Accelerando

Chapter 5: Router

Some years later, two men and a cat are tying one on in a bar that

doesn’t exist.

 

The air in the bar is filled with a billowing relativistic smoke cloud

- it’s a stellarium, accurately depicting the view beyond the

imaginary walls. Aberration of starlight skews the color toward violet

around the doorway, brightening in a rainbow mist over the tables,

then dimming to a hazy red glow in front of the raised platform at the

back. The Doppler effect has slowly emerged over the past few months

as the ship gathers momentum. In the absence of visible stellar motion

- or a hard link to the ship’s control module - it’s the easiest way

for a drunken passenger to get a feeling for how frighteningly fast

the Field Circus is moving. Some time ago, the ship’s momentum

exceeded half its rest mass, at which point a single kilogram packs

the punch of a multimegaton hydrogen bomb.

 

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 are male -

sprawls indolently across the wooden floorboards in front of the bar,

directly beneath the bridge of the starbow. 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 men slump at a table, lost in

their respective morose thoughts: One nurses a bottle of Czech beer,

the other a half-empty cocktail glass.

 

“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 sediment. “No;

that not right. It’s the correct kind of attention. Am not knowing

where I stand with her.”

 

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: “If you

knew, you’d have nothing to dream about. Anyway, what she wants and

what you want may not be the same thing.”

 

The first man runs a hand through his hair. Tight-curled black

ringlets briefly turn silver beneath his aging touch. “Pierre, if

talent for making patronizing statements is what you get from tupping

Amber -”

 

Pierre glares at him with all the venom an augmented nineteen-year-old

can muster. “Be glad she has no ears in here,” he hisses. His hand

tightens around his glass reflexively, but the physics model in force

in the bar refuses to let him break it. “You’ve had too fucking much

to drink, Boris.”

 

A tinkle of icy laughter comes from the direction of the cat. “Shut

up, you,” says Boris, glancing at the animal. He tips the bottle back,

lets the dregs trickle down his throat. “Maybe you’re right. Am sorry.

Do not mean to be rude about the queen.” He shrugs, puts the bottle

down. Shrugs again, heavily. “Am just getting depressed.”

 

“You’re good at that,” Pierre observes.

 

Boris sighs again. “Evidently. If our positions are reversed -”

 

“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 wouldn’t

believe a word of it, being sad and single and all that.” Pierre

snorts. “Life isn’t fair, Boris - live with it.”

 

“I’d better go - ” Boris stands.

 

“Stay away from Ang,” says Pierre, still annoyed with him. “At least

until you’re sober.”

 

“Okay already, stay cool; Am consciously running a watchdog thread.”

Boris blinks irritably. “Enforcing social behavior. It doesn’t

normally allow this drunk. Not where reputation damage are possible in

public.”

 

He does a slow dissolve into thin air, leaving Pierre alone in the bar

with the cat.

 

“How much longer do we have to put up with this shit?” he asks aloud.

Tempers are frayed, and arguments proliferate indefinitely in the

pocket universe of the ship.

 

The cat doesn’t look round. “In our current reference frame, we drop

the primary reflector and start decelerating in another two million

seconds,” she says. “Back home, five or six megaseconds.”

 

“That’s a big gap. What’s the cultural delta up to now?” Pierre asks

idly. He snaps his fingers: “Waiter, another cocktail. The same, if

you please.”

 

“Oh, probably about ten to twenty times our departure reference,” says

the cat. “If you’d been following the news from back home, you’d have

noted a significant speed-up in the deployment of switched

entanglement routers. They’re having another networking revolution,

only this one will run to completion inside a month because they’re

using dark fiber that’s already in the ground.”

 

“Switched … entanglement?” Pierre shakes his head, bemused. The

waiter, a faceless body in black tie and a long, starched apron, walks

around the bar and offers him a glass. “That almost sounds as if it

makes sense. What else?”

 

The cat rolls over on her flank, stretches, claws extended. “Stroke

me, and I might tell you,” she suggests.

 

“Fuck you, and the dog you rode in on,” Pierre replies. He lifts his

glass, removes a glac� cherry on a cocktail stick, throws it toward

the spiral staircase that leads down to the toilets, and chugs back

half of the drink in one go - freezing pink slush with an afterbite of

caramelized hexose sugars and ethanol. The near spillage as he thumps

the glass down serves to demonstrate that he’s teetering on the edge

of drunkenness. “Mercenary!”

 

“Lovesick drug-using human,” the cat replies without rancor, and rolls

to her feet. She arches her back and yawns, baring 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 confused. “I mean, I would bury

you.” She stretches again and glances round the otherwise-empty bar.

“By the way, when are you going to apologize to Amber?”

