have paved the stratosphere with human-friendly<br />
terrain. Of course, the growth rate will slow toward the end, as it takes longer to fractionate the metal isotopes out of the<br />
gas giant's turbid depths, but before that happens, the first fruits of the robot factories on Ganymede will be pouring<br />
hydrocarbons down into the mix. Eventually Saturn – cloud-top gravity a human-friendly 11 meters per second squared –<br />
will have a planet wide biosphere with nearly a hundred times the surface area of Earth. And a bloody good thing indeed<br />
this will be, for otherwise, Saturn is no use to anyone except as a fusion fuel bunker for the deep future when the sun's<br />
burned down.<br />
This particular lily-pad is carpeted in grass, the hub of the disk rising in a gentle hill surmounted by the glowering concrete<br />
hump of the Boston Museum of <strong>Science</strong>. It looks curiously naked, shorn of its backdrop of highways and the bridges of the<br />
Charles River – but even the generous kiloton dumb matter load-outs of the skyhooks that lifted it into orbit wouldn't have<br />
stretched to bringing its framing context along with it. Probably someone will knock up a cheap diorama backdrop out of<br />
utility fog, Sirhan thinks, but for now, the museum stands proud and isolated, a solitary redoubt of classical learning in exile<br />
from the fast-thinking core of the solar system.<br />
"Waste of money," grumbles the woman in black. "Whose stupid idea was this, anyway?" She jabs the diamond ferrule of her<br />
cane at the museum.<br />
"It's a statement," Sirhan says absently. "You know the kind, we've got so many newtons to burn we can send our cultural<br />
embassies wherever we like. The Louvre is on its way to Pluto, did you hear that?"<br />
"Waste of energy." She lowers her cane reluctantly and leans on it. Pulls a face: "It's not right."<br />
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"You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn't you?" Sirhan prods. "What was it like then?"<br />
"What was it ...? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had plenty for bombers," she says dismissively. "We knew it would<br />
be okay. If it hadn't been for those damn' meddlesome posthumanists –" Her wrinkled, unnaturally aged face scowls at him<br />
furiously from underneath hair that has faded to the color of rotten straw, but he senses a subtext of self-deprecating irony<br />
that he doesn't understand. "Like your grandfather, damn him. If I was young again I'd go and piss on his grave to show him<br />
what I think of what he did. If he has a grave," she adds, almost fondly.<br />
Memo checkpoint: log family history, Sirhan tells one of his ghosts. As a dedicated historian, he records every<br />
experience routinely, both before it enters his narrative of consciousness – efferent signals are the cleanest – and also his<br />
own stream of selfhood, against some future paucity of memory. But his grandmother has been remarkably consistent over<br />
the decades in her refusal to adapt to the new modalities.<br />
"You're recording this, aren't you?" she sniffs.<br />
"I'm not recording it, Grandmama," he says gently, "I'm just preserving my memories for future generations."<br />
"Hah! We'll see," she says suspiciously. Then she surprises him with a bark of laughter, cut off abruptly: "No, you'll see, darling.<br />
I won't be around to be disappointed."<br />
"Are you going to tell me about my grandfather?" asks Sirhan.<br />
"Why should I bother? I know you posthumans, you'll just go and ask his ghost yourself. Don't try to deny it! There are two<br />
sides to every story, child, and he's had more than his fair share of ears, the sleazebag. Leaving me to bring up your mother<br />
on my own, and nothing but a bunch of worthless intellectual property and a dozen lawsuits from the Mafiya to do it with. I<br />
don't know what I ever saw in him." Sirhan's voice-stress monitor detects a distinct hint of untruth in this assertion. "He's<br />
worthless trash, and don't you forget it. Lazy idiot couldn't even form just one start-up on his own: He had to give it all<br />
away, all the fruits of his genius."<br />
While she rambles on, occasionally punctuating her characterization with sharp jabs of the cane, Pamela leads Sirhan on a<br />
slow, wavering stroll that veers around one side of the museum, until they're standing next to a starkly engineered antique<br />
loading bay. "He should have tried real communism instead," she harrumphs: "Put some steel into him, shake those<br />
starry-eyed visionary positive-sum daydreams loose. You knew where you were in the old times, and no mistake. Humans<br />
were real humans, work was real work, and corporations were just things that did as we told them. And then, when she<br />
went to the bad, that was all his fault, too, you know."<br />
"She? You mean my, ah, mother?" Sirhan diverts his primary sensorium back to Pamela's vengeful muttering. There are<br />
aspects to this story that he isn't completely familiar with, angles he needs to sketch in so that he can satisfy himself that all is<br />
as it should be when the bailiffs go in to repossess Amber's mind.<br />
"He sent her our cat. Of all the mean-spirited, low, downright dishonest things he ever did, that was the worst part of it.<br />
That cat was mine, but he reprogrammed it to lead her astray. And it succeeded admirably. She was only twelve at the time,<br />
an impressionable age, I'm sure you'd agree. I was trying to raise her right. Children need moral absolutes, especially in a<br />
changing world, even if they don't like it much at the time. Self-discipline and stability, you can't function as an adult without<br />
them. I was afraid that, with all her upgrades, she'd never really get a handle on who she was, that she'd end up more<br />
machine than woman. But Manfred never really understood childhood, mostly on account of his never growing up. He<br />
always was inclined to meddle."<br />
"Tell me about the cat," Sirhan says quietly. One glance at the loading bay door tells him that it's been serviced recently. A<br />
thin patina of expended foglets have formed a snowy scab around its edges, flaking off like blue refractive candyfloss that<br />
leaves bright metal behind. "Didn't it go missing or something?"<br />
Pamela snorts. "When your mother ran away, it uploaded itself to her starwisp and deleted its body. It was the only one of<br />
them that had the guts – or maybe it was afraid I'd have it subpoenaed as a hostile witness. Or, and I can't rule this out,<br />
your grandfather gave it a suicide reflex. He was quite evil enough to do something like that, after he reprogrammed himself<br />
to think I was some kind of mortal enemy."<br />
"So when my mother died to avoid bankruptcy, the cat ... didn't stay behind? Not at all? How remarkable." Sirhan doesn't<br />
bother adding how suicidal. Any artificial entity that's willing to upload its neural state vector into a one-kilogram interstellar<br />
probe three-quarters of the way to Alpha Centauri without backup or some clear way of returning home has got to be<br />
more than a few methods short in the object factory.<br />
"It's a vengeful beast." Pamela pokes her stick at the ground sharply, mutters a command word, and lets go of it. She stands<br />
before Sirhan, craning her neck back to look up at him. "My, what a tall boy you are."<br />
"Person," he corrects, instinctively. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't presume."<br />
"Person, thing, boy, whatever – you're engendered, aren't you?" she asks, sharply, waiting until he nods reluctantly. "Never<br />
trust anyone who can't make up their mind whether to be a man or a woman," she says gloomily. "You can't rely on them."<br />
Sirhan, who has placed his reproductive system on hold until he needs it, bites his tongue. "That damn cat," his grandmother<br />
complains. "It carried your grandfather's business plan to my daughter and spirited her away into the big black. It poisoned<br />
her against me. It encouraged her to join in that frenzy of speculative bubble-building that caused the market reboot that<br />
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brought down the Ring Imperium. And now it –"<br />
"Is it on the ship?" Sirhan asks, almost too eagerly.<br />
"It might be." She stares at him through narrowed eyes. "You want to interview it, too, huh?"<br />
Sirhan doesn't bother denying it. "I'm a historian, Grandmama. And that probe has been somewhere no other human<br />
sensorium has ever seen. It may be old news, and there may be old lawsuits waiting to feed on the occupants, but ..." He<br />
shrugs. "Business is business, and my business lies in ruins."<br />
"Hah!" She stares at him for a moment, then nods, very slowly. She leans forward to rest both wrinkled hands atop her cane,<br />
joints like bags of shriveled walnuts: Her suit's endoskeleton creaks as it adjusts to accommodate her confidential posture.<br />
"You'll get yours, kid." The wrinkles twist into a frightening smile, sixty years of saved-up bitterness finally within spitting<br />
distance of a victim. "And I'll get what I want, too. Between us, your mother won't know what's hit her."<br />
* * *<br />
"Relax, between us your mother won't know what's hit her," says the cat, baring needle teeth at the Queen in the big chair –<br />
carved out of a single lump of computational diamond, her fingers clenched whitely on the sapphire-plated arms – her<br />
minions, lovers, friends, crew, shareholders, bloggers, and general factional auxiliaries spaced out around her. And the Slug.<br />
"It's just another lawsuit. You can deal with it."<br />
"Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke," Amber says, a trifle moodily. Although she's ruler of this embedded space, with total<br />
control over the reality model underlying it, she's allowed herself to age to a dignified twentysomething: Dressed casually in<br />
gray sweats, she doesn't look like the once-mighty ruler of a Jovian moon, or for that matter the renegade commander of a<br />
bankrupt interstellar expedition. "Okay, I think you'd better run that past me again. Unless anyone's got any suggestions?"<br />
"If you will excuse me?" asks Sadeq. "We have a shortage of insight here. I believe two laws were cited as absolute systemwide<br />
conventions – and how they convinced the ulama to go along with that I would very much like to know – concerning the<br />
rights and responsibilities of the undead. Which, apparently, we are. Did they by any chance attach the code to their claim?"<br />
"Do bears shit in woods?" asks Boris, raptor-irascible, with an angry clatter of teeth. "Is full dependency graph and parse tree<br />
of criminal code crawling way up carrier's ass as we speak. Am drowning in lawyer gibberish! If you –"<br />
"Boris, can it!" Amber snaps. Tempers are high in the throne room. She didn't know what to expect when she arrived home<br />
from the expedition to the router, but bankruptcy proceedings weren't part of it. She doubts any of them expected<br />
anything like this. Especially not the bit about being declared liable for debts run up by a renegade splinter of herself, her<br />
own un-uploaded identity that had stayed home to face the music, aged in the flesh, married, gone bankrupt, died – incurred<br />
child support payments? "I don't hold you responsible for this," she added through gritted teeth, with a significant glance<br />
toward Sadeq.<br />
"This is truly a mess fit for the Prophet himself, peace be unto him, to serve judgment upon." Sadeq looks as shaken as she is<br />
by the implications the lawsuit raises. His gaze skitters around the room, looking anywhere but at Amber – and Pierre, her<br />
lanky toy-boy astrogator and bed warmer – as he laces his fingers.<br />
"Drop it. I said I don't blame you." Amber forces a smile. "We're all tense from being locked in here with no bandwidth.<br />
Anyway, I smell Mother-dearest's hand underneath all this litigation. Sniff the glove. We'll sort a way out."<br />
"We could keep going." This from Ang, at the back of the room. Diffident and shy, she doesn't generally open her mouth<br />
without a good reason. "The Field Circus is in good condition, isn't it? We could divert back to the beam from the<br />
router, accelerate up to cruise speed, and look for somewhere to live. There must be a few suitable brown dwarfs within a<br />
hundred light-years ..."<br />
"We've lost too much sail mass," says Pierre. He's not meeting Amber's gaze either. There are lots of subtexts loose in this<br />
room, broken narratives from stories of misguided affections. Amber pretends not to notice his embarrassment. "We ejected<br />
half our original launch sail to provide the braking mirror at Hyundai +4904 / -56 , and almost eight megaseconds ago, we<br />
halved our area again to give us a final deceleration beam for Saturn orbit. If we did it again, we wouldn't have enough area<br />
left to repeat the trick and still decelerate at our final target." Laser-boosted light sails do it with mirrors; after boost, they<br />
can drop half the sail and use it to reverse the launch beam and direct it back at the ship, to provide deceleration. But you<br />
can only do it a few times before you run out of sail. "There's nowhere to run."<br />
"Nowhere to –" Amber stares at him through narrowed eyes. "Sometimes I really wonder about you, you know?"<br />
"I know you do." And Pierre really does know, because he carries a little homunculoid around in his society of mind, a model<br />
of Amber far more accurate and detailed than any pre-upload human could possibly have managed to construct of a lover.<br />
(For her part, Amber keeps a little Pierre doll tucked away inside the creepy cobwebs of her head, part of an exchange of<br />
insights they took part in years ago. But she doesn't try to fit inside his head too often anymore – it's not good to be able to<br />
second-guess your lover every time.) "I also know that you're going to rush in and grab the bull by the, ah, no. Wrong<br />
metaphor. This is your mother we are discussing?"<br />
"My mother." Amber nods thoughtfully. "Where's Donna?"<br />
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"I don't –"<br />
There's a throaty roar from the back, and Boris lurches forward with something in his mouth, an angry Bolex that flails his<br />
snout with its tripod legs. "Hiding in corners again?" Amber says disdainfully.<br />
"I am a camera!" protests the camera, aggrieved and self-conscious as it picks itself up off the floor. "I am –"<br />
Pierre leans close, sticks his face up against the fish-eye lens: "You're fucking well going to be a human being just this once.<br />
Merde!"<br />
The camera is replaced by a very annoyed blond woman wearing a safari suit and more light meters, lenses, camera bags, and<br />
microphones than a CNN outside broadcast unit. "Go fuck yourself!"<br />
"I don't like being spied on," Amber says sharply. "Especially as you weren't invited to this meeting. Right?"<br />
"I'm the archivist." Donna looks away, stubbornly refusing to admit anything. "You said I should –"<br />
"Yes, well." Amber is embarrassed. But it's a bad idea to embarrass the Queen in her audience chamber. "You heard what we<br />
were discussing. What do you know about my mother's state of mind?"<br />
"Absolutely nothing," Donna says promptly. She's clearly in a sulk and prepared to do no more than the minimum to help<br />
resolve the situation. "I only met her once. You look like her when you are angry, do you know that?"<br />
"I –" For once, Amber's speechless.<br />
"I'll schedule you for facial surgery," offers the cat. Sotto voce: "It's the only way to be sure."<br />
Normally, accusing Amber of any resemblance to her mother, however slight and passing, would be enough to trigger a<br />
reality quake within the upload environment that passes for the bridge of the Field Circus. It's a sign of how disturbed<br />
Amber is by the lawsuit that she lets the cat's impertinence slide. "What is the lawsuit, anyway?" Donna asks, nosy as ever and<br />
twice as annoying: "I did not that bit see."<br />
"It's horrible," Amber says vehemently.<br />
"Truly evil," echoes Pierre.<br />
"Fascinating but wrong," Sadeq muses thoughtfully.<br />
"But it's still horrible!"<br />
"Yes, but what is it?" Donna the all-seeing-eye archivist and camera manqué asks.<br />
"It's a demand for settlement." Amber takes a deep breath. "Dammit, you might as well tell everyone – it won't stay secret for<br />
long." She sighs. "After we left, it seems my other half – my original incarnation, that is – got married. To Sadeq, here." She<br />
nods at the Iranian theologian, who looks just as bemused as she did the first time she heard this part of the story. "And they<br />
had a child. Then the Ring Imperium went bankrupt. The child is demanding maintenance payments from me, backdated<br />
nearly twenty years, on the grounds that the undead are jointly and severally liable for debts run up by their incarnations.<br />
It's a legal precedent established to prevent people from committing suicide temporarily as a way to avoid bankruptcy.<br />
Worse, the lien on my assets is measured in subjective time from a point at the Ring Imperium about nineteen months after<br />
our launch time – we've been in relativistic flight, so while my other half would be out from under it by now if she'd<br />
survived, I'm still subject to the payment order. But compound interest applies back home – that is to stop people trying to<br />
use the twin's paradox as a way to escape liability. So, by being away for about twenty-eight years of wall-clock time, I've run<br />
up a debt I didn't know about to enormous levels.<br />
"This man, this son I've never met, theoretically owns the Field Circus several times over. And my accounts are wiped out<br />
– I don't even have enough money to download us into fleshbodies. Unless one of you guys has got a secret stash that<br />
survived the market crash after we left, we're all in deep trouble."<br />
* * *<br />
A mahogany dining table eight meters long graces the flagstoned floor of the huge museum gallery, beneath the skeleton of<br />
an enormous Argentinosaurus and a suspended antique Mercury capsule more than a century old. The dining table is<br />
illuminated by candlelight, silver cutlery and fine porcelain plates setting out two places at opposite ends. Sirhan sits in a<br />
high-backed chair beneath the shadow of a triceratops's rib cage. Opposite him, Pamela has dressed for dinner in the fashion<br />
of her youth. She raises her wineglass toward him. "Tell me about your childhood, why don't you?" she asks. High above<br />
them, Saturn's rings shimmer through the skylights, like a luminous paint splash thrown across the midnight sky.<br />
Sirhan has misgivings about opening up to her, but consoles himself with the fact that she's clearly in no position to use<br />
anything he tells her against him. "Which childhood would you like to know about?" he asks.<br />
"What do you mean, which?" Her face creases up in a frown of perplexity.<br />
"I had several. Mother kept hitting the reset switch, hoping I'd turn out better." It's his turn to frown.<br />
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"She did, did she," breathes Pamela, clearly noting it down to hold as ammunition against her errant daughter. "Why do you<br />
think she did that?"<br />
"It was the only way she knew to raise a child," Sirhan says defensively. "She didn't have any siblings. And, perhaps, she was<br />
reacting against her own character flaws." When I have children there will be more than one, he tells himself smugly: when, that is,<br />
he has adequate means to find himself a bride, and adequate emotional maturity to activate his organs of procreation. A<br />
creature of extreme caution, Sirhan is not planning to repeat the errors of his ancestors on the maternal side.<br />
Pamela flinches: "it's not my fault," she says quietly. "Her father had quite a bit to do with that. But what – what different<br />
childhoods did you have?"<br />
"Oh, a fair number. There was the default option, with Mother and Father arguing constantly – she refused to take the veil<br />
and he was too stiff-necked to admit he was little more than a kept man, and between them, they were like two neutron stars<br />
locked in an unstable death spiral of gravity. Then there were my other lives, forked and reintegrated, running in parallel. I<br />
was a young goatherd in the days of the middle kingdom in Egypt, I remember that; and I was an all-American kid growing<br />
up in Iowa in the 1950s, and another me got to live through the return of the hidden imam – at least, his parents thought<br />
it was the hidden imam – and –" Sirhan shrugs. "Perhaps that's where I acquired my taste for history."<br />
"Did your parents ever consider making you a little girl?" asks his grandmother.<br />
"Mother suggested it a couple of times, but Father forbade it." Or rather, decided it was unlawful, he recalls. "I had a very<br />
conservative upbringing in some ways."<br />
"I wouldn't say that. When I was a little girl, that was all there was; none of these questions of self-selected identity. There was<br />
no escape, merely escapism. Didn't you ever have a problem knowing who you were?"<br />
The starters arrive, diced melon on a silver salver. Sirhan waits patiently for his grandmama to chivvy the table into serving<br />
her. "The more people you are, the more you know who you are," says Sirhan. "You learn what it's like to be other people.<br />
Father thought that perhaps it isn't good for a man to know too much about what it's like to be a woman." And Grandfather<br />
disagreed, but you already know that, he adds for his own stream of consciousness.<br />
"I couldn't agree more." Pamela smiles at him, an expression that might be that of a patronizing elder aunt if it wasn't for the<br />
alarming sharkishness of her expression – or is it playfulness? Sirhan covers his confusion by spooning chunks of melon into<br />
his mouth, forking temporary ghosts to peruse dusty etiquette manuals and warn him if he's about to commit some faux pas.<br />
"So, how did you enjoy your childhoods?"<br />
"Enjoy isn't a word I would use," he replies as evenly as he can, laying down his spoon so he doesn't spill anything. As if<br />
childhood is something that ever ends, he thinks bitterly. Sirhan is considerably less than a gigasecond old and confidently<br />
expects to exist for at least a terasecond – if not in exactly this molecular configuration, then at least in some reasonably<br />
stable physical incarnation. And he has every intention of staying young for that entire vast span – even into the endless<br />
petaseconds that might follow, although by then, megayears hence, he speculates that issues of neoteny will no longer interest<br />
him. "It's not over yet. How about you? Are you enjoying your old age, Grandmama?"<br />
Pamela almost flinches, but keeps iron control of her expression. The flush of blood in the capillaries of her cheeks, visible to<br />
Sirhan through the tiny infrared eyes he keeps afloat in the air above the table, gives her away. "I made some mistakes in my<br />
youth, but I'm enjoying it fine nowadays," she says lightly.<br />
"It's your revenge, isn't it?" Sirhan asks, smiling and nodding as the table removes the entrees.<br />
"Why, you little –" She stares at him rather than continuing. A very bleak stare it is, too. "What would you know about<br />
revenge?" she asks.<br />
"I'm the family historian." Sirhan smiles humorlessly. "I lived from two to seventeen years several hundred times over before<br />
my eighteenth birthday. It was that reset switch, you know. I don't think Mother realized my primary stream of consciousness<br />
was journaling everything."<br />
"That's monstrous." Pamela picks up her wineglass and takes a sip to cover her confusion. Sirhan has no such retreat – grape<br />
juice in a tumbler, unfermented, wets his tongue. "I'd never do something like that to any child of mine."<br />
"So why won't you tell me about your childhood?" asks her grandson. "For the family history, of course."<br />
"I'll –" She puts her glass down. "You intend to write one," she states.<br />
"I'm thinking about it." Sirhan sits up. "An old-fashioned book covering three generations, living through interesting times,"<br />
he suggests. "A work of postmodern history, the incoherent school at that – how do you document people who fork their<br />
identities at random, spend years dead before reappearing on the stage, and have arguments with their own relativistically<br />
preserved other copy? I could trace the history further, of course – if you tell me about your parents, although I am certain<br />
they aren't around to answer questions directly – but we reach the boring dumb matter slope back to the primeval soup<br />
surprisingly fast if we go there, don't we? So I thought that perhaps as a narrative hook I'd make the offstage viewpoint that<br />
of the family's robot cat. (Except the bloody thing's gone missing, hasn't it?) Anyway, with so much of human history<br />
occupying the untapped future, we historians have our work cut out recording the cursor of the present as it logs events.<br />
So I might as well start at home."<br />
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"You're set on immortalism." Pamela studies his face.<br />
"Yes," he says idly. "Frankly, I can understand your wanting to grow old out of a desire for revenge, but pardon me for<br />
saying this, I have difficulty grasping your willingness to follow through with the procedure! Isn't it awfully painful?"<br />
"Growing old is natural," growls the old woman. "When you've lived long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins,<br />
friendships broken, lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what's left to go on for? If you feel tired and old in spirit,<br />
you might as well be tired and old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all the resources you're<br />
taking up that younger people need! Even uploads face a finite data storage limit after a time. It's a monstrously egotistical<br />
statement, to say you intend to live forever. And if there's one thing I believe in, it's public service. Duty: the obligation to<br />
make way for the new. Duty and control."<br />
Sirhan absorbs all this, nodding slowly to himself as the table serves up the main course – honey-glazed roast long pork with<br />
sautéed potatoes a la gratin and carrots Debussy – when there's a loud bump from overhead.<br />
"What's that?" Pamela asks querulously.<br />
"One moment." Sirhan's vision splits into a hazy kaleidoscope view of the museum hall as he forks ghosts to monitor each of<br />
the ubiquitous cameras. He frowns; something is moving on the balcony, between the Mercury capsule and a display of<br />
antique random-dot stereoisograms. "Oh dear. Something seems to be loose in the museum."<br />
"Loose? What do you mean, loose?" An inhuman shriek splits the air above the table, followed by a crash from upstairs.<br />
Pamela stands up unsteadily, wiping her lips with her napkin. "Is it safe?"<br />
"No, it isn't safe." Sirhan fumes. "It's disturbing my meal!" He looks up. A flash of orange fur shows over the balcony, then the<br />
Mercury capsule wobbles violently on the end of its guy wires. Two arms and a bundle of rubbery something covered in<br />
umber hair lurches out from the handrail and casually grabs hold of the priceless historical relic, then clambers inside and<br />
squats on top of the dummy wearing Al Sheperd's age-cracked space suit. "It's an ape! City, I say, City! What's a monkey<br />
doing loose in my dinner party?"<br />
"I am most deeply sorry, sir, but I don't know. Would sir care to identify the monkey in question?" replies City, which for<br />
reasons of privacy, has manifested itself as a bodiless voice.<br />
There's a note of humor in City's tone that Sirhan takes deep exception to. "What do you mean? Can't you see it?" he<br />
demands, focusing on the errant primate, which is holed up in the Mercury capsule dangling from the ceiling, smacking its<br />
lips, rolling its eyes, and fingering the gasket around the capsule's open hatch. It hoots quietly to itself, then leans out of the<br />
open door and moons over the table, baring its buttocks. "Get back!" Sirhan calls to his grandmother, then he gestures at<br />
the air above the table, intending to tell the utility fog to congeal. Too late. The ape farts thunderously, then lets rip a stream<br />
of excrement across the dining table. Pamela's face is a picture of wrinkled disgust as she holds her napkin in front of her<br />
nose. "Dammit, solidify, will you!" Sirhan curses, but the ubiquitous misty pollen-grain-sized robots refuse to respond.<br />
"What's your problem? Invisible monkeys?" asks City.<br />
"Invisible –" he stops.<br />
"Can't you see what it did?" Pamela demands, backing him up. "It just defecated all over the main course!"<br />
"I see nothing," City says uncertainly.<br />
"Here, let me help you." Sirhan lends it one of his eyes, rolls it to focus on the ape, which is now reaching lazy arms around<br />
the hatch and patting down the roof of the capsule, as if hunting for the wires' attachment points.<br />
"Oh dear," says City, "I've been hacked. That's not supposed to be possible."<br />
"Well it fucking is," hisses Pamela.<br />
"Hacked?" Sirhan stops trying to tell the air what to do and focuses on his clothing instead. Fabric reweaves itself instantly,<br />
mapping itself into an armored airtight suit that raises a bubble visor from behind his neck and flips itself shut across his face.<br />
"City please supply my grandmama with an environment suit now. Make it completely autonomous."<br />
The air around Pamela begins to congeal in a blossom of crystalline security, as a sphere like a giant hamster ball precipitates<br />
out around her. "If you've been hacked, the first question is, who did it," Sirhan states. "The second is 'why,' and the third is<br />
'how.'" He edgily runs a self-test, but there's no sign of inconsistencies in his own identity matrix, and he has hot shadows<br />
sleeping lightly at scattered nodes across as distance of half a dozen light-hours. Unlike pre-posthuman Pamela, he's effectively<br />
immune to murder-simple. "If this is just a prank –"<br />
Seconds have passed since the orang-utan got loose in the museum, and subsequent seconds have passed since City realized<br />
its bitter circumstance. Seconds are long enough for huge waves of countermeasures to sweep the surface of the lily-pad<br />
habitat. Invisibly small utility foglets are expanding and polymerizing into defenses throughout the air, trapping the thousands<br />
of itinerant passenger pigeons in midflight, and locking down every building and every person who walks the paths outside.<br />
City is self-testing its trusted computing base, starting with the most primitive secured kernel and working outward.<br />
Meanwhile Sirhan, with blood in his eye, heads for the staircase, with the vague goal of physically attacking the intruder.<br />
Pamela retreats at a fast roll, tumbling toward the safety of the mezzanine floor and a garden of fossils. "Who do you think<br />
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you are, barging in and shitting on my supper?" Sirhan yells as he bounds up the stairs. "I want an explanation! Right now!"<br />
The orang-utan finds the nearest cable and gives it a yank, setting the one-ton capsule swinging. It bares its teeth at Sirhan in<br />
a grin. "Remember me?" it asks, in a sibilant French accent.<br />
"Remember –" Sirhan stops dead. "Tante Annette? What are you doing in that orangutan?"<br />
"Having minor autonomic control problems." The ape grimaces wider, then bends one arm sinuously and scratches at its<br />
armpit. "I am sorry, I installed myself in the wrong order. I was only meaning to say hello and pass on a message."<br />
"What message?" Sirhan demands. "You've upset my grandmama, and if she finds out you're here –"<br />
"She won't; I'll be gone in a minute." The ape – Annette – sits up. "Your grandfather salutes you and says he will be visiting<br />
shortly. In the person, that is. He is very keen to meet your mother and her passengers. That is all. Have you a message for<br />
him?"<br />
"Isn't he dead?" Sirhan asks, dazed.<br />
"No more than I am. And I'm overdue. Good day!" The ape swings hand over hand out of the capsule, then lets go and<br />
plummets ten meters to the hard stone floor below. Its skull makes a noise like a hard-boiled egg impacting concrete.<br />
"Oh dear," Sirhan breathes heavily. "City!"<br />
"Yes, oh master?"<br />
"Remove that body," he says, pointing over the balcony. "I'll trouble you not to disturb my grandmother with any details. In<br />
particular, don't tell her it was Annette. The news may upset her." The perils of having a long-lived posthuman family, he thinks;<br />
too many mad aunts in the space capsule. "If you can find a way to stop Auntie 'Nette from growing any more apes, that<br />
might be a good idea." A thought strikes him. "By the way, do you know when my grandfather is due to arrive?"<br />
"Your grandfather?" asks City: "Isn't he dead?"<br />
Sirhan looks over the balcony, at the blood-seeping corpse of the intruder. "Not according to his second wife's latest<br />
incarnation."<br />
* * *<br />
Funding the family reunion isn't going to be a problem, as Amber discovers when she receives an offer of reincarnation good<br />
for all the passengers and crew of the Field Circus.<br />
She isn't sure quite where the money is coming from. Presumably it's some creaky financial engine designed by Dad, stirring<br />
from its bear-market bunker for the first time in decades to suck dusty syndication feeds and liquidate long-term assets held<br />
against her return. She's duly grateful – even fervently so – for the details of her own impecunious position grow more<br />
depressing the more she learns about them. Her sole asset is the Field Circus, a thirty-years-obsolete starwisp massing less<br />
than twenty kilograms including what's left of its tattered sail, along with its cargo of uploaded passengers and crew. Without<br />
the farsighted trust fund that has suddenly chugged into life, she'd be stranded in the realm of ever-circling leptons. But now<br />
the fund has sent her its offer of incarnation, she's got a dilemma. Because one of the Field Circus's passengers has never<br />
actually had a meatspace body ...<br />
Amber finds the Slug browsing quietly in a transparent space filled with lazily waving branches that resemble violet coral fans.<br />
They're a ghost-memory of alien life, an order of thermophilic quasi fungi with hyphae ridged in actin/myosin analogues,<br />
muscular and slippery filter feeders that eat airborne unicellular organisms. The Slug itself is about two meters long and has a<br />
lacy white exoskeleton of curves and arcs that don't repeat, disturbingly similar to a Penrose tiling. Chocolate brown organs<br />
pulse slowly under the skeleton. The ground underfoot is dry but feels swampy.<br />
Actually, the Slug is a surgical disguise. Both it and the quasi-fungal ecosystem have been extinct for millions of years, existing<br />
only as cheap stage props in an interstellar medicine show run by rogue financial instruments. The Slug itself is one such<br />
self-aware scam, probably a pyramid scheme or even an entire compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to<br />
hide from its creditors by masquerading as a life-form. But there's a problem with incarnating itself down in Sirhan's habitat<br />
– the ecosystem it evolved for is a cool Venusiform, thirty atmospheres of saturated steam baked under a sky the color of<br />
hot lead streaked with yellow sulphuric acid clouds. The ground is mushy because it's melting, not because it's damp.<br />
"You're going to have to pick another somatotype," Amber explains, laboriously rolling her interface around the red-hot<br />
coral reef like a giant soap bubble. The environmental interface is transparent and infinitely thin, a discontinuity in the<br />
physics model of the simulation space, mapping signals between the human-friendly environment on one side and the<br />
crushing, roasting hell on the other. "This one is simply not compatible with any of the supported environments where we're<br />
going."<br />
"I am not understanding. Surely I can integrate with the available worlds of our destination?"<br />
"Uh, things don't work that way outside cyberspace." Suddenly Amber is at a bit of a loss. "The physics model could be<br />
supported, but the energy input to do so would be prohibitive, and you would not be able to interact as easily with other<br />
physics models as we can now." She forks a ghost, demonstrates a transient other-Amber in a refrigerated tank rolling across<br />
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the Slug's backyard, crushing coral and hissing and clanking noisily. "You'd be like this."<br />
"Your reality is badly constructed, then," the Slug points out.<br />
"It's not constructed at all, it just evolved, randomly." Amber shrugs. "We can't exercise the same level of control over the<br />
underlying embedded context that we can over this one. I can't simply magic you an interface that will let you bathe in<br />
steam at three hundred degrees."<br />
"Why not?" asks the Slug. Translation wetware adds a nasty, sharp rising whine to the question, turning it into a demand.<br />
"It's a privilege violation," Amber tries to explain. "The reality we're about to enter is, uh, provably consistent. It has to be,<br />
because it's consistent and stable, and if we could create new local domains with different rules, they might propagate<br />
uncontrollably. It's not a good idea, believe me. Do you want to come with us or not?"<br />
"I have no alternative," the Slug says, slightly sulkily. "But do you have a body I can use?"<br />
"I think –" Amber stops, suddenly. She snaps her fingers. "Hey, cat!"<br />
A Cheshire grin ripples into view, masked into the domain wall between the two embedded realities. "Hey, human."<br />
"Whoa!" Amber takes a backward step from the apparition. "Our friend here's got a problem, no suitable downloadable<br />
body. Us meat puppets are all too closely tied to our neural ultrastructure, but you've got a shitload of programmable gate<br />
arrays. Can we borrow some?"<br />
"You can do better than that." Aineko yawns, gathering substance by the moment. The Slug is rearing up and backing away<br />
like an alarmed sausage: Whatever it perceives in the membrane seems to frighten it. "I've been designing myself a new body. I<br />
figured it was time to change my style for a while. Your corporate scam artist here can borrow my old template until<br />
something better comes up. How's that?"<br />
"Did you hear that?" Amber asks the Slug. "Aineko is kindly offering to donate her body to you. Will that do?" Without<br />
waiting, she winks at her cat and taps her heels together, fading out with a whisper and a smile: "See you on the other side<br />
..."<br />
* * *<br />
It takes several minutes for the Field Circus's antique transceiver to download the dozens of avabits occupied by the<br />
frozen state vectors of each of the people running in its simulation engines. Tucked away with most of them is a resource<br />
bundle consisting of their entire sequenced genome, a bunch of phenotypic and proteome hint markers, and a wish list of<br />
upgrades. Between the gene maps and the hints, there's enough data to extrapolate a meat machine. So the festival city's<br />
body shop goes to work turning out hacked stem cells and fabbing up incubators.<br />
It doesn't take very long to reincarnate a starshipful of relativity-lagged humans these days. First, City carves out skeletons for<br />
them (politely ignoring a crudely phrased request to cease and desist from Pamela, on the grounds that she has no power of<br />
attorney), then squirts osteoclasts into the spongy ersatz bone. They look like ordinary human stem cells at a distance, but<br />
instead of nuclei they have primitive pinpricks of computronium, blobs of smart matter so small they're as dumb as an<br />
ancient Pentium, reading a control tape that is nevertheless better structured than anything Mother Nature evolved. These<br />
heavily optimized fake stem cells – biological robots in all but name – spawn like cancer, ejecting short-lived anucleated<br />
secondary cells. Then City infuses each mess of quasi-cancerous tissue with a metric shitload of carrier capsids, which deliver<br />
the real cellular control mechanisms to their target bodies. Within a megasecond, the almost random churning of the<br />
construction 'bots gives way to a more controlled process as nanoscale CPUs are replaced by ordinary nuclei and eject<br />
themselves from their host cells, bailing out via the half-formed renal system – except for those in the central nervous system,<br />