 

“I’m not going to fucking apologize to her!” Pierre shouts. In the

ensuing silence and confusion, he raises his glass and tries to 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 table. “No way,”

he rasps quietly.

 

“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. “Like Boris

with his adolescent woman trouble, too? You primates are so

predictable. Whoever thought of sending a starship crewed by posthuman

adolescents -”

 

“Go ‘way,” says Pierre: “I’ve got serious drinking to do.”

 

“To the Macx, I suppose,” puns the cat, turning away. But the moody

youth has no answer for her, other than to conjure a refill from the

vasty deeps.

 

*

 

Meanwhile, in another partition of the Field Circus’s reticulated

reality, a different instance of the selfsame cat - Aineko by name,

sarcastic by disposition - is talking to its former owner’s daughter,

the Queen of the Ring Imperium. Amber’s avatar looks about sixteen,

with disheveled blonde hair and enhanced cheekbones. It’s a lie, of

course, because in subjective life experience, she’s in her

mid-twenties, but apparent age signifies little in a simulation space

populated by upload minds, or in real space, where posthumans age at

different rates.

 

Amber wears a tattered black dress over iridescent purple leggings,

and sprawls lazily across the arms of her informal throne - an

ostentatious lump of nonsense manufactured from a single carbon

crystal doped with semiconductors. (Unlike the real thing back home in

Jupiter orbit, this one is merely a piece of furniture for a virtual

environment.) The scene is very much the morning after the evening

before, like a goth nightclub gone to seed: all stale smoke and

crumpled velvet, wooden church pews, burned-out candles, and gloomy

Polish avant-garde paintings. Any hint of a regal statement the queen

might 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

device. But these are her private quarters, and she’s off duty: The

regal person of the Queen is strictly for formal, corporate occasions.

 

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” she suggests.

 

“Nope,” replies the cat. “It was more like: ‘Greetings, earthlings,

compile me on your leader.’”

 

“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 loading some

buggy alien wetware on my sweet gray stuff. Weird semiotics, too. What

does Dr. Khurasani say?”

 

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 is immersed

in scriptural interpretations. He refused to be drawn.”

 

“Huh.” Amber stares at the cat. “So. You’ve been carrying this lump of

source code since when …?”

 

“At the signal, for precisely two hundred and sixteen million, four

hundred and twenty-nine thousand, and fifty-two seconds,” Aineko

supplies, then beeps smugly. “Call it just under six years.”

 

“Right.” Amber squeezes her eyes shut. Uneasy possibilities whisper in

her mind’s ears. “And it began talking to you -”

 

“- About three million seconds after I picked it up and ran it on a

basic environment hosted on a neural network emulator modeled on the

components found in the stomatogastric ganglion of a spiny lobster.

Clear?”

 

Amber sighs. “I wish you’d told Dad about it. Or Annette. Things could

have been so different!”

 

“How?” The cat stops licking her arse and looks up at the queen with a

peculiarly opaque stare. “It took the specialists a decade to figure

out the first message was a map of the pulsar neighborhood with

directions to the nearest router on the interstellar network. Knowing

how to plug into the router wouldn’t help while it was three

light-years away, would it? Besides, it was fun watching the idiots

trying to ‘crack the alien code’ without ever wondering if it might be

a reply in a language we already know to a message we sent out years

ago. Fuckwits. And, too, Manfred pissed me off once too often. He kept

treating me like a goddamn house pet.”

 

“But you -” Amber bites her lip. But you were, when he bought you, she

had been about to say. Engineered consciousness is still relatively

new: It didn’t exist when Manfred and Pamela first hacked on Aineko’s

cognitive network, and according to the 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 couple of years ago, finding it

easier to think of the cat as a zimboe - a zombie with no

self-awareness, but programmed to claim to be aware in an attempt to

deceive the truly conscious beings around it. “I know you’re conscious

now, but Manfred didn’t know back then. Did he?”

 

Aineko glares at her, then slowly narrows her eyes to slits - either

feline affection, or a more subtle gesture. Sometimes Amber finds it

hard to believe that, twenty five years ago, Aineko started out as a

crude neural network driven toy from a Far Eastern amusement factory -

upgradeable, but still basically a mechanical animal emulator.

 

“I’m sorry. Let me start again. You actually figured out what the

second alien packet was, you, yourself, and nobody else. Despite the

combined efforts of the entire CETI analysis team who spent Gaia knows

how many human-equivalent years of processing power trying to crack

its semantics. I hope you’ll pardon me for saying I find that hard to

believe?”

 

The cat yawns. “I could have told Pierre instead.” Aineko glances at

Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily changes the

subject: “The solution was intuitively obvious, just not to humans.