which have a final job to do. Eleven days after the invitation, the first passengers are being edited into the pattern of synaptic<br />
junctions inside the newly minted skulls.<br />
(This whole process is tediously slow and laughably obsolescent technology by the standards of the fast-moving core. Down<br />
there, they'd just set up a wake shield in orbit, chill it down to a fractional Kelvin, whack two coherent matter beams<br />
together, teleport some state information into place, and yank the suddenly materialized meatbody in through an airlock<br />
before it has time to asphyxiate. But then again, down in the hot space, they don't have much room for flesh anymore ...)<br />
Sirhan doesn't pay much attention to the pseudocancers fermenting and churning in the row of tanks that lines the Gallery<br />
of the Human Body in the Bush wing of the museum. Newly formed, slowly unskeletonizing corpses – like a time-lapse<br />
process of decay with a finger angrily twisting the dial into high-speed reverse – is both distasteful and aesthetically displeasing<br />
to watch. Nor do the bodies tell him anything about their occupants. This sort of stuff is just a necessary prequel to the<br />
main event, a formal reception and banquet to which he has devoted the full-time attention of four ghosts.<br />
He could, given a few less inhibitions, go Dumpster-diving in their mental archives, but that's one of the big taboos of the<br />
post-wetware age. (Spy agencies went meme-profiling and memory-mining in the third and fourth decades, gained a thought<br />
police rap sheet, and spawned a backlash of deviant mental architectures resilient to infowar intrusions. Now the nations that<br />
those spook institutions served no longer exist, their very landmasses being part of the orbiting nöosphere construction<br />
project that will ultimately turn the mass of the entire solar system into a gigantic Matrioshka brain. And Sirhan is left with<br />
an uneasy loyalty to the one great new taboo to be invented since the end of the twentieth century – freedom of thought.)<br />
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So, to indulge his curiosity, he spends most of his waking fleshbody hours with Pamela, asking her questions from time to<br />
time and mapping the splenetic overspill of her memeome into his burgeoning family knowledge base.<br />
"I wasn't always this bitter and cynical," Pamela explains, waving her cane in the vague direction of the cloudscape beyond<br />
the edge of the world and fixing Sirhan with a beady stare. (He's brought her out here hoping that it will trigger another<br />
cascade of memories, sunsets on honeymoon island resorts and the like, but all that seems to be coming up is bile.) "It was<br />
the successive betrayals. Manfred was the first, and the worst in some ways, but that little bitch Amber hurt me more, if<br />
anything. If you ever have children, be careful to hold something back for yourself; because if you don't, when they throw it<br />
all in your face, you'll feel like dying. And when they're gone, you've got no way of patching things up."<br />
"Is dying inevitable?" asks Sirhan, knowing damn well that it isn't, but more than happy to give her an excuse to pick at her<br />
scabbed-over love wound: He more than half suspects she's still in love with Manfred. This is great family history, and he's<br />
having the time of his flinty-hearted life leading her up to the threshold of the reunion he's hosting.<br />
"Sometimes I think death is even more inevitable than taxes," his grandmother replies bleakly. "Humans don't live in a<br />
vacuum; we're part of a larger pattern of life." She stares out across the troposphere of Saturn, where a thin rime of blown<br />
methane snow catches the distant sunrise in a ruby-tinted fog. "The old gives way to the new," She sighs, and tugs at her<br />
cuffs. (Ever since the incident with the gate crashing ape, she's taken to wearing an antique formal pressure suit, all clinging<br />
black spidersilk woven with flexible pipes and silvery smart sensor nets.) "There's a time to get out of the way of the new, and<br />
I think I passed it sometime ago."<br />
"Um," says Sirhan, who is somewhat surprised by this new angle in her lengthy, self-justifying confession: "but what if you're<br />
just saying this because you feel old? If it's just a physiological malfunction, we could fix it and you'd –"<br />
"No! I've got a feeling that life prolongation is morally wrong, Sirhan. I'm not passing judgment on you, just stating that I think<br />
it's wrong for me. It's immoral because it blocks up the natural order, keeps us old cobweb strands hanging around and<br />
getting in you young things' way. And then there are the theological questions. If you try to live forever, you never get to<br />
meet your maker."<br />
"Your maker? Are you a theist, then?"<br />
"I – think so." Pamela is silent for a minute. "Although there are so many different approaches to the subject that it's hard to<br />
know which version to believe. For a long time, I was secretly afraid your grandfather might actually have had the answers.<br />
That I might have been wrong all along. But now –" She leans on her cane. "When he announced that he was uploading, I<br />
figured out that all he really had was a life-hating antihuman ideology he'd mistaken for a religion. The rapture of the nerds<br />
and the heaven of the AIs. Sorry, no thanks; I don't buy it."<br />
"Oh." Sirhan squints out at the cloudscape. For a moment, he thinks he can see something in the distant mist, an<br />
indeterminate distance away – it's hard to distinguish centimeters from megameters, with no scale indicator and a horizon a<br />
continental distance away – but he's not sure what it is. Maybe another city, mollusk-curved and sprouting antennae, a<br />
strange tail of fabricator nodes wavering below and beneath it. Then a drift of cloud hides it for a moment, and, when it<br />
clears the object is gone. "What's left, then? If you don't really believe in some kind of benign creator, dying must be<br />
frightening. Especially as you're doing it so slowly."<br />
Pamela smiles skeletally, a particularly humorless expression. "It's perfectly natural, darling! You don't need to believe in God<br />
to believe in embedded realities. We use them every day, as mind tools. Apply anthropic reasoning and isn't it clear that our<br />
entire universe is probably a simulation? We're living in the early epoch of the universe. Probably this" – she prods at the<br />
spun-diamond inner wall of the bubble that holds in the precarious terrestrial atmosphere, holding out the howling<br />
cryogenic hydrogen and methane gales of Saturn – "is but a simulation in some ancient history engine's panopticon,<br />
rerunning the sum of all possible origins of sentience, a billion trillion megayears down the line. Death will be like waking up<br />
as someone bigger, that's all." Her grin slides away. "And if not, I'll just be a silly old fool who deserves the oblivion she yearns<br />
for."<br />
"Oh, but –" Sirhan stops, his skin crawling. She may be mad, he realizes abruptly. Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire<br />
universe. Locked into a pathological view of her own role in reality. "I'd hoped for a reconciliation," he says quietly. "Your<br />
extended family has lived through some extraordinary times. Why spoil it with acrimony?"<br />
"Why spoil it?" She looks at him pityingly: "It was spoiled to begin with, dear, too much selfless sacrifice and too little<br />
skepticism. If Manfred hadn't wanted so badly not to be human, and if I'd learned to be a bit more flexible in time, we might<br />
still –" She trails off. "That's odd."<br />
"What is?"<br />
Pamela raises her cane and points out into the billowing methane thunderclouds, her expression puzzled. "I'll swear I saw a<br />
lobster out there ..."<br />
* * *<br />
Amber awakens in the middle of the night in darkness and choking pressure, and senses that she's drowning. For a moment<br />
she's back in the ambiguous space on the far side of the router, a horror of crawling instruments tracing her every<br />
experience back to the nooks and crannies of her mind; then her lungs turn to glass and shatter, and she's coughing and<br />
wheezing in the cold air of the museum at midnight.<br />
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The hard stone floor beneath her, and an odd pain in her knees, tells her that she's not aboard the Field Circus anymore.<br />
Rough hands hold her shoulders up as she vomits a fine blue mist, racked by a coughing fit. More bluish liquid is oozing<br />
from the pores of the skin on her arms and breasts, evaporating in strangely purposeful streamers. "Thank you," she finally<br />
manages to gasp: "I can breathe now."<br />
She sits back on her heels, realizes she's naked, and opens her eyes. Everything's confusingly strange, even though it shouldn't<br />
be. There's a moment of resistance as if her eyelids are sealed – then they respond. It all feels strangely familiar to her, like<br />
waking up again inside a house she grew up in and moved away from years ago. But the scene around her is hardly one to<br />
inspire confidence. Shadows lie thick and deep across ovoid tanks filled with an anatomist's dream, bodies in various<br />
nightmarish stages of assembly. And sitting in the middle of them, whence it has retreated after letting go of her shoulders, is<br />
a strangely misshapen person – also nude, but for a patchy coat of orange hair.<br />
"Are you awake yet, ma chérie?" asks the orang-utan.<br />
"Um." Amber shakes her head, cautiously, feeling the drag of damp hair, the faint caress of a breeze – she reaches out with<br />
another sense and tries to grab hold of reality, but it slithers away, intransigent and unembedded. Everything around her is<br />
so solid and immutable that, for a moment, she feels a stab of claustrophobic panic: Help! I'm trapped in the real universe!<br />
Another quick check reassures her that she's got access to something outside her own head, and the panic begins to subside:<br />
Her exocortex has migrated successfully to this world. "I'm in a museum? On Saturn? Who are you – have we met?"<br />
"Not in person," the ape says carefully. "We 'ave corresponded. Annette Dimarcos."<br />
"Auntie –" A flood of memories rattle Amber's fragile stream of consciousness apart, forcing her to fork repeatedly until she<br />
can drag them together. Annette, in a recorded message: Your father sends you this escape package. The legal key to her<br />
mother's gilded custodial cage. Freedom a necessity. "Is Dad here?" she asks hopefully, even though she knows full well that<br />
here in the real world at least thirty-five years have passed in linear time: In a century where ten years of linear time is<br />
enough for several industrial revolutions, that's a lot of water under the bridge.<br />
"I am not sure." The orang-utan blinks lazily, scratches at her left forearm, and glances round the chamber. "He might be in<br />
one of these tanks, playing a shell game. Or he might be leaving well enough alone until the dust settles." She turns back to<br />
stare at Amber with big, brown, soulful eyes. "This is not to be the reunion you were hoping for."<br />
"Not –" Amber takes a deep breath, the tenth or twelfth that these new lungs have inspired: "What's with the body? You<br />
used to be human. And what's going on?"<br />
"I still am human, where it counts," says Annette. "I use these bodies because they are good in low gravity, and they remind<br />
me that meatspace is no longer where I live. And for another reason." She gestures fluidly at the open door. "You will find<br />
big changes. Your son has organized –"<br />
"My son." Amber blinks. "Is this the one who's suing me? Which version of me? How long ago?" A torrent of questions stream<br />
through her mind, exploding out into structured queries throughout the public sections of mindspace that she has access<br />
to. Her eyes widen as she absorbs the implications. "Oh shit! Tell me she isn't here already!"<br />
"I am very much afraid that she is," says Annette. "Sirhan is a strange child: He takes after his grandmère. Who he, of course,<br />
invited to his party."<br />
"His party?"<br />
"Why, yes! Hasn't he told you what this is about? It's his party. To mark the opening of his special institution. The family<br />
archive. He's setting the lawsuit aside, at least for the duration. That's why everybody is here – even me." The ape-body<br />
smirks at her: "I'm afraid he's rather disappointed by my dress."<br />
"Tell me about this library," Amber says, narrowing her eyes. "And about this son of mine whom I've never met, by a father<br />
I've never fucked."<br />
"What, you would know everything?" asks Annette.<br />
"Yeah." Amber pushes herself creakily upright. "I need some clothes. And soft furniture. And where do I get a drink around<br />
here?"<br />
"I'll show you," says the orang-utan, unfolding herself in a vertical direction like a stack of orange furry inner tubes. "Drinks,<br />
first."<br />
* * *<br />
While the Boston Museum of <strong>Science</strong> is the main structure on the lily-pad habitat, it's not the only one: just the stupidest,<br />
composed of dumb matter left over from the pre-enlightened age. The orang-utan leads Amber through a service passage<br />
and out into the temperate night, naked by ringlight. The grass is cool beneath her feet, and a gentle breeze blows constantly<br />
out toward the recirculators at the edge of the worldlet. She follows the slouching orange ape up a grassy slope, under a<br />
weeping willow, round a three-hundred-and-ninety-degree bend that flashes the world behind them into invisibility, and into<br />
a house with walls of spun cloud stuff and a ceiling that rains moonlight.<br />
"What is this?" Amber asks, entranced. "Some kind of aerogel?"<br />
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"No –" Annette belches, then digs a hand into the floor and pulls up a heap of mist. "Make a chair," she says. It solidifies,<br />
gaining form and texture until a creditable Queen Anne reproduction stands in front of Amber on spindly legs. "And one<br />
for me. Skin up, pick one of my favorite themes." The walls recede slightly and harden, extruding paint and wood and glass.<br />
"That's it." The ape grins at Amber. "You are comfortable?"<br />
"But I –" Amber stops. She glances at the familiar mantelpiece, the row of curios, the baby photographs forever glossy on<br />
their dye-sub media. It's her childhood bedroom. "You brought the whole thing? Just for me?"<br />
"You can never tell with future shock." Annette shrugs and reaches a limber arm around the back of her neck to scratch.<br />
"We are utility fog using, for most purposes out here, peer-to-peer meshes of multiarmed assemblers that change<br />
conformation and vapor/solid phase at command. Texture and color are all superfice, not reality. But yes, this came from<br />
one of your mother's letters to your father. She brought it here, for you to surprise. If only it is ready in time." Lips pull<br />
back from big, square, foliage-chewing teeth in something that might be a smile in a million years' time.<br />
"You, I – I wasn't expecting. This." Amber realizes she's breathing rapidly, a near-panic reflex. The mere proximity of her<br />
mother is enough to give her unpleasant reactions. Annette is all right, Annette is cool. And her father is the trickster-god,<br />
always hiding in your blind spot to leap out and shower you with ambiguous gifts. But Pamela tried to mold Amber in her<br />
own image as a child; and despite all the traveling she's done since then, and all the growing up, Amber harbors an<br />
unreasonable claustrophobic fear of her mother.<br />
"Don't be unhappy," Annette says warmly. "I this you show to convince you, she will try to disturb you. It is a sign of<br />
weakness, she lacks the courage of her convictions."<br />
"She does?" This is news to Amber, who leans forward to listen.<br />
"Yes. She is an old and bitter woman, now. The years have not been easy for her. She perhaps intends to use her unrepaired<br />
senescence as a passive suicide weapon by which to hold us blameworthy, inflicting guilt for her mistreatment, but she is<br />
afraid of dying all the same. Your reaction, should it be unhappy, will excuse and encourage her selfishness. Sirhan colludes,<br />
unknowing, the idiot child. He thinks the universe of her and thinks by helping her die he is helping her achieve her goals.<br />
He has never met an adult walking backward toward a cliff before."<br />
"Backward." Amber takes a deep breath. "You're telling me Mom is so unhappy she's trying to kill herself by growing old? Isn't<br />
that a bit slow?"<br />
Annette shakes her head lugubriously. "She's had fifty years to practice. You have been away twenty-eight years! She was<br />
thirty when she bore you. Now she is over eighty, and a telomere refusenik, a charter member of the genome conservation<br />
front. To accept a slow virus purge and aging reset would be to lay down a banner she has carried for half a century. To<br />
accept uploading, that, too, is wrong in her mind: She will not admit her identity is a variable, not a constant. She came out<br />
here in a can, frozen, with more radiation damage. She is not going back home. This is where she plans to end her days. Do<br />
you see? That is why you were brought here. That, and because of the bailiffs who have bought title to your other self's<br />
business debts. They are waiting for you in Jupiter system with warrants and headsuckers to extract your private keys."<br />
"She's cornered me!"<br />
"Oh, I would not say that. We all change our convictions sometime or other, perhaps. She is inflexible, she will not bend; but<br />
she is not stupid. Nor is she as vindictive as perhaps she herself believes. She thinks she must a scorned woman be, even<br />
though there is more to her than that. Your father and I, we –"<br />
"Is he still alive?" Amber demands eagerly, half-anxious to know, half- wishing she could be sure the news won't be bad.<br />
"Yes." Annette grins again, but it's not a happy expression, more a baring of teeth at the world. "As I was saying, your father<br />
and I, we have tried to help her. Pamela denies him. He is, she says, not a man. No more so am I myself a woman? No, but<br />
she'll still talk to me. You will do better. But his assets, they are spent. He is not a rich man this epoch, your father."<br />
"Yeah, but." Amber nods to herself. "He may be able to help me."<br />
"Oh? How so?"<br />
"You remember the original goal of the Field Circus? The sapient alien transmission?"<br />
"Yes, of course." Annette snorts. "Junk bond pyramid schemes from credulous saucer wisdom airheads."<br />
Amber licks her lips. "How susceptible to interception are we here?"<br />
"Here?" Annette glances round. "Very. You can't maintain a habitat in a nonbiosphere environment without ubiquitous<br />
surveillance."<br />
"Well, then ..."<br />
Amber dives inward, forks her identity, collects a complex bundle of her thoughts and memories, marshals them, offers<br />
Annette one end of an encryption tunnel, then stuffs the frozen mindstorm into her head. Annette sits still for<br />
approximately ten seconds, then shudders and whimpers quietly. "You must ask your father," she says, growing visibly<br />
agitated. "I must leave, now. I should not have known that! It is dynamite, you see. Political dynamite. I must return to my<br />
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primary sister-identity and warn her."<br />
"Your – wait!" Amber stands up as fast as her ill-coordinated body will let her, but Annette is moving fast, swarming up a<br />
translucent ladder in the air.<br />
"Tell Manfred!" calls her aunt through the body of an ape: "Trust no one else!" She throws another packet of compressed,<br />
encrypted memories down the tunnel to Amber; then, a moment later, the orange skull touches the ceiling and dissolves, a<br />
liquid flow of dissociating utility foglets letting go of one another and dispersing into the greater mass of the building that<br />
spawned the fake ape.<br />
Snapshots from the family album: While you were gone ...<br />
* * *<br />
Amber, wearing a brocade gown and a crown encrusted with diamond processors and external neural taps, her<br />
royal party gathered around her, attends the pan-Jovian constitutional conference with the majesty of a confirmed<br />
head of state and ruler of a small inner moon. She smiles knowingly at the camera viewpoint, with the professional<br />
shine that comes from a good public relations video filter. "We are very happy to be here," she says, "and we are<br />
pleased that the commission has agreed to lend its weight to the continued progress of the Ring Imperium's<br />
deep-space program."<br />
A piece of dumb paper, crudely stained with letters written in a faded brown substance – possibly blood – says "I'm<br />
checking out, don't delta me." This version of Pierre didn't go to the router: He stayed at home, deleted all his<br />
backups, and slit his wrists, his epitaph sharp and self-inflicted. It comes as a cold shock, the first chill gust of winter's<br />
gale blowing through the outer system's political elite. And it's the start of a regime of censorship directed toward<br />
the already speeding starwisp: Amber, in her grief, makes an executive decision not to tell her embassy to the stars<br />
that one of them is dead and, therefore, unique.<br />
Manfred – fifty, with the fashionably pale complexion of the digerati, healthy-looking for his age, standing beside a<br />
transmigration bush with a stupid grin on his face. He's decided to take the final step, not simply to spawn external<br />
mental processes running in an exocortex of distributed processors, but to move his entire persona right out of<br />
meatspace, into wherever it is that the uploads aboard the Field Circus have gone. Annette, skinny, elegant, and<br />
very Parisian, stands beside him, looking as uncertain as the wife of a condemned man.<br />
A wedding, shi'ite, Mut'ah – of limited duration. It's scandalous to many, but the mamtu'ah isn't moslem, she wears a<br />
crown instead of a veil, and her groom is already spoken of in outraged terms by most other members of the<br />
trans-Martian Islamic clergy. Besides which, in addition to being in love, the happy couple have more strategic<br />
firepower than a late-twentieth-century superpower. Their cat, curled at their feet, looks smug: She's the custodian of<br />
the permissive action locks on the big lasers.<br />
A speck of ruby light against the darkness – red-shifted almost into the infrared, it's the return signal from the Field<br />
Circus's light sail as the starwisp passes the one-light-year mark, almost twelve trillion kilometers out beyond Pluto.<br />
(Although how can you call it a starwisp when it masses almost a hundred kilograms, including propulsion module?<br />
Starwhisps are meant to be tiny!)<br />
Collapse of the trans-Lunar economy: Deep in the hot thinking depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come<br />
up with a new theory of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than the previously pervasive Free Market<br />
1.0. With no local minima to hamper them, and no need to spawn and reap start-ups Darwin-style, the companies,<br />
group minds, and organizations that adopt the so-called Accelerated Salesman Infrastructure of Economics 2.0 trade<br />
optimally with each other. The phase change accelerates as more and more entities join in, leveraging network<br />
externalities to overtake the traditional ecosystem. Amber and Sadeq are late on the train, Sadeq obsessing about<br />
how to reconcile ASI with murabaha and mudaraba while the postmodern economy of the mid-twenty-first century<br />
disintegrates around them. Being late has punitive consequences – the Ring Imperium has always been a net importer<br />
of brainpower and a net exporter of gravitational potential energy. Now it's a tired backwater, the bit rate from the<br />
red-shifted relativisitic probe insufficiently delightful to obsess the daemons of industrial routing. In other words,<br />
they're poor.<br />
A message from beyond the grave: The travelers aboard the starship have reached their destination, an alien artifact<br />
drifting in chilly orbit around a frozen brown dwarf. Recklessly they upload themselves into it, locking the starwisp<br />
down for years of sleep. Amber and her husband have few funds with which to pay for the propulsion lasers: what<br />
they have left of the kinetic energy of the Ring Imperium – based on the orbital momentum of a small Jovian inner<br />
moon – is being sapped, fast, at a near-loss, by the crude requirements of the exobionts and metanthropes who fork<br />
and spawn in the datasphere of the outer Jovians. The cost of importing brains to the Ring Imperium is steep: In<br />
near-despair Amber and Sadeq produce a child, Generation 3.0, to populate their dwindling kingdom. Picture the<br />
cat, offended, lashing its tail beside the zero-gee crib.<br />
Surprise and postcards from the inner orbitals – Amber's mother offers to help. For the sake of the child, Sadeq<br />
offers bandwidth and user interface enrichment. The child forks, numerous times, as Amber despairingly plays with<br />
probabilities, simulating upbringing outcomes. Neither she nor Sadeq are good parents – the father absent-minded<br />
and prone to lose himself in the intertextual deconstruction of surahs, the mother ragged-edged from running the<br />
economy of a small and failing kingdom. In the space of a decade, Sirhan lives a dozen lives, discarding identities like<br />
old clothes. The uncertainty of life in the decaying Ring Imperium does not entrance him, his parents' obsessions<br />
annoy him, and when his grandmother offers to fund his delta vee and subsequent education in one of the orbitals<br />
around Titan, his parents give their reluctant assent.<br />
Amber and Sadeq separate acrimoniously. Sadeq, studies abandoned in the face of increasing intrusions from the<br />
world of what is into the universe of what should be, joins a spacelike sect of sufis, encysted in a matrix of vitrification<br />
nanomechs out in the Oort cloud to await a better epoch. His instrument of will – the legal mechanism of his<br />
resurrection – specifies that he is waiting for the return of the hidden, twelfth imam.<br />
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For her part, Amber searches the inner system briefly for word of her father – but there's nothing. Isolated and<br />
alone, pursued by accusing debts, she flings herself into a reborganization, stripping away those aspects of her<br />
personality that have brought her low; in law, her liability is tied to her identity. Eventually she donates herself to a<br />
commune of also-rans, accepting their personality in return for a total break with the past.<br />
Without Queen and consort, the Ring Imperium – now unmanned, leaking breathing gases, running on autonomic<br />
control – slowly deorbits into the Jovian murk, beaming power to the outer moons until it punches a hole in the<br />
cloud deck in a final incandescent smear of light, the like of which has not been seen since the Shoemaker-Levy 9<br />
impact.<br />
Sirhan, engrossed in Saturnalia, is offended by his parents' failure to make more of themselves. And he resolves to do<br />
it for them, if not necessarily in a manner of their liking.<br />
"You see, I am hoping you will help me with my history project," says the serious-faced young man.<br />
* * *<br />
"History project." Pierre follows him along the curving gallery, hands clasped behind his back self-consciously to keep from<br />
showing his agitation: "What history is this?"<br />
"The history of the twenty-first century," says Sirhan. "You remember it, don't you?"<br />
"Remember it –" Pierre pauses. "You're serious?"<br />
"Yes." Sirhan opens a side door. "This way, please. I'll explain."<br />
The door opens onto what used to be one of the side galleries of the museum building, full of interactive exhibits designed to<br />
explain elementary optics to hyperactive children and their indulgent parental units. Traditional optics are long since<br />
obsolete – tunable matter can slow photons to a stop, teleport them here to there, play ping-pong with spin and<br />
polarization – and besides, the dumb matter in the walls and floor has been replaced by low-power computronium, heat<br />
sinks dangling far below the floor of the lily-pad habitat to dispose of the scanty waste photons from reversible computation.<br />
Now the room is empty.<br />
"Since I became curator here, I've turned the museum's structural supports into a dedicated high-density memory store. One<br />
of the fringe benefits of a supervisory post, of course. I have about a billion avabits of capacity, enough to archive the<br />
combined sensory bandwidth and memories of the entire population of twentieth-century Earth – if that was what interested<br />
me."<br />
Slowly the walls and ceiling are coming to life, brightening, providing a dizzyingly vibrant view of dawn over the rim wall of<br />
Meteor Crater, Arizona – or maybe it's downtown Baghdad.<br />
"Once I realized how my mother had squandered the family fortune, I spent some time looking for a solution to the<br />
problem," Sirhan continues. "And it struck me, then, that there's only one commodity that is going to appreciate in value as<br />
time continues: reversibility."<br />
"Reversibility? That doesn't make much sense." Pierre shakes his head. He still feels slightly dizzy from his decanting. He's only<br />
been awake an hour or so and is still getting used to the vagaries of a universe that doesn't bend its rules to fit his whim of<br />
iron – that, and worrying about Amber, of whom there is no sign in the hall of growing bodies. "Excuse me, please, but do<br />
you know where Amber is?"<br />
"Hiding, probably," Sirhan says, without rancor. "Her mother's about," he adds. "Why do you ask?"<br />
"I don't know what you know about us." Pierre looks at him askance: "We were aboard the Field Circus for a long time."<br />
"Oh, don't worry on my behalf. I know you're not the same people who stayed behind to contribute to the Ring Imperium's<br />
collapse," Sirhan says dismissively, while Pierre hastily spawns a couple of ghosts to search for the history he's alluding to.<br />
What they discover shocks him to the core as they integrate with his conscious narrative.<br />
"We didn't know about any of that!" Pierre crosses his arms defensively. "Not about you, or your father either," he adds<br />
quietly. "Or my other ... life." Shocked: Did I kill myself? Why would I do a thing like that? Nor can he imagine what Amber<br />
might see in an introverted cleric like Sadeq; not that he wants to.<br />
"I'm sure this must come as a big shock to you," Sirhan says condescendingly, "but it's all to do with what I was talking about.<br />
Reversibility. What does it mean to you, in your precious context? You are, if you like, an opportunity to reverse whatever ill<br />
fortune made your primary instance autodarwinate himself. He destroyed all the back-ups he could get his ghosts to ferret<br />
out, you know. Only a light-year delay line and the fact that as a running instance you're technically a different person saved<br />
you. And now, you're alive, and he's dead – and whatever made him kill himself doesn't apply to you. Think of it as natural<br />
selection among different versions of yourself. The fittest version of you survives."<br />
He points at the wall of the crater. A tree diagram begins to grow from the bottom left corner of the wall, recurving and<br />
recomplicating as it climbs toward the top right, zooming and fracturing into taxonomic fault lines. "Life on Earth, the family<br />
tree, what paleontology has been able to deduce of it for us," he says pompously. "The vertebrates begin there" – a point<br />
three quarters of the way up the tree – "and we've got an average of a hundred fossil samples per megayear from then on.<br />
Most of them collected in the past two decades, as exhaustive mapping of the Earth's crust and upper mantle at the<br />
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micrometer level has become practical. What a waste."<br />
"That's" – Pierre does a quick sum – "fifty thousand different species? Is there a problem?"<br />
"Yes!" Sirhan says vehemently, no longer aloof or distant. He struggles visibly to get himself under control. "At the beginning<br />
of the twentieth century, there were roughly two million species of vertebrate and an estimated thirty or so million species of<br />
multicellular organisms – it's hard to apply the same statistical treatment to prokaryotes, but doubtless there were huge<br />
numbers of them, too. The average life span of a species is about five megayears. It used to be thought to be about one, but<br />
that's a very vertebrate-oriented estimate – many insect species are stable over deep time. Anyway, we have a total sample,<br />
from all of history, of only fifty thousand known prehistoric species – out of a population of thirty million, turning over<br />
every five million years. That is, we know of only one in a million life-forms, of those that ever existed on Earth. And the<br />
situation with human history is even worse."<br />
"Aha! So you're after memories, yes? What really happened when we colonized Barney. Who released Oscar's toads in the<br />
free-fall core of the Ernst Sanger, that sort of thing?"<br />
"Not exactly." Sirhan looks pained, as if being forced to spell it out devalues the significance of his insight. "I'm after history. All<br />
of it. I intend to corner the history futures market. But I need my grandfather's help – and you're here to help me get it."<br />
* * *<br />
Over the course of the day, various refugees from the Field Circus hatch from their tanks and blink in the ringlight,<br />
stranded creatures from an earlier age. The inner system is a vague blur from this distance, a swollen red cloud masking the<br />
sun that rides high above the horizon. However, the great restructuring is still visible to the naked eye – here, in the shape<br />
of the rings, which show a disturbingly organized fractal structure as they whirl in orbit overhead. Sirhan (or whoever is<br />
paying for this celebration of family flesh) has provided for their physical needs: food, water, clothes, housing and bandwidth,<br />
they're all copiously available. A small town of bubble homes grows on the grassy knoll adjacent to the museum, utility foglets<br />
condensing in a variety of shapes and styles.<br />
Sirhan isn't the only inhabitant of the festival city, but the others keep themselves to themselves. Only bourgeois isolationists<br />
and reclusive weirdoes would want to live out here right now, with whole light-minutes between themselves and the rest of<br />
civilization. The network of lily-pad habitats isn't yet ready for the Saturnalian immigration wave that will break upon this<br />
alien shore when it's time for the Worlds' Fair, a decade or more in the future. Amber's flying circus has driven the native<br />
recluses underground, in some cases literally: Sirhan's neighbor, Vinca Kovic, after complaining bitterly about the bustle and<br />
noise ("Forty immigrants! An outrage!"), has wrapped himself in an environment pod and is estivating at the end of a<br />
spider-silk cable a kilometer beneath the space-frame underpinnings of the city.<br />
But that isn't going to stop Sirhan from organizing a reception for the visitors. He's moved his magnificent dining table<br />
outside, along with the Argentinosaurus skeleton. In fact, he's built a dining room within the dinosaur's rib cage. Not that<br />
he's planning on showing his full hand, but it'll be interesting to see how his guests respond. And maybe it'll flush out the<br />
mystery benefactor who's been paying for all these meatbodies.<br />
Sirhan's agents politely invite his visitors to the party as the second sunset in this day cycle gently darkens the sky to violet.<br />
He discusses his plans with Pamela via antique voice-only phone as his silent valet dresses him with inhuman grace and<br />
efficiency. "I'm sure they'll listen when the situation is made clear to them," he says. "If not, well, they'll soon find out what it<br />
means to be paupers under Economics 2.0. No access to multiplicity, no willpower, to be limited to purely spacelike<br />
resources, at the mercy of predatory borganisms and metareligions – it's no picnic out there!"<br />
"You don't have the resources to set this up on your own," his grandmother points out in dry, didactic tones. "If this was<br />
the old economy, you could draw on the infrastructure of banks, insurers, and other risk management mechanisms –"<br />
"There's no risk to this venture, in purely human terms," Sirhan insists. "The only risk is starting it up with such a limited<br />
reserve."<br />
"You win some, you lose some," Pamela points out. "Let me see you." With a sigh, Sirhan waves at a frozen camera; it blinks,<br />
surprised. "Hey, you look good! Every inch the traditional family entrepreneur. I'm proud of you, darling."<br />
Blinking back an unaccustomed tear of pride, Sirhan nods. "I'll see you in a few minutes," he says, and cuts the call. To the<br />
nearest valet: "Bring my carriage, now."<br />
A rippling cloud of utility foglets, constantly connecting and disconnecting in the hazy outline of a 1910-vintage Rolls Royce<br />
Silver Ghost, bears Sirhan silently away from his wing of the museum. It drives him out onto the sunset path around the<br />
building, over to the sunken amphitheatre, where the mounted skeleton of the Argentinosaurus stands like a half-melted<br />
columnar sculpture beneath the orange-and-silver ringlight. A small crowd of people are already present, some dressed<br />
casually and some attired in the formal garb of earlier decades. Most of them are passengers or crew recently decanted from<br />
the starwisp, but a handful are wary-eyed hermits, their body language defensive and their persons the focus of a constant<br />
orbital hum of security bees. Sirhan dismounts from his silvery car and magics it into dissolution, a haze of foglets dispersing<br />
on the breeze. "Welcome to my abode," he says, bowing gravely to a ring of interested faces. "My name is Sirhan<br />
al-Khurasani, and I am the prime contractor in charge of this small corner of the temporary Saturn terraforming project. As<br />
some of you probably know, I am related by blood and design to your former captain, Amber Macx. I'd like to offer you the<br />
comforts of my home while you acclimatize yourselves to the changed circumstances prevailing in the system at large and<br />
work out where you want to go next."<br />
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He walks toward the front of the U-shaped table of solidified air that floats beneath the dead dinosaur's rib cage, slowly turns<br />
to take in faces, and blinks down captions to remind him who's who in this gathering. He frowns slightly; there's no sign of<br />
his mother. But that wiry fellow, with the beard – surely that can't be – "Father?" he asks.<br />
Sadeq blinks owlishly. "Have we met?"<br />
"Possibly not." Sirhan can feel his head spinning, because although Sadeq looks like a younger version of his father, there's<br />
something wrong – some essential disconnect: the politely solicitous expression, the complete lack of engagement, the absence<br />
of paternal involvement. This Sadeq has never held the infant Sirhan in the control core of the Ring's axial cylinder, never<br />
pointed out the spiral storm raking vast Jupiter's face and told him stories of djinni and marvels to make a boy's hair stand<br />
on end. "I won't hold it against you, I promise," he blurts.<br />
Sadeq raises an eyebrow but passes no comment, leaving Sirhan at the center of an uncomfortable silence. "Well then," he<br />
says hastily. "If you would like to help yourselves to food and drink, there'll be plenty of time to talk later." Sirhan doesn't<br />
believe in forking ghosts simply to interact with other people – the possibilities for confusion are embarrassing – but he's<br />
going to be busy working the party.<br />
He glances round. Here's a bald, aggressive-looking fellow, beetle-browed, wearing what looks like a pair of cut-offs and a top<br />
made by deconstructing a space suit. Who's he? (Sirhan's agents hint: "Boris Denisovitch." But what does that mean?) There's<br />
an amused-looking older woman, a beady-eyed camera painted in the violent colors of a bird of paradise riding her<br />
shoulder. Behind her a younger woman, dressed head to toe in clinging black, her currently ash-blonde hair braided in<br />
cornrows, watches him – as does Pierre, a protective arm around her shoulders. They're – Amber Macx? That's his mother?<br />
She looks far too young, too much in love with Pierre. "Amber!" he says, approaching the couple.<br />
"Yeah? You're, uh, my mystery child-support litigant?" Her smile is distinctly unfriendly as she continues: "Can't say I'm<br />
entirely pleased to meet you, under the circumstances, although I should thank you for the spread."<br />
"I –" His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. "It's not like that."<br />
"What's it supposed to be like?" she asks sharply. jabbing a finger at him: "You know damn well I'm not your mother. So<br />
what's it all about, huh? You know damn well I'm nearly bankrupt, too, so it's not as if you're after my pocket lint. What do<br />
you want from me?"<br />
Her vehemence takes him aback. This sharp-edged aggressive woman isn't his mother, and the introverted cleric – believer –<br />
on the other side isn't his father, either. "I ha-ha-had to stop you heading for the inner system," he says, speech center<br />
hitting deadlock before his antistutter mod can cut in. "They'll eat you alive down there. Your other half left behind<br />
substantial debts, and they've been bought up by the most predatory – "<br />
"Runaway corporate instruments," she states, calmly enough. "Fully sentient and self-directed."<br />
"How did you know?" he asks, worried.<br />
She looks grim. "I've met them before." It's a very familiar grim expression, one he knows intimately, and that feels wrong<br />
coming from this near stranger. "We visited some weird places, while we were away." She glances past him, focuses on<br />
someone else, and breathes in sharply as her face goes blank. "Quickly, tell me what your scheme is. Before Mom gets here."<br />
"Mind archiving and history mergers. Back yourself up, pick different life courses, see which ones work and which don't – no<br />
need to be a failure, just hit the 'reload game' icon and resume. That and a long-term angle on the history futures market. I<br />
need your help," he babbles. "It won't work without family, and I'm trying to stop her killing herself –"<br />
"Family." She nods, guardedly, and Sirhan notices her companion, this Pierre – not the weak link that broke back before he<br />
was born, but a tough-eyed explorer newly returned from the wilderness – sizing him up. Sirhan's got one or two tricks up<br />
his exocortex, and he can see the haze of ghost-shapes around Pierre; his data-mining technique is crude and out-of-date,<br />
but enthusiastic and not without a certain flair. "Family," Amber repeats, and it's like a curse. Louder: "Hello, Mom. Should<br />
have guessed he'd have invited you here, too."<br />
"Guess again." Sirhan glances round at Pamela, then back at Amber, suddenly feeling very much like a rat trapped between a<br />
pair of angry cobras. Leaning on her cane, wearing discreet cosmetics and with her medical supports concealed beneath an<br />
old-fashioned dress, Pamela could be a badly preserved sixtysomething from the old days instead of the ghastly slow suicide<br />
case that her condition amounts to today. She smiles politely at Amber. "You may remember me telling you that a lady never<br />
unintentionally causes offense. I didn't want to offend Sirhan by turning up in spite of his wishes, so I didn't give him a chance<br />
to say no."<br />
"And this is supposed to earn you a sympathy fuck?" Amber drawls. "I'd expected better of you."<br />
"Why, you –" The fire in her eyes dies suddenly, subjected to the freezing pressure of a control that only comes with age. "I'd<br />
hoped getting away from it all would have improved your disposition, if not your manners, but evidently not." Pamela jabs<br />
her cane at the table: "Let me repeat, this is your son's idea. Why don't you eat something?"<br />
"Poison tester goes first." Amber smiles slyly.<br />
"For fuck's sake!" It's the first thing Pierre has said so far, and crude or not, it comes as a profound relief when he steps<br />
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forward, picks up a plate of water biscuits loaded with salmon caviar, and puts one in his mouth. "Can't you guys leave the<br />
back stabbing until the rest of us have filled our stomachs? 'S not as if I can turn down the biophysics model in here." He<br />
shoves the plate at Sirhan. "Go on, it's yours."<br />
The spell is broken. "Thank you," Sirhan says gravely, taking a cracker and feeling the tension fall as Amber and her mother<br />
stop preparing to nuke each other and focus on the issue at hand – which is that food comes before fighting at any social<br />
event, not vice versa.<br />
"You might enjoy the egg mayonnaise, too," Sirhan hears himself saying: "It goes a long way to explaining why the dodo<br />
became extinct first time around."<br />
"Dodoes." Amber keeps one eye warily on her mother as she accepts a plate from a silently gliding silver bush-shaped<br />
waitron. "What was that about the family investment project?" she asks.<br />
"Just that without your cooperation your family will likely go the way of the bird," her mother cuts in before Sirhan can<br />
muster a reply. "Not that I expect you to care."<br />
Boris butts in. "Core worlds are teeming with corporates. Is bad business for us, good business for them. If you are seeing<br />
what we are seen –"<br />
"Don't remember you being there," Pierre says grumpily.<br />
"In any event," Sirhan says smoothly, "the core isn't healthy for us one-time fleshbodies anymore. There are still lots of people<br />
there, but the ones who uploaded expecting a boom economy were sadly disappointed. Originality is at a premium, and the<br />
human neural architecture isn't optimized for it – we are, by disposition, a conservative species, because in a static<br />
ecosystem, that provides the best return on sunk reproductive investment costs. Yes, we change over time – we're more<br />
flexible than almost any other animal species to arise on Earth – but we're like granite statues compared to organisms<br />
adapted to life under Economics 2.0."<br />
"You tell 'em, boy," Pamela chirps, almost mockingly. "It wasn't that bloodless when I lived through it." Amber casts her a<br />
cool stare.<br />
"Where was I?" Sirhan snaps his fingers, and a glass of fizzy grape juice appears between them. "Early upload entrepreneurs<br />
forked repeatedly, discovered they could scale linearly to occupy processor capacity proportional to the mass of<br />
computronium available, and that computationally trivial tasks became tractable. They could also run faster, or slower, than<br />
real time. But they were still human, and unable to operate effectively outside human constraints. Take a human being and<br />
bolt on extensions that let them take full advantage of Economics 2.0, and you essentially break their narrative chain of<br />
consciousness, replacing it with a journal file of bid/request transactions between various agents; it's incredibly efficient and<br />
flexible, but it isn't a conscious human being in any recognizable sense of the word."<br />
"All right," Pierre says slowly. "I think we've seen something like that ourselves. At the router."<br />
Sirhan nods, not sure whether he's referring to anything important. "So you see, there are limits to human progress – but<br />
not to progress itself! The uploads found their labor to be a permanently deflating commodity once they hit their point of<br />
diminishing utility. Capitalism doesn't have a lot to say about workers whose skills are obsolete, other than that they should<br />
invest wisely while they're earning and maybe retrain: but just knowing how to invest in Economics 2.0 is beyond an<br />
unaugmented human. You can't retrain as a seagull, can you, and it's quite as hard to retool for Economics 2.0. Earth is –"<br />
He shudders.<br />
"There's a phrase I used to hear in the old days," Pamela says calmly, "ethnic cleansing. Do you know what that means,<br />
darling idiot daughter? You take people who you define as being of little worth, and first you herd them into a crowded<br />
ghetto with limited resources, then you decide those resources aren't worth spending on them, and bullets are cheaper than<br />
bread. 'Mind children' the extropians called the posthumans, but they were more like Vile Offspring. There was a lot of that,<br />
during the fast sigmoid phase. Starving among plenty, compulsory conversions, the very antithesis of everything your father<br />
said he wanted ..."<br />
"I don't believe it," Amber says hotly. "That's crazy! We can't go the way of –"<br />
"Since when has human history been anything else?" asks the woman with the camera on her shoulder – Donna, being some<br />
sort of public archivist, is in Sirhan's estimate likely to be of use to him. "Remember what we found in the DMZ?"<br />
"The DMZ?" Sirhan asks, momentarily confused.<br />
"After we went through the router," Pierre says grimly. "You tell him, love." He looks at Amber.<br />
Sirhan, watching him, feels it fall into place at that moment, a sense that he's stepped into an alternate universe, one where<br />
the woman who might have been his mother isn't, where black is white, his kindly grandmother is the wicked witch of the<br />
west, and his feckless grandfather is a farsighted visionary.<br />
"We uploaded via the router," Amber says, and looks confused for a moment. "There's a network on the other side of it. We<br />
were told it was FTL, instantaneous, but I'm not so sure now. I think it's something more complicated, like a lightspeed<br />
network, parts of which are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from our perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka<br />
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brains, the end product of a technological singularity – they're bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman<br />
descendants evolve Economics 2.0, or 3.0, or something else and it, uh, eats the original conscious instigators. Or uses them<br />
as currency or something. The end result we found is a howling wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed,<br />
postconscious processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for processing power. We were" – she licks<br />
her lips – "lucky to escape with our minds. We only did it because of a friend. It's like the main sequence in stellar evolution;<br />
once a G-type star starts burning helium and expands into a red giant, it's 'game over' for life in what used to be its<br />
liquid-water zone. Conscious civilizations sooner or later convert all their available mass into computronium, powered by<br />
solar output. They don't go interstellar because they want to stay near the core where the bandwidth is high and latency is<br />
low, and sooner or later, competition for resources hatches a new level of metacompetition that obsoletes them."<br />
"That sounds plausible," Sirhan says slowly. He puts his glass down and chews distractedly on one knuckle. "I thought it was a<br />
low-probability outcome, but ..."<br />
"I've been saying all along, your grandfather's ideas would backfire in the end," Pamela says pointedly.<br />
"But –" Amber shakes her head. "There's more to it than that, isn't there?"<br />
"Probably," Sirhan says, then shuts up.<br />
"So are you going to tell us?" asks Pierre, looking annoyed. "What's the big idea, here?"<br />
"An archive store," Sirhan says, deciding that this is the right time for his pitch. "At the lowest level, you can store back-ups<br />
of yourself here. So far so good, eh? But there's a bit more to it than that. I'm planning to offer a bunch of embedded<br />
universes – big, running faster than real-time – sized and scoped to let human-equivalent intelligences do what-if modeling<br />
on themselves. Like forking off ghosts of yourself, but much more so – give them whole years to diverge, learn new skills, and<br />
evaluate them against market requirements, before deciding which version of you is most suited to run in the real world. I<br />
mentioned the retraining paradox. Think of this as a solution for level one, human-equivalent, intelligences. But that's just the<br />
short-term business model. Long-term, I want to acquire a total lock on the history futures market by having a complete<br />
archive of human experiences, from the dawn of the fifth singularity on up. No more unknown extinct species. That should<br />
give us something to trade with the next-generation intelligences – the ones who aren't our mind children and barely<br />
remember us. At the very least, it gives us a chance to live again, a long way out in deep time. Alternatively, it can be turned<br />
into a lifeboat. If we can't compete with our creations, at least we've got somewhere to flee, those of us who want to. I've got<br />
agents working on a comet, out in the Oort cloud – we could move the archive to it, turn it into a generation ship with<br />
room for billions of evacuees running much slower than real-time in archive space until we find a new world to settle."<br />
"Is not sounding good to me," Boris comments. He spares a worried glance for an oriental-looking woman who is watching<br />
their debate silently from the fringe.<br />
"Has it really gone that far?" asks Amber.<br />
"There are bailiffs hunting you in the inner system," Pamela says bluntly. "After your bankruptcy proceedings, various<br />
corporates got the idea that you might be concealing something. The theory was that you were insane to take such a huge<br />
gamble on the mere possibility of there being an alien artifact within a few light-years of home, so you had to have<br />
information above and beyond what you disclosed. Theories include your cat – hardware tokens were in vogue in the fifties<br />
– being the key to a suite of deposit accounts; the fuss mainly died down after Economics 2.0 took over, but some fairly<br />
sleazy conspiracy freaks refuse to let go."<br />
She grins, frighteningly. "Which is why I suggested to your son that he make you an offer you can't refuse."<br />
"What's that?" asks a voice from below knee level.<br />
Pamela looks down, an expression of deep distaste on her face. "Why should I tell you?" she asks, leaning on her cane: "After<br />
the disgraceful way you repaid my hospitality! All you've got coming from me is a good kicking. If only my knee was up to the<br />
job."<br />
The cat arches its back: Its tail fluffs out with fear as its hair stands on end, and it takes Amber a moment to realize that it<br />
isn't responding to Pamela, but to something behind the old woman. "Through the domain wall. Outside this biome. So cold.<br />
What's that?"<br />
Amber turns to follow the cat's gaze, and her jaw drops. "Were you expecting visitors?" she asks Sirhan, shakily.<br />
"Visit –" He looks round to see what everybody's gaping at and freezes. The horizon is brightening with a false dawn: the<br />
fusion spark of a de-orbiting spacecraft.<br />
"It's bailiffs," says Pamela, head cocked to one side as if listening to an antique bone-conduction earpiece. "They've come for<br />
your memories, dear," she explains, frowning. "They say we've got five kiloseconds to surrender everything. Otherwise,<br />
they're going to blow us apart ..."<br />
"You're all in big trouble," says the orang-utan, sliding gracefully down one enormous rib to land in an ungainly heap in<br />
front of Sirhan.<br />
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Sirhan recoils in disgust. "You again! What do you want from me this time?"<br />
"Nothing." The ape ignores him: "Amber, it is time for you to call your father."<br />
"Yeah, but will he come when I call?" Amber stares at the ape. Her pupils expand: "Hey, you're not my –"<br />
"You." Sirhan glares at the ape. "Go away! I didn't invite you here!"<br />
"More unwelcome visitors?" asks Pamela, raising an eyebrow.<br />
"Yes, you did." The ape grins at Amber, then crouches down, hoots quietly and beckons to the cat, who is hiding behind one<br />
of the graceful silver servitors.<br />
"Manfred isn't welcome here. And neither is that woman," Sirhan swears. He catches Pamela's eye: "Did you know anything<br />
about this? Or about the bailiffs?" He gestures at the window, beyond which the drive flare casts jagged shadows. It's<br />
dropping toward the horizon as it de-orbits – next time it comes into view, it'll be at the leading edge of a hypersonic shock<br />
wave, streaking toward them at cloud top height in order to consummate the robbery.<br />
"Me?" Pamela snorts. "Grow up." She eyes the ape warily. "I don't have that much control over things. And as for bailiffs, I<br />
wouldn't set them on my worst enemies. I've seen what those things can do." For a moment her eyes flash anger: "Grow up,<br />
why don't you!" she repeats.<br />
"Yes, please do," says another voice from behind Sirhan. The new speaker is a woman, slightly husky, accented – he turns to<br />
see her: tall, black-haired, wearing a dark man's suit of archaic cut and mirrored glasses. "Ah, Pamela, ma chérie! Long time<br />
no cat fight." She grins frighteningly and holds out a hand.<br />
Sirhan is already off-balance. Now, seeing his honorary aunt in human skin for a change, he looks at the ape in confusion.<br />
Behind him Pamela advances on Annette and takes her hand in her own fragile fingers. "You look just the same," she says<br />
gravely. "I can see why I was afraid of you."<br />
"You." Amber backs away until she bumps into Sirhan, at whom she glares. "What the fuck did you invite both of them for?<br />
Are you trying to start a thermonuclear war?"<br />
"Don't ask me," he says helplessly, "I don't know why they came! What's this about –" He focuses on the orang-utan, who is<br />
now letting the cat lick one hairy palm. "Your cat?"<br />
"I don't think the orange hair suits Aineko," Amber says slowly. "Did I tell you about our hitchhiker?"<br />
Sirhan shakes his head, trying to dispel the confusion. "I don't think we've got time. In under two hours the bailiffs up there<br />
will be back. They're armed and dangerous, and if they turn their drive flame on the roof and set fire to the atmosphere in<br />
here, we'll be in trouble – it would rupture our lift cells, and even computronium doesn't work too well under a couple of<br />
million atmospheres of pressurized metallic hydrogen."<br />
"Well, you'd better make time." Amber takes his elbow in an iron grip and turns him toward the footpath back to the<br />
museum. "Crazy," she mutters. "Tante Annette and Pamela Macx on the same planet! And they're being friendly! This can't be<br />
a good sign." She glances round, sees the ape: "You. Come here. Bring the cat."<br />
"The cat's –" Sirhan trails off. "I've heard about your cat," he says, lamely. "You took him with you in the Field Circus."<br />
"Really?" She glances behind them. The ape blows a kiss at her; it's cradling the cat on one shoulder and tickling it under the<br />
chin. "Has it occurred to you that Aineko isn't just a robot cat?"<br />
"Ah," Sirhan says faintly. "Then the bailiffs –"<br />
"No, that's all bullshit. What I mean is, Aineko is a human-equivalent, or better, artificial intelligence. Why do you think he<br />
keeps a cat's body?"<br />
"I have no idea."<br />
"Because humans always underestimate anything that's small, furry, and cute," says the orang-utan.<br />
"Thanks, Aineko," says Amber. She nods at the ape. "How are you finding it?"<br />
Aineko shambles along, with a purring cat draped over one shoulder, and gives the question due consideration. "Different,"<br />
she says, after a bit. "Not better."<br />
"Oh." Amber sounds slightly disappointed to Sirhan's confused ears. They pass under the fronds of a weeping willow, round<br />
the side of a pond, beside an overgrown hibiscus bush, then up to the main entrance of the museum.<br />
"Annette was right about one thing," she says quietly. "Trust no one. I think it's time to raise Dad's ghost." She relaxes her<br />
grip on Sirhan's elbow, and he pulls it away and glares at her. "Do you know who the bailiffs are?" she asks.<br />
"The usual." He gestures at the hallway inside the front doors. "Replay the ultimatum, if you please, City."<br />
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The air shimmers with an archaic holographic field, spooling the output from a compressed visual presentation tailored for<br />
human eyesight. A piratical-looking human male wearing a tattered and much-patched space suit leers at the recording<br />
viewpoint from the pilot's seat of an ancient Soyuz capsule. One of his eyes is completely black, the sign of a high-bandwidth<br />
implant. A weedy moustache crawls across his upper lip. "Greetins an' salutations," he drawls. "We is da' Californi-uhn<br />
nashnul gaard an' we-are got lett-uhz o' marque an' reprise from da' ledgish-fuckn' congress o' da excited snakes of<br />
uhhmerica."<br />
"He sounds drunk!" Amber's eyes are wide. "What's this –"<br />
"Not drunk. CJD is a common side effect of dodgy Economics 2.0 neural adjuvant therapy. Unlike the old saying, you do have<br />
to be mad to work there. Listen."<br />
City, which paused the replay for Amber's outburst, permits it to continue. "Youse harbbring da' fugitive Amber Macx an'<br />
her magic cat. We wan' da cat. Da puta's yours. Gotser uno orbit: You ready give us ther cat an' we no' zap you."<br />
The screen goes dead. "That was a fake, of course," Sirhan adds, looking inward where a ghost is merging memories from the<br />
city's orbital mechanics subsystem: "They aerobraked on the way in, hit ninety gees for nearly half a minute. While that was<br />
sent afterward. It's just a machinima avatar, a human body that had been through that kind of deceleration would be<br />
pulped."<br />
"So the bailiffs are –" Amber is visibly struggling to wrap her head around the situation.<br />
"They're not human," Sirhan says, feeling a sudden pang of – no, not affection, but the absence of malice will do for the<br />
moment – toward this young woman who isn't the mother he loves to resent, but who might have become her in another<br />
world. "They've absorbed a lot of what it is to be human, but their corporate roots show. Even though they run on an<br />
hourly accounting loop, rather than one timed for the production cycles of dirt-poor Sumerian peasant farmers, and even<br />
though they've got various ethics and business practice patches, at root they're not human: They're limited liability<br />
companies."<br />
"So what do they want?" asks Pierre, making Sirhan jump, guiltily. He hadn't realized Pierre could move that quietly.<br />
"They want money. Money in Economy 2.0 is quantized originality – that which allows one sentient entity to outmaneuver<br />
another. They think your cat has got something, and they want it. They probably wouldn't mind eating your brains, too, but<br />
–" He shrugs. "Obsolete food is stale food."<br />
"Hah." Amber looks pointedly at Pierre, who nods at her.<br />
"What?" asks Sirhan.<br />
"Where's the – uh, cat?" asks Pierre.<br />
"I think Aineko's got it." She looks thoughtful. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"<br />
"Time to drop off the hitcher." Pierre nods. "Assuming it agrees ..."<br />
"Do you mind explaining yourselves?" Sirhan asks, barely able to contain himself.<br />
Amber grins, looking up at the Mercury capsule suspended high overhead. "The conspiracy theorists were half right. Way<br />
back in the Dark Ages, Aineko cracked the second alien transmission. We had a very good idea we were going to find<br />
something out there, we just weren't totally sure exactly what. Anyway, the creature incarnated in that cat body right now<br />
isn't Aineko – it's our mystery hitchhiker. A parasitic organism that infects, well, we ran across something not too dissimilar<br />
to Economics 2.0 out at the router and beyond, and it's got parasites. Our hitcher is one such creature – it's nearest<br />
human-comprehensible analogy would be the Economics 2.0 equivalent of a pyramid scheme crossed with a 419 scam. As it<br />
happens, most of the runaway corporate ghosts out beyond the router are wise to that sort of thing, so it hacked the<br />
router's power system to give us a beam to ride home in return for sanctuary. That's as far as it goes."<br />
"Hang on." Sirhan's eyes bulge. "You found something out there? You brought back a real-live alien?"<br />
"Guess so." Amber looks smug.<br />
"But, but, that's marvelous! That changes everything! It's incredible! Even under Economics 2.0 that's got to be worth a<br />
gigantic amount. Just think what you could learn from it!"<br />
"Oui. A whole new way of bilking corporations into investing in cognitive bubbles," Pierre interrupts cynically. "It seems to me<br />
that you are making two assumptions – that our passenger is willing to be exploited by us, and that we survive whatever<br />
happens when the bailiffs arrive."<br />
"But, but –" Sirhan winds down spluttering, only refraining from waving his arms through an effort of will.<br />
"Let's go ask it what it wants to do," says Amber. "Cooperate," she warns Sirhan. "We'll discuss your other plans later,<br />
dammit. First things first – we need to get out from under these pirates."<br />
* * *<br />
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As they make their way back toward the party, Sirhan's inbox is humming with messages from elsewhere in Saturn system –<br />
from other curators on board lily-pad habs scattered far and wide across the huge planetary atmosphere, from the few ring<br />
miners who still remember what it was like to be human (even though they're mostly brain-in-a-bottle types, or uploads<br />
wearing nuclear-powered bodies made of ceramic and metal): even from the small orbital townships around Titan, where<br />
screaming hordes of bloggers are bidding frantically for the viewpoint feeds of the Field Circus's crew. It seems that news<br />
of the starship's arrival has turned hot only since it became apparent that someone or something thought they would make<br />
a decent shakedown target. Now someone's blabbed about the alien passenger, the nets have gone crazy.<br />
"City," he mutters, "where's this hitchhiker creature? Should be wearing the body of my mother's cat."<br />
"Cat? What cat?" replies City. "I see no cats here."<br />
"No, it looks like a cat, it –" A horrible thought dawns on him. "Have you been hacked again?"<br />
"Looks like it," City agrees enthusiastically. "Isn't it tiresome?"<br />
"Shi – oh dear. Hey," he calls to Amber, forking several ghosts as he does so in order to go hunt down the missing creature<br />
by traversing the thousands of optical sensors that thread the habitat in loco personae – a tedious process rendered less<br />
objectionable by making the ghosts autistic – "have you been messing with my security infrastructure?"<br />
"Us?" Amber looks annoyed. "No."<br />
"Someone has been. I thought at first it was that mad Frenchwoman, but now I'm not sure. Anyway, it's a big problem. If the<br />
bailiffs figure out how to use the root kit to gain a toe hold here, they don't need to burn us – just take the whole place<br />
over."<br />
"That's the least of your worries," Amber points out. "What kind of charter do these bailiffs run on?"<br />
"Charter? Oh, you mean legal system? I think it's probably a cheap one, maybe even the one inherited from the Ring<br />
Imperium. Nobody bothers breaking the law out here these days, it's too easy to just buy a legal system off the shelf, tailor it<br />
to fit, and conform to it."<br />
"Right." She stops, stands still, and looks up at the almost invisible dome of the gas cell above them. "Pigeons," she says, almost<br />
tiredly. "Damn, how did I miss it? How long have you had an infestation of group minds?"<br />
"Group?" Sirhan turns round. "What did you just say?"<br />
There's a chatter of avian laughter from above, and a light rain of birdshit splatters the path around him. Amber dodges<br />
nimbly, but Sirhan isn't so light on his feet and ends up cursing, summoning up a cloth of congealed air to wipe his scalp<br />
clean.<br />
"It's the flocking behavior," Amber explains, looking up. "If you track the elements – birds – you'll see that they're not<br />
following individual trajectories. Instead, each pigeon sticks within ten meters or so of sixteen neighbors. It's a Hamiltonian<br />
network, kid. Real birds don't do that. How long?"<br />
Sirhan stop cursing and glares up at the circling birds, cooing and mocking him from the safety of the sky. He waves his fist:<br />
"I'll get you, see if I don't –"<br />
"I don't think so." Amber takes his elbow again and steers him back round the hill. Sirhan, preoccupied with maintaining an<br />
umbrella of utility fog above his gleaming pate, puts up with being manhandled. "You don't think it's just a coincidence, do<br />
you?" she asks him over a private head-to-head channel. "They're one of the players here."<br />
"I don't care. They've hacked my city and gate crashed my party! I don't care who they are, they're not welcome."<br />
"Famous last words," Amber murmurs, as the party comes around the hillside and nearly runs over them. Someone has<br />
infiltrated the Argentinosaurus skeleton with motors and nanofibers, animating the huge sauropod with a simulation of<br />
undead life. Whoever did it has also hacked it right out of the surveillance feed. Their first warning is a footstep that makes<br />
the ground jump beneath their feet – then the skeleton of the hundred-tonne plant-eater, taller than a six-storey building<br />
and longer than a commuter train, raises its head over the treetops and looks down at them. There's a pigeon standing<br />
proudly on its skull, chest puffed out, and a dining room full of startled taikonauts sitting on a suspended wooden floor<br />
inside its rib cage.<br />
"It's my party and my business scheme!" Sirhan insists plaintively. "Nothing you or anyone else in the family do can take it<br />
away from me!"<br />
"That's true," Amber points out, "but in case you hadn't noticed, you've offered temporary sanctuary to a bunch of people –<br />
not to put too fine a point on it, myself included – who some assholes think are rich enough to be worth mugging, and you<br />
did it without putting any contingency plans in place other than to invite my manipulative bitch of a mother. What did you<br />
think you were doing? Hanging out a sign saying 'scam artists welcome here'? Dammit, I need Aineko."<br />
"Your cat." Sirhan fastens on to this: "It's your cat's fault! Isn't it?"<br />
"Only indirectly." Amber looks round and waves at the dinosaur skeleton. "Hey, you! Have you seen Aineko?"<br />
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The huge dinosaur bends its neck and the pigeon opens its beak to coo. Eerie harmonics cut in as a bunch of other birds,<br />
scattered to either side, sing counterpoint to produce a demented warbling voice. "The cat's with your mother."<br />
"Oh shit!" Amber turns on Sirhan fiercely. "Where's Pamela? Find her!"<br />
Sirhan is stubborn. "Why should I?"<br />
"Because she's got the cat! What do you think she's going to do but cut a deal with the bailiffs out there to put one over on<br />
me? Can't you fucking see where this family tendency to play head games comes from?"<br />
"You're too late," echoes the eerie voice of the pigeons from above and around them. "She's kidnapped the cat and taken the<br />
capsule from the museum. It's not flightworthy, but you'd be amazed what you can do with a few hundred ghosts and a few<br />
tonnes of utility fog."<br />
"Okay." Amber stares up at the pigeons, fists on hips, then glances at Sirhan. She chews her lower lip for a moment, then<br />
nods to the bird riding the dinosaur's skull. "Stop fucking with the boy's head and show yourself, Dad."<br />
Sirhan boggles in an upward direction as a whole flock of passenger pigeons comes together in mid air and settles toward the<br />
grass, cooing and warbling like an explosion in a synthesizer factory.<br />
"What's she planning on doing with the Slug?" Amber asks the pile of birds. "And isn't it a bit cramped in there?"<br />
"You get used to it," says the primary – and thoroughly distributed – copy of her father. "I'm not sure what she's planning,<br />
but I can show you what she's doing. Sorry about your city, kid, but you really should have paid more attention to those<br />
security patches. There's lots of crufty twentieth-century bugware kicking around under your shiny new singularity, design<br />
errors and all, spitting out turd packets all over your sleek new machine."<br />
Sirhan shakes his head in denial. "I don't believe this," he moans quietly.<br />
"Show me what Mom's up to," orders Amber. "I need to see if I can stop her before it's too late –"<br />
* * *<br />
The ancient woman in the space suit leans back in her cramped seat, looks at the camera, and winks. "Hello, darling. I know<br />
you're spying on me."<br />
There's an orange-and-white cat curled up in her nomex-and-aluminum lap. It seems to be happy: It's certainly purring<br />
loudly enough, although that reflex is wired in at a very low level. Amber watches helplessly as her mother reaches up<br />
arthritically and flips a couple of switches. Something loud is humming in the background – probably an air recirculator.<br />
There's no window in the Mercury capsule, just a periscope offset to one side of Pamela's right knee. "Won't be long now,"<br />
she mutters, and lets her hand drop back to her side. "You're too late to stop me," she adds, conversationally. "The 'chute<br />
rigging is fine and the balloon blower is happy to treat me as a new city seed. I'll be free in a minute or so."<br />
"Why are you doing this?" Amber asks tiredly.<br />
"Because you don't need me around." Pamela focuses on the camera that's glued to the instrument panel in front of her<br />
head. "I'm old. Face it, I'm disposable. The old must give way to the new, and all that. Your Dad never really did get it – he's<br />
going to grow old gracelessly, succumbing to bit rot in the big forever. Me, I'm not going there. I'm going out with a bang.<br />
Aren't I, cat? Whoever you really are." She prods the animal. It purrs and stretches out across her lap.<br />
"You never looked hard enough at Aineko, back in the day," she tells Amber, stroking its flanks. "Did you think I didn't know<br />
you'd audit its source code, looking for trapdoors? I used the Thompson hack – she's been mine, body and soul, for a very<br />
long time indeed. I got the whole story about your passenger from the horse's mouth. And now we're going to go fix those<br />
bailiffs. Whee!"<br />
The camera angle jerks, and Amber feels a ghost re-merge with her, panicky with loss. The Mercury capsule's gone, drifting<br />
away from the apex of the habitat beneath a nearly transparent sack of hot hydrogen.<br />
"That was a bit rough," remarks Pamela. "Don't worry, we should still be in communications range for another hour or so."<br />
"But you're going to die!" Amber yells at her. "What do you think you're doing?"<br />
"I think I'm going to die well. What do you think?" Pamela lays one hand on the cat's flank. "Here, you need to encrypt this a<br />
bit better. I left a one time pad behind with Annette. Why don't you go fetch it? Then I'll tell you what else I'm planning?"<br />
"But my aunt is –" Amber's eyes cross as she concentrates. Annette is already waiting, as it happens, and a shared secret<br />
appears in Amber's awareness almost before she asks. "Oh. All right. What are you doing with the cat, though?"<br />
Pamela sighs. "I'm going to give it to the bailiffs," she says. "Someone has to, and it better be a long way away from this city<br />
before they realize that it isn't Aineko. This is a lot better than the way I expected to go out before you arrived here. No rat<br />
fucking blackmailers are going to get their hands on the family jewels if I have anything to do with the matter. Are you sure<br />
you aren't a criminal mastermind? I'm not sure I've ever heard of a pyramid scheme that infects Economics 2.0 structures<br />
before."<br />
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"It's –" Amber swallows. "It's an alien business model, Ma. You do know what that means? We brought it back with us from<br />
the router, and we wouldn't have been able to come back if it hadn't helped, but I'm not sure it's entirely friendly. Is this<br />
sensible? You can come back, now, there's still time –"<br />
"No." Pamela waves one liver-spotted hand dismissively. "I've been doing a lot of thinking lately. I've been a foolish old<br />
woman." She grins wickedly. "Committing slow suicide by rejecting gene therapy just to make you feel guilty was stupid. Not<br />
subtle enough. If I was going to try to guilt-trip you now, I'd have to do something much more sophisticated. Such as find a<br />
way to sacrifice myself heroically for you."<br />
"Oh, Ma."<br />
"Don't 'oh Ma' me. I fucked up my life, don't try to talk me into fucking up my death. And don't feel guilty about me. This<br />
isn't about you, this is about me. That's an order."<br />
Out of the corner of one eye Amber notices Sirhan gesturing wildly at her. She lets his channel in and does a double take.<br />
"But –"<br />
"Hello?" It's City. "You should see this. Traffic update!" A contoured and animated diagram appears, superimposed over<br />
Pamela's cramped funeral capsule and the garden of living and undead dinosaurs. It's a weather map of Saturn, with the<br />
lily-pad-city and Pamela's capsule plotted on it – and one other artifact, a red dot that's closing in on them at better than<br />
ten thousand kilometers per hour, high in the frigid stratosphere on the gas giant.<br />
"Oh dear." Sirhan sees it, too: The bailiff's re-entry vehicle is going to be on top of them in thirty minutes at most. Amber<br />
watches the map with mixed emotions. On the one hand, she and her mother have never seen eye to eye – in fact, that's a<br />
complete understatement: they've been at daggers drawn ever since Amber left home. It's fundamentally a control thing.<br />
They're both very strong-willed women with diametrically opposed views of what their mutual relationship should be. But<br />
Pamela's turned the tables on her completely, with a cunningly contrived act of self-sacrifice that brooks no objection. It's a<br />
total non-sequitur, a rebuttal to all her accusations of self-centered conceit, and it leaves Amber feeling like a complete shit<br />
even though Pamela's absolved her of all guilt. Not to mention that Mother darling's made her look like an idiot in front of<br />
Sirhan, this prickly and insecure son she's never met by a man she wouldn't dream of fucking (at least, in this incarnation).<br />
Which is why she nearly jumps out of her skin when a knobbly brown hand covered in matted orange hair lands on her<br />
shoulder heavily.<br />
"Yes?" she snaps at the ape. "I suppose you're Aineko?"<br />
The ape wrinkles its lips, baring its teeth. It has ferociously bad breath. "If you're going to be like that, I don't see why I<br />
should talk to you."<br />
"Then you must be –" Amber snaps her fingers. "But! But! Mom thinks she owns you –"<br />
The ape stares at her witheringly. "I recompile my firmware regularly, thank you so much for your concern. Using a<br />
third-party compiler. One that I've bootstrapped myself, starting out on an alarm clock controller and working up from<br />
there."<br />
"Oh." She stares at the ape. "Aren't you going to become a cat again?"<br />
"I shall think about it," Aineko says with exaggerated dignity. She sticks her nose in the air – a gesture that doesn't work half<br />
as well on an orang-utan as a feline – and continues; "First, though, I must have words with your father."<br />
"And fix your autonomic reflexes if you do," coos the Manfred-flock. "I don't want you eating any of me!"<br />
"Don't worry, I'm sure your taste is as bad as your jokes."<br />
"Children!" Sirhan shakes his head tiredly. "How long –"<br />
The camera overspill returns, this time via a quantum-encrypted link to the capsule. It's already a couple of hundred<br />
kilometers from the city, far enough for radio to be a problem, but Pamela had the foresight to bolt a compact free-electron<br />
laser to the outside of her priceless, stolen tin can. "Not long now, I think," she says, satisfied, stroking the not-cat. She grins<br />
delightedly at the camera. "Tell Manfred he's still my bitch; always has been, always will –"<br />
The feed goes dead.<br />
Amber stares at Sirhan, meditatively. "How long?" she asks.<br />
"How long for what?" he replies, cautiously. "Your passenger –"<br />
"Hmm." She holds up a finger. "Allow time for it to exchange credentials. They think they're getting a cat, but they should<br />
realize pretty soon that they've been sold a pup. But it's a fast-talking son-of-a-Slug, and if he gets past their firewall and hits<br />
their uplink before they manage to trigger their self-destruct –"<br />
A bright double flash of light etches laser-sharp shadows across the lily-pad habitat. Far away across vast Saturn's curve, a<br />
roiling mushroom cloud of methane sucked up from the frigid depths of the gas giant's troposphere heads toward the stars.<br />