You’re so verbal.” Lifting a hind paw, she scratches behind her left

ear for a moment then pauses, foot waving absentmindedly. “Besides,

the CETI team was searching under the street lights while I was

sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find primes; when

that didn’t work, they started trying to breed a Turing machine that

would run it without immediately halting.” Aineko lowers her paw

daintily. “None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist

system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had ever beamed

out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother had a hand in my

wetware, too.”

 

“Treating it as a map -” Amber stops. “You were meant to penetrate

Dad’s corporate network?”

 

“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. “Pam pissed

me off, too. I don’t like people who try to use me.”

 

“I don’t care. Taking that thing on board was still a really stupid

risk you took,” Amber accuses.

 

“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 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 you like to swallow the

packet?”

 

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 programming

into my core dialogue, or even my exocortex, you’re crazy!” Her eyes

narrow. “Can it use your grammar model?”

 

“Sure.” If the cat was human, it would be shrugging nonchalantly at

this point. “It’s safe, Amber, really and truly. I found out what it

is.”

 

“I want to talk to it,” she says impetuously - and before the cat can

reply, adds, “So what is it?”

 

“It’s a protocol stack. Basically it allows new nodes to connect to a

network, by providing high-level protocol conversion 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 they bolted a lobster’s

neural network on top of it - they wanted to make it architecturally

compatible with us. But there 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 your head?”

 

*

 

Greetings from the fifth decade of the century of wonders.

 

The solar system that lies roughly twenty-eight trillion kilometers

- just short of three light-years - behind the speeding starwhisp

Field Circus is seething with change. There have been more

technological advances in the past ten years than in the entire

previous expanse of human history - and more unforeseen accidents.

 

Lots of hard problems have proven to be tractable. The planetary

genome and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the

biosciences are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome:

Plotting the phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and

biochemical structures, understanding how extended phenotypic

traits are generated and contribute to evolutionary fitness. The

biosphere has become surreal: small dragons have been sighted

nesting in the Scottish highlands, and in the American midwest,

raccoons have been caught programming microwave ovens.

 

The computing power of the solar system is now around one thousand

MIPS per gram, and is unlikely to increase in the near term - all

but a fraction of one percent of the dumb matter is still locked up

below the accessible planetary crusts, and the sapience/mass ratio

has hit a glass ceiling that will only be broken when people,

corporations, or other posthumans get around to dismantling the

larger planets. A start has already been made in Jupiter orbit and

the asteroid belt. Greenpeace has sent squatters to occupy Eros and

Juno, but the average asteroid is now surrounded by a reef of

specialized nanomachinery and debris, victims of a cosmic land grab

unmatched since the days of the wild west. The best brains flourish

in free fall, minds surrounded by a sapient aether of extensions

that outthink their meaty cortices by many orders of magnitude -

minds like Amber, Queen of the Inner Ring Imperium, the first

self-extending power center in Jupiter orbit.

 

Down at the bottom of the terrestrial gravity well, there has been

a major economic catastrophe. Cheap immortagens, out-of-control

personality adjuvants, and a new formal theory of uncertainty have

knocked the bottom out of the insurance and underwriting

industries. Gambling on a continuation of the worst aspects of the

human condition - disease, senescence, and death - looks like a

good way to lose money, and a deflationary spiral lasting almost

fifty hours has taken down huge swaths of the global stock market.

Genius, good looks, and long life are now considered basic human

rights in the developed world: even the poorest backwaters are

feeling extended effects from the commoditization of intelligence.

 

Not everything is sweetness and light in the era of mature

nanotechnology. Widespread intelligence amplification doesn’t lead

to widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults

explode across the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened

by successive semiotic jihads. India and Pakistan have held their

long-awaited nuclear war: external intervention by US and EU

nanosats prevented most of the IRBMs from getting through, but the

subsequent spate of network raids and Basilisk attacks cause havoc.

Luckily, infowar turns out to be more survivable than nuclear war -

especially once it is discovered that a simple anti-aliasing filter

stops nine out of ten neural-wetware-crashing Langford fractals

from causing anything worse than a mild headache.

 

New discoveries this decade include the origins of the weakly

repulsive force responsible for changes in the rate of expansion of

the universe after the big bang, and on a less abstract level,

experimental implementations of a Turing Oracle using quantum

entanglement circuits: a device that can determine whether a given

functional expression can be evaluated in finite time. It’s boom

time in the field of Extreme Cosmology, where some of the more

recherch� researchers are bickering over the possibility that the

entire universe was created as a computing device, with a program

encoded in the small print of the Planck constant. And theorists

are talking again about the possibility of using artificial

wormholes to provide instantaneous connections between distant

corners of space-time.

 

Most people have forgotten about the well-known extraterrestrial

transmission received fifteen years earlier. Very few people know

anything about the second, more complex transmission received a

little later. Many of those are now passengers or spectators of the

Field Circus: a light-sail craft that is speeding out of Sol system

on a laser beam generated by Amber’s installations in low-Jupiter

orbit. (Superconducting tethers anchored to Amalthea drag through

Jupiter’s magnetosphere, providing gigawatts of electricity for the

hungry lasers: energy that comes, in turn, from the small moon’s

orbital momentum.)

 

Manufactured by Airbus-Cisco years earlier, the Field Circus is a

hick backwater, isolated from the mainstream of human culture, its

systems complexity limited by mass: The destination lies nearly

three light-years from Earth, and even with high acceleration and

relativistic cruise speeds, the one-kilogram starwhisp and its

hundred-kilogram light sail will take the best part of seven years

to get there. Sending a human-sized probe is beyond even the vast

energy budget of the new orbital states in Jupiter system -

near-lightspeed travel is horrifically expensive. Rather than a

big, self-propelled ship with canned primates for passengers, as

previous generations had envisaged, the starship is a

Coke-can-sized slab of nanocomputers, running a neural simulation

of the uploaded brain states of some tens of humans at merely

normal speed. By the time its occupants beam themselves home again

for download into freshly cloned bodies, a linear extrapolation

shows that as much change will have overtaken human civilization as

in the preceding fifty millennia - the sum total of H. sapiens

sapiens’ time on Earth.

 

But that’s okay by Amber, because what she expects to find in orbit

around the brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/[-56] will be worth the wait.

 

*

 

Pierre is at work in another virtual environment, the one currently

running the master control system of the Field Circus. He’s

supervising the sail-maintenance ‘bots when the message comes in. Two

visitors are on their way up the beam from Jupiter orbit. The only

other person around is Su Ang, who showed up sometime after he

arrived, and she’s busy with some work of her own. The master control

VM - like all the other human-accessible environments at this level of

the ship’s virtualization stack - is a construct modeled on a famous

movie; this one resembles the bridge of a long-since sunk ocean liner,

albeit with discreetly informative user interfaces hovering in front

of the ocean views outside the windows. Polished brass gleams softly

everywhere. “What was that?” he calls out, responding to the soft

chime of a bell.

 

“We have visitors,” Ang repeats, interrupting her rhythmic chewing.

(She’s trying out a betel-nut kick, but she’s magicked the

tooth-staining dye away and will probably detox herself in a few

hours.) “They’re buffering up the line already; just acknowledging

receipt is sucking most of our downstream bandwidth.”

 

“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 the endless

expanse of green-gray ocean ahead.

 

Ang chews a bit more, watching him with an expression he can’t

interpret. “They’re still locked,” she says. A pause: “But there was a

flash from the Franklins, back home. One of them’s some kind of

lawyer, while the other’s a film producer.”

 

“A film producer?”

 

“The Franklin Trust says it’s to help defray our lawsuit expenses.

Myanmar is gaining. They’ve already subpoenaed Amber’s downline

instance, and they’re trying to bring this up in some kind of kangaroo

jurisdiction - Oregon Christian Reconstructionist Empire, I think.”

 

“Ouch.” Pierre winces. The daily news from Earth, modulated onto a

lower-powered communication laser, is increasingly bad. On the plus

side, Amber is incredibly rich: The goodwill futures leveraged off her

dad’s trust metric means people will 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 orbit with enough KE to power Northern Europe

for a century. But her interstellar venture burns through money - both

the traditional barter-indirection type and the more creative modern

varieties - about the way you would if you heaped up the green pieces

of paper and shoveled them onto a conveyor belt leading to the

business end of a running rocket motor. Just holding off the

environmental protests over deorbiting a small Jovian moon is a

grinding job. Moreover, a whole bunch of national governments have

woken up and are trying to legislate themselves a slice of the cake.

Nobody’s tried to forcibly take over yet (there are two hundred

gigawatts of lasers anchored to the Ring Imperium, and Amber takes her

sovereign status seriously, has even applied for a seat at the UN and

membership in the EC), but the nuisance lawsuits are mounting up into

a comprehensive denial of service attack, or maybe economic sanctions.

And Uncle Gianni’s retirement hasn’t helped any, either. “Anything to

say about it?”

 

“Mmph.” Ang looks irritated for some reason. “Wait your turn, they’ll

be out of the buffer in another couple of days. Maybe a bit longer in

the case of the lawyer, he’s got a huge infodump packaged on his

person. Probably another semisapient class-action lawsuit.”

 

“I’ll bet. They never learn, do they?”

 

“What, about the legal system here?”