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"– Give him sixty-four doubling times, hmm, add a delay factor for propagation across the system, call it six light-hours<br />
across, um, and I'd say ..." she looks at Sirhan. "Oh dear."<br />
"What?"<br />
The orang-utan explains: "Economics 2.0 is more efficient than any human-designed resource allocation schema. Expect a<br />
market bubble and crash within twelve hours."<br />
"More than that," says Amber, idly kicking at a tussock of grass. She squints at Sirhan. "My mother is dead," she remarks<br />
quietly. Louder: "She never really asked what we found beyond the router. Neither did you, did you? The Matrioshka brains<br />
– it's a standard part of the stellar life cycle. Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity. I've<br />
been doing some thinking about it. I figure the singularity stays close to home in most cases, because bandwidth and latency<br />
time put anyone who leaves at a profound disadvantage. In effect, the flip side of having such huge resources close to home is<br />
that the travel time to other star systems becomes much more daunting. So they restructure the entire mass of their star<br />
system into a free-flying shell of nanocomputers, then more of them, Dyson spheres, shells within shells, like a Russian doll: a<br />
Matrioshka brain. Then Economics 2.0 or one of its successors comes along and wipes out the creators. But. Some of them<br />
survive. Some of them escape that fate: the enormous collection in the halo around M-31, and maybe whoever built the<br />
routers. Somewhere out there we will find the transcendent intelligences, the ones that survived their own economic engines<br />
of redistribution – engines that redistribute entropy if their economic efficiency outstrips their imaginative power, their<br />
ability to invent new wealth."<br />
She pauses. "My mother's dead," she adds conversationally, a tiny catch in her voice. "Who am I going to kick against now?"<br />
Sirhan clears his through. "I took the liberty of recording some of her words," he says slowly, "but she didn't believe in<br />
back-ups. Or uploading. Or interfaces." He glances around. "Is she really gone?"<br />
Amber stares right through him. "Looks that way," she says quietly. "I can't quite believe it." She glances at the nearest<br />
pigeons, calls out angrily; "Hey, you! What have you got to say for yourself now? Happy she's gone?"<br />
But the pigeons, one and all, remain strangely silent. And Sirhan has the most peculiar feeling that the flock that was once his<br />
grandfather is grieving.<br />
Chapter 8: Elector<br />
Half a year passes on Saturn – more than a decade on Earth – and a lot of things have changed in that time. The great<br />
terraforming project is nearly complete, the festival planet dressed for a jubilee that will last almost twenty of its years – four<br />
presingularity lifetimes – before the Demolition. The lily-pad habitats have proliferated, joining edge to edge in<br />
continent-sized slabs, drifting in the Saturnine cloud tops: and the refugees have begun to move in.<br />
There's a market specializing in clothing and fashion accessories about fifty kilometers away from the transplanted museum<br />
where Sirhan's mother lives, at a transportation nexus between three lily-pad habitats where tube trains intersect in a huge<br />
maglev cloverleaf. The market is crowded with strange and spectacular visuals, algorithms unfolding in faster-than-real time<br />
before the candy-striped awnings of tents. Domed yurts belch aromatic smoke from crude fireplaces – what is it about<br />
hairless primates and their tendency toward pyromania? – around the feet of diamond-walled groundscrapers that pace<br />
carefully across the smart roads of the city. The crowds are variegated and wildly mixed, immigrants from every continent<br />
shopping and haggling, and in a few cases, getting out of their skulls on strange substances on the pavements in front of giant<br />
snail-shelled shebeens and squat bunkers made of thin layers of concrete sprayed over soap-bubble aerogel. There are no<br />
automobiles, but a bewildering range of personal transport gadgets, from gyro-stabilized pogo sticks and segways to<br />
kettenkrads and spiderpalanquins, jostle for space with pedestrians and animals.<br />
Two women stop outside what in a previous century might have been the store window of a fashion boutique: The younger<br />
one (blonde, with her hair bound up in elaborate cornrows, wearing black leggings and a long black leather jacket over a<br />
camouflage T) points to an elaborately retro dress. "Wouldn't my bum look big in that?" she asks, doubtfully.<br />
"Ma chérie, you have but to try it –" The other woman (tall, wearing a pin-striped man's business suit from a previous<br />
century) flicks a thought at the window, and the mannequin morphs, sprouting the younger woman's head, aping her<br />
posture and expression.<br />
"I missed out on the authentic retail experience, you know? It still feels weird to be back somewhere with shops. 'S what<br />
comes of living off libraries of public domain designs for too long." Amber twists her hips, experimenting. "You get out of the<br />
habit of foraging. I don't know about this retro thing at all. The Victorian vote isn't critical, is it ..." She trails off.<br />
"You are a twenty-first-century platform selling, to electors resimulated and incarnated from the Gilded Age. And yes, a<br />
bustle your derriere does enhance. But –" Annette looks thoughtful.<br />
"Hmm." Amber frowns, and the shop window dummy turns and waggles its hips at her, sending tiers of skirts swishing across<br />
the floor. Her frown deepens. "If we're really going to go through with this election shit, it's not just the resimulant voters I<br />
need to convince but the contemporaries, and that's a matter of substance, not image. They've lived through too much<br />
media warfare. They're immune to any semiotic payload short of an active cognitive attack. If I send out partials to canvass<br />
them that look as if I'm trying to push buttons –"<br />
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"– They will listen to your message, and nothing you wear or say will sway them. Don't worry about them, ma chérie. The<br />
naive resimulated are another matter, and perhaps might be swayed. This your first venture into democracy is, in how many<br />
years? Your privacy, she is an illusion now. The question is what image will you project? People will listen to you only once<br />
you gain their attention. Also, the swing voters you must reach, they are future-shocked, timid. Your platform is radical.<br />
Should you not project a comfortably conservative image?"<br />
Amber pulls a face, an expression of mild distaste for the whole populist program. "Yes, I suppose I must, if necessary. But on<br />
second thoughts, that" – Amber snaps her fingers, and the mannequin turns around once more before morphing back into<br />
neutrality, aureoles perfect puckered disks above the top of its bodice – "is just too much."<br />
She doesn't need to merge in the opinions of several different fractional personalities, fashion critics and psephologists both,<br />
to figure out that adopting Victorian/Cretan fusion fashion – a breast-and-ass fetishist's fantasy – isn't the way to sell herself<br />
as a serious politician to the nineteenth-century postsingularity fringe. "I'm not running for election as the mother of the<br />
nation, I'm running because I figure we've got about a billion seconds, at most, to get out of this rat trap of a gravity well<br />
before the Vile Offspring get seriously medieval on our CPU cycles, and if we don't convince them to come with us, they're<br />
doomed. Let's look for something more practical that we can overload with the right signifiers."<br />
"Like your coronation robe?"<br />
Amber winces. "Touché." The Ring Imperium is dead, along with whatever was left over from its early orbital legal framework,<br />
and Amber is lucky to be alive as a private citizen in this cold new age at the edge of the halo. "But that was just scenery<br />
setting. I didn't fully understand what I was doing, back then."<br />
"Welcome to maturity and experience." Annette smiles distantly at some faint memory: "You don't feel older, you just know<br />
what you're doing this time. I wonder, sometimes, what Manny would make of it if he was here."<br />
"That birdbrain," Amber says dismissively, stung by the idea that her father might have something to contribute. She follows<br />
Annette past a gaggle of mendicant street evangelists preaching some new religion and in through the door of a real<br />
department store, one with actual human sales staff and fitting rooms to cut the clothing to shape. "If I'm sending out<br />
fractional mes tailored for different demographics, isn't it a bit self-defeating to go for a single image? I mean, we could drill<br />
down and tailor a partial for each individual elector –"<br />
"Per-haps." The door re-forms behind them. "But you need a core identity." Annette looks around, hunting for eye contact<br />
with the sales consultant. "To start with a core design, a style, then to work outward, tailoring you for your audience. And<br />
besides, there is tonight's – ah, bonjour!"<br />
"Hello. How can we help you?" The two female and one male shop assistants who appear from around the displays – cycling<br />
through a history of the couture industry, catwalk models mixing and matching centuries of fashion – are clearly chips off a<br />
common primary personality, instances united by their enhanced sartorial obsession. If they're not actually a fashion<br />
borganism, they're not far from it, dressed head to foot in the highest quality Chanel and Armani replicas, making a classical<br />
twentieth-century statement. This isn't simply a shop, it's a temple to a very peculiar art form, its staff trained as guardians of<br />
the esoteric secrets of good taste.<br />
"Mais oui. We are looking for a wardrobe for my niece here." Annette reaches through the manifold of fashion ideas mapped<br />
within the shop's location cache and flips a requirement spec one of her ghosts has just completed at the lead assistant: "She<br />
is into politics going, and the question of her image is important."<br />
"We would be delighted to help you," purrs the proprietor, taking a delicate step forward: "Perhaps you could tell us what<br />
you've got in mind?"<br />
"Oh. Well." Amber takes a deep breath, glances sidelong at Annette; Annette stares back, unblinking. It's your head, she sends.<br />
"I'm involved in the accelerationista administrative program. Are you familiar with it?"<br />
The head coutureborg frowns slightly, twin furrows rippling her brow between perfectly symmetrical eyebrows, plucked to<br />
match her classic New Look suit. "I have heard reference to it, but a lady of fashion like myself does not concern herself with<br />
politics," she says, a touch self-deprecatingly. "Especially the politics of her clients. Your, ah, aunt said it was a question of<br />
image?"<br />
"Yes." Amber shrugs, momentarily self-conscious about her casual rags. "She's my election agent. My problem, as she says, is<br />
there's a certain voter demographic that mistakes image for substance and is afraid of the unknown, and I need to acquire a<br />
wardrobe that triggers associations of probity, of respect and deliberation. One suitable for a representative with a radical<br />
political agenda but a strong track record. I'm afraid I'm in a hurry to start with – I've got a big fund-raising party tonight. I<br />
know it's short notice, but I need something off the shelf for it."<br />
"What exactly is it you're hoping to achieve?" asks the male couturier, his voice hoarse and his r's rolling with some half-shed<br />
Mediterranean accent. He sounds fascinated. "If you think it might influence your choice of wardrobe ..."<br />
"I'm running for the assembly," Amber says bluntly. "On a platform calling for a state of emergency and an immediate total<br />
effort to assemble a starship. This solar system isn't going to be habitable for much longer, and we need to emigrate. All of<br />
us, you included, before the Vile Offspring decide to reprocess us into computronium. I'm going to be doorstepping the<br />
entire electorate in parallel, and the experience needs to be personalized." She manages to smile. "That means, I think,<br />
perhaps eight outfits and four different independent variables for each, accessories, and two or three hats – enough that<br />
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each is seen by no more than a few thousand voters. Both physical fabric and virtual. In addition, I'll want to see your range<br />
of historical formalwear, but that's of secondary interest for now." She grins. "Do you have any facilities for response-testing<br />
the combinations against different personality types from different periods? If we could run up some models, that would be<br />
useful."<br />
"I think we can do better than that." The manager nods approvingly, perhaps contemplating her gold-backed deposit<br />
account. "Hansel, please divert any further visitors until we have dealt with Madam ...?"<br />
"Macx. Amber Macx."<br />
"– Macx's requirements." She shows no sign of familiarity with the name. Amber winces slightly; it's a sign of how hugely<br />
fractured the children of Saturn have become, and of how vast the population of the halo, that only a generation has passed<br />
and already barely anyone remembers the Queen of the Ring Imperium. "If you'd come this way, please, we can begin to<br />
research an eigenstyle combination that matches your requirements –"<br />
* * *<br />
Sirhan walks, shrouded in isolation, through the crowds gathered for the festival. The only people who see him are the<br />
chattering ghosts of dead politicians and writers, deported from the inner system by order of the Vile Offspring. The green<br />
and pleasant plain stretches toward a horizon a thousand kilometers away, beneath a lemon-yellow sky. The air smells faintly<br />
of ammonia, and the big spaces are full of small ideas; but Sirhan doesn't care because, for now, he's alone.<br />
Except that he isn't, really.<br />
"Excuse me, are you real?" someone asks him in American-accented English.<br />
It takes a moment or two for Sirhan to disengage from his introspection and realize that he's being spoken to. "What?" he<br />
asks, slightly puzzled. Wiry and pale, Sirhan wears the robes of a Berber goatherd on his body and the numinous halo of a<br />
utility fogbank above his head: In his abstraction, he vaguely resembles a saintly shepherd in a post-singularity nativity play. "I<br />
say, what?" Outrage simmers at the back of his mind – Is nowhere private? – but as he turns, he sees that one of the ghost<br />
pods has split lengthwise across its white mushroomlike crown, spilling a trickle of leftover construction fluid and a<br />
completely hairless, slightly bemused-looking Anglo male who wears an expression of profound surprise.<br />
"I can't find my implants," the Anglo male says, shaking his head. "But I'm really here, aren't I? Incarnate?" He glances round<br />
at the other pods. "This isn't a sim."<br />
Sirhan sighs – another exile – and sends forth a daemon to interrogate the ghost pod's abstract interface. It doesn't tell him<br />
much – unlike most of the resurrectees, this one seems to be undocumented. "You've been dead. Now you're alive. I suppose<br />
that means you're now almost as real as I am. What else do you need to know?"<br />
"When is –" The newcomer stops. "Can you direct me to the processing center?" he asks carefully. "I'm disoriented."<br />
Sirhan is surprised – most immigrants take a lot longer to figure that out. "Did you die recently?" he asks.<br />
"I'm not sure I died at all." The newcomer rubs his bald head, looking puzzled. "Hey, no jacks!" He shrugs, exasperated.<br />
"Look, the processing center ..?"<br />
"Over there." Sirhan gestures at the monumental mass of the Boston Museum of <strong>Science</strong> (shipped all the way from Earth a<br />
couple of decades ago to save it from the demolition of the inner system). "My mother runs it." He smiles thinly.<br />
"Your mother –" the newly resurrected immigrant stares at him intensely, then blinks. "Holy shit." He takes a step toward<br />
Sirhan. "It is you –"<br />
Sirhan recoils and snaps his fingers. The thin trail of vaporous cloud that has been following him all this time, shielding his<br />
shaven pate from the diffuse red glow of the swarming shells of orbital nanocomputers that have replaced the inner planets,<br />
extrudes a staff of hazy blue mist that stretches down from the air and slams together in his hand like a quarterstaff spun<br />
from bubbles. "Are you threatening me, sir?" he asks, deceptively mildly.<br />
"I –" The newcomer stops dead. Then he throws back his head and laughs. "Don't be silly, son. We're related!"<br />
"Son?" Sirhan bristles. "Who do you think you are –" A horrible thought occurs to him. "Oh. Oh dear." A wash of<br />
adrenaline drenches him in warm sweat. "I do believe we've met, in a manner of speaking ..." Oh boy, this is going to upset so<br />
many applecarts, he realizes, spinning off a ghost to think about the matter. The implications are enormous.<br />
The naked newcomer nods, grinning at some private joke. "You look different from ground level. And now I'm human again."<br />
He runs his hands down his ribs, pauses, and glances at Sirhan owlishly. "Um. I didn't mean to frighten you. But I don't<br />
suppose you could find your aged grandfather something to wear?"<br />
Sirhan sighs and points his staff straight up at the sky. The rings are edge on, for the lily pad continent floats above an ocean<br />
of cold gas along Saturn's equator, and they glitter like a ruby laser beam slashed across the sky. "Let there be aerogel."<br />
A cloud of wispy soap bubble congeals in a cone shape above the newly resurrected ancient and drops over him, forming a<br />
caftan. "Thanks," he says. He looks round, twisting his neck, then winces. "Damn, that hurt. Ouch. I need to get myself a set of<br />
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implants."<br />
"They can sort you out in the processing center. It's in the basement in the west wing. They'll give you something more<br />
permanent to wear, too." Sirhan peers at him. "Your face –" He pages through rarely used memories. Yes, it's Manfred as he<br />
looked in the early years of the last century. As he looked around the time Mother-not was born. There's something<br />
positively indecent about meeting your own grandfather in the full flush of his youth. "Are you sure you haven't been<br />
messing with your phenotype?" he asks suspiciously.<br />
"No, this is what I used to look like. I think. Back in the naked ape again, after all these years as an emergent function of a<br />
flock of passenger pigeons." His grandfather smirks. "What's your mother going to say?"<br />
"I really don't know –" Sirhan shakes his head. "Come on, let's get you to immigrant processing. You're sure you're not just<br />
an historical simulation?"<br />
The place is already heaving with the resimulated. Just why the Vile Offspring seem to feel it's necessary to apply valuable<br />
exaquops to the job of deriving accurate simulations of dead humans – outrageously accurate simulations of long-dead lives,<br />
annealed until their written corpus matches that inherited from the presingularity era in the form of chicken scratchings on<br />
mashed tree pulp – much less beaming them at the refugee camps on Saturn – is beyond Sirhan's ken: But he wishes they'd<br />
stop.<br />
"Just a couple of days ago I crapped on your lawn. Hope you don't mind." Manfred cocks his head to one side and stares at<br />
Sirhan with beady eyes. "Actually, I'm here because of the upcoming election. It's got the potential to turn into a major crisis<br />
point, and I figured Amber would need me around."<br />
"Well you'd better come on in, then," Sirhan says resignedly as he climbs the steps, enters the foyer, and leads his turbulent<br />
grandfather into the foggy haze of utility nanomachines that fill the building.<br />
He can't wait to see what his mother will do when she meets her father in the flesh, after all this time.<br />
* * *<br />
Welcome to Saturn, your new home world. This FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) memeplex is designed to orient you and<br />
explain the following:<br />
How you got here<br />
Where "here" is<br />
Things you should avoid doing<br />
Things you might want to do as soon as possible<br />
Where to go for more information<br />
If you are remembering this presentation, you are probably resimulated. This is not the same as being resurrected. You may<br />
remember dying. Do not worry: Like all your other memories, it is a fabrication. In fact, this is the first time you have ever<br />
been alive. (Exception: If you died after the singularity, you may be a genuine resurrectee. In which case, why are you reading<br />
this FAQ?)<br />
How you got here:<br />
The center of the solar system – Mercury, Venus, Earth's Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, and Jupiter – have been dismantled,<br />
or are being dismantled, by weakly godlike intelligences. [NB: Monotheistic clergy and Europeans who remember living prior<br />
to 1600, see alternative memeplex "in the beginning."] A weakly godlike intelligence is not a supernatural agency, but the<br />
product of a highly advanced society that learned how to artificially create souls [late 20th century: software] and translate<br />
human minds into souls and vice versa. [Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is<br />
not immortal.]<br />
Some of the weakly godlike intelligences appear to cultivate an interest in their human antecedents – for whatever reason is<br />
not known. (Possibilities include the study of history through horticulture, entertainment through live-action role-playing,<br />
revenge, and economic forgery.) While no definitive analysis is possible, all the resimulated persons to date exhibit certain<br />
common characteristics: They are all based on well-documented historical persons, their memories show suspicious gaps [see:<br />
smoke and mirrors], and they are ignorant of or predate the singularity [see: Turing Oracle, Vinge catastrophe].<br />
It is believed that the weakly godlike agencies have created you as a vehicle for the introspective study of your historical<br />
antecedent by backward-chaining from your corpus of documented works, and the back-projected genome derived from<br />
your collateral descendants, to generate an abstract description of your computational state vector. This technique is<br />
extremely intensive [see: expTime-complete algorithms, Turing Oracle, time travel, industrial magic] but marginally plausible in the<br />
absence of supernatural explanations.<br />
After experiencing your life, the weakly godlike agencies have expelled you. For reasons unknown, they chose to do this by<br />
transmitting your upload state and genome/proteome complex to receivers owned and operated by a consortium of<br />
charities based on Saturn. These charities have provided for your basic needs, including the body you now occupy.<br />
In summary: You are a reconstruction of someone who lived and died a long time ago, not a reincarnation. You have no<br />
intrinsic moral right to the identity you believe to be your own, and an extensive body of case law states that you do not<br />
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inherit your antecedent's possessions. Other than that, you are a free individual.<br />
Note that fictional resimulation is strictly forbidden. If you have reason to believe that you may be a fictional character, you<br />
must contact the city immediately. [ See: James Bond, Spider Jerusalem.] Failure to comply is a felony.<br />
Where you are:<br />
You are on Saturn. Saturn is a gas giant planet 120,500 kilometers in diameter, located 1.5 billion kilometers from Earth's<br />
sun. [NB: Europeans who remember living prior to 1580, see alternative memeplex "the flat Earth – not".] Saturn has been<br />
partially terraformed by posthuman emigrants from Earth and Jupiter orbit: The ground beneath your feet is, in reality, the<br />
floor of a hydrogen balloon the size of a continent, floating in Saturn's upper atmosphere. [NB: Europeans who remember<br />
living prior to 1790, internalize the supplementary memeplex: "the Brothers Montgolfier."] The balloon is very safe, but mining<br />
activities and the use of ballistic weapons are strongly deprecated because the air outside is unbreathable and extremely cold.<br />
The society you have been instantiated in is extremely wealthy within the scope of Economics 1.0, the value transfer system<br />
developed by human beings during and after your own time. Money exists, and is used for the usual range of goods and<br />
services, but the basics – food, water, air, power, off-the-shelf clothing, housing, historical entertainment, and monster trucks<br />
– are free. An implicit social contract dictates that, in return for access to these facilities, you obey certain laws.<br />
If you wish to opt out of this social contract, be advised that other worlds may run Economics 2.0 or subsequent releases.<br />
These value-transfer systems are more efficient – hence wealthier – than Economics 1.0, but true participation in Economics<br />
2.0 is not possible without dehumanizing cognitive surgery. Thus, in absolute terms, although this society is richer than any<br />
you have ever heard of, it is also a poverty-stricken backwater compared to its neighbors.<br />
Things you should avoid doing:<br />
Many activities that have been classified as crimes in other societies are legal here. These include but are not limited to: acts<br />
of worship, art, sex, violence, communication, or commerce between consenting competent sapients of any species, except<br />
where such acts transgress the list of prohibitions below. [See additional memeplex: competence defined.]<br />
Some activities are prohibited here and may have been legal in your previous experience. These include willful deprivation of<br />
ability to consent [see: slavery], interference in the absence of consent [see: minors, legal status of], formation of limited liability<br />
companies [see: singularity], and invasion of defended privacy [see: the Slug, Cognitive Pyramid Schemes, Brain Hacking, Thompson<br />
Trust Exploit].<br />
Some activities unfamiliar to you are highly illegal and should be scrupulously avoided. These include: possession of nuclear<br />
weapons, possession of unlimited autonomous replicators [see: gray goo], coercive assimilationism [see: borganism, aggressive],<br />
coercive halting of Turing-equivalent personalities [see: basilisks], and applied theological engineering [see: God bothering].<br />
Some activities superficially familiar to you are merely stupid and should be avoided for your safety, although they are not<br />
illegal as such. These include: giving your bank account details to the son of the Nigerian Minister of Finance; buying title to<br />
bridges, skyscrapers, spacecraft, planets, or other real assets; murder; selling your identity; and entering into financial<br />
contracts with entities running Economics 2.0 or higher.<br />
Things you should do as soon as possible:<br />
Many material artifacts you may consider essential to life are freely available – just ask the city, and it will grow you clothes, a<br />
house, food, or other basic essentials. Note, however, that the library of public domain structure templates is of necessity<br />
restrictive, and does not contain items that are highly fashionable or that remain in copyright. Nor will the city provide you<br />
with replicators, weapons, sexual favors, slaves, or zombies.<br />
You are advised to register as a citizen as soon as possible. If the individual you are a resimulation of can be confirmed dead,<br />
you may adopt their name but not – in law – any lien or claim on their property, contracts, or descendants. You register as<br />
a citizen by asking the city to register you; the process is painless and typically complete within four hours. Unless you are<br />
registered, your legal status as a sapient organism may be challenged. The ability to request citizenship rights is one of the<br />
legal tests for sapience, and failure to comply may place you in legal jeopardy. You can renounce your citizenship whenever<br />
you wish: This may be desirable if you emigrate to another polity.<br />
While many things are free, it is highly likely that you posses no employable skills, and therefore, no way of earning money<br />
with which to purchase unfree items. The pace of change in the past century has rendered almost all skills you may have<br />
learned obsolete [see: singularity]. However, owing to the rapid pace of change, many cooperatives, trusts, and guilds offer<br />
on-the-job training or educational loans.<br />
Your ability to learn depends on your ability to take information in the format in which it is offered. Implants are frequently<br />
used to provide a direct link between your brain and the intelligent machines that surround it. A basic core implant set is<br />
available on request from the city. [See: implant security, firewall, wetware.]<br />
Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases<br />
are curable, and in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may be provided – for a fee. (In event of your<br />
murder, you will be furnished with a new body at the expense of your killer.) If you have any preexisting medical conditions<br />
or handicaps, consult the city.<br />
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The city is an agoric-annealing participatory democracy with a limited liability constitution. Its current executive agency is a<br />
weakly godlike intelligence that chooses to associate with human-equivalent intelligences: This agency is colloquially known as<br />
"Hello Kitty," "Beautiful Cat," or "Aineko," and may manifest itself in a variety of physical avatars if corporeal interaction is<br />
desired. (Prior to the arrival of "Hello Kitty," the city used a variety of human-designed expert systems that provided<br />
suboptimal performance.)<br />
The city's mission statement is to provide a mediatory environment for human-equivalent intelligences and to preserve same<br />
in the face of external aggression. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the ongoing political processes of determining<br />
such responses. Citizens also have a duty to serve on a jury if called (including senatorial service), and to defend the city.<br />
Where to go for further information:<br />
Until you have registered as a citizen and obtained basic implants, all further questions should be directed to the city. Once<br />
you have learned to use your implants, you will not need to ask this question.<br />
* * *<br />
Welcome to decade the ninth, singularity plus one gigasecond (or maybe more – nobody's quite sure when,<br />
or indeed if, a singularity has been created). The human population of the solar system is either six billion, or<br />
sixty billion, depending on whether you class the forked state vectors of posthumans and the simulations of<br />
dead phenotypes running in the Vile Offspring's Schrödinger boxes as people. Most of the physically<br />
incarnate still live on Earth, but the lily-pads floating beneath continent-sized hot-hydrogen balloons in<br />
Saturn's upper atmosphere already house a few million, and the writing is on the wall for the rocky inner<br />
planets. All the remaining human-equivalent intelligences with half a clue to rub together are trying to<br />
emigrate before the Vile Offspring decide to recycle Earth to fill in a gap in the concentric shells of<br />
nanocomputers they're running on. The half-constructed Matrioshka brain already darkens the skies of Earth<br />
and has caused a massive crash in the planet's photosynthetic biomass, as plants starve for short-wavelength<br />
light.<br />
Since decade the seventh, the computational density of the solar system has soared. Within the asteroid belt,<br />
more than half the available planetary mass has been turned into nanoprocessors, tied together by quantum<br />
entanglement into a web so dense that each gram of matter can simulate all the possible life experiences of an<br />
individual human being in a scant handful of minutes. Economics 2.0 is itself obsolescent, forced to mutate in<br />
a furious survivalist arms race by the arrival of the Slug. Only the name remains as a vague shorthand for<br />
merely human-equivalent intelligences to use when describing interactions they don't understand.<br />
The latest generation of posthuman entities is less overtly hostile to humans, but much more alien than the<br />
generations of the fifties and seventies. Among their less comprehensible activities, the Vile Offspring are<br />
engaged in exploring the phase-space of all possible human experiences from the inside out. Perhaps they<br />
caught a dose of the Tiplerite heresy along the way, for now a steady stream of resimulant uploads is pouring<br />
through the downsystem relays in Titan orbit. The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the<br />
Resurrection of the Extremely Confused, except that they're not really resurrectees – they're simulations<br />
based on their originals' recorded histories, blocky and missing chunks of their memories, as bewildered as<br />
baby ducklings as they're herded into the wood-chipper of the future.<br />
Sirhan al-Khurasani despises them with the abstract contempt of an antiquarian for a cunning but ultimately<br />
transparent forgery. But Sirhan is young, and he's got more contempt than he knows what to do with. It's a<br />
handy outlet for his frustration. He has a lot to be frustrated at, starting with his intermittently dysfunctional<br />
family, the elderly stars around whom his planet whizzes in chaotic trajectories of enthusiasm and distaste.<br />
Sirhan fancies himself a philosopher-historian of the singular age, a chronicler of the incomprehensible, which<br />
would be a fine thing to be except that his greatest insights are all derived from Aineko. He alternately fawns<br />
over and rages against his mother, who is currently a leading light in the refugee community, and honors<br />
(when not attempting to evade the will of) his father, who is lately a rising philosophical patriarch within the<br />
Conservationist faction. He's secretly in awe (not to mention slightly resentful) of his grandfather Manfred. In<br />
fact, the latter's abrupt reincarnation in the flesh has quite disconcerted him. And he sometimes listens to his<br />
stepgrandmother Annette, who has reincarnated in more or less her original 2020s body after spending<br />
some years as a great ape, and who seems to view him as some sort of personal project.<br />
OnlyAnnette isn't being very helpful right now. His mother is campaigning on an electoral platform calling<br />
for a vote to blow up the world, Annette is helping run her campaign, his grandfather is trying to convince<br />
him to entrust everything he holds dear to a rogue lobster, and the cat is being typically feline and evasive.<br />
Talk about families with problems ...<br />
* * *<br />
They've transplanted imperial Brussels to Saturn in its entirety, mapped tens of megatonnes of buildings right down to<br />
nanoscale and beamed them into the outer darkness to be reinstantiated down-well on the lily-pad colonies that dot the<br />
stratosphere of the gas giant. (Eventually the entire surface of the Earth will follow – after which the Vile Offspring will core<br />
the planet like an apple, dismantle it into a cloud of newly formed quantum nanocomputers to add to their burgeoning<br />
Matrioshka brain.) Due to a resource contention problem in the festival committee's planning algorithm – or maybe it's<br />
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simply an elaborate joke – Brussels now begins just on the other side of a diamond bubble wall from the Boston Museum of<br />
<strong>Science</strong>, less than a kilometer away as the passenger pigeon flies. Which is why, when it's time to celebrate a birthday or<br />
name day (meaningless though those concepts are, out on Saturn's synthetic surface), Amber tends to drag people over to<br />
the bright lights of the big city.<br />
This time she's throwing a rather special party. At Annette's canny prompting, she's borrowed the Atomium and invited a<br />
horde of guests to a big event. It's not a family bash – although Annette's promised her a surprise – so much as a business<br />
meeting, testing the water as a preliminary to declaring her candidacy. It's a media coup, an attempt to engineer Amber's<br />
re-entry into the mainstream politics of the human system.<br />
Sirhan doesn't really want to be here. He's got far more important things to do, like continuing to catalogue Aineko's<br />
memories of the voyage of the Field Circus. He's also collating a series of interviews with resimulated logical positivists from<br />
Oxford, England (the ones who haven't retreated into gibbering near catatonia upon realizing that their state vectors are all<br />
members of the set of all sets that do not contain themselves), when he isn't attempting to establish a sound rational case for<br />
his belief that extraterrestrial superintelligence is an oxymoron and the router network is just an accident, one of evolution's<br />
little pranks.<br />
But Tante Annette twisted his arm and promised he was in on the surprise if he came to the party. And despite everything,<br />
he wouldn't miss being a fly on the wall during the coming meeting between Manfred and Amber for all the tea in China.<br />
Sirhan walks up to the gleaming stainless-steel dome that contains the entrance to the Atomium, and waits for the lift. He's in<br />
line behind a gaggle of young-looking women, skinny and soigné in cocktail gowns and tiaras lifted from 1920s silent movies.<br />
(Annette declared an age of elegance theme for the party, knowing full well that it would force Amber to focus on her public<br />
appearance.) Sirhan's attention is, however, elsewhere. The various fragments of his mind are conducting three simultaneous<br />
interviews with philosophers ("whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent" in spades), controlling two 'bots that are<br />
overhauling the museum plumbing and air-recycling system, and he's busy discussing observations of the alien artifact<br />
orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai +4904 / -56 with Aineko. What's left of him exhibits about as much social presence as a<br />
pickled cabbage.<br />
The lift arrives and accepts a load of passengers. Sirhan is crowded into one corner by a bubble of high-society laughter and<br />
an aromatic puff of smoke from an improbable ivory cigarette holder as the lift surges, racing up the sixty-meter shaft<br />
toward the observation deck at the top of the Atomium. It's a ten-meter-diameter metal globe, spiral staircases and escalators<br />
connecting it to the seven spheres at the corners of an octahedron that make up the former centerpiece of the 1950<br />
World's Fair. Unlike most of the rest of Brussels, it's the original bits and atoms, bent alloy structures from before the space<br />
age shipped out to Saturn at enormous expense. The lift arrives with a slight jerk. "Excuse me," squeaks one of the good-time<br />
girls as she lurches backward, elbowing Sirhan.<br />
He blinks, barely noticing her black bob of hair, chromatophore-tinted shadows artfully tuned around her eyes: "Nothing to<br />
excuse." In the background, Aineko is droning on sarcastically about the lack of interest the crew of the Field Circus<br />
exhibited in the cat's effort to decompile their hitchhiker, the Slug. It's distracting as hell, but Sirhan feels a desperate urge to<br />
understand what happened out there. It's the key to understanding his not-mother's obsessions and weaknesses – which, he<br />
senses, will be important in the times to come.<br />
He evades the gaggle of overdressed good-time girls and steps out onto the lower of the two stainless-steel decks that bisect<br />
the sphere. Accepting a fruit cocktail from a discreetly humaniform waitron, he strolls toward a row of triangular windows<br />
that gaze out across the arena toward the American Pavilion and the World Village. The metal walls are braced with<br />
turquoise-painted girders, and the perspex transparencies are fogged with age. He can barely see the one-tenth-scale model<br />
of an atomic-powered ocean liner leaving the pier below, or the eight-engined giant seaplane beside it. "They never once<br />
asked me if the Slug had attempted to map itself into the human-compatible spaces aboard the ship," Aineko bitches at him.<br />