 

“Yup.” Pierre nods. “One of Amber’s smarter ideas, reviving

eleventh-century Scots law and updating it with new options on

barratry, trial by combat, and compurgation.” He pulls a face and

detaches a couple of ghosts to go look out for the new arrivals; then

he goes back to repairing sails. The interstellar medium is abrasive,

full of dust - each grain of which carries the 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 system’s mass is silvery

utility flakes for patching and replacing the soap-bubble-thin

membrane as it ablates away. The skill is in knowing how best to

funnel repair resources to where they’re needed, while minimizing

tension in the suspension lines and avoiding resonance and thrust

imbalance. As he trains the patch ‘bots, he broods about the hate mail

from his elder brother (who still blames him for their father’s

accident), and about Sadeq’s religious injunctions - Superstitious

nonsense, he thinks - and the fickleness of powerful women, and the

endless depths of his own nineteen-year-old soul.

 

While he’s brooding, Ang evidently finishes whatever she was doing and

bangs out - not even bothering to use the polished mahogany door at

the rear of the bridge, just discorporating and rematerializing

somewhere else. Wondering if she’s annoyed, he glances up just as the

first of his ghosts patches into his memory map, and he remembers what

happened when it met the new arrival. His eyes widen: “Oh shit!”

 

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 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 this isn’t just a

routine visit. The lawyer means trouble.

 

*

 

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 body - and feed

signals to it that mimic its neurological inputs. Read its outputs

and route them to a model body in a model universe with a model of

physical laws, closing the loop. Ren� Descartes would understand.

That’s the state of the passengers of the Field Circus in a

nutshell. Formerly physical humans, their neural software (and a

map of the intracranial wetware it runs on) has been transferred

into a virtual machine environment executing on a honking great

computer, where the universe they experience is merely a dream

within a dream.

 

Brains in bottles - empowered ones, with total, dictatorial,

control over the reality they are exposed to - sometimes stop

engaging in activities that brains in bodies can’t avoid.

Menstruation isn’t mandatory. Vomiting, angina, exhaustion, and

cramp are all optional. So is meatdeath, the decomposition of the

corpus. But some activities don’t cease, because people (even

people who have been converted into a software description,

squirted through a high-bandwidth laser link, and ported into a

virtualization stack) don’t want them to stop. Breathing is wholly

unnecessary, but suppression of the breathing reflex is disturbing

unless you hack your hypothalamic map, and most homomorphic uploads

don’t want to do that. Then there’s eating - not to avoid

starvation, but for pleasure: Feasts on saut�ed dodo seasoned with

silphium are readily available here, and indeed, why not? It seems

the human addiction to sensory input won’t go away. And that’s

without considering sex, and the technical innovations that become

possible when the universe - and the bodies within it - are

mutable.

 

*

 

The public audience with the new arrivals is held in yet another

movie: the Parisian palace of Charles IX, the throne room lifted

wholesale from La Reine Margot by Patrice Ch�reau. Amber insisted on

period authenticity, with the realism dialed right up to eleven. It’s

1572 to the hilt this time, physical to the max. Pierre grunts in

irritation, unaccustomed to his beard. His codpiece chafes, and

sidelong glances tell him he isn’t the only member of the royal court

who’s uncomfortable. Still, Amber is resplendent in a gown worn by

Isabelle Adjani as Marguerite de Valois, and the luminous sunlight

streaming through the stained-glass windows high above the crowd of

actor zimboes lends a certain barbaric majesty to the occasion. The

place is heaving with bodies in clerical robes, doublets, and low-cut

gowns - some of them occupied by real people. Pierre sniffs again:

Someone (Gavin, with his history bug, perhaps?) has been working on

getting the smells right. He hopes like hell that nobody throws up. At

least nobody seems to have come as Catherine de M�dicis …

 

A bunch of actors portraying Huguenot soldiers approach the throne on

which Amber is seated: They pace slowly forward, escorting a rather

bemused-looking fellow with long, lank hair and a brocade jacket that

appears to be made of cloth-of-gold. “His lordship, Attorney at Arms

Alan Glashwiecz!” announces a flunky, reading from a parchment, “here

at the behest of the most excellent guild and corporation of Smoot,

Sedgwick Associates, with matters of legal import to discuss with Her

Royal Highness!”

 

A flourish of trumpets. Pierre glances at Her Royal Highness, who nods

gracefully, but is slightly peaky - it’s a humid summer day and her

many-layered robes look very hot. “Welcome to the furthermost soil of

the Ring Imperium,” she announces in a clear, ringing voice. “I bid

you welcome and invite you to place your petition before me in full

public session of court.”

 

Pierre directs his attention to Glashwiecz, who appears to be worried.

Doubtless he’d absorbed the basics of court protocol in the Ring

(population all of eighteen thousand back home, a growing little

principality), but the reality of it, a genuine old-fashioned monarchy

rooted in Amber’s three-way nexus of power, data, and time, always

takes a while to sink in. “I would be pleased to do so,” he says, a

little stiffly, “but in front of all those -”

 

Pierre misses the next bit, because someone has just goosed him on the

left buttock. He starts and half turns to see Su Ang looking past him

at the throne, a lady-in-waiting for the queen. She wears an apricot

dress with tight sleeves and a bodice that bares everything above her

nipples. There’s a fortune in pearls roped into her hair. As he

notices her, she winks at him.