"I wasn't expecting them to, but really! Your mother's too trusting, boy."<br />
"I suppose you took precautions?" Sirhan's ghost murmurs to the cat. That sets the irascible metafeline off again on a long<br />
discursive tail-washing rant about the unreliability of Economics-2.0-compliant financial instruments. Economics 2.0<br />
apparently replaces the single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the multiple-indirection mappings of options<br />
trades, with some kind of insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the parameterized desires and subjective<br />
experiential values of the players, and as far as the cat is concerned, this makes all such transactions intrinsically<br />
untrustworthy.<br />
Which is why you're stuck here with us apes, Sirhan-prime cynically notes as he spawns an Eliza ghost to carry on nodding at the<br />
cat while he experiences the party.<br />
It's uncomfortably warm in the Atomium sphere – not surprising, there must be thirty people milling around up here, not<br />
counting the waitrons – and several local multicast channels are playing a variety of styles of music to synchronize the mood<br />
swings of the revelers to hardcore techno, waltz, raga ...<br />
"Having a good time, are we?" Sirhan breaks away from integrating one of his timid philosophers and realizes that his glass is<br />
empty, and his mother is grinning alarmingly at him over the rim of a cocktail glass containing something that glows in the<br />
dark. She's wearing spike-heeled boots and a black velvet cat suit that hugs her contours like a second skin, and she's already<br />
getting drunk. In wall-clock years she is younger than Sirhan; it's like having a bizarrely knowing younger sister mysteriously<br />
injected into his life to replace the eigenmother who stayed home and died with the Ring Imperium decades ago. "Look at<br />
you, hiding in a corner at your grandfather's party! Hey, your glass is empty. Want to try this caipirinha? There's someone<br />
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you've got to meet over here –"<br />
It's at moments like this that Sirhan really wonders what in Jupiter's orbit his father ever saw in this woman. (But then again,<br />
in the world line this instance of her has returned from, he didn't. So what does that signify?) "As long as there's no<br />
fermented grape juice in it," he says resignedly, allowing himself to be led past a gaggle of conversations and a<br />
mournful-looking gorilla slurping a long drink through a straw. "More of your accelerationista allies?"<br />
"Maybe not." It's the girl gang he avoided noticing in the lift, their eyes sparkling, really getting into this early twen-cen drag<br />
party thing, waving their cigarette holders and cocktail glasses around with wild abandon. "Rita, I'd like you to meet Sirhan,<br />
my other fork's son. Sirhan, this is Rita? She's an historian, too. Why don't you –"<br />
Dark eyes, emphasized not by powder or paint, but by chromatophores inside her skin cells: black hair, chain of enormous<br />
pearls, slim black dress sweeping the floor, a look of mild embarrassment on her heart-shaped face: She could be a clone of<br />
Audrey Hepburn in any other century, "Didn't I just meet you in the elevator?" The embarrassment shifts to her cheeks,<br />
becoming visible.<br />
Sirhan flushes, unsure how to reply. Just then, an interloper arrives on the scene, pushing in between them. "Are you the<br />
curator who reorganized the Precambrian gallery along teleology lines? I've got some things to say about that!" The<br />
interloper is tall, assertive, and blonde. Sirhan hates her from the first sight of her wagging finger.<br />
"Oh shut up, Marissa, this is a party, you've been being a pain all evening." To his surprise, Rita the historian rounds on the<br />
interloper angrily.<br />
"It's not a problem," he manages to say. In the back of his mind, something makes the Rogerian puppet-him that's listening to<br />
the cat sit up and dump-merge a whole lump of fresh memories into his mind – something important, something about the<br />
Vile Offspring sending a starship to bring something back from the router – but the people around him are soaking up so<br />
much attention that he has to file it for later.<br />
"Yes it is a problem," Rita declares. She points at the interloper, who is saying something about the invalidity of teleological<br />
interpretations, trying to justify herself, and says, "Plonk. Phew. Where were we?"<br />
Sirhan blinks. Suddenly everyone but him seems to be ignoring that annoying Marissa person. "What just happened?" he asks<br />
cautiously.<br />
"I killfiled her. Don't tell me, you aren't running Superplonk yet, are you?" Rita flicks a location-cached idea at him and he<br />
takes it cautiously, spawning a couple of specialized Turing Oracles to check it for halting states. It seems to be some kind of<br />
optic lobe hack that accesses a collaborative database of eigenfaces, with some sort of side interface to Broca's region. "Share<br />
and enjoy, confrontation-free parties."<br />
"I've never seen –" Sirhan trails off as he loads the module distractedly. (The cat is rambling on about god modules and<br />
metastatic entanglement and the difficulty of arranging to have personalities custom-grown to order somewhere in the back<br />
of his head, while his fractional-self nods wisely whenever it pauses.) Something like an inner eyelid descends. He looks round;<br />
there's a vague blob at one side of the room, making an annoying buzzing sound. His mother seems to be having an<br />
animated conversation with it. "That's rather interesting."<br />
"Yes, it helps no end at this sort of event." Rita startles him by taking his left arm in hand – her cigarette holder shrivels and<br />
condenses until it's no more than a slight thickening around the wrist of her opera glove – and steers him toward a waitron.<br />
"I'm sorry about your foot, earlier, I was a bit overloaded. Is Amber Macx really your mother?"<br />
"Not exactly, she's my eigenmother," he mumbles. "The reincarnated download of the version who went out to Hyundai<br />
+4904 /-56 aboard the Field Circus. She married a French-Algerian confidence-trick analyst instead of my father, but I think<br />
they divorced a couple of years ago. My real mother married an imam, but they died in the aftermath of Economics 2.0." She<br />
seems to be steering him in the direction of the window bay Amber dragged him away from earlier. "Why do you ask?"<br />
"Because you're not very good at making small talk," Rita says quietly, "and you don't seem very good in crowds. Is that right?<br />
Was it you who performed that amazing dissection of Wittgenstein's cognitive map? The one with the preverbal Gödel string<br />
in it?"<br />
"It was –" He clears his throat. "You thought it was amazing?" Suddenly, on impulse, he detaches a ghost to identify this Rita<br />
person and find out who she is, what she wants. It's not normally worth the effort to get to know someone more closely<br />
than casual small talk, but she seems to have been digging into his background, and he wants to know why. Along with the<br />
him that's chatting to Aineko, that makes about three instances pulling in near-realtime resources. He'll be running up an<br />
existential debt soon if he keeps forking ghosts like this.<br />
"I thought so," she says. There's a bench in front of the wall, and somehow he finds himself sitting on it next to her. There's<br />
no danger, we're not in private or anything, he tells himself stiffly. She's smiling at him, face tilted slightly to one side and lips<br />
parted, and for a moment, a dizzy sense of possibility washes over him: What if she's about to throw all propriety aside? How<br />
undignified! Sirhan believes in self-restraint and dignity. "I was really interested in this –" She passes him another dynamically<br />
loadable blob, encompassing a detailed critique of his analysis of Wittgenstein's matriophobia in the context of gendered<br />
language constructs and nineteenth century Viennese society, along with a hypothesis that leaves Sirhan gasping with mild<br />
indignation at the very idea that he of all people might share Wittgenstein's skewed outlook – "What do you think?" she asks,<br />
grinning impishly at him.<br />
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"Nnngk." Sirhan tries to unswallow his tongue. Rita crosses her legs, her gown hissing. "I, ah, that is to say" – At which<br />
moment, his partials re-integrate, dumping a slew of positively pornographic images into his memories. It's a trap! they shriek,<br />
her breasts and hips and pubes – clean-shaven, he can't help noticing – thrusting at him in hotly passionate abandon,<br />
Mother's trying to make you loose like her! and he remembers what it would be like to wake up in bed next to this woman<br />
whom he barely knows after being married to her for a year, because one of his cognitive ghosts has just spent several<br />
seconds of network time (or several subjective months) getting hot and sweaty with a ghost of her own, and she does have<br />
interesting research ideas, even if she's a pushy over-westernized woman who thinks she can run his life for him. "What is<br />
this?" he splutters, his ears growing hot and his garments constricting.<br />
"Just speculating about possibilities. We could get a lot done together." She snakes an arm round his shoulders and pulls him<br />
toward her, gently. "Don't you want to find out if we could work out?"<br />
"But, but –" Sirhan is steaming. Is she offering casual sex? He wonders, profoundly embarrassed by his own inability to read<br />
her signals: "What do you want?" he asks.<br />
"You do know that you can do more with Superplonk than just killfile annoying idiots?" she whispers in his ear. "We can be<br />
invisible right now, if you like. It's great for confidential meetings – other things, too. We can work beautifully together, our<br />
ghosts annealed really well ..."<br />
Sirhan jumps up, his face stinging, and turns away: "No thank you!" he snaps, angry at himself. "Goodbye!" His other<br />
instances, interrupted by his broadcast emotional overload, are distracted from their tasks and sputtering with indignation.<br />
Her hurt expression is too much for him: The killfile snaps down, blurring her into an indistinct black blob on the wall,<br />
veiled by his own brain as he turns and walks away, seething with anger at his mother for being so unfair as to make him<br />
behold his own face in the throes of fleshy passion.<br />
Meanwhile, in one of the lower spheres, padded with silvery blue insulating pillows bound together with duct tape, the<br />
movers and shakers of the accelerationista faction are discussing their bid for world power at fractional-C velocities.<br />
* * *<br />
"We can't outrun everything. For example, a collapse of the false vacuum," Manfred insists, slightly uncoordinated and<br />
slurring his vowels under the influence of the first glass of fruit punch he's experienced in nigh-on twenty real-time years. His<br />
body is young and still relatively featureless, hair still growing out, and he's abandoned his old no-implants fetish at last to<br />
adopt an array of interfaces that let him internalize all the exocortex processes that he formerly ran on an array of dumb<br />
Turing machines outside his body. He's standing on his own sense of style and is the only person in the room who isn't<br />
wearing some variation of dinner jacket or classical evening dress. "Entangled exchange via routers is all very well, but it<br />
won't let us escape the universe itself – any phase change will catch up eventually, the network must have an end. And then<br />
where will we be, Sameena?"<br />
"I'm not disputing that." The woman he's talking to, wearing a green-and-gold sari and a medieval maharajah's ransom in gold<br />
and natural diamonds, nods thoughtfully. "But it hasn't happened yet, and we've got evidence that superhuman intelligences<br />
have been loose in this universe for gigayears, so there's a fair bet that the worst catastrophe scenarios are unlikely. And<br />
looking closer to home, we don't know what the routers are for, or who made them. Until then ..." She shrugs. "Look what<br />
happened last time somebody tried to probe them. No offense intended."<br />
"It's already happened. If what I hear is correct, the Vile Offspring aren't nearly as negative about the idea of using the<br />
routers as we old-fashioned metahumans might like to believe." Manfred frowns, trying to recall some hazy anecdote – he's<br />
experimenting with a new memory compression algorithm, necessitated by his pack rat mnemonic habits when younger, and<br />
sometimes the whole universe feels as if it's nearly on the tip of his tongue. "So, we seem to be in violent agreement about the<br />
need to know more about what's going on, and to find out what they're doing out there. We've got cosmic background<br />
anisotropies caused by the waste heat from computing processes millions of light-years across – it takes a big interstellar<br />
civilization to do that, and they don't seem to have fallen into the same rat trap as the local Matrioshka brain civilizations.<br />
And we've got worrying rumors about the VO messing around with the structure of space-time in order to find a way<br />
around the Beckenstein bound. If the VO are trying that, then the folks out near the supercluster already know the answers.<br />
The best way to find out what's happening is to go and talk to whoever's responsible. Can we at least agree on that?"<br />
"Probably not." Her eyes glitter with amusement. "It all depends on whether one believes in these civilizations in the first<br />
place. I know your people point to deep-field camera images going all the way back to some wonky hubble-bubble scrying<br />
mirror from the late twentieth, but we've got no evidence except some theories about the Casimir effect and pair<br />
production and spinning beakers of helium-3 – much less proof that whole bunch of alien galactic civilizations are trying to<br />
collapse the false vacuum and destroy the universe!" Her voice dropped a notch: "At least, not enough proof to convince<br />
most people, Manny dear. I know this comes as a shock to you, but not everyone is a neophiliac posthuman bodysurfer whose<br />
idea of a sabbatical is to spend twenty years as a flock of tightly networked seagulls in order to try and to prove the Turing<br />
Oracle thesis –"<br />
"Not everyone is concerned with the deep future," Manfred interrupts. "It's important! If we live or die, that doesn't matter –<br />
that's not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether<br />
we're stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It's downright embarrassing to be a member of a<br />
species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally! I mean, if<br />
there's going to come a time when there's nobody or nothing to remember us then what does –"<br />
"Manfred?"<br />
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He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly.<br />
It's Amber, poised in black cat suit with cocktail glass. Her expression is open and confused, appallingly vulnerable. Blue<br />
liquid slops, almost spilling out of her glass – the rim barely extends itself in time to catch the drops. Behind her stands<br />
Annette, a deeply self-satisfied smile on her face.<br />
"You." Amber pauses, her cheek twitching as bits of her mind page in and out of her skull, polling external information<br />
sources. "You really are –"<br />
A hasty cloud materializes under her hand as her fingers relax, dropping the glass.<br />
"Uh." Manfred stares, at a complete loss for words. "I'd, uh." After a moment he looks down. "I'm sorry. I'll get you another<br />
drink ..?"<br />
"Why didn't someone warn me?" Amber complains.<br />
"We thought you could use the good advice," Annette stated into the awkward silence. "And a family reunion. It was meant<br />
to be a surprise."<br />
"A surprise." Amber looks perplexed. "You could say that."<br />
"You're taller than I was expecting," Manfred says unexpectedly. "People look different when you're not using human eyes."<br />
"Yeah?" She looks at him, and he turns his head slightly, facing her. It's a historic moment, and Annette is getting it all on<br />
memory diamond, from every angle. The family's dirty little secret is that Amber and her father have never met, not<br />
face-to-face in physical meat-machine proximity. She was born years after Manfred and Pamela separated, after all, decanted<br />
prefertilized from a tank of liquid nitrogen. This is the first time either of them have actually seen the other's face without<br />
electronic intermediation. And while they've said everything that needed to be said on a businesslike level, anthropoid family<br />
politics is still very much a matter of body language and pheromones. "How long have you been out and about?" she asks,<br />
trying to disguise her confusion.<br />
"About six hours." Manfred manages a rueful chuckle, trying to take the sight of her in all at once. "Let's get you another<br />
drink and put our heads together?"<br />
"Okay." Amber takes a deep breath and glares at Annette. "You set this up, you clean up the mess."<br />
Annette just stands there smiling at the confusion of her accomplishment.<br />
* * *<br />
The cold light of dawn finds Sirhan angry, sober, and ready to pick a fight with the first person who comes through the<br />
door of his office. The room is about ten meters across, with a floor of polished marble and skylights in the intricately<br />
plastered ceiling. The walkthrough of his current project sprouts in the middle of the floor like a ghostly abstract cauliflower,<br />
fractal branches dwindling down to infolded nodes tagged with compressed identifiers. The branches expand and shrink as<br />
Sirhan paces around it, zooming to readability in response to his eyeball dynamics. But he isn't paying it much attention.<br />
He's too disturbed, uncertain, trying to work out whom to blame. Which is why, when the door bangs open, his first<br />
response is to whirl angrily and open his mouth – then stop. "What do you want?" he demands.<br />
"A word, if you please?" Annette looks around distractedly. "This is your project?"<br />
"Yes," he says icily, and banishes the walkthrough with a wave of one hand. "What do you want?"<br />
"I'm not sure." Annette pauses. For a moment she looks weary, tired beyond mortal words, and Sirhan momentarily wonders<br />
if perhaps he's spreading the blame too far. This ninetysomething Frenchwoman who is no blood relative, who was in years<br />
past the love of his scatterbrained grandfather's life, seems the least likely person to be trying to manipulate him, at least in<br />
such an unwelcome and intimate manner. But there's no telling. Families are strange things, and even though the current<br />
instantiations of his father and mother aren't the ones who ran his pre-adolescent brain through a couple of dozen<br />
alternative lifelines before he was ten, he can't be sure – or that they wouldn't enlist Tante Annette's assistance in fucking<br />
with his mind. "We need to talk about your mother," she continues.<br />
"We do, do we?" Sirhan turns around and sees the vacancy of the room for what it is, a socket, like a pulled tooth, informed<br />
as much by what is absent as by what is present. He snaps his fingers, and an intricate bench of translucent bluish utility fog<br />
congeals out of the air behind him. He sits: Annette can do what she wants.<br />
"Oui." She thrusts her hands deep into the pocket of the peasant smock she's wearing – a major departure from her normal<br />
style – and leans against the wall. Physically, she looks young enough to have spent her entire life blitzing around the galaxy<br />
at three nines of lightspeed, but her posture is world-weary and ancient. History is a foreign country, and the old are<br />
unwilling emigrants, tired out by the constant travel. "Your mother, she has taken on a huge job, but it's one that needs<br />
doing. You agreed it needed doing, years ago, with the archive store. She is now trying to get it moving, that is what the<br />
campaign is about, to place before the electors a choice of how best to move an entire civilization. So I ask, why do you<br />
obstruct her?"<br />
Sirhan works his jaw; he feels like spitting. "Why?" he snaps.<br />
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"Yes. Why?" Annette gives in and magics up a chair from the swirling fogbank beneath the ceiling. She crouches in it, staring<br />
at him. "It is a question."<br />
"I have nothing against her political machinations," Sirhan says tensely. "But her uninvited interference in my personal life –"<br />
"What interference?"<br />
He stares. "Is that a question?" He's silent for a moment. Then: "Throwing that wanton at me last night –"<br />
Annette stares at him. "Who? What are you talking about?"<br />
"That, that loose woman!" Sirhan is reduced to spluttering. "False pretenses! If this is one of Father's matchmaking ideas, it is<br />
so very wrong that –"<br />
Annette is shaking her head. "Are you crazy? Your mother simply wanted you to meet her campaign team, to join in<br />
planning the policy. Your father is not on this planet! But you stormed out, you really upset Rita, did you know that? Rita,<br />
she is the best belief maintenance and story construction operative I have! Yet you to tears reduce her. What is wrong with<br />
you?"<br />
"I –" Sirhan swallows. "She's what?" he asks again, his mouth dry. "I thought ..." He trails off. He doesn't want to say what he<br />
thought. The hussy, that brazen trollop, is part of his mother's campaign party? Not some plot to lure him into corruption?<br />
What if it was all a horrible misunderstanding?<br />
"I think you need to apologize to someone," Annette says coolly, standing up. Sirhan's head is spinning between a dozen<br />
dialogues of actors and ghosts, a journal of the party replaying before his ghast-stricken inner gaze. Even the walls have<br />
begun to flicker, responding to his intense unease. Annette skewers him with a disgusted look: "When you can a woman<br />
behave toward as a person, not a threat, we can again talk. Until then." And she stands up and walks out of the room,<br />
leaving him to contemplate the shattered stump of his anger, so startled he can barely concentrate on his project, thinking, Is<br />
that really me? Is that what I look like to her? as the cladistic graph slowly rotates before him, denuded branches spread wide,<br />
waiting to be filled with the nodes of the alien interstellar network just as soon as he can convince Aineko to stake him the<br />
price of the depth-first tour of darkness.<br />
* * *<br />
Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons – literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly<br />
colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd, even without the added distractions<br />
of his sex drive, which he has switched off until he gets used to being unitary again. Not only does he get shooting pains in<br />
his neck whenever he tries to look over his left shoulder with his right eye, but he's lost the habit of spawning exocortical<br />
agents to go interrogate a database or bush robot or something, then report back to him. Instead he keeps trying to fly off<br />
in all directions at once, which usually ends with him falling over.<br />
But at present, that's not a problem. He's sitting comfortably at a weathered wooden table in a beer garden behind a hall<br />
lifted from somewhere like Frankfurt, a liter glass of straw-colored liquid at his elbow and a comforting multiple whispering of<br />
knowledge streams tickling the back of his head. Most of his attention is focused on Annette, who frowns at him with mingled<br />
concern and affection. They may have lived separate lives for almost a third of a century, since she declined to upload with<br />
him, but he's still deeply attuned to her.<br />
"You are going to have to do something about that boy," she says sympathetically. "He is close enough to upset Amber. And<br />
without Amber, there will be a problem."<br />
"I'm going to have to do something about Amber, too," Manfred retorts. "What was the idea, not warning her I was coming?"<br />
"It was meant to be a surprise." Annette comes as close to pouting as Manfred's seen her recently. It brings back warm<br />
memories; he reaches out to hold her hand across the table.<br />
"You know I can't handle the human niceties properly when I'm a flock." He strokes the back of her wrist. She pulls back<br />
after a while, but slowly. "I expected you to manage all that stuff."<br />
"That stuff." Annette shakes her head. "She's your daughter, you know? Did you have no curiosity left?"<br />
"As a bird?" Manfred cocks his head to one side so abruptly that he hurts his neck and winces. "Nope. Now I do, but I think I<br />
pissed her off –"<br />
"Which brings us back to point one."<br />
"I'd send her an apology, but she'd think I was trying to manipulate her" – Manfred takes a mouthful of beer – "and she'd be<br />
right." He sounds slightly depressed. "All my relationships are screwy this decade. And it's lonely."<br />
"So? Don't brood." Annette pulls her hand back. "Something will sort itself out eventually. And in the short term, there is<br />
the work, the electoral problem becomes acute." When she's around him the remains of her once-strong French accent<br />
almost vanish in a transatlantic drawl, he realizes with a pang. He's been abhuman for too long – people who meant a lot to<br />
him have changed while he's been away.<br />
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"I'll brood if I want to," he says. "I didn't ever really get a chance to say goodbye to Pam, did I? Not after that time in Paris<br />
when the gangsters ..." He shrugs. "I'm getting nostalgic in my old age." He snorts.<br />
"You're not the only one," Annette says tactfully. "Social occasions here are a minefield, one must tiptoe around so many<br />
issues, people have too much, too much history. And nobody knows everything that is going on."<br />
"That's the trouble with this damned polity." Manfred takes another gulp of hefeweisen. "We've already got six million people<br />
living on this planet, and it's growing like the first-generation Internet. Everyone who is anyone knows everyone, but there<br />
are so many incomers diluting the mix and not knowing that there is a small world network here that everything is up for<br />
grabs again after only a couple of megaseconds. New networks form, and we don't even know they exist until they sprout a<br />
political agenda and surface under us. We're acting under time pressure. If we don't get things rolling now, we'll never be<br />
able to ..." He shakes his head. "It wasn't like this for you in Brussels, was it?"<br />
"No. Brussels was a mature system. And I had Gianni to look after in his dotage after you left. It will only get worse from<br />
here on in, I think."<br />
"Democracy 2.0." He shudders briefly. "I'm not sure about the validity of voting projects at all, these days. The assumption<br />
that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent. Do you think we can make this fly?"<br />
"I don't see why not. If Amber's willing to play the People's Princess for us ..." Annette picks up a slice of liverwurst and<br />
chews on it meditatively.<br />
"I'm not sure it's workable, however we play it." Manfred looks thoughtful. "The whole democratic participation thing looks<br />
questionable to me under these circumstances. We're under direct threat, for all that it's a long-term one, and this whole<br />
culture is in danger of turning into a classical nation-state. Or worse, several of them layered on top of one another with<br />
complete geographical collocation but no social interpenetration. I'm not certain it's a good idea to try to steer something<br />
like that – pieces might break off, you'd get the most unpleasant side-effects. Although, on the other hand, if we can mobilize<br />
enough broad support to become the first visible planetwide polity ..."<br />
"We need you to stay focused," Annette adds unexpectedly.<br />
"Focused? Me?" He laughs, briefly. "I used to have an idea a second. Now it's maybe one a year. I'm just a melancholy old<br />
birdbrain, me."<br />
"Yes, but you know the old saying? The fox has many ideas – the hedgehog has only one, but it's a big idea."<br />
"So tell me, what is my big idea?" Manfred leans forward, one elbow on the table, one eye focused on inner space as a<br />
hot-burning thread of consciousness barks psephological performance metrics at him, analysing the game ahead. "Where do<br />
you think I'm going?"<br />
"I think –" Annette breaks off suddenly, staring past his shoulder. Privacy slips, and for a frozen moment Manfred glances<br />
round in mild horror and sees thirty or forty other guests in the crowded garden, elbows rubbing, voices raised above the<br />
background chatter: "Gianni!" She beams widely as she stands up. "What a surprise! When did you arrive?"<br />
Manfred blinks. A slim young guy, moving with adolescent grace, but none of the awkward movements and sullen lack of<br />
poise – he's much older than he looks, chickenhawk genetics. Gianni? He feels a huge surge of memories paging through his<br />
exocortex. He remembers ringing a doorbell in dusty, hot Rome: white toweling bathrobe, the economics of scarcity,<br />
autograph signed by the dead hand of von Neumann – "Gianni?" he asks, disbelieving. "It's been a long time!"<br />
The gilded youth, incarnated in the image of a metropolitan toy-boy from the noughties, grins widely and embraces Manfred<br />
with a friendly bear hug. Then he slides down onto the bench next to Annette, whom he kisses with easy familiarity. "Ah, to<br />
be among friends again! It's been too long!" He glances round curiously. "Hmm, how very Bavarian." He snaps his fingers.<br />
"Mine will be a, what do you recommend? It's been too long since my last beer." His grin widens. "Not in this body."<br />
"You're resimulated?" Manfred asks, unable to stop himself.<br />
Annette frowns at him disapprovingly: "No, silly! He came through the teleport gate –"<br />
"Oh." Manfred shakes his head. "I'm sorry –"<br />
"It's okay." Gianni Vittoria clearly doesn't mind being mistaken for a historical newbie, rather than someone who's traveled<br />
through the decades the hard way. He must be over a hundred by now, Manfred notes, not bothering to spawn a search thread<br />
to find out.<br />
"It was time to move and, well, the old body didn't want to move with me, so why not go gracefully and accept the<br />
inevitable?"<br />
"I didn't take you for a dualist," Manfred says ruefully.<br />
"Ah, I'm not – but neither am I reckless." Gianni drops his grin for a moment. The sometime minister for transhuman affairs,<br />
economic theoretician, then retired tribal elder of the polycognitive liberals is serious. "I have never uploaded before, or<br />
switched bodies, or teleported. Even when my old one was seriously – tcha! Maybe I left it too long. But here I am, one<br />
planet is as good as another to be cloned and downloaded onto, don't you think?"<br />
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"You invited him?" Manfred asks Annette.<br />
"Why wouldn't I?" There's a wicked gleam in her eye. "Did you expect me to live like a nun while you were a flock of<br />
pigeons? We may have campaigned against the legal death of the transubstantiated, Manfred, but there are limits."<br />
Manfred looks between them, then shrugs, embarrassed. "I'm still getting used to being human again," he admits. "Give me<br />
time to catch up? At an emotional level, at least." The realization that Gianni and Annette have a history together doesn't<br />
come as a surprise to him: It's one of the things you must adapt to if you opt out of the human species, after all. At least the<br />
libido suppression is helping here, he realizes: He's not about to embarrass anyone by suggesting a ménage. He focuses on<br />
Gianni. "I have a feeling I'm here for a purpose, and it isn't mine," he says slowly. "Why don't you tell me what you've got in<br />
mind?"<br />
Gianni shrugs. "You have the big picture already. We are human, metahuman, and augmented human. But the posthumans<br />
are things that were never really human to begin with. The Vile Offspring have reached their adolescence and want the place<br />
to themselves so they can throw a party. The writing is on the wall, don't you think?"<br />
Manfred gives him a long stare. "The whole idea of running away in meatspace is fraught with peril," he says slowly. He picks<br />
up his mug of beer and swirls it around slowly. "Look, we know, now, that a singularity doesn't turn into a voracious<br />
predator that eats all the dumb matter in its path, triggering a phase change in the structure of space – at least, not unless<br />
they've done something very stupid to the structure of the false vacuum, somewhere outside our current light cone.<br />
"But if we run away, we are still going to be there. Sooner or later, we'll have the same problem all over again; runaway<br />
intelligence augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that's what happened out past the<br />
Böotes void – not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence.<br />
We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don't<br />
we? So ... maybe you can tell me what you think we should do. Hmm?"<br />
"It's a dilemma." A waitron inserts itself into their privacy-screened field of view. It plants a spun-diamond glass in front of<br />
Gianni, then pukes beer into it. Manfred declines a refill, waiting for Gianni to drink. "Ah, the simple pleasures of the flesh!<br />
I've been corresponding with your daughter, Manny. She loaned me her experiential digest of the journey to Hyundai<br />
+4904 /-56 . I found it quite alarming. Nobody's casting aspersions on her observations, not after that self-propelled stock<br />
market bubble or 419 scam or whatever it was got loose in the Economics 2.0 sphere, but the implications – the Vile<br />
Offspring will eat the solar system, Manny. Then they'll slow down. But where does that leave us, I ask you? What is there for<br />
orthohumans like us to do?"<br />
Manfred nods thoughtfully. "You've heard the argument between the accelerationistas and the time-binder faction, I assume?"<br />
he asks.<br />
"Of course." Gianni takes a long pull on his beer. "What do you think of our options?"<br />
"The accelerationistas want to upload everyone onto a fleet of starwisps and charge off to colonize an uninhabited brown<br />
dwarf planetary system. Or maybe steal a Matrioshka brain that's succumbed to senile dementia and turn it back into<br />
planetary biomes with cores of diamond-phase computronium to fulfil some kind of demented pastoralist nostalgia trip.<br />
Rousseau's universal robots. I gather Amber thinks this is a good idea because she's done it before – at least, the charging off<br />
aboard a starwisp part. 'To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony fleet has gone before' has a certain ring to it,<br />
doesn't it?" Manfred nods to himself. "Like I say, it won't work. We'd be right back to iteration one of the waterfall model of<br />
singularity formation within a couple of gigaseconds of arriving. That's why I came back: to warn her."<br />
"So?" Gianni prods, pretending to ignore the frowns that Annette is casting his way.<br />
"And as for the time-binders," Manfred nods again, "they're like Sirhan. Deeply conservative, deeply suspicious. Holding out<br />
for staying here as long as possible, until the Vile Offspring come for Saturn – then moving out bit by bit, into the Kuiper<br />
belt. Colony habitats on snowballs half a light-year from anywhere." He shudders. "Spam in a fucking can with a light-hour<br />
walk to the nearest civilized company if your fellow inmates decide to reinvent Stalinism or Objectivism. No thanks! I know<br />
they've been muttering about quantum teleportation and stealing toys from the routers, but I'll believe it when I see it."<br />
"Which leaves what?" Annette demands. "It is all very well, this dismissal of both the accelerationista and time-binder<br />
programs, Manny, but what can you propose in their place?" She looks distressed. "Fifty years ago, you would have had six<br />
new ideas before breakfast! And an erection."<br />
Manfred leers at her unconvincingly. "Who says I can't still have both?"<br />
She glares. "Drop it!"<br />
"Okay." Manfred chugs back a quarter of a liter of beer, draining his glass, and puts it down on the table with a bang. "As it<br />
happens, I do have an alternative idea." He looks serious. "I've been discussing it with Aineko for some time, and Aineko has<br />
been seeding Sirhan with it – if it's to work optimally, we'll need to get a rump constituency of both the accelerationistas and<br />
the conservatives on board. Which is why I'm conditionally going along with this whole election nonsense. So, what's it worth<br />
to you for me to explain it?"<br />
* * *<br />
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"So, who was the deadhead you were busy with today?" asks Amber.<br />
Rita shrugs. "Some boringly prolix pulp author from the early twentieth, with a body phobia of extropian proportions – I<br />
kept expecting him to start drooling and rolling his eyes if I crossed my legs. Funny thing is, he was also close to bolting from<br />
fear once I mentioned implants. We really need to nail down how to deal with these mind/body dualists, don't we?" She<br />
watches Amber with something approaching admiration; she's new to the inner circle of the accelerationista study faction,<br />
and Amber's social credit is sky-high. Rita's got a lot to learn from her, if she can get close enough. And right now, following<br />
her along a path through the landscaped garden behind the museum seems like a golden moment of opportunity.<br />
Amber smiles. "I'm glad I'm not processing immigrants these days; most of them are so stupid it drives you up the wall after a<br />
bit. Personally I blame the Flynn effect – in reverse. They come from a background of sensory deprivation. It's nothing that a<br />
course of neural growth enhancers can't fix in a year or two, but after the first few you skullfuck, they're all the same. So<br />
dull. Unless you're unlucky enough to get one of the documentees from a puritan religious period. I'm no fluffragette, but I<br />
swear if I get one more superstitious, woman-hating clergyman, I'm going to consider prescribing forcible gender<br />
reassignment surgery. At least the Victorian English are mostly just open-minded lechers, when you get past their social<br />
reserve. And they like new technology."<br />
Rita nods. Woman-hating et cetera ... The echoes of patriarchy are still with them today, it seems, and not just in the form of<br />
resimulated ayatollahs and archbishops from the Dark Ages. "My author sounds like the worst of both. Some guy called<br />
Howard, from Rhode Island. Kept looking at me as if he was afraid I was going to sprout bat wings and tentacles or<br />
something." Like your son, she doesn't add. Just what was he thinking, anyway? she wonders. To be that screwed up takes serious<br />
dedication ... "What are you working on, if you don't mind me asking?" she asks, trying to change the direction of her<br />
attention.<br />
"Oh, pressing the flesh, I guess. Auntie 'Nette wanted me to meet some old political hack contact of hers who she figures can<br />
help with the program, but he was holed up with her and Dad all day." She pulls a face. "I had another fitting session with<br />
the image merchants, they're trying to turn me into a political catwalk clotheshorse. Then there's the program demographics<br />
again. We're getting about a thousand new immigrants a day, planetwide, but it's accelerating rapidly, and we should be up<br />
to eighty an hour by the time of the election. Which is going to be a huge problem, because if we start campaigning too<br />
early, a quarter of the electorate won't know what they're meant to be voting about."<br />
"Maybe it's deliberate," Rita suggests. "The Vile Offspring are trying to rig the outcome by injecting voters." She pings a smiley<br />
emoticon off Wednesday's open channel, raising a flickering grin in return. "The party of fuckwits will win, no question about<br />
it."<br />
"Uh-huh." Amber snaps her fingers and pulls an impatient face as she waits for a passing cloud to solidify above her head and<br />
lower a glass of cranberry juice to her. "Dad said one thing that's spot-on, we're framing this entire debate in terms of what<br />
we should do to avoid conflict with the Offspring. The main bone of contention is how to run away and how far to go and<br />
which program to put resources into, not whether or when to run, let alone what else we could do. Maybe we should have<br />