 

Pierre freezes the scene, decoupling them from reality, and she faces

him. “Are we alone now?” she asks.

 

“Guess so. You want to talk about something?” he asks, heat rising in

his cheeks. The noise around them is a random susurrus of

machine-generated crowd scenery, the people motionless as their shared

reality thread proceeds independently of the rest of the universe.

 

“Of course!” She smiles at him and shrugs. The effect on her chest is

remarkable - those period bodices could give a skeleton a cleavage -

and she winks at him again. “Oh, Pierre.” She smiles. “So easily

distracted!” She snaps her fingers, and her clothing cycles through

Afghani burqua, nudity, trouser suit, then back to court finery. Her

grin is the only constant. “Now that I’ve got your attention, stop

looking at me and start looking at him.”

 

Even more embarrassed, Pierre follows her outstretched arm all the way

to the momentarily frozen Moorish emissary. “Sadeq?”

 

“Sadeq knows him, Pierre. This guy, there’s something wrong.”

 

“Shit. You think I don’t know that?” Pierre looks at her with

annoyance, embarrassment forgotten. “I’ve seen him before. Been

tracking his involvement for years. Guy’s a front for the Queen

Mother. He acted as her divorce lawyer when she went after Amber’s

Dad.”

 

“I’m sorry.” Ang glances away. “You haven’t been yourself lately,

Pierre. I know it’s something wrong between you and the Queen. I was

worried. You’re not paying attention to the little details.”

 

“Who do you think warned Amber?” he asks.

 

“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 help?”

 

“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 - and he

feels a pang of something odd: teenage male uncertainty about the

friendship of women. What does she want? “I 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 ought to go back into the audience

before anybody notices.”

 

“Do you want to talk about the problem first?” she asks, inviting his

confidence.

 

“I -” Pierre shakes his head. I could tell her everything, he realizes

shakily as his metaconscience prods him urgently. He’s got a 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 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. “Not now,” he says. “Let’s

go back.”

 

“Okay.” She nods, then turns away, steps behind him with a swish of

skirts, and he unfreezes time again as they snap back into place

within the larger universe, just in time to see the respected visitor

serve the queen with a class-action lawsuit, and the Queen respond by

referring adjudication to trial by combat.

 

*

 

Hyundai +4904/[-56] is a brown dwarf, a lump of dirty hydrogen

condensed from a stellar nursery, eight times as massive as Jupiter

but not massive enough to ignite a stable fusion reaction at its core.

The relentless crush of gravity has overcome the mutual repulsion of

electrons trapped at its core, shrinking it into a shell of slush

around a sphere of degenerate matter. It’s barely larger than the gas

giant the human ship uses as an energy source, but it’s much denser.

Gigayears ago, a chance stellar near miss sent it careening off into

the galaxy on its own, condemned to drift in eternal darkness along

with a cluster of frozen moons that dance attendance upon it.

 

By the time the Field Circus is decelerating toward it at short range

- having shed the primary sail, which drifts farther out into

interstellar space while reflecting light back onto the remaining

secondary sail surface to slow the starwhisp - Hyundai +4904/[-56] is

just under one parsec distant from Earth, closer even than Proxima

Centauri. Utterly dark at visible wavelengths, the brown dwarf could

have drifted through the outer reaches of the solar system before

conventional telescopes would have found it by direct observation.

Only an infrared survey in the early years of the current century gave

it a name.

 

A bunch of passengers and crew have gathered on the bridge (now

running at one-tenth of real time) to watch the arrival. Amber sits

curled up in the captain’s chair, moodily watching the gathered

avatars. Pierre is still avoiding her at every opportunity, formal

audiences excepted, and the damned shark and his pet hydra aren’t

invited, but apart from that, most of the gang is here. There are

sixty-three uploads running on the Field Circus’s virtualization

stack, software copied out of 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 it’s your party. And especially when you’re worried

about debt, even though you’re a billionairess, beneficiary of the

human species’ biggest reputations-rating trust fund. Amber’s clothing

- black leggings, black sweater - is as dark as her mood.

 

“Something troubles you.” A hand descends on the back of the chair

next to her.

 

She glances round momentarily, nods in recognition. “Yeah. Have a

seat. You missed the audience?”

 

The thin, brown-skinned man with a neatly cropped beard and deeply

lined forehead slips into the seat next to her. “It was not part of my

heritage,” he explains carefully, “although the situation is not

unfamiliar.” A momentary smile threatens to crack his stony face. “I

found the casting a trifle disturbing.”