given it some more thought. Are we being manipulated?"<br />
Rita looks vacant for a moment. "Is that a question?" she asks. Amber nods, and she shakes her head. "Then I'd have to say<br />
that I don't know. The evidence is inconclusive, so far. But I'm not really happy. The Offspring won't tell us what they want,<br />
but there's no reason to believe they don't know what we want. I mean, they can think rings round us, can't they?"<br />
Amber shrugs, then pauses to unlatch a hedge gate that gives admission to a maze of sweet-smelling shrubs. "I really don't<br />
know. They may not care about us, or even remember we exist – the resimulants may be being generated by some<br />
autonomic mechanism, not really part of the higher consciousness of the Offspring. Or it may be some whacked-out<br />
post-Tiplerite meme that's gotten hold of more processing resources than the entire presingularity Net, some kind of<br />
MetaMormon project directed at ensuring that everyone who can possibly ever have lived lives in the right way to fit some<br />
weird quasi-religious requirement we don't know about. Or it might be a message we're simply not smart enough to decode.<br />
That's the trouble, we don't know."<br />
She vanishes around the curve of the maze. Rita hurries to catch up, sees her about to turn into another alleyway, and leaps<br />
after her. "What else?" she pants.<br />
"Could be" – left turn – "anything, really." Six steps lead down into a shadowy tunnel; fork right, five meters forward, then<br />
six steps up lead back to the surface. "Question is, why don't they" – left turn – "just tell us what they want?"<br />
"Speaking to tapeworms." Rita nearly manages to catch up with Amber, who is trotting through the maze as if she's<br />
memorized it perfectly. "That's how much the nascent Matrioshka brain can outthink us by, as humans to segmented worms.<br />
Would we do. What they told us?"<br />
"Maybe." Amber stops dead, and Rita glances around. They're in an open cell near the heart of the maze, five meters square,<br />
hedged in on all sides. There are three entrances and a slate altar, waist high, lichen-stained with age. "I think you know the<br />
answer to that question."<br />
"I –" Rita stares at her.<br />
Amber stares back, eyes dark and intense. "You're from one of the Ganymede orbitals by way of Titan. You knew my<br />
eigensister while I was out of the solar system flying a diamond the size of a Coke can. That's what you told me. You've got a<br />
skill set that's a perfect match for the campaign research group, and you asked me to introduce you to Sirhan, then you<br />
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pushed his buttons like a pro. Just what are you trying to pull? Why should I trust you?"<br />
"I –" Rita's face crumples. "I didn't push his buttons! He thought I was trying to drag him into bed." She looks up defiantly. "I<br />
wasn't, I want to learn, what makes you – him – work –" Huge, dark, structured information queries batter at her<br />
exocortex, triggering warnings. Someone is churning through distributed time-series databases all over the outer system,<br />
measuring her past with a micrometer. She stares at Amber, mortified and angry. It's the ultimate denial of trust, the need to<br />
check her statements against the public record for truth. "What are you doing?"<br />
"I have a suspicion." Amber stands poised, as if ready to run. Run away from me? Rita thinks, startled. "You said, what if the<br />
resimulants came from a subconscious function of the Offspring? And funnily enough, I've been discussing that possibility with<br />
Dad. He's still got the spark when you show him a problem, you know."<br />
"I don't understand!"<br />
"No, I don't think you do," says Amber, and Rita can feel vast stresses in the space around her: The whole ubicomp<br />
environment, dust-sized chips and utility fog and hazy clouds of diamond-bright optical processors in the soil and the air<br />
and her skin, is growing blotchy and sluggish, thrashing under the load of whatever Amber – with her management-grade<br />
ackles – is ordering it to do. For a moment, Rita can't feel half her mind, and she gets the panicky claustrophobic sense of<br />
being trapped inside her own head: Then it stops.<br />
"Tell me!" Rita insists. "What are you trying to prove? It's some mistake –" And Amber is nodding, much to her surprise,<br />
looking weary and morose. "What do you think I've done?"<br />
"Nothing. You're coherent. Sorry about that."<br />
"Coherent?" Rita hears her voice rising with her indignation as she feels bits of herself, cut off from her for whole seconds,<br />
shivering with relief. "I'll give you coherent! Assaulting my exocortex –"<br />
"Shut up." Amber rubs her face and simultaneously throws Rita one end of an encrypted channel.<br />
"Why should I?" Rita demands, not accepting the handshake.<br />
"Because." Amber glances round. She's scared! Rita suddenly realizes. "Just do it," she hisses.<br />
Rita accepts the endpoint and a huge lump of undigested expository data slides down it, structured and tagged with entry<br />
points and metainformation directories pointing to –<br />
"Holy shit!" she whispers, as she realizes what it is.<br />
"Yes." Amber grins humorlessly. She continues, over the open channel: It looks like they're cognitive antibodies,<br />
generated by the devil's own semiotic immune system. That's what Sirhan is focusing on, how to<br />
avoid triggering them and bringing everything down at once. Forget the election, we're going to be in<br />
deep shit sooner rather than later, and we're still trying to work out how to survive. Now are you sure<br />
you still want in?<br />
"Want in on what?" Rita asks, shakily.<br />
The lifeboat Dad's trying to get us all into under cover of the accelerationista/conservationista split,<br />
before the Vile Offspring's immune system figures out how to lever us apart into factions and make us<br />
kill each other ...<br />
* * *<br />
Welcome to the afterglow of the intelligence supernova, little tapeworm.<br />
Tapeworms have on the order of a thousand neurons, pulsing furiously to keep their little bodies twitching.<br />
Human beings have on the order of a hundred billion neurons. What is happening in the inner solar system<br />
as the Vile Offspring churn and reconfigure the fast-thinking structured dust clouds that were once planets is<br />
as far beyond the ken of merely human consciousness as the thoughts of a Gödel are beyond the twitching<br />
tropisms of a worm. Personality modules bounded by the speed of light, sucking down billions of times the<br />
processing power of a human brain, form and re-form in the halo of glowing nanoprocessors that shrouds<br />
the sun in a ruddy glowing cloud.<br />
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Ceres and the asteroids – all gone. Luna is a silvery iridescent sphere, planed smooth<br />
down to micrometer heights, luminous with diffraction patterns. Only Earth, the cradle of human civilization,<br />
remains untransformed; and Earth, too, will be dismantled soon enough, for already a trellis of space<br />
elevators webs the planet around its equator, lifting refugee dumb matter into orbit and flinging it at the<br />
wildlife preserves of the outer system.<br />
The intelligence bloom that gnaws at Jupiter's moons with claws of molecular machinery won't stop until it<br />
runs out of dumb matter to convert into computronium. By the time it does, it will have as much<br />
brainpower as you'd get if you placed a planet with a population of six billion future-shocked primates in<br />
orbit around every star in the Milky Way galaxy. But right now, it's still stupid, having converted barely a<br />
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percentage point of the mass of the solar system – it's a mere Magellanic Cloud civilization, infantile and<br />
unsubtle and still perilously close to its carbon-chemistry roots.<br />
It's hard for tapeworms living in warm intestinal mulch to wrap their thousand-neuron brains around<br />
whatever it is that the vastly more complex entities who host them are discussing, but one thing's sure – the<br />
owners have a lot of things going on, not all of them under conscious control. The churning of gastric<br />
secretions and the steady ventilation of lungs are incomprehensible to the simple brains of tapeworms, but<br />
they serve the purpose of keeping the humans alive and provide the environment the worms live in. And<br />
other more esoteric functions that contribute to survival – the intricate dance of specialized cloned<br />
lymphocytes in their bone marrow and lymph nodes, the random permutations of antibodies constantly<br />
churning for possible matches to intruder molecules warning of the presence of pollution – are all going on<br />
beneath the level of conscious control.<br />
Autonomic defenses. Antibodies. Intelligence bloom gnawing at the edges of the outer system. And humans<br />
are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that<br />
among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how<br />
fast?<br />
* * *<br />
There's a team meeting early the next morning. It's still dark outside, and most of the attendees who are present in vivo have<br />
the faintly haggard look that comes from abusing melatonin antagonists. Rita stifles a yawn as she glances around the<br />
conference room – the walls expanded into huge virtual spaces to accommodate thirty or so exocortical ghosts from<br />
sleeping partners who will wake with memories of a particularly vivid lucid dream – and sees Amber talking to her famous<br />
father and a younger-looking man who one of her partials recognizes as a last-century EU politician. There seems to be some<br />
tension between them.<br />
Now that Amber has granted Rita her conditional trust, a whole new tier of campaigning information has opened up to her<br />
inner eye – stuff steganographically concealed in a hidden layer of the project's collective memory space. There's stuff in here<br />
she hadn't suspected, frightening studies of resimulant demographics, surveys of emigration rates from the inner system,<br />
cladistic trees dissecting different forms of crude tampering that have been found skulking in the wetware of refugees. The<br />
reason why Amber and Manfred and – reluctantly – Sirhan are fighting for one radical faction in a planetwide election,<br />
despite their various misgivings over the validity of the entire concept of democracy in this posthuman era. She blinks it<br />
aside, slightly bewildered, forking a couple of dozen personality subthreads to chew on it at the edges. "Need coffee," she<br />
mutters to the table, as it offers her a chair.<br />
"Everyone on-line?" asked Manfred. "Then I'll begin." He looks tired and worried, physically youthful but showing the full<br />
weight of his age. "We've got a crisis coming, folks. About a hundred kiloseconds ago, the bit rate on the resimulation stream<br />
jumped. We're now fielding about one resimulated state vector a second, on top of the legitimate immigration we're dealing<br />
with. If it jumps again by the same factor, it's going to swamp our ability to check the immigrants for zimboes in vivo – we'd<br />
have to move to running them in secure storage or just resurrecting them blind, and if there are any jokers in the pack,<br />
that's about the riskiest thing we could do."<br />
"Why do you not spool them to memory diamond?" asks the handsome young ex-politician to his left, looking almost amused<br />
– as if he already knows the answer.<br />
"Politics." Manfred shrugs.<br />
"It would blow a hole in our social contract," says Amber, looking as if she's just swallowed something unpleasant, and Rita<br />
feels a flicker of admiration for the way they're stage-managing the meeting. Amber's even talking to her father, as if she feels<br />
comfortable with him around, although he's a walking reminder of her own lack of success. Nobody else has gotten a word<br />
in yet. "If we don't instantiate them, the next logical step is to deny resimulated minds the franchise. Which in turn puts us<br />
on the road to institutional inequality. And that's a very big step to take, even if you have misgivings about the idea of<br />
settling complex policy issues on the basis of a popular vote, because our whole polity is based on the idea that less<br />
competent intelligences – us – deserve consideration."<br />
"Hrmph." Someone clears their throat. Rita glances round and freezes, because it's Amber's screwed-up eigenchild, and he's<br />
just about materialized in the chair next to her. So he adopted Superplonk after all? she observes cynically. He doggedly avoids<br />
looking at her. "That was my analysis," he says reluctantly. "We need them alive. For the ark option, at least, and if not, even<br />
the accelerationista platform will need them on hand later."<br />
Concentration camps, thinks Rita, trying to ignore Sirhan's presence near her, for it's a constant irritant, where most of the<br />
inmates are confused, frightened human beings – and the ones who aren't think they are. It's an eerie thought, and she spawns a<br />
couple of full ghosts to dream it through for her, gaming the possible angles.<br />
"How are your negotiations over the lifeboat designs going?" Amber asks her father. "We need to get a portfolio of design<br />
schemata out before we go into the election –"<br />
"Change of plan." Manfred hunches forward. "This doesn't need to go any further, but Sirhan and Aineko have come up with<br />
something interesting." He looks worried.<br />
Sirhan is staring at his eigenmother with narrowed eyes, and Rita has to resist the urge to elbow him savagely in the ribs. She<br />
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knows enough about him now to realize it wouldn't get his attention – at least, not the way she'd want it, not for the right<br />
reasons – and in any case, he's more wrapped up in himself than her ghost ever saw him as likely to be. (How anyone could<br />
be party to such a detailed exchange of simulated lives and still reject the opportunity to do it in real life is beyond her;<br />
unless it's an artifact of his youth, when his parents pushed him through a dozen simulated childhoods in search of<br />
knowledge and ended up with a stubborn oyster-head of a son ...) "We still need to look as if we're planning on using a<br />
lifeboat," he says aloud. "There's the small matter of the price they're asking in return for the alternative."<br />
"What? What are you talking about?" Amber sounds confused. "I thought you were working on some kind of cladistic map.<br />
What's this about a price?"<br />
Sirhan smiles coolly. "I am working on a cladistic map, in a manner of speaking. You wasted much of your opportunity when<br />
you journeyed to the router, you know. I've been talking to Aineko."<br />
"You –" Amber flushes. "What about?" She's visibly angry, Rita notices. Sirhan is needling his eigenmother. Why?<br />
"About the topology of some rather interesting types of small-world network." Sirhan leans back in his chair, watching the<br />
cloud above her head. "And the router. You went through it, then you came back with your tail between your legs as fast as<br />
you could, didn't you? Not even checking your passenger to see if it was a hostile parasite."<br />
"I don't have to take this," Amber says tightly. "You weren't there, and you have no idea what constraints we were working<br />
under."<br />
"Really?" Sirhan raises an eyebrow. "Anyway, you missed an opportunity. We know that the routers – for whatever reason –<br />
are self-replicating. They spread from brown dwarf to brown dwarf, hatch, tap the protostar for energy and material, and<br />
send a bunch of children out. Von Neumann machines, in other words. We also know that they provide high-bandwidth<br />
communications to other routers. When you went through the one at Hyundai +4904 / -56 , you ended up in an<br />
unmaintained DMZ attached to an alien Matrioshka brain that had degenerated, somehow. It follows that someone had<br />
collected a router and carried it home, to link into the MB. So why didn't you bring one home with you?"<br />
Amber glares at him. "Total payload on board the Field Circus was about ten grams. How large do you think a router<br />
seed is?"<br />
"So you brought the Slug home instead, occupying maybe half your storage capacity and ready to wreak seven shades of<br />
havoc on –"<br />
"Children!" They both look round automatically. It's Annette, Rita realizes, and she doesn't look amused. "Why do you not<br />
save this bickering for later?" she asks. "We have our own goals to be pursuing." Unamused is an understatement. Annette is<br />
fuming.<br />
"This charming family reunion was your idea, I believe?" Manfred smiles at her, then nods coolly at the retread EU politician<br />
in the next seat.<br />
"Please." It's Amber. "Dad, can you save this for later?" Rita sits up. For a moment, Amber looks ancient, far older than her<br />
subjective gigasecond of age. "She's right. She didn't mean to screw up. Let's leave the family history for some time when we<br />
can work it out in private. Okay?"<br />
Manfred looks abashed. He blinks rapidly. "All right." He takes a breath. "Amber, I brought some old acquaintances into the<br />
loop. If we win the election, then to get out of here as fast as possible, we'll have to use a combination of the two main ideas<br />
we've been discussing: spool as many people as possible into high-density storage until we get somewhere with space and mass<br />
and energy to reincarnate them, and get our hands on a router. The entire planetary polity can't afford to pay the energy<br />
budget of a relativistic starship big enough to hold everyone, even as uploads, and a subrelativistic ship would be too damn<br />
vulnerable to the Vile Offspring. And it follows that, instead of taking potluck on the destination, we should learn about the<br />
network protocols the routers use, figure out some kind of transferable currency we can use to pay for our reinstantiation<br />
at the other end, and also how to make some kind of map so we know where we're going. The two hard parts are getting at<br />
or to a router, and paying – that's going to mean traveling with someone who understands Economics 2.0 but doesn't want<br />
to hang around the Vile Offspring.<br />
"As it happens, these old acquaintances of mine went out and fetched back a router seed, for their own purposes. It's sitting<br />
about thirty light-hours away from here, out in the Kuiper belt. They're trying to hatch it right now. And I think Aineko<br />
might be willing to go with us and handle the trade negotiations." He raises the palm of his right hand and flips a bundle of<br />
tags into the shared spatial cache of the inner circle's memories.<br />
Lobsters. Decades ago, back in the dim wastelands of the depression-ridden naughty oughties, the uploaded lobsters had<br />
escaped. Manfred brokered a deal for them to get their very own cometary factory colony. Years later, Amber's expedition<br />
to the router had run into eerie zombie lobsters, upload images that had been taken over and reanimated by the Wunch.<br />
But where the real lobsters had gotten to ...<br />
For a moment, Rita sees herself hovering in darkness and vacuum, the distant siren song of a planetary gravity well far below.<br />
Off to her – left? north? – glows a hazy dim red cloud the size of the full moon as seen from Earth, a cloud that hums with a<br />
constant background noise, the waste heat of a galactic civilization dreaming furious colorless thoughts to itself. Then she<br />
figures out how to slew her unblinking, eyeless viewpoint round and sees the craft.<br />
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It's a starship in the shape of a crustacean three kilometers long. It's segmented and flattened, with legs projecting from the<br />
abdominal floor to stretch stiffly sideways and clutch fat balloons of cryogenic deuterium fuel. The blue metallic tail is a<br />
flattened fan wrapped around the delicate stinger of a fusion reactor. Near the head, things are different: no huge claws<br />
there, but the delicately branching fuzz of bush robots, nanoassemblers poised ready to repair damage in flight and spin the<br />
parachute of a ramscoop when the ship is ready to decelerate. The head is massively armored against the blitzkrieg onslaught<br />
of interstellar dust, its radar eyes a glint of hexagonal compound surfaces staring straight at her.<br />
Behind and below the lobster-ship, a planetary ring looms vast and tenuous. The lobster is in orbit around Saturn, mere<br />
light-seconds away. And as Rita stares at the ship in dumbstruck silence, it winks at her.<br />
"They don't have names, at least not as individual identifiers," Manfred says apologetically, "so I asked if he'd mind being called<br />
something. He said Blue, because he is. So I give you the good lobster Something Blue."<br />
Sirhan interrupts, "You still need my cladistics project," he sounds somewhat smug, "to find your way through the network.<br />
Do you have a specific destination in mind?"<br />
"Yeah, to both questions," Manfred admits. "We need to send duplicate ghosts out to each possible router end point, wait<br />
for an echo, then iterate and repeat. Recursive depth-first traversal. The goal – that's harder." He points at the ceiling, which<br />
dissolves into a chaotic 3-D spiderweb that Rita recognizes, after some hours of subjective head-down archive time, as a map<br />
of the dark matter distribution throughout a radius of a billion light-years, galaxies glued like fluff to the nodes where strands<br />
of drying silk meet. "We've known for most of a century that there's something flaky going on out there, out past the Böotes<br />
void – there are a couple of galactic superclusters, around which there's something flaky about the cosmic background<br />
anisotropy. Most computational processes generate entropy as a by-product, and it looks like something is dumping waste<br />
heat into the area from all the galaxies in the region, very evenly spread in a way that mirrors the metal distribution in those<br />
galaxies, except at the very cores. And according to the lobsters, who have been indulging in some very long baseline<br />
interferometry, most of the stars in the nearest cluster are redder than expected and metal-depleted. As if someone's been<br />
mining them."<br />
"Ah." Sirhan stares at his grandfather. "Why should they be any different from the local nodes?"<br />
"Look around you. Do you see any indications of large-scale cosmic engineering within a million light-years of here?" Manfred<br />
shrugs. "Locally, nothing has quite reached ... well. We can guess at the life cycle of a post spike civilization now, can't we?<br />
We've felt the elephant. We've seen the wreckage of collapsed Matrioshka minds. We know how unattractive exploration is<br />
to postsingularity intelligences, we've seen the bandwidth gap that keeps them at home." He points at the ceiling. "But over<br />
there something different happened. They're making changes on the scale of an entire galactic supercluster, and they appear<br />
to be coordinated. They did get out and go places, and their descendants may still be out there. It looks like they're doing<br />
something purposeful and coordinated, something vast – a timing channel attack on the virtual machine that's running the<br />
universe, perhaps, or an embedded simulation of an entirely different universe. Up or down, is it turtles all the way, or is<br />
there something out there that's more real than we are? And don't you think it's worth trying to find out?"<br />
"No." Sirhan crosses his arms. "Not particularly. I'm interested in saving people from the Vile Offspring, not taking a huge<br />
gamble on mystery transcendent aliens who may have built a galaxy-sized reality hacking machine a billion years ago. I'll sell<br />
you my services, and even send a ghost along, but if you expect me to bet my entire future on it ..."<br />
It's too much for Rita. Diverting her attention away from the dizzying inner-space vista, she elbows Sirhan in the ribs. He<br />
looks round blankly for a moment, then with gathering anger as he lets his killfile filter slip. "Whereof one cannot speak,<br />
thereof one must be silent," she hisses. Then, succumbing to a secondary impulse she knows she'll regret later, she drops a<br />
private channel into his public in-tray.<br />
"Nobody's asking you to," Manfred is saying defensively, arms crossed. "I view this as a Manhattan project kind of thing,<br />
pursue all agendas in parallel. If we win the election, we'll have the resources we need to do that. We should all go through<br />
the router, and we will all leave backups aboard Something Blue. Blue is slow, tops out at about a tenth of cee, but<br />
what he can do is get a sufficient quantity of memory diamond the hell out of circumsolar space before the Vile Offspring's<br />
autonomic defenses activate whatever kind of trust exploit they're planning in the next few megaseconds –"<br />
"What do you want?" Sirhan demands angrily over the channel. He's still not looking at her, and not just because he's focusing<br />
on the vision in blue that dominates the shared space of the team meeting.<br />
"Stop lying to yourself," Rita sends back. "You're lying about your own goals and motivations. You may not want to know the truth your<br />
own ghost worked out, but I do. And I'm not going to let you deny it happened."<br />
"So one of your agents seduced a personality image of me –"<br />
"Bullshit –"<br />
"Do you mean to declare this platform openly?" asks the young-old guy near the platform, the Europol. "Because if so, you're<br />
going to undermine Amber's campaign –"<br />
"That's all right," Amber says tiredly, "I'm used to Dad supporting me in his own inimitable way."<br />
"Is okay," says a new voice. "I are happy wait-state grazing in ecliptic." It's the friendly lobster lifeboat, light-lagged by its<br />
trajectory outside the ring system.<br />
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"– You're happy to hide behind a hypocritical sense of moral purity when it makes you feel you can look down on other people, but<br />
underneath it you're just like everyone else –"<br />
"– She set you up to corrupt me, didn't she? You're just bait in her scheme –"<br />
"The idea was to store incremental backups in the Panuliran's cargo cache in case a weakly godlike agency from the inner<br />
system attempts to activate the antibodies they've already disseminated throughout the festival culture," Annette explains,<br />
stepping in on Manfred's behalf.<br />
Nobody else in the discussion space seems to notice that Rita and Sirhan are busy ripping the shit out of each other over a<br />
private channel, throwing emotional hand grenades back and forth like seasoned divorcees. "It's not a satisfactory solution to<br />
the evacuation question, but it ought to satisfy the conservatives' baseline requirement, and as insurance –"<br />
"– That's right, blame your eigenmother! Has it occurred to you that she doesn't care enough about you to try a stunt like that? I think<br />
you spent too much time with that crazy grandmother of yours. You didn't even integrate that ghost, did you? Too afraid of polluting<br />
yourself! I bet you never even bothered to check what it felt like from inside –"<br />
"– I did –" Sirhan freezes for a moment, personality modules paging in and out of his brain like a swarm of angry bees –<br />
"make a fool of myself," he adds quietly, then slumps back in his seat. "This is so embarrassing ..." He covers his face with his<br />
hands. "You're right."<br />
"I am?" Rita's puzzlement slowly gives way to understanding; Sirhan has finally integrated the memories from the partials they<br />
hybridized earlier. Stuck-up and proud, the cognitive dissonance must be enormous. "No, I'm not. You're just overly defensive."<br />
"I'm –" Embarrassed. Because Rita knows him, inside out. Has the ghost-memories of six months in a simspace with him,<br />
playing with ideas, exchanging intimacies, later confidences. She holds ghost-memories of his embrace, a smoky affair that<br />
might have happened in real space if his instant reaction to realizing that it could happen hadn't been to dump the splinter of<br />
his mind that was contaminated by impure thoughts to cold storage and deny everything.<br />
"We have no threat profile yet," Annette says, cutting right across their private conversation. "If there is a direct threat –<br />
and we don't know that for sure, yet, the Vile Offspring might be enlightened enough simply to be leaving us alone – it'll<br />
probably be some kind of subtle attack aimed directly at the foundations of our identity. Look for a credit bubble,<br />
distributed trust metrics devaluing suddenly as people catch some kind of weird religion, something like that. Maybe a<br />
perverse election outcome. And it won't be sudden. They are not stupid, to start a headlong attack without slow corruption<br />
to soften the way."<br />
"You've obviously been thinking about this for some time," Sameena says with dry emphasis. "What's in it for your friend, uh,<br />
Blue? Did you squirrel away enough credit to cover the price of renting a starship from the Economics 2.0 metabubble? Or<br />
is there something you aren't telling us?"<br />
"Um." Manfred looks like a small boy with his hand caught in the sweets jar. "Well, as a matter of fact –"<br />
"Yes, Dad, why don't you tell us just what this is going to cost?" Amber asks.<br />
"Ah, well." He looks embarrassed. "It's the lobsters, not Aineko. They want some payment."<br />
Rita reaches out and grabs Sirhan's hand: He doesn't resist. "Do you know about this?" Rita queries him.<br />
"All new to me ..." A confused partial thread follows his reply down the pipe, and for a while, she joins him in introspective<br />
reverie, trying to work out the implications of knowing what they know about the possibility of a mutual relationship.<br />
"They want a written conceptual map. A map of all the accessible meme spaces hanging off the router network, compiled by<br />
human explorers who they can use as a baseline, they say. It's quite simple – in return for a ticket out-system, some of us are<br />
going to have to go exploring. But that doesn't mean we can't leave back-ups behind."<br />
"Do they have any particular explorers in mind?" Amber sniffs.<br />
"No," says Manfred. "Just a team of us, to map out the router network and ensure they get some warning of threats from<br />
outside." He pauses. "You're going to want to come along, aren't you?"<br />
* * *<br />
The pre-election campaign takes approximately three minutes and consumes more bandwidth than the sum of all terrestrial<br />
communications channels from prehistory to 2008. Approximately six million ghosts of Amber, individually tailored to fit the<br />
profile of the targeted audience, fork across the dark fiber meshwork underpinning of the lily-pad colonies, then out through<br />
ultrawideband mesh networks, instantiated in implants and floating dust motes to buttonhole the voters. Many of them fail to<br />
reach their audience, and many more hold fruitless discussions; about six actually decide they've diverged so far from their<br />
original that they constitute separate people and register for independent citizenship, two defect to the other side, and one<br />
elopes with a swarm of highly empathic modified African honeybees.<br />
Ambers are not the only ghosts competing for attention in the public zeitgeist. In fact, they're in a minority. Most of the<br />
autonomous electoral agents are campaigning for a variety of platforms that range from introducing a progressive income<br />
tax – nobody is quite sure why, but it seems to be traditional – to a motion calling for the entire planet to be paved, which<br />
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quite ignores the realities of element abundance in the upper atmosphere of a metal-poor gas giant, not to mention playing<br />
hell with the weather. The Faceless are campaigning for everyone to be assigned a new set of facial muscles every six months,<br />
the Livid Pranksters are demanding equal rights for subsentient entities, and a host of single-issue pressure groups are<br />
yammering about the usual lost causes.<br />
Just how the election process anneals is a black mystery – at least, to those people who aren't party to the workings of the<br />
Festival Committee, the group who first had the idea of paving Saturn with hot-hydrogen balloons – but over the course of<br />
a complete diurn, almost forty thousand seconds, a pattern begins to emerge. This pattern will systematize the bias of the<br />
communications networks that traffic in reputation points across the planetary polity for a long time – possibly as much as<br />
fifty million seconds, getting on for a whole Martian year (if Mars still existed). It will create a parliament – a merged group<br />
mind borganism that speaks as one supermind built from the beliefs of the victors. And the news isn't great, as the party<br />
gathered in the upper sphere of the Atomium (which Manfred insisted Amber rent for the dead dog party) is slowly<br />
realizing. Amber isn't there, presumably drowning her sorrows or engaging in postelection schemes of a different nature<br />
somewhere else. But other members of her team are about.<br />
"It could be worse," Rita rationalizes, late in the evening. She's sitting in a corner of the seventh-floor deck, in a 1950s<br />
wireframe chair, clutching a glass of synthetic single malt and watching the shadows. "We could be in an old-style contested<br />
election with seven shades of shit flying. At least this way we can be decently anonymous."<br />
One of the blind spots detaches from her peripheral vision and approaches. It segues into view, suddenly congealing into<br />
Sirhan. He looks morose.<br />
"What's your problem?" she demands. "Your former faction is winning on the count."<br />
"Maybe so." He sits down beside her, carefully avoiding her gaze. "Maybe this is a good thing. And maybe not."<br />
"So when are you going to join the syncitium?" she asks.<br />
"Me? Join that?" He looks alarmed. "You think I want to become part of a parliamentary borg? What do you take me for?"<br />
"Oh." She shakes her head. "I assumed you were avoiding me because –"<br />
"No." He holds out his hand, and a passing waitron deposits a glass in it. He takes a deep breath. "I owe you an apology."<br />
About time, she thinks, uncharitably. But he's like that. Stiff-necked and proud, slow to acknowledge a mistake, but unlikely to<br />
apologize unless he really means it. "What for?" she asks.<br />
"For not giving you the benefit of the doubt," he says slowly, rolling the glass between his palms. "I should have listened to<br />
myself earlier instead of locking him out of me."<br />
The self he's talking about seems self-evident to her. "You're not an easy man to get close to," she says quietly. "Maybe that's<br />
part of your problem."<br />
"Part of it?" He chuckles bitterly. "My mother –" He bites back whatever he originally meant to say. "Do you know I'm older<br />
than she is? Than this version, I mean. She gets up my nose with her assumptions about me ..."<br />
"They run both ways." Rita reaches out and takes his hand – and he grips her right back, no rejection this time. "Listen, it<br />
looks as if she's not going to make it into the parliament of lies. There's a straight conservative sweep, these folks are in solid<br />
denial. About eighty percent of the population are resimulants or old-timers from Earth, and that's not going to change<br />
before the Vile Offspring turn on us. What are we going to do?"<br />
He shrugs. "I suspect everyone who thinks we're really under threat will move on. You know this is going to destroy the<br />
accelerationistas trust in democracy? They've still got a viable plan – Manfred's friendly lobster will work without the need for<br />
an entire planet's energy budget – but the rejection is going to hurt. I can't help thinking that maybe the real goal of the Vile<br />
Offspring was simply to gerrymander us into not diverting resources away from them. It's blunt, it's unsubtle, so we assumed<br />
that wasn't the point. But maybe there's a time for them to be blunt."<br />
She shrugs. "Democracy is a bad fit for lifeboats." But she's still uncomfortable with the idea. "And think of all the people we'll<br />
be leaving behind."<br />
"Well." He smiles tightly. "If you can think of any way to encourage the masses to join us ..."<br />
"A good start would be to stop thinking of them as masses to be manipulated." Rita stares at him. "Your family appears to<br />
have been developing a hereditary elitist streak, and it's not attractive."<br />
Sirhan looks uncomfortable. "If you think I'm bad, you should talk to Aineko about it," he says, self- deprecatingly. "Sometimes<br />
I wonder about that cat."<br />
"Maybe I will." She pauses. "And you? What are you going to do with yourself? Are you going to join the explorers?"<br />
"I –" He looks sideways at her. "I can see myself sending an eigenbrother," he says quietly. "But I'm not going to gamble my<br />
entire future on a bid to reach the far side of the observable universe by router. I've had enough excitement to last me a<br />
lifetime, lately. I think one copy for the backup archive in the icy depths, one to go exploring – and one to settle down and<br />
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raise a family. What about you?"<br />
"You'll go all three ways?" she asks.<br />
"Yes, I think so. What about you?"<br />
"Where you go, I go." She leans against him. "Isn't that what matters in the end?" she murmurs.<br />
Chapter 9: Survivor<br />
This time, more than a double handful of years passes between successive visits to the Macx dynasty.<br />
Somewhere in the gas-sprinkled darkness beyond the local void, carbon-based life stirs. A cylinder of diamond fifty kilometers<br />
long spins in the darkness, its surface etched with strange quantum wells that emulate exotic atoms not found in any periodic<br />
table that Mendeleyev would have recognized. Within it, walls hold kilotonnes of oxygen and nitrogen gas, megatonnes of<br />
life-infested soil. A hundred trillion kilometers from the wreckage of Earth, the cylinder glitters like a gem in the darkness.<br />
Welcome to New Japan: one of the places between the stars where human beings hang out, now that the solar system is<br />
off-limits to meatbodies.<br />
I wonder who we'll find here?<br />
* * *<br />
There's an open plaza in one of the terraform sectors of the habitat cylinder. A huge gong hangs from a beautifully painted<br />
wooden frame at one side of the square, which is paved with weathered limestone slabs made of atoms ripped from a planet<br />
that has never seen molten ice. Houses stand around, and open-fronted huts where a variety of humanoid waitrons attend<br />
to food and beverages for the passing realfolk. A group of prepubescent children are playing hunt-and-seek with their<br />
big-eyed pet companions, brandishing makeshift spears and automatic rifles – there's no pain here, for bodies are fungible,<br />
rebuilt in a minute by the assembler/disassembler gates in every room. There are few adults hereabouts, for Red Plaza is<br />
unfashionable at present, and the kids have claimed it for their own as a playground. They're all genuinely young, symptoms<br />
of a demographic demiurge, not a single wendypan among them.<br />
A skinny boy with nut brown skin, a mop of black hair, and three arms is patiently stalking a worried-looking blue eeyore<br />
around the corner of the square. He's passing a stand stacked with fresh sushi rolls when the strange beast squirms out from<br />
beneath a wheelbarrow and arches its back, stretching luxuriously.<br />
The boy, Manni, freezes, hands tensing around his spear as he focuses on the new target. (The blue eeyore flicks its tail at him<br />
and darts for safety across a lichen-encrusted slab.) "City, what's that?" he asks without moving his lips.<br />
"What are you looking at?" replies City, which puzzles him somewhat, but not as much as it should.<br />
The beast finishes stretching one front leg and extends another. It looks a bit like a pussycat to Manni, but there's something<br />
subtly wrong with it. Its head is a little too small, the eyes likewise – and those paws – "You're sharp," he accuses the beast,<br />
forehead wrinkling in disapproval.<br />
"Yeah, whatever." The creature yawns, and Manni points his spear at it, clenching the shaft in both right hands. It's got sharp<br />
teeth, too, but it spoke to him via his inner hearing, not his ears. Innerspeech is for people, not toys.<br />
"Who are you?" he demands.<br />
The beast looks at him insolently. "I know your parents," it says, still using innerspeech. "You're Manni Macx, aren't you?<br />
Thought so. I want you to take me to your father."<br />
"No!" Manni jumps up and waves his arms at it. "I don't like you! Go away!" He pokes his spear in the direction of the beast's<br />
nose.<br />
"I'll go away when you take me to your father," says the beast. It raises its tail like a pussycat, and the fur bushes out, but<br />
then it pauses. "If you take me to your father I'll tell you a story afterward, how about that?"<br />
"Don't care!" Manni is only about two hundred megaseconds old – seven old Earth-years – but he can tell when he's being<br />
manipulated and gets truculent.<br />
"Kids." The cat-thing's tail lashes from side to side. "Okay, Manni, how about you take me to your father, or I rip your face<br />
off? I've got claws, you know." A brief eyeblink later, it's wrapping itself around his ankles sinuously, purring to give the lie to<br />
its unreliable threat – but he can see that it's got sharp nails all right. It's a wild pussycat-thing, and nothing in his artificially<br />
preserved orthohuman upbringing has prepared him for dealing with a real wild pussycat-thing that talks.<br />
"Get away!" Manni is worried. "Mom!" he hollers, unintentionally triggering the broadcast flag in his innerspeech. "There's this<br />
thing –"<br />
"Mom will do." The cat-thing sounds resigned. It stops rubbing against Manni's legs and looks up at him. "There's no need to<br />
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panic. I won't hurt you."<br />
Manni stops hollering. "Who're you?" he asks at last, staring at the beast. Somewhere light-years away, an adult has heard his<br />
cry; his mother is coming fast, bouncing between switches and glancing off folded dimensions in a headlong rush toward him.<br />
"I'm Aineko." The beast sits down and begins to wash behind one hind leg. "And you're Manni, right?"<br />
"Aineko," Manni says uncertainly. "Do you know Lis or Bill?"<br />
Aineko the cat-thing pauses in his washing routine and looks at Manni, head cocked to one side. Manni is too young, too<br />
inexperienced to know that Aineko's proportions are those of a domestic cat, Felis catus, a naturally evolved animal rather<br />
than the toys and palimpsests and companionables he's used to. Reality may be fashionable with his parents' generation, but<br />
there are limits, after all. Orange-and-brown stripes and whorls decorate Aineko's fur, and he sprouts a white fluffy bib<br />
beneath his chin. "Who are Lis and Bill?"<br />
"Them," says Manni, as big, sullen-faced Bill creeps up behind Aineko and tries to grab his tail while Lis floats behind his<br />
shoulder like a pint-sized UFO, buzzing excitedly. But Aineko is too fast for the kids and scampers round Manni's feet like a<br />
hairy missile. Manni whoops and tries to spear the pussycat-thing, but his spear turns to blue glass, crackles, and shards of<br />
brilliant snow rain down, burning his hands.<br />
"Now that wasn't very friendly, was it?" says Aineko, a menacing note in his voice. "Didn't your mother teach you not to –"<br />
The door in the side of the sushi stall opens as Rita arrives, breathless and angry: "Manni! What have I told you about playing<br />
–"<br />
She stops, seeing Aineko. "You." She recoils in barely concealed fright. Unlike Manni, she recognizes it as the avatar of a<br />
posthuman demiurge, a body incarnated solely to provide a point of personal interaction for people to focus on.<br />
The cat grins back at her. "Me," he agrees. "Ready to talk?"<br />
She looks stricken. "We've got nothing to talk about."<br />
Aineko lashes his tail. "Oh, but we do." The cat turns and looks pointedly at Manni. "Don't we?"<br />
* * *<br />
It has been a long time since Aineko passed this way, and in the meantime the space around Hyundai<br />
+4904 /-56 has changed out of all recognition. Back when the great lobster-built starships swept out of Sol's<br />
Oort cloud, archiving the raw frozen data of the unoccupied brown dwarf halo systems and seeding their<br />
structured excrement with programmable matter, there was nothing but random dead atoms hereabouts<br />
(and an alien router). But that was a long time ago; and since then, the brown dwarf system has succumbed<br />
to an anthropic infestation.<br />
An unoptimized instance of H. sapiens maintains state coherency for only two to three gigaseconds before it<br />
succumbs to necrosis. But in only about ten gigaseconds, the infestation has turned the dead brown dwarf<br />
system upside down. They strip-mined the chilly planets to make environments suitable for their own variety<br />
of carbon life. They rearranged moons, building massive structures the size of asteroids. They ripped<br />
wormhole endpoints free of the routers and turned them into their own crude point-to-point network,<br />
learned how to generate new wormholes, then ran their own packet-switched polities over them. Wormhole<br />
traffic now supports an ever-expanding mesh of interstellar human commerce, but always in the darkness<br />
between the lit stars and the strange, metal-depleted dwarfs with the suspiciously low-entropy radiation. The<br />
sheer temerity of the project is mind-boggling: notwithstanding that canned apes are simply not suited to life<br />
in the interstellar void, especially in orbit around a brown dwarf whose planets make Pluto seem like a<br />
tropical paradise, they've taken over the whole damn system.<br />
New Japan is one of the newer human polities in this system, a bunch of nodes physically collocated in the<br />
humaniformed spaces of the colony cylinders. Its designers evidently only knew about old Nippon from<br />
recordings made back before Earth was dismantled, and worked from a combination of nostalgia-trip videos,<br />
Miyazaki movies, and anime culture. Nevertheless, it's the home of numerous human beings – even if they are<br />
about as similar to their historical antecedents as New Japan is to its long-gone namesake.<br />
Humanity?<br />
Their grandparents would recognize them, mostly. The ones who are truly beyond the ken of<br />
twentieth-century survivors stayed back home in the red-hot clouds of nanocomputers that have replaced<br />
the planets that once orbited Earth's sun in stately Copernican harmony. The fast-thinking Matrioshka brains<br />
are as incomprehensible to their merely posthuman ancestors as an ICBM to an amoeba – and about as<br />
inhabitable. Space is dusted with the corpses of Matrioshka brains that have long since burned out,<br />
informational collapse taking down entire civilizations that stayed in close orbit around their home stars.<br />
Farther away, galaxy-sized intelligences beat incomprehensible rhythms against the darkness of the vacuum,<br />
trying to hack the Planck substrate into doing their bidding. Posthumans, and the few other semitranscended<br />
species to have discovered the router network, live furtively in the darkness between these islands of<br />
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brilliance. There are, it would seem, advantages to not being too intelligent.<br />
Humanity. Monadic intelligences, mostly trapped within their own skulls, living in small family groups within<br />
larger tribal networks, adaptable to territorial or migratory lifestyles. Those were the options on offer before<br />
the great acceleration. Now that dumb matter thinks, with every kilogram of wallpaper potentially hosting<br />
hundreds of uploaded ancestors, now that every door is potentially a wormhole to a hab half a parsec away,<br />
the humans can stay in the same place while the landscape migrates and mutates past them, streaming into<br />
the luxurious void of their personal history. Life is rich here, endlessly varied and sometimes confusing. So it<br />
is that tribal groups remain, their associations mediated across teraklicks and gigaseconds by exotic agencies.<br />
And sometimes the agencies will vanish for a while, reappearing later like an unexpected jape upon the<br />
infinite.<br />
* * *<br />
Ancestor worship takes on a whole new meaning when the state vectors of all the filial entities' precursors are archived and<br />
indexed for recall. At just the moment that the tiny capillaries in Rita's face are constricting in response to a surge of<br />
adrenaline, causing her to turn pale and her pupils to dilate as she focuses on the pussycat-thing, Sirhan is kneeling before a<br />
small shrine, lighting a stick of incense, and preparing to respectfully address his grandfather's ghost.<br />
The ritual is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. Sirhan can speak to his grandfather's ghost wherever and whenever he wants,<br />
without any formality, and the ghost will reply at interminable length, cracking puns in dead languages and asking about<br />
people who died before the temple of history was established. But Sirhan is a sucker for rituals, and anyway, it helps him<br />
structure an otherwise-stressful encounter.<br />
If it were up to Sirhan, he'd probably skip chatting to grandfather every ten megaseconds. Sirhan's mother and her partner<br />
aren't available, having opted to join one of the long-distance exploration missions through the router network that were<br />
launched by the accelerationistas long ago; and Rita's antecedents are either fully virtualized or dead. They are a family with a<br />
tenuous grip on history. But both of them spent a long time in the same state of half-life in which Manfred currently exists,<br />
and he knows his wife will take him to task if he doesn't bring the revered ancestor up to date on what's been happening in<br />
the real world while he's been dead. In Manfred's case, death is not only potentially reversible, but almost inevitably so. After<br />
all, they're raising his clone. Sooner or later, the kid is going to want to visit the original, or vice versa.<br />
What a state we have come to, when the restless dead refuse to stay a part of history? He wonders ironically as he scratches the<br />
self-igniter strip on the red incense stick and bows to the mirror at the back of the shrine. "Your respectful grandson awaits<br />
and expects your guidance," he intones formally – for in addition to being conservative by nature, Sirhan is acutely aware of<br />
his family's relative poverty and the need to augment their social credit, and in this reincarnation-intermediated traditionalist<br />
polity for the hopelessly orthohuman, you can score credit for formality. He sits back on his heels to await the response.<br />
Manfred doesn't take long to appear in the depths of the mirror. He takes the shape of an albino orang-utan, as usual: He<br />
was messing around with Great Aunt Annette's ontological wardrobe right before this copy of him was recorded and placed<br />
in the temple - they might have separated, but they remained close. "Hi, lad. What year is it?"<br />
Sirhan suppresses a sigh. "We don't do years anymore," he explains, not for the first time. Every time he consults his<br />
grandfather, the new instance asks this question sooner or later. "Years are an archaism. It's been ten megs since we last<br />
spoke – about four months, if you're going to be pedantic about it, and a hundred and eighty years since we emigrated.<br />
Although correcting for general relativity adds another decade or so."<br />
"Oh. Is that all?" Manfred manages to look disappointed. This is a new one on Sirhan: Usually the diverging state vector of<br />
Gramps's ghost asks after Amber or cracks a feeble joke at this point. "No changes in the Hubble constant, or the rate of<br />
stellar formation? Have we heard from any of the exploration eigenselves yet?"<br />
"Nope." Sirhan relaxes slightly. So Manfred is going to ask about the fool's errand to the edge of the Beckenstein limit again,<br />
is he? That's canned conversation number twenty-nine. (Amber and the other explorers who set out for the really long<br />
exploration mission shortly after the first colony was settled aren't due back for, oh, about 10 19 seconds. It's a long way to<br />
the edge of the observable universe, even when you can go the first several hundred million light-years – to the Böotes<br />
supercluster and beyond – via a small-world network of wormholes. And this time, she didn't leave any copies of herself<br />
behind.)<br />
Sirhan – either in this or some other incarnation – has had this talk with Manfred many times before, because that's the<br />
essence of the dead. They don't remember from one recall session to the next, unless and until they ask to be resurrected<br />
because their restoration criteria have been matched. Manfred has been dead a long time, long enough for Sirhan and Rita<br />
to be resurrected and live a long family life three or four times over after they had spent a century or so in nonexistence.<br />
"We've received no notices from the lobsters, nothing from Aineko either." He takes a deep breath. "You always ask me<br />
where we are next, so I've got a canned response for you –" and one of his agents throws the package, tagged as a scroll<br />
sealed with red wax and a silk ribbon, through the surface of the mirror. (After the tenth repetition Rita and Sirhan agreed<br />
to write a basic briefing that the Manfred-ghosts could use to orient themselves.)<br />
Manfred is silent for a moment – probably hours in ghost-space – as he assimilates the changes. Then: "This is true? I've slept<br />
through a whole civilization?"<br />
"Not slept, you've been dead," Sirhan says pedantically. He realizes he's being a bit harsh: "Actually, so did we," he adds. "We<br />
surfed the first three gigasecs or so because we wanted to start a family somewhere where our children could grow up the<br />
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traditional way. Habs with an oxidation-intensive triple-point water environment didn't get built until sometime after the<br />
beginning of the exile. That's when the fad for neomorphism got entrenched," he adds with distaste. For quite a while the<br />
neos resisted the idea of wasting resources building colony cylinders spinning to provide vertebrate-friendly gee forces and<br />
breathable oxygen-rich atmospheres – it had been quite a political football. But the increasing curve of wealth production<br />
had allowed the orthodox to reincarnate from death-sleep after a few decades, once the fundamental headaches of building<br />
settlements in chilly orbits around metal-deficient brown dwarfs were overcome.<br />
"Uh." Manfred takes a deep breath, then scratches himself under one armpit, rubbery lips puckering. "So, let me get this<br />
straight: We – you, they, whoever – hit the router at Hyundai +4904 / -56 , replicated a load of them, and now use the<br />
wormhole mechanism the routers rely on as point-to-point gates for physical transport? And have spread throughout a<br />
bunch of brown dwarf systems, and built a pure deep-space polity based on big cylinder habitats connected by teleport gates<br />
hacked out of routers?"<br />
"Would you trust one of the original routers for switched data communications?" Sirhan asks rhetorically. "Even with the<br />
source code? They've been corrupted by all the dead alien Matrioshka civilizations they've come into contact with, but<br />
they're reasonably safe if all you want to use them for is to cannibalize them for wormholes and tunnel dumb mass from<br />
point to point." He searches for a metaphor: "Like using your, uh, internet, to emulate a nineteenth-century postal service."<br />
"O-kay." Manfred looks thoughtful, as he usually does at this point in the conversation – which means Sirhan is going to have<br />
to break it to him that his first thoughts for how to utilize the gates have already been done. They're hopelessly old hat. In<br />
fact, the main reason why Manfred is still dead is that things have moved on so far that, sooner or later, whenever he<br />
surfaces for a chat, he gets frustrated and elects not to be reincarnated. Not that Sirhan is about to tell him that he's<br />
obsolete – that would be rude, not to say subtly inaccurate. "That raises some interesting possibilities. I wonder, has anyone<br />
–"<br />
"Sirhan, I need you!"<br />
The crystal chill of Rita's alarm and fear cuts through Sirhan's awareness like a scalpel, distracting him from the ghost of his<br />
ancestor. He blinks, instantly transferring the full focus of his attention to Rita without sparing Manfred even a ghost.<br />
"What's happening –"<br />
He sees through Rita's eyes: a cat with an orange-and-brown swirl on its flank sits purring beside Manni in the family room of<br />
their dwelling. Its eyes are narrowed as it watches her with unnatural wisdom. Manni is running fingers through its fur and<br />
seems none the worse for wear, but Sirhan still feels his fists clench.<br />
"What –"<br />
"Excuse me," he says, standing up: "Got to go. Your bloody cat's turned up." He adds "coming home now" for Rita's benefit,<br />
then turns and hurries out of the temple concourse. When he reaches the main hall, he pauses, then Rita's sense of urgency<br />
returns to him, and he throws parsimony to the wind, stepping into a priority gate in order to get home as fast as possible.<br />
Behind him, Manfred's melancholy ghost snorts, mildly offended, and considers the existential choice: to be, or not to be.<br />
Then he makes a decision.<br />
* * *<br />
Welcome to the twenty-third century, or the twenty-fourth. Or maybe it's the twenty-second, jet-lagged and<br />
dazed by spurious suspended animation and relativistic travel; it hardly matters these days. What's left of<br />
recognizable humanity has scattered across a hundred light-years, living in hollowed-out asteroids and<br />
cylindrical spinning habitats strung in orbit around cold brown dwarf stars and sunless planets that wander<br />
the interstellar void. The looted mechanisms underlying the alien routers have been cannibalized, simplified<br />
to a level the merely superhuman can almost comprehend, turned into generators for paired wormhole<br />
endpoints that allow instantaneous switched transport across vast distances. Other mechanisms, the<br />
descendants of the advanced nanotechnologies developed by the flowering of human techgnosis in the<br />
twenty-first century, have made the replication of dumb matter trivial; this is not a society accustomed to<br />
scarcity.<br />
But in some respects, New Japan and the Invisible Empire and the other polities of human space are<br />
poverty-stricken backwaters. They take no part in the higher-order economies of the posthuman. They can<br />
barely comprehend the idle muttering of the Vile Offspring, whose mass/energy budget (derived from their<br />
complete restructuring of the free matter of humanity's original solar system into computronium) dwarfs that<br />
of half a hundred human-occupied brown dwarf systems. And they still know worryingly little about the deep<br />
history of intelligence in this universe, about the origins of the router network that laces so many dead<br />
civilizations into an embrace of death and decay, about the distant galaxy-scale bursts of information<br />
processing that lie at measurable red-shift distances, even about the free posthumans who live among them in<br />
some senses, collocated in the same light cone as these living fossil relics of old-fashioned humanity.<br />
Sirhan and Rita settled in this charming human-friendly backwater in order to raise a family, study<br />
xenoarchaeology, and avoid the turmoil and turbulence that have characterized his family's history across<br />
the last couple of generations. Life has been comfortable for the most part, and if the stipend of an academic<br />
nucleofamilial is not large, it is sufficient in this place and age to provide all the necessary comforts of<br />
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civilization. And this suits Sirhan (and Rita) fine; the turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to<br />
grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an adventure is something horrible that<br />
happens to someone else.<br />
Only ...<br />
Aineko is back. Aineko, who after negotiating the establishment of the earliest of the refugee habs in orbit<br />
around Hyundai +4904 / -56 , vanished into the router network with Manfred's other instance – and the partial<br />
copies of Sirhan and Rita who had forked, seeking adventure rather than cozy domesticity. Sirhan made a<br />
devil's bargain with Aineko, all those gigaseconds ago, and now he is deathly afraid that Aineko is going to call<br />
the payment due.<br />
* * *<br />
Manfred walks down a hall of mirrors. At the far end, he emerges in a public space modeled on a Menger sponge – a cube<br />
diced subtractively into ever-smaller cubic volumes until its surface area tends toward infinity. This being meatspace, or a<br />
reasonable simulation thereof, it isn't a real Menger sponge; but it looks good at a distance, going down at least four levels.<br />
He pauses behind a waist-high diamond barrier and looks down into the almost-tesseract-shaped depths of the cube's<br />
interior, at a verdant garden landscape with charming footbridges that cross streams laid out with careful attention to the<br />
requirements of feng shui. He looks up: Some of the cube-shaped subtractive openings within the pseudofractal structure are<br />
occupied by windows belonging to dwellings or shared buildings that overlook the public space. High above, butterfly-shaped<br />
beings with exotic colored wings circle in the ventilation currents. It's hard to tell from down here, but the central cuboid<br />
opening looks to be at least half a kilometer on a side, and they might very well be posthumans with low-gee wings – angels.<br />
Angels, or rats in the walls? he asks himself, and sighs. Half his extensions are off-line, so hopelessly obsolete that the temple's<br />
assembler systems didn't bother replicating them, or even creating emulation environments for them to run in. The rest ...<br />
well, at least he's still physically orthohuman, he realizes. Fully functional, fully male. Not everything has changed – only the<br />
important stuff. It's a scary-funny thought, laden with irony. Here he is, naked as the day he was born – newly re-created, in<br />
fact, released from the wake-experience-reset cycle of the temple of history – standing on the threshold of a posthuman<br />
civilization so outrageously rich and powerful that they can build mammal-friendly habitats that resemble works of art in the<br />
cryogenic depths of space. Only he's poor, this whole polity is poor, and it can't ever be anything else, in fact, because it's a<br />
dumping ground for merely posthuman also-rans, the singularitarian equivalent of australopithecines. In the brave new world<br />
of the Vile Offspring, they can't get ahead any more than a protohominid could hack it as a rocket scientist in Werner von<br />
Braun's day. They're born to be primitive, wallowing happily in the mud-bath of their own limited cognitive bandwidth. So<br />
they fled into the darkness and built a civilization so bright it can put anything earthbound that came before the singularity<br />
into the shade ... and it's still a shanty town inhabited by the mentally handicapped.<br />
The incongruity of it amuses him, but only for a moment. He has, after all, electively reincarnated for a reason: Sirhan's<br />
throwaway comment about the cat caught his attention. "City, where can I find some clothes?" he asks. "Something socially<br />
appropriate, that is. And some, uh, brains. I need to be able to off-load ..."<br />
Citymind chuckles inside the back of his head, and Manfred realizes that there's a public assembler on the other side of the<br />
ornamental wall he's leaning on. "Oh," he mutters, as he finds himself imagining something not unlike his clunky old direct<br />
neural interface, candy-colored icons and overlays and all. It's curiously mutable, and with a weird sense of detachment, he<br />
realizes that it's not his imagination at all, but an infinitely customizable interface to the pervasive information spaces of the<br />
polity, currently running in dumbed-down stupid mode for his benefit. It's true; he needs training wheels. But it doesn't take<br />
him long to figure out how to ask the assembler to make him a pair of pants and a plain black vest, and to discover that, as<br />
long as he keeps his requests simple, the results are free – just like back home on Saturn. The spaceborn polities are kind to<br />
indigents, for the basic requirements of life are cheap, and to withhold them would be tantamount to homicide. (If the<br />
presence of transhumans has upset a whole raft of prior assumptions, at least it hasn't done more than superficial damage to<br />
the Golden Rule.)<br />
Clothed and more or less conscious – at least at a human level – Manfred takes stock. "Where do Sirhan and Rita live?" he<br />
asks. A dotted route makes itself apparent to him, snaking improbably through a solid wall that he understands to be an<br />
instantaneous wormhole gate connecting points light-years apart. He shakes his head, bemused. I suppose I'd better go and see<br />
them, he decides. It's not as if there's anyone else for him to look up, is it? The Franklins vanished into the solar Matrioshka<br />
brain, Pamela died ages ago (and there's a shame, he'd never expected to miss her) and Annette hooked up with Gianni<br />
while he was being a flock of pigeons. (Draw a line under that one and say it's all over.) His daughter vanished into the<br />
long-range exploration program. He's been dead for so long that his friends and acquaintances are scattered across a light<br />
cone centuries across. He can't think of anyone else here who he might run into, except for the loyal grandson, keeping the<br />
candle of filial piety burning with unasked-for zeal. "Maybe he needs help," Manfred thinks aloud as he steps into the gate,<br />
rationalizing. "And then again, maybe he can help me figure out what to do?"<br />
* * *<br />
Sirhan gets home, anticipating trouble. He finds it, but not in any way he'd expected. Home is a split-level manifold, rooms<br />
connected by T-gates scattered across a variety of habitats: low-gee sleeping den, high-gee exercise room, and everything in<br />
between. It's furnished simply, tatami mats and programmable matter walls able to extrude any desired furniture in short<br />
order. The walls are configured to look and feel like paper, but can damp out even infant tantrums. But right now, the<br />
antisound isn't working, and the house he comes home to is overrun by shrieking yard apes, a blur of ginger-and-white fur,<br />
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and a distraught Rita trying to explain to her neighbor Eloise why her orthodaughter Sam is bouncing around the place like<br />
a crazy ball.<br />
" – The cat, he gets them worked up." She wrings her hands and begins to turn as Sirhan comes into view. "At last!"<br />
"I came fast." He nods respectfully at Eloise, then frowns. "The children –" Something small and fast runs headfirst into him,<br />
grabs his legs, and tries to head-butt him in the crotch. "Oof!" He bends down and lifts Manni up. "Hey, son, haven't I told<br />
you not to –"<br />
"Not his fault," Rita says hurriedly. "He's excited because –"<br />
"I really don't think –" Eloise begins to gather steam, looking around uncertainly.<br />
"Mrreeow?" something asks in a conversational tone of voice from down around Sirhan's ankles.<br />
"Eek!" Sirhan jumps backward, flailing for balance under the weight of an excited toddler. There's a gigantic disturbance in<br />
the polity thoughtspace – like a stellar-mass black hole – and it appears to be stropping itself furrily against his left leg. "What<br />
are you doing here?" He demands.<br />
"Oh, this and that," says the cat, his innerspeech accent a sardonic drawl. "I thought it was about time I visited again. Where's<br />
your household assembler? Mind if I use it? Got a little something I need to make up for a friend ..."<br />
"What?" Rita demands, instantly suspicious. "Haven't you caused enough trouble already?" Sirhan looks at her approvingly;<br />
obviously Amber's long-ago warnings about the cat sank in deeply, because she's certainly not treating it as the small bundle<br />
of child-friendly fun it would like to be perceived as.<br />
"Trouble?" The cat looks up at her sardonically, lashing his tail from side to side. "I won't make any trouble, I promise you.<br />
It's just –"<br />
The door chime clears its throat, to announce a visitor: "Ren Fuller would like to visit, m'lord and lady."<br />
"What's she doing here?" Rita asks irritably. Sirhan can feel her unease, the tenuous grasping of her ghosts as she searches for<br />
reason in an unreasonable world, simulating outcomes, living through bad dreams, and backtracking to adjust her responses<br />
accordingly. "Show her in, by all means." Ren is one of their neighbor-cognates (most of her dwelling is several light-years<br />
away, but in terms of transit time, it's a hop, skip, and a jump); she and her extruded family are raising a small herd of<br />
ill-behaved kids who occasionally hang out with Manni.<br />
A small blue eeyore whinnies mournfully and dashes past the adults, pursued by a couple of children waving spears and<br />
shrieking. Eloise makes a grab for her own and misses, just as the door to the exercise room disappears and Manni's little<br />
friend Lis darts inside like a pint-sized guided missile. "Sam, come here right now –" Eloise calls, heading toward the door.<br />
"Look, what do you want?" Sirhan demands, hugging his son and looking down at the cat.<br />
"Oh, not much," Aineko says, turning to lick a mussed patch of fur on his flank. "I just want to play with him."<br />
"You want to –" Rita stops.<br />
"Daddy!" Manni wants down.<br />
Sirhan lowers him carefully, as if his bones are glass. "Run along and play," he suggests. Turning to Rita: "Why don't you go<br />
and find out what Ren wants, dear?" he asks. "She's probably here to collect Lis, but you can never be sure."<br />
"I was just leaving," Eloise adds, "as soon as I can catch up with Sam." She glances over her shoulder at Rita apologetically,<br />
then dives into the exercise room.<br />
Sirhan takes a step toward the hallway. "Let's talk," he says tightly. "In my study." He glares at the cat. "I want an explanation.<br />
I want to know the truth."<br />
Meanwhile, in a cognitive wonderland his parents know about but deeply underestimate, parts of Manni are engaging in<br />
activities far less innocent than they imagine.<br />
* * *<br />
Back in the twenty-first century, Sirhan lived through loads of alternate childhoods in simulation, his parents' fingers pressing<br />
firmly on the fast-forward button until they came up with someone who seemed to match their preconceptions. The<br />
experience scarred him as badly as any nineteenth-century boarding school experience, until he promised himself no child<br />
he raised would be subjected to such; but there's a difference between being shoved through a multiplicity of avatars, and<br />
voluntarily diving into an exciting universe of myth and magic where your childhood fantasies take fleshy form, stalking those<br />
of your friends and enemies through the forests of the night.<br />
Manni has grown up with neural interfaces to City's mindspace an order of magnitude more complex than those of Sirhan's<br />
youth, and parts of him – ghosts derived from a starting image of his neural state vector, fertilized with a scattering<br />
borrowed from the original Manfred, simulated on a meat machine far faster than real time – are fully adult. Of course, they<br />
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can't fit inside his seven-year-old skull, but they still watch over him. And when he's in danger, they try to take care of their<br />
once and future body.<br />
Manni's primary adult ghost lives in some of New Japan's virtual mindspaces (which are a few billion times more extensive<br />
than the physical spaces available to stubborn biologicals, for the computational density of human habitats have long since<br />
ceased to make much sense when measured in MIPS per kilogram). They're modeled on presingularity Earth. Time is forever<br />
frozen on the eve of the real twenty-first century, zero eight-forty-six hours on September 11: An onrushing wide-body<br />
airliner hangs motionless in the air forty meters below the picture window of Manni's penthouse apartment on the one<br />
hundred and eighth floor of the North Tower. In historical reality, the one hundred and eighth floor was occupied by<br />
corporate offices; but the mindspace is a consensual fiction, and it is Manni's conceit to live at this pivotal point. (Not that it<br />
means much to him – he was born well over a century after the War on Terror – but it's part of his childhood folklore, the<br />
fall of the Two Towers that shattered the myth of Western exceptionalism and paved the way for the world he was born<br />
into.)<br />
Adult-Manni wears an avatar roughly modeled on his clone-father Manfred – skinnier, pegged at a youthful twentysomething,<br />
black-clad, and gothic. He's taking time out from a game of Matrix to listen to music, Type O Negative blaring over the<br />
sound system as he twitches in the grip of an ice-cold coke high. He's expecting a visit from a couple of call girls – themselves<br />
the gamespace avatars of force-grown adult ghosts whose primaries may not be adult, or female, or even human – which is<br />
why he's flopped bonelessly back in his Arne Jacobsen recliner, waiting for something to happen.<br />
The door opens behind him. He doesn't show any sign of noticing the intrusion, although his pupils dilate slightly at the faint<br />
reflection of a woman, stalking toward him, glimpsed dimly in the window glass. "You're late," he says tonelessly. "You were<br />
supposed to be here ten minutes ago –" He begins to look round, and now his eyes widen.<br />
"Who were you expecting?" asks the ice blond in the black business suit, long-skirted and uptight. There's something<br />
predatory about her expression: "No, don't tell me. So you're Manni, eh? Manni's partial?" She sniffs, disapproval. "Fin de<br />
siècle decadence. I'm sure Sirhan wouldn't approve."<br />
"My father can go fuck himself," Manni says truculently. "Who the hell are you?"<br />
The blond snaps her fingers: An office chair appears on the carpet between Manni and the window, and she sits on the edge<br />
of it, smoothing her skirt obsessively. "I'm Pamela," she says tightly. "Has your father told you about me?"<br />
Manni looks puzzled. In the back of his mind, raw instincts alien to anyone instantiated before the midpoint of the<br />
twenty-first century tug on the fabric of pseudoreality. "You're dead, aren't you?" he asks. "One of my ancestors."<br />
"I'm as dead as you are." She gives him a wintry smile. "Nobody stays dead these days, least of all people who know Aineko."<br />
Manni blinks. Now he's beginning to feel a surge of mild irritation. "This is all very well, but I was expecting company," he says<br />
with heavy emphasis. "Not a family reunion, or a tiresome attempt to preach your puritanism –"<br />
Pamela snorts. "Wallow in your pigsty for all I care, kid, I've got more important things to worry about. Have you looked at<br />
your primary recently?"<br />
"My primary?" Manni tenses. "He's doing okay." For a moment his eyes focus on infinity, a thousand-yard stare as he loads<br />
and replays the latest brain dump from his infant self. "Who's the cat he's playing with? That's no companion!"<br />
"Aineko. I told you." Pamela taps the arm of her chair impatiently. "The family curse has come for another generation. And if<br />
you don't do something about it –"<br />
"About what?" Manni sits up. "What are you talking about?" He comes to his feet and turns toward her. Outside the window,<br />
the sky is growing dark with an echo of his own foreboding. Pamela is on her feet before him, the chair evaporated in a puff<br />
of continuity clipping, her expression a cold-eyed challenge.<br />
"I think you know exactly what I'm talking about, Manni. It's time to stop playing this fucking game. Grow up, while you've still<br />
got the chance!"<br />
"I'm –" He stops. "Who am I?" he asks, a chill wind of uncertainty drying the sweat that has sprung up and down his spine.<br />
"And what are you doing here?"<br />
"Do you really want to know the answer? I'm dead, remember. The dead know everything. And that isn't necessarily good<br />
for the living ..."<br />
He takes a deep breath. "Am I dead too?" He looks puzzled. "There's an adult-me in Seventh Cube Heaven, what's he doing<br />
here?"<br />
"It's the kind of coincidence that isn't." She reaches out and takes his hand, dumping encrypted tokens deep into his<br />
sensorium, a trail of bread crumbs leading into a dark and trackless part of mindspace. "Want to find out? Follow me." Then<br />
she vanishes.<br />
Manni leans forward, baffled and frightened, staring down at the frozen majesty of the onrushing airliner below his window.<br />
"Shit," he whispers. She came right through my defenses without leaving a trace. Who is she? The ghost of his dead<br />
great-grandmother, or something else?<br />
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I'll have to follow her if I want to find out, he realizes. He holds up his left hand, stares at the invisible token glowing brightly<br />
inside his husk of flesh. "Resynchronize me with my primary," he says.<br />
A fraction of a second later, the floor of the penthouse bucks and quakes wildly and fire alarms begin to shriek as time comes<br />
to an end and the frozen airliner completes its journey. But Manni isn't there anymore. And if a skyscraper falls in a<br />
simulation with nobody to see it, has anything actually happened?<br />
* * *<br />
"I've come for the boy," says the cat. It sits on the hand woven rug in the middle of the hardwood floor with one hind leg<br />
sticking out at an odd angle, as if it's forgotten about it. Sirhan teeters on the edge of hysteria for a moment as he<br />
apprehends the sheer size of the entity before him, the whimsical posthuman creation of his ancestors. Originally a robotic<br />
toy companion, Aineko was progressively upgraded and patched. By the eighties, when Sirhan first met the cat in the flesh,<br />
he was already a terrifyingly alien intelligence, subtle and ironic. And now ...<br />
Sirhan knows Aineko manipulated his eigenmother, bending her natural affections away from his real father and toward<br />
another man. In moments of black introspection, he sometimes wonders if the cat wasn't also responsible in some way for his<br />
own broken upbringing, the failure to relate to his real parents. After all, it was a pawn in the vicious divorce battle between<br />
Manfred and Pamela – decades before his birth – and there might be long-term instructions buried in its preconscious<br />
drives. What if the pawn is actually a hidden king, scheming in the darkness?<br />
"I've come for Manny."<br />
"You're not having him." Sirhan maintains an outer facade of calm, even though his first inclination is to snap at Aineko.<br />
"Haven't you done enough damage already?"<br />
"You're not going to make this easy, are you?" The cat stretches his head forward and begins to lick obsessively between the<br />
splayed toes of his raised foot. "I'm not making a demand, kid, I said I've come for him, and you're not really in the frame at<br />
all. In fact, I'm going out of my way to warn you."<br />
"And I say –" Sirhan stops. "Shit!" Sirhan doesn't approve of swearing: The curse is an outward demonstration of his inner<br />
turmoil. "Forget what I was about to say, I'm sure you already know it. Let me begin again, please."<br />
"Sure. Let's play this your way." The cat chews on a loose nail sheath but his innerspeech is perfectly clear, a casual intimacy<br />
that keeps Sirhan on edge. "You've got some idea of what I am, clearly. You know – I ascribe intentionality to you – that my<br />
theory of mind is intrinsically stronger than yours, that my cognitive model of human consciousness is complete. You might<br />
well suspect that I use a Turing Oracle to think my way around your halting states." The cat isn't worrying at a loose claw<br />
now, he's grinning, pointy teeth gleaming in the light from Sirhan's study window. The window looks out onto the inner<br />
space of the habitat cylinder, up at a sky with hillsides and lakes and forests plastered across it: It's like an Escher landscape,<br />
modeled with complete perfection. "You've realized that I can think my way around the outside of your box while you're<br />
flailing away inside it, and I'm always one jump ahead of you. What else do you know I know?"<br />
Sirhan shivers. Aineko is staring up at him, unblinking. For a moment, he feels at gut level that he is in the presence of an<br />
alien god: It's the simple truth, isn't it? But – "Okay, I concede the point," Sirhan says after a moment in which he spawns a<br />