 

“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, Marguerite

had an interesting life,” she muses.

 

“Don’t you mean depraved and debauched?” her neighbor counters.

 

“Sadeq.” She closes her eyes. “Let’s not pick a fight over absolute

morality just right now, please? We have an orbital insertion to carry

out, then an artifact to locate, and a dialogue to open, and I’m

feeling very tired. Drained.”

 

“Ah - I apologize.” He inclines his head carefully. “Is it your young

man’s fault? Has he slighted you?”

 

“Not exactly -” Amber pauses. Sadeq, whom she basically invited along

as ship’s theologian in case they ran into any gods, has taken up her

pastoral well-being as some kind of hobby. She finds it mildly

oppressive at times, flattering at others, surreal always. Using the

quantum search resources available to a citizen of the Ring Imperium,

he’s outpublished his peers, been elected a hojetolislam at an

unprecedentedly young age: His original will probably be an ayatollah

by the time they get home. He’s circumspect in dealing with cultural

differences, reasons with impeccable logic, carefully avoids

antagonizing her - and constantly seeks to guide her moral

development. “It’s a personal misunderstanding,” she says. “I’d rather

not talk about it until we’ve sorted it out.”

 

“Very well.” He looks unsatisfied, but that’s normal. Sadeq still has

the dusty soil of a childhood in the industrial city of Yazd stuck to

his boots. Sometimes she wonders if their disagreements don’t mirror

in miniature the gap between the early twentieth and early

twenty-first centuries. “But back to the here and now. Do you know

where this router is?”

 

“I will, in a few minutes or hours.” Amber raises her voice,

simultaneously spawning a number of search-ghosts. “Boris! You got any

idea where we’re going?”

 

Boris lumbers round in place to face her; today he’s wearing a

velociraptor, and they don’t turn easily in confined spaces. He snarls

irritably: “Give me some space!” He coughs, a threatening noise from

the back of his wattled throat, “Searching the sail’s memory now.” The

back of the soap-bubble-thin laser sail is saturated with tiny

nanocomputers spaced micrometers apart. Equipped with light receptors

and configured as cellular automata, they form a gigantic phased-array

detector, a retina more than a hundred meters in diameter. Boris is

feeding them patterns describing anything that differs from the

unchanging starscape. Soon the memories will condense and return as

visions of darkness in motion - the cold, dead attendants of an

aborted sun.

 

“But where is it going to be?” asks Sadeq. “Do you know what you are

looking for?”

 

“Yes. We should have no trouble finding it,” says Amber. “It looks

like this.” She flicks an index finger at the row of glass windows

that front the bridge. Her signet ring flashes ruby light, and

something indescribably weird shimmers into view in place of the

seascape. Clusters of pearly beads that form helical chains, disks and

whorls of color that interlace and knot through one another, hang in

space above a darkling planet. “Looks like a William Latham sculpture

made out of strange matter, doesn’t it?”

 

“Very abstract,” Sadeq says approvingly.

 

“It’s alive,” she adds. “And when it gets close enough to see us,

it’ll try to eat us.”

 

“What?” Sadeq sits up uneasily.

 

“You mean nobody told you?” asks Amber: “I thought we’d briefed

everybody.” She throws a glistening golden pomegranate at him, and he

catches it. The apple of knowledge dissolves in his hand, and he sits

in a haze of ghosts absorbing information on his behalf. “Damn,” she

adds mildly.

 

Sadeq freezes in place. Glyphs of crumbling stonework overgrown with

ivy texture his skin and his dark suit, warning that he’s busy in

another private universe.

 

“Hrrrr! Boss! Found something,” calls Boris, drooling on the bridge

floor.

 

Amber glances up. Please, let it be the router, she thinks. “Put it on

the main screen.”

 

“Are you sure this is safe?” Su Ang asks nervously.

 

“Nothing is safe,” Boris snaps, clattering his huge claws on the deck.

“Here. Look.”

 

The view beyond the windows flips to a perspective on a dusty bluish

horizon: swirls of hydrogen brushed with a high cirrus of white

methane crystals, stirred above the freezing point of oxygen by

Hyundai +4904/[-56]‘s residual rotation. The image-intensification

level is huge - a naked human eyeball would see nothing but blackness.

Rising above the limb of the gigantic planet is a small pale disk:

Callidice, largest moon of the brown dwarf - or second-innermost

planet - a barren rock slightly larger than Mercury. The screen zooms

in on the moon, surging across a landscape battered by craters and

dusted with the spume of ice volcanoes. Finally, just above the far

horizon, something turquoise shimmers and spins against a backdrop of

frigid darkness.

 

“That’s it,” Amber whispers, her stomach turning to jelly as all the

terrible might-have-beens dissolve like phantoms of the night around

her; “That’s it!” Elated, she stands up, wanting to share the moment

with everybody she values. “Wake up, Sadeq! Someone get that damned

cat in here! Where’s Pierre? He’s got to see this!”

 

*

 

Night and revelry rule outside the castle. The crowds are drunken and

rowdy on the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Fireworks

burst overhead, and the open windows admit a warm breeze redolent of

cooked meats, woodsmoke, open sewers. Meanwhile a lover steals up a

tightly-spiraling stone staircase in the near dark; his goal, a

prarranged rendezvous. He’s been drinking, and his best linen shirt

shows the stains of sweat and food. He pauses at the third window to

breathe in the outside air and run both hands through his mane of

hair, which is long, unkempt, and grimy. Why am I doing this? he

wonders. This is so unlike him, this messing around -

 

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 inside

into a reception room paneled in oak blackened by age. Crossing the

threshold makes another crossover kick in by prior arrangement.

Something other than his own volition steers his feet, and he feels an

unfamiliar throb in his chest, anticipation and a warmth and looseness

lower down that makes him cry out, “where are you?”

 

“Over here.” He sees her waiting for him in the doorway. She’s

partially undressed, wearing layered underskirts and a flat-chested

corset that makes the tops of her breasts swell like lustrous domes.

Her tight sleeves are half-unraveled, her hair disheveled. He’s full

of her brilliant eyes, the constriction holding her spine straight,

the taste in her mouth. She’s the magnet for his reality, impossibly

alluring, so tense she could burst. “Is it working for you?” she asks.

 

“Yes.” he feels tight, breathless, squeezed between impossibility and

desire as he walks toward her. They’ve experimented with 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. She opens her mouth: He

kisses her, feels the warmth of his tongue thrust between her lips,

the strength of his arms enclosing her waist.

 

She leans against him, feeling his erection. “So this is how it feels

to be you,” she says wonderingly. The door to her chamber is ajar, but

she doesn’t have the self-restraint to wait: The flood of new

sensations - rerouted from her physiology model to his proprioceptive

sensorium - has taken hold. She grinds her hips against him, pushing

deeper into his arms, whining softly 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 of her body - it’s as if he’s

dissolving, feeling the throbbing hardness against his groin, turning

to water and running away. Somehow he gets his arms around her waist -

so tight, so breathless - and stumbles forward into the bedroom. She’s

whimpering as he drops her on the over-stuffed mattress: “Do it to

me!” she demands, “Do it now!”

 

Somehow he ends up on top of her, hose down around his ankles, skirts

bundled up around her waist; she kisses him, grinding her hips against

him and murmuring urgent nothings. Then his heart is in his mouth, and

there’s a sensation like 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 it inside so badly, but at the same time it’s an

intrusion, frightening and unexpected. He feels the lightning touch of

his tongue on her nipples as he leans closer, feels exposed and

terrified and ecstatic as her private places take in his member. As he

begins to dissolve into the universe he screams in the privacy of his

own head, I didn’t know it felt like this -

 

Afterward, she turns to him with a lazy smile, and asks, “How was it

for you?” Obviously assuming that, if she enjoyed it, he must have,

too.

 

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

yelling (“What are you, some kind of queer?”) - and he feels dirty.

 

*

 

Greetings from the last megasecond before the discontinuity.

 

The solar system is thinking furiously at 10^33 MIPS - thoughts

bubble and swirl in the equivalent of a million billion unaugmented

human minds. Saturn’s rings glow with waste heat. The remaining

faithful of the Latter-Day Saints are correlating the phase-space

of their genome and the records of their descent in an attempt to

resurrect their ancestors. Several skyhooks have unfurled in

equatorial orbit around the earth like the graceful fernlike leaves

of sundews, ferrying cargo and passengers to and from orbit. Small,

crab like robots swarm the surface of Mercury, exuding a black

slime of photovoltaic converters and the silvery threads of mass

drivers. A glowing cloud of industrial nanomes forms a haze around

the innermost planet as it slowly shrinks under the onslaught of

copious solar power and determined mining robots.

 

The original incarnations of Amber and her court float in high

orbit above Jupiter, presiding over the huge nexus of dumb matter

trade that is rapidly biting into the available mass of the inner

Jovian system. The trade in reaction mass is brisk, and there are

shipments of diamond/vacuum biphase structures to assemble and

crank down into the lower reaches of the solar system. Far below,

skimming the edges of Jupiter’s turbulent cloudscape, a gigantic

glowing figure-of-eight - a five-hundred-kilometer-long loop of

superconducting cable - traces incandescent trails through the gas

giant’s magnetosphere. It’s trading momentum for electrical

current, diverting it into a fly’s eye grid of lasers that beam it

toward Hyundai +4904/[-56]. As long as the original Amber and her

incarnate