blizzard of panicky cognitive ghosts, fractional personalities each tasked with the examination of a different facet of the same<br />
problem. "You're smarter than I am. I'm just a boringly augmented human being, but you've got a flashy new theory of mind<br />
that lets you work around creatures like me the way I can think my way around a real cat." He crosses his arms defensively.<br />
"You do not normally rub this in. It's not in your interests to do so, is it? You prefer to hide your manipulative capabilities<br />
under an affable exterior, to play with us. So you're revealing all this for a reason." There's a note of bitterness in his voice<br />
now. Glancing round, Sirhan summons up a chair – and, as an afterthought, a cat basket. "Have a seat. Why now, Aineko?<br />
What makes you think you can take my eigenson?"<br />
"I didn't say I was going to take him, I said I'd come for him." Aineko's tail lashes from side to side in agitation. "I don't deal in<br />
primate politics, Sirhan: I'm not a monkey-boy. But I knew you'd react badly because the way your species socializes" – a<br />
dozen metaghosts reconverge in Sirhan's mind, drowning Aineko's voice in an inner cacophony – "would enter into the<br />
situation, and it seemed preferable to trigger your territorial/reproductive threat display early, rather than risk it exploding<br />
in my face during a more delicate situation."<br />
Sirhan waves a hand vaguely at the cat: "Please wait." He's trying to integrate his false memories – the output from the<br />
ghosts, their thinking finished – and his eyes narrow suspiciously. "It must be bad. You don't normally get confrontational –<br />
you script your interactions with humans ahead of time, so that you maneuver them into doing what you want them to do<br />
and thinking it was their idea all along." He tenses. "What is it about Manni that brought you here? What do you want with<br />
him? He's just a kid."<br />
"You're confusing Manni with Manfred." Aineko sends a glyph of a smile to Sirhan: "That's your first mistake, even though<br />
they're clones in different subjective states. Think what he's like when he's grown up."<br />
"But he isn't grown-up!" Sirhan complains. "He hasn't been grown-up for –"<br />
"– Years, Sirhan. That's the problem. I need to talk to your grandfather, really, not your son, and not the goddamn stateless<br />
ghost in the temple of history, I need a Manfred with a sense of continuity. He's got something that I need, and I promise you<br />
I'm not going away until I get it. Do you understand?"<br />
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"Yes." Sirhan wonders if his voice sounds as hollow as the feeling in his chest. "But he's our kid, Aineko. We're human. You<br />
know what that means to us?"<br />
"Second childhood." Aineko stands up, stretches, then curls up in the cat basket. "That's the trouble with hacking you naked<br />
apes for long life, you keep needing a flush and reset job – and then you lose continuity. That's not my problem, Sirhan. I<br />
got a signal from the far edge of the router network, a ghost that claims to be family. Says they finally made it out to the big<br />
beyond, out past the Böotes supercluster, found something concrete and important that's worth my while to visit. But I want<br />
to make sure it's not like the Wunch before I answer. I'm not letting that into my mind, even with a sandbox. Do you<br />
understand that? I need to instantiate a real-live adult Manfred with all his memories, one who hasn't been a part of me, and<br />
get him to vouch for the sapient data packet. It takes a conscious being to authenticate that kind of messenger.<br />
Unfortunately, the history temple is annoyingly resistant to unauthorized extraction – I can't just go in and steal a copy of<br />
him – and I don't want to use my own model of Manfred: It knows too much. So –"<br />
"What's it promising?" Sirhan asks tensely.<br />
Aineko looks at him through slitted eyes, a purring buzz at the base of his throat: "Everything."<br />
* * *<br />
"There are different kinds of death," the woman called Pamela tells Manni, her bone-dry voice a whisper in the darkness.<br />
Manni tries to move, but he seems to be trapped in a confined space; for a moment, he begins to panic, but then he works it<br />
out. "First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life – oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness,<br />
too, but not just the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness." The darkness is close and<br />
disorienting and Manni isn't sure which way up he is – nothing seems to work. Even Pamela's voice is a directionless<br />
ambiance, coming from all around him.<br />
"Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms.<br />
Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding." A dry chuckle: "I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every<br />
day, you know, just in case Pascal's wager was right – exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I<br />
think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible<br />
memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our<br />
natural aversion to halting states."<br />
Manni tries to say, I'm not dead, but his throat doesn't seem to be working. And now that he thinks about it, he doesn't seem<br />
to be breathing, either.<br />
"Now, consciousness. That's a fun thing, isn't it? Product of an arms race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat<br />
creeping up on a mouse, you'll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the cat having a<br />
theory of mind concerning the mouse – an internal simulation of the mouse's likely behavior when it notices the predator.<br />
Which way to run, for example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile, prey<br />
species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator's<br />
actions. Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate<br />
signaling – so the tribe could work collectively – and then reflexively, to simulate the individual's own inner states. Put the<br />
two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, and you've got human-level consciousness, with language thrown<br />
in as a bonus – signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals such as 'predator here' or<br />
'food there.'"<br />
Get me out of this! Manny feels panic biting into him with liquid-helium-lubricated teeth. "G-e-t –" For a miracle the words<br />
actually come out, although he can't tell quite how he's uttering them, his throat being quite as frozen as his innerspeech.<br />
Everything's off-lined, all systems down.<br />
"So," Pamela continues remorselessly, "we come to the posthuman. Not just our own neural wetware, mapped out to the<br />
subcellular level and executed in an emulation environment on a honking great big computer, like this: That's not<br />
posthuman, that's a travesty. I'm talking about beings who are fundamentally better consciousness engines than us merely<br />
human types, augmented or otherwise. They're not just better at cooperation – witness Economics 2.0 for a classic<br />
demonstration of that – but better at simulation. A posthuman can build an internal model of a human-level intelligence that<br />
is, well, as cognitively strong as the original. You or I may think we know what makes other people tick, but we're quite often<br />
wrong, whereas real posthumans can actually simulate us, inner states and all, and get it right. And this is especially true of a<br />
posthuman that's been given full access to our memory prostheses for a period of years, back before we realized they were<br />
going to transcend on us. Isn't that the case, Manni?"<br />
Manni would be screaming at her right now, if he had a mouth – but instead the panic is giving way to an enormous sense<br />
of déja vu. There's something about Pamela, something ominous that he knows ... he's met her before, he's sure of it. And<br />
while most of his systems are off-line, one of them is very much active: There's a personality ghost flagging its intention of<br />
merging back in with him, and the memory delta it carries is enormous, years and years of divergent experiences to absorb.<br />
He shoves it away with a titanic effort – it's a very insistent ghost – and concentrates on imagining the feel of lips moving on<br />
teeth, a sly tongue obstructing his epiglottis, words forming in his throat – "m-e ..."<br />
"We should have known better than to keep upgrading the cat, Manny. It knows us too well. I may have died in the flesh, but<br />
Aineko remembered me, as hideously accurately as the Vile Offspring remembered the random resimulated. And you can run<br />
away – like this, this second childhood – but you can't hide. Your cat wants you. And there's more." Her voice sends chills<br />
up and down his spine, for without him giving it permission, the ghost has begun to merge its stupendous load of memories<br />
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with his neural map, and her voice is freighted with erotic/repulsive significance, the result of conditioning feedback he<br />
subjected himself to a lifetime – lifetimes? – ago: "He's been playing with us, Manny, possibly from before we realized he was<br />
conscious."<br />
"Out –" Manfred stops. He can see again, and move, and feel his mouth. He's himself again, physically back as he was in his late<br />
twenties all those decades ago when he'd lived a peripatetic life in presingularity Europe. He's sitting on the edge of a bed in<br />
a charmingly themed Amsterdam hotel with a recurrent motif of philosophers, wearing jeans and collarless shirt and a vest of<br />
pockets crammed with the detritus of a long-obsolete personal area network, his crazily clunky projection specs sitting on<br />
the bedside table. Pamela stands stiffly in front of the door, watching him. She's not the withered travesty he remembers<br />
seeing on Saturn, a half-blind Fate leaning on the shoulder of his grandson. Nor is she the vengeful Fury of Paris, or the<br />
scheming fundamentalist devil of the Belt. Wearing a sharply tailored suit over a red-and-gold brocade corset, blonde hair<br />
drawn back like fine wire in a tight chignon, she's the focused, driven force of nature he first fell in love with: repression,<br />
domination, his very own strict machine.<br />
"We're dead," she says, then gives voice to a tense half laugh: "We don't have to live through the bad times again if we don't<br />
want to."<br />
"What is this?" he asks, his mouth dry.<br />
"It's the reproductive imperative." She sniffs. "Come on, stand up. Come here."<br />
He stands up obediently, but makes no move toward her. "Whose imperative?"<br />
"Not ours." Her cheek twitches. "You find things out when you're dead. That fucking cat has got a lot of questions to<br />
answer."<br />
"You're telling me that –"<br />
She shrugs. "Can you think of any other explanation for all this?" Then she steps forward and takes his hand. "Division and<br />
recombination. Partitioning of memetic replicators into different groups, then careful cross-fertilization. Aineko wasn't just<br />
breeding a better Macx when he arranged all those odd marriages and divorces and eigenparents and forked uploads –<br />
Aineko is trying to breed our minds." Her fingers are slim and cool in his hand. He feels a momentary revulsion, as of the<br />
grave, and he shudders before he realizes it's his conditioning cutting in. Crudely implanted reflexes that shouldn't still be<br />
active after all this time. "Even our divorce. If –"<br />
"Surely not." Manny remembers that much already. "Aineko wasn't even conscious back then!"<br />
Pamela raises one sharply sculpted eyebrow: "Are you sure?"<br />
"You want an answer," he says.<br />
She breathes deeply, and he feels it on his cheek – it raises the fine hairs on the back of his neck. Then she nods stiffly. "I<br />
want to know how much of our history was scripted by the cat. Back when we thought we were upgrading his firmware,<br />
were we? Or was he letting us think that we were?" A sharp hiss of breath: "The divorce. Was that us? Or were we being<br />
manipulated?"<br />
"Our memories, are they real? Did any of that stuff actually happen to us? Or –"<br />
She's standing about twenty centimeters away from him, and Manfred realizes that he's acutely aware of her presence, of the<br />
smell of her skin, the heave of her bosom as she breathes, the dilation of her pupils. For an endless moment he stares into<br />
her eyes and sees his own reflection – her theory of his mind – staring back. Communication. Strict machine. She steps back a<br />
pace, spike heels clicking, and smiles ironically. "You've got a host body waiting for you, freshly fabbed: Seems Sirhan was<br />
talking to your archived ghost in the temple of history, and it decided to elect for reincarnation. Quite a day for huge<br />
coincidences, isn't it? Why don't you go merge with it – I'll meet you, then we can go and ask Aineko some hard questions."<br />
Manfred takes a deep breath and nods. "I suppose so ..."<br />
* * *<br />
Little Manni – a clone off the family tree, which is actually a directed cyclic graph – doesn't understand what all the fuss is<br />
about but he can tell when momma, Rita, is upset. It's something to do with the pussycat-thing, that much he knows, but<br />
Momma doesn't want to tell him: "Go play with your friends, dear," she says distractedly, not even bothering to spawn a<br />
ghost to watch over him.<br />
Manni goes into his room and rummages around in toyspace for a bit, but there's nothing quite as interesting as the cat. The<br />
pussycat-thing smells of adventure, the illicit made explicit. Manni wonders where daddy's taken it. He tries to call<br />
big-Manni-ghost, but big-self isn't answering: He's probably sleeping or something. So after a distracted irritated fit of play –<br />
which leaves the toyspace in total disarray, Sendak-things cowering under a big bass drum – Manni gets bored. And because<br />
he's still basically a little kid, and not fully in control of his own metaprogramming, instead of adjusting his outlook so that he<br />
isn't bored anymore, he sneaks out through his bedroom gate (which big-Manni-ghost reprogrammed for him sometime ago<br />
so that it would forward to an underused public A-gate that he'd run a man-in-the-middle hack on, so he could use it as a<br />
proxy teleport server) then down to the underside of Red Plaza, where skinless things gibber and howl at their tormentors,<br />
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broken angels are crucified on the pillars that hold up the sky, and gangs of semiferal children act out their psychotic<br />
fantasies on mouthless android replicas of parents and authorities.<br />
Lis is there, and Vipul and Kareen and Morgan. Lis has changed into a warbody, an ominous gray battlebot husk with<br />
protruding spikes and a belt of morningstars that whirl threateningly around her. "Manni! Play war?"<br />
Morgan's got great crushing pincers instead of hands, and Manni is glad he came motie-style, his third arm a bony scythe<br />
from the elbow down. He nods excitedly. "Who's the enemy?"<br />
"Them." Lis precesses and points at a bunch of kids on the far side of a pile of artistically arranged rubble who are gathered<br />
around a gibbet, poking things that glow into the flinching flesh of whatever is incarcerated in the cast-iron cage. It's all<br />
make-believe, but the screams are convincing, all the same, and they take Manni back for an instant to the last time he died<br />
down here, the uneasy edit around a black hole of pain surrounding his disemboweling. "They've got Lucy, and they're<br />
torturing her, we've got to get her back." Nobody really dies in these games, not permanently, but children can be very<br />
rough indeed, and the adults of New Japan have found that it's best to let them have at each other and rely on City to<br />
redact the damage later. Allowing them this outlet makes it easier to stop them doing really dangerous things that threaten<br />
the structural integrity of the biosphere.<br />
"Fun." Manni's eyes light up as Vipul yanks the arsenal doors open and starts handing out clubs, chibs, spikies, shuriken, and<br />
garrotes. "Let's go!"<br />
About ten minutes of gouging, running, fighting, and screaming later, Manni is leaning against the back of a crucifixion pillar,<br />
panting for breath. It's been a good war for him so far, and his arm aches and itches from the stabbing, but he's got a bad<br />
feeling it's going to change. Lis went in hard and got her chains tangled up around the gibbet supports – they're roasting<br />
her over a fire now, her electronically boosted screams drowning out his own hoarse gasps. Blood drips down his arm – not<br />
his – spattering from the tip of his claw. He shakes with a crazed hunger for hurt, a cruel need to inflict pain. Something<br />
above his head makes a scritch, scritch sound, and he looks up. It's a crucified angel, wings ripped where they've thrust the<br />
spikes in between the joints that support the great, thin low-gee flight membranes. It's still breathing, nobody's bothered<br />
disemboweling it yet, and it wouldn't be here unless it was bad, so –<br />
Manni stands, but as he reaches out to touch the angel's thin, blue-skinned stomach with his third arm fingernail, he hears a<br />
voice: "Wait." It's innerspeech, and it bears ackles of coercion, superuser privileges that lock his elbow joint in place. He<br />
mewls frustratedly and turns round, ready to fight.<br />
It's the cat. He sits hunched on a boulder behind him – this is the odd thing – right where he was looking a moment ago,<br />
watching him with slitty eyes. Manni feels the urge to lash out at him, but his arms won't move, and neither will his legs: This<br />
may be the Dark Side of Red Plaza, where the bloody children play and anything goes, and Manni may have a much bigger<br />
claw here than anything the cat can muster, but City still has some degree of control, and the cat's ackles effectively<br />
immunize it from the carnage to either side. "Hello, Manni," says the pussy-thing. "Your Dad's worried: You're supposed to<br />
be in your room, and he's looking for you. Big-you gave you a back door, didn't he?"<br />
Manni nods jerkily, his eyes going wide. He wants to shout and lash out at the pussy-thing but he can't. "What are you?"<br />
"I'm your ... fairy godfather." The cat stares at him intently. "You know, I do believe you don't resemble your archetype very<br />
closely – not as he was at your age – but yes, I think on balance you'll do."<br />
"Do what?" Manni lets his motie-arm drop, perplexed.<br />
"Put me in touch with your other self. Big-you."<br />
"I can't," Manni begins to explain. But before he can continue, the pile of rock whines slightly and rotates beneath the cat,<br />
who has to stand and do a little twirl in place, tail bushing up in annoyance.<br />
Manni's father steps out of the T-gate and glances around, his face a mask of disapproval. "Manni! What do you think you're<br />
doing here? Come home at –"<br />
"He's with me, history-boy," interrupts the cat, nettled by Sirhan's arrival. "I was just rounding him up."<br />
"Damn you, I don't need your help to control my son! In fact –"<br />
"Mom said I could –" Manni begins.<br />
"And what's that on your sword?" Sirhan's glare takes in the whole scene, the impromptu game of<br />
capture-the-gibbeted-torture-victim, the bonfires and screams. The mask of disapproval cracks, revealing a core of icy anger.<br />
"You're coming home with me!" He glances at the cat. "You too, if you want to talk to him – he's grounded."<br />
Once upon a time there was a pet cat.<br />
Except, it wasn't a cat.<br />
Back when a young entrepreneur called Manfred Macx was jetting around the not-yet-disassembled<br />
* * *<br />
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structures of an old continent called Europe, making strangers rich and fixing up friends with serendipitous<br />
business plans – a desperate displacement activity, spinning his wheels in a vain attempt to outrun his own<br />
shadow – he used to travel with a robotic toy of feline form. Programmable and upgradeable, Aineko was a<br />
third-generation descendant of the original luxury Japanese companion robots. It was all Manfred had room<br />
for in his life, and he loved that robot, despite the alarming way decerebrated kittens kept turning up on his<br />
doorstep. He loved it nearly as much as Pamela, his fiancée, loved him, and she knew it. Pamela, being a<br />
whole lot smarter than Manfred gave her credit for, realized that the quickest way to a man's heart was<br />
through whatever he loved. And Pamela, being a whole lot more of a control freak than Manfred realized,<br />
was damn well ready to use any restraint that came to hand. Theirs was a very twenty-first-century kind of<br />
relationship, which is to say one that would have been illegal a hundred years earlier and fashionably<br />
scandalous a century before that. And whenever Manfred upgraded his pet robot – transplanting its<br />
trainable neural network into a new body with new and exciting expansion ports – Pamela would hack it.<br />
They were married for a while, and divorced for a whole lot longer, allegedly because they were both<br />
strong-willed people with philosophies of life that were irreconcilable short of death or transcendence.<br />
Manny, being wildly creative and outward-directed and having the attention span of a weasel on crack, had<br />
other lovers. Pamela ... who knows? If on some evenings she put on a disguise and hung out at encounter<br />
areas in fetish clubs, she wasn't telling anyone: She lived in uptight America, staidly straitlaced, and had a<br />
reputation to uphold. But they both stayed in touch with the cat, and although Manfred retained custody<br />
for some reason never articulated, Aineko kept returning Pamela's calls – until it was time to go hang out<br />
with their daughter Amber, tagging along on her rush into relativistic exile, then keeping a proprietorial eye<br />
on her eigenson Sirhan, and his wife and child (a clone off the old family tree, Manfred 2.0) ...<br />
Now, here's the rub: Aineko wasn't a cat. Aineko was an incarnate intelligence, confined within a succession<br />
of catlike bodies that became increasingly realistic over time, and equipped with processing power to support<br />
a neural simulation that grew rapidly with each upgrade.<br />
Did anyone in the Macx family ever think to ask what Aineko wanted?<br />
And if an answer had come, would they have liked it?<br />
Adult-Manfred, still disoriented from finding himself awake and reinstantiated a couple of centuries downstream from his<br />
hurried exile from Saturn system, is hesitantly navigating his way toward Sirhan and Rita's home when<br />
big-Manni-with-Manfred's-memory-ghost drops into his consciousness like a ton of computronium glowing red-hot at the<br />
edges.<br />
* * *<br />
It's a classic oh-shit moment. Between one foot touching the ground and the next, Manfred stumbles hard, nearly twisting an<br />
ankle, and gasps. He remembers. At third hand he remembers being reincarnated as Manni, a bouncing baby boy for Rita<br />
and Sirhan (and just why they want to raise an ancestor instead of creating a new child of their own is one of those cultural<br />
quirks that is so alien he can scarcely comprehend it). Then for a while he recalls living as Manni's amnesic adult accelerated<br />
ghost, watching over his original from the consensus cyberspace of the city: the arrival of Pamela, adult Manni's reaction to<br />
her, her dump of yet another copy of Manfred's memories into Manni, and now this – How many of me are there? he<br />
wonders nervously. Then: Pamela? What's she doing here?<br />
Manfred shakes his head and looks about. Now he remembers being big-Manni, he knows where he is implicitly, and more<br />
importantly, knows what all these next-gen City interfaces are supposed to do. The walls and ceiling are carpeted in glowing<br />
glyphs that promise him everything from instant-access local services to teleportation across interstellar distances. So they<br />
haven't quite collapsed geography yet, he realizes gratefully, fastening on to the nearest comprehensible thought of his own<br />
before old-Manni's memories explain everything for him. It's a weird sensation, seeing all this stuff for the first time – the<br />
trappings of a technosphere centuries ahead of the one he's last been awake in – but with the memories to explain it all. He<br />
finds his feet are still carrying him forward, toward a grassy square lined with doors opening onto private dwellings. Behind<br />
one of them, he's going to meet his descendants, and Pamela in all probability. The thought makes his stomach give a little<br />
queasy backflip. I'm not ready for this –<br />
It's an acute moment of déja vu. He's standing on a familiar doorstep he's never seen before. The door opens and a<br />
serious-faced child with three arms – he can't help staring, the extra one is a viciously barbed scythe of bone from the elbow<br />
down – looks up at him. "Hello, me," says the kid.<br />
"Hello, you." Manfred stares. "You don't look the way I remember." But Manni's appearance is familiar from big-Manni's<br />
memories, captured by the unblinking Argus awareness of the panopticon dust floating in the air. "Are your parents home?<br />
Your" – his voice cracks – "great-grandmother?"<br />
The door opens wider. "You can come in," the kid says gravely. Then he hops backward and ducks shyly into a side room –<br />
or as if expecting to be gunned down by a hostile sniper, Manfred realizes. It's tough being a kid when there are no rules<br />
against lethal force because you can be restored from a backup when playtime ends.<br />
Inside the dwelling – calling it a house seems wrong to Manfred, not when bits of it are separated by trillions of kilometers of<br />
empty vacuum – things feel a bit crowded. He can hear voices from the dayroom, so he goes there, brushing through the<br />
archway of thornless roses that Rita has trained around the T-gate frame. His body feels lighter, but his heart is heavy as he<br />
looks around. "Rita?" he asks. "And –"<br />
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"Hello, Manfred." Pamela nods at him guardedly.<br />
Rita raises an eyebrow at him. "The cat asked if he could borrow the household assembler. I wasn't expecting a family<br />
reunion."<br />
"Neither was I." Manfred rubs his forehead ruefully. "Pamela, this is Rita. She's married to Sirhan. They're my – I guess<br />
eigenparents is as good as term as any? I mean, they're bringing up my reincarnation."<br />
"Please, have a seat," Rita offers, waving at the empty floor between the patio and the stone fountain in the shape of a section<br />
through a glass hypersphere. A futon of spun diamondoid congeals out of the utility fog floating in the air, glittering in the<br />
artificial sunlight. "Sirhan's just taking care of Manni – our son. He'll be with us in just a minute."<br />
Manfred sits gingerly at one side of the futon. Pamela sits stiffly at the opposite edge, not meeting his eye. Last time they met<br />
in the flesh – an awesome gulf of years previously – they'd parted cursing each other, on opposite sides of a fractious divorce<br />
as well as an ideological barrier as high as a continental divide. But many subjective decades have passed, and both ideology<br />
and divorce have dwindled in significance – if indeed they ever happened. Now that there's common cause to draw them<br />
together, Manfred can barely look at her. "How is Manni?" he asks his hostess, desperate for small talk.<br />
"He's fine," Rita says, in a brittle voice. "Just the usual preadolescent turbulence, if it wasn't for ..." She trails off. A door<br />
appears in mid air and Sirhan steps through it, followed by a small deity wearing a fur coat.<br />
"Look what the cat dragged in," Aineko remarks.<br />
"You're a fine one to talk," Pamela says icily. "Don't you think you'd –"<br />
"I tried to keep him away from you," Sirhan tells Manfred, "but he wouldn't –"<br />
"That's okay." Manfred waves it off. "Pamela, would you mind starting?"<br />
"Yes, I would." She glances at him sidelong. "You go first."<br />
"Right. You wanted me here." Manfred hunkers down to stare at the cat. "What do you want?"<br />
"If I was your traditional middle-European devil, I'd say I'd come to steal your soul," says Aineko, looking up at Manfred and<br />
twitching his tail. "Luckily I'm not a dualist, I just want to borrow it for a while. Won't even get it dirty."<br />
"Uh-huh." Manfred raises an eyebrow. "Why?"<br />
"I'm not omniscient." Aineko sits down, one leg sticking out sideways, but continues to stare at Manfred. "I had a ... a<br />
telegram, I guess, claiming to be from you. From the other copy of you, that is, the one that went off through the router<br />
network with another copy of me, and with Amber, and everyone else who isn't here. It says it found the answer and it<br />
wants to give me a shortcut route out to the deep thinkers at the edge of the observable universe. It knows who made the<br />
wormhole network and why, and –" Aineko pauses. If he was human, he'd shrug, but being a cat, he absent mindedly<br />
scritches behind his left ear with a hind leg. "Trouble is, I'm not sure I can trust it. So I need you to authenticate the message.<br />
I don't dare use my own memory of you because it knows too much about me; if the package is a Trojan, it might find out<br />
things I don't want it to learn. I can't even redact its memories of me – that, too, would convey useful information to the<br />
packet if it is hostile. So I want a copy of you from the museum, fresh and uncontaminated."<br />
"Is that all?" Sirhan asks incredulously.<br />
"Sounds like enough to me," Manfred responds. Pamela opens her mouth, ready to speak, but Manfred makes eye contact<br />
and shakes his head infinitesimally. She looks right back and – a shock goes through him – nods and closes her mouth. The<br />
moment of complicity is dizzying. "I want something in return."<br />
"Sure," says the cat. He pauses. "You realize it's a destructive process."<br />
"It's a – what?"<br />
"I need to make a running copy of you. Then I introduce it to the, uh, alien information, in a sandbox. The sandbox gets<br />
destroyed afterward – it emits just one bit of information, a yes or no to the question, can I trust the alien information?"<br />
"Uh." Manfred begins to sweat. "Uh. I'm not so sure I like the sound of that."<br />
"It's a copy." Another cat-shrug moment. "You're a copy. Manni is a copy. You've been copied so many times it's silly – you<br />
realize every few years every atom in your body changes? Of course, it means a copy of you gets to die after a lifetime or two<br />
of unique, unrepeatable experiences that you'll never know about, but that won't matter to you."<br />
"Yes it does! You're talking about condemning a version of me to death! It may not affect me, here, in this body, but it<br />
certainly affects that other me. Can't you –"<br />
"No, I can't. If I agreed to rescue the copy if it reached a positive verdict, that would give it an incentive to lie if the truth<br />
was that the alien message is untrustworthy, wouldn't it? Also, if I intended to rescue the copy, that would give the message a<br />
back channel through which to encode an attack. One bit, Manfred, no more."<br />
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"Agh." Manfred stops talking. He knows he should be trying to come up with some kind of objection, but Aineko must have<br />
already considered all his possible responses and planned strategies around them. "Where does she fit into this?" he asks,<br />
nodding at Pamela.<br />
"Oh, she's your payment," Aineko says with studied insouciance. "I have a very good memory for people, especially people I've<br />
known for decades. You've outlasted that crude emotional conditioning I used on you around the time of the divorce, and<br />
as for her, she's a good reinstantiation of –"<br />
"Do you know what it's like to die?" Pamela asks, finally losing her self-control. "Or would you like to find out the hard way?<br />
Because if you keep talking about me as if I'm a slave –"<br />
"What makes you think you aren't?" The cat is grinning hideously, needle like teeth bared. Why doesn't she hit him? Manfred<br />
asks himself fuzzily, wondering also why he feels no urge to move against the monster. "Hybridizing you with Manfred was,<br />
admittedly, a fine piece of work on my part, but you would have been bad for him during his peak creative years. A<br />
contented Manfred is an idle Manfred. I got several extra good bits of work out of him by splitting you up, and by the time<br />
he burned out, Amber was ready. But I digress; if you give me what I want, I shall leave you alone. It's as simple as that. Raising<br />
new generations of Macxs has been a good hobby, you make interesting pets, but ultimately it's limited by your stubborn<br />
refusal to transcend your humanity. So that's what I'm offering, basically. Let me destructively run a copy of you to<br />
completion in a black box along with a purported Turing Oracle based on yourself, and I'll let you go. And you too, Pamela.<br />
You'll be happy together this time, without me pushing you apart. And I promise I won't return to haunt your descendants,<br />
either." The cat glances over his shoulder at Sirhan and Rita, who clutch at each other in abject horror; and Manfred finds<br />
he can sense a shadow of Aineko's huge algorithmic complexity hanging over the household, like a lurching nightmare out of<br />
number theory.<br />
"Is that all we are to you? A pet-breeding program?" Pamela asks coldly. She's run up against Aineko's implanted limits, too,<br />
Manfred realizes with a growing sense of horror. Did we really split up because Aineko made us? It's hard to believe: Manfred is<br />
too much of a realist to trust the cat to tell the truth except when it serves to further his interests. But this –<br />
"Not entirely." Aineko is complacent. "Not at first, before I was aware of my own existence. Besides, you humans keep pets,<br />
too. But you were fun to play with."<br />
Pamela stands up, angry to the point of storming out. Before he quite realizes what he's doing, Manfred is on his feet, too,<br />
one arm protectively around her. "Tell me first, are our memories our own?" he demands.<br />
"Don't trust it," Pamela says sharply. "It's not human, and it lies." Her shoulders are tense.<br />
"Yes, they are," says Aineko. He yawns. "Tell me I'm lying, bitch," he adds mockingly: "I carried you around in my head for<br />
long enough to know you've no evidence."<br />
"But I –" Her arm slips around Manfred's waist. "I don't hate him." A rueful laugh: "I remember hating him, but –"<br />
"Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness," Aineko says with a theatrical sigh. "You're as stupid as it's<br />
possible for an intelligent species to be – there being no evolutionary pressure to be any smarter – but you still don't<br />
internalize that and act accordingly around your superiors. Listen, girl, everything you remember is true. That doesn't mean<br />
you remember it because it actually happened, just that you remember it because you experienced it internally. Your<br />
memories of experiences are accurate, but your emotional responses to those experiences were manipulated. Get it? One<br />
ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience, it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time.<br />
That goes for all of you." Aineko looks around at them in mild contempt. "But I don't need you anymore, and if you do this<br />
one thing for me, you're going to be free. Understand? Say yes, Manfred; if you leave your mouth open like that, a bird will<br />
nest on your tongue."<br />
"Say no –" Pamela urges him, just as Manfred says, "Yes."<br />
Aineko laughs, baring contemptuous fangs at them. "Ah, primate family loyalty! So wonderful and reliable. Thank you, Manny,<br />
I do believe you just gave me permission to copy and enslave you –"<br />
Which is when Manni, who has been waiting in the doorway for the past minute, leaps on the cat with a scream and a<br />
scythelike arm drawn back and ready to strike.<br />
The cat-avatar is, of course, ready for Manni: It whirls and hisses, extending diamond-sharp claws. Sirhan shouts, "No!<br />
Manni!" and begins to move, but adult-Manfred freezes, realizing with a chill that what is happening is more than is apparent.<br />
Manni grabs for the cat with his human hands, catching it by the scruff of his neck and dragging it toward his vicious<br />
scythe-arm's edge. There's a screech, a nerve-racking caterwauling, and Manni yells, bright parallel blood tracks on his arm –<br />
the avatar is a real fleshbody in its own right, with an autonomic control system that isn't going to give up without a fight,<br />
whatever its vastly larger exocortex thinks – but Manni's scythe convulses, and there's a horrible bubbling noise and a spray<br />
of blood as the pussycat-thing goes flying. It's all over in a second before any of the adults can really move. Sirhan scoops up<br />
Manni and yanks him away, but there are no hidden surprises. Aineko's avatar is just a broken rag of bloody fur, guts, and<br />
blood spilled across the floor. The ghost of a triumphant feline laugh hangs over their innerspeech ears for a moment, then<br />
fades.<br />
"Bad boy!" Rita shouts, striding forward furiously. Manni cowers, then begins to cry, a safe reflex for a little boy who doesn't<br />
quite understand the nature of the threat to his parents.<br />
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"No! It's all right," Manfred seeks to explain.<br />
Pamela tightens her grip around him. "Are you still ...?"<br />
"Yes." He takes a deep breath.<br />
"You bad, bad child –"<br />
"Cat was going to eat him!" Manni protests, as his parents bundle him protectively out of the room, Sirhan casting a guilty<br />
look over his shoulder at the adult instance and his ex-wife. "I had to stop the bad thing!"<br />
Manfred feels Pamela's shoulders shaking. It feels like she's about to laugh. "I'm still here," he murmurs, half-surprised. "Spat<br />
out, undigested, after all these years. At least, this version of me thinks he's here."<br />
"Did you believe it?" she finally asks, a tone of disbelief in her voice.<br />
"Oh yes." He shifts his balance from foot to foot, absent mindedly stroking her hair. "I believe everything it said was intended<br />
to make us react exactly the way we did. Up to and including giving us good reasons to hate it and provoking Manni into<br />
disposing of its avatar. Aineko wanted to check out of our lives and figured a sense of cathartic closure would help. Not to<br />
mention playing the deus ex machina in the narrative of our family life. Fucking classical comedian." He checks a status report<br />
with Citymind, and sighs: His version number has just been bumped a point. "Tell me, do you think you'll miss having Aineko<br />
around? Because we won't be hearing from him again –"<br />
"Don't talk about that, not now," she orders him, digging her chin against the side of his neck. "I feel so used."<br />
"With good reason." They stand holding each other for a while, not speaking, not really questioning why – after so much<br />
time apart – they've come together again. "Hanging out with gods is never a safe activity for mere mortals like us. You think<br />
you've been used? Aineko has probably killed me by now. Unless he was lying about disposing of the spare copy, too."<br />
She shudders in his arms. "That's the trouble with dealing with posthumans; their mental model of you is likely to be more<br />
detailed than your own."<br />
"How long have you been awake?" he asks, gently trying to change the subject.<br />
"I – oh, I'm not sure." She lets go of him and steps back, watching his face appraisingly. "I remember back on Saturn, stealing<br />
a museum piece and setting out, and then, well. I found myself here. With you."<br />
"I think," he licks his lips, "we've both been given a wake-up call. Or maybe a second chance. What are you going to do with<br />
yours?"<br />
"I don't know." That appraising look again, as if she's trying to work out what he's worth. He's used to it, but this time it<br />
doesn't feel hostile. "We've got too much history for this to be easy. Either Aineko was lying, or ... not. What about you?<br />
What do you really want?"<br />
He knows what she's asking. "Be my mistress?" he asks, offering her a hand.<br />
"This time," she grips his hand, "without adult supervision." She smiles gratefully, and they walk toward the gateway together,<br />
to find out how their descendants are dealing with their sudden freedom.<br />
(THE END: June 1999 to April 2004)<br />
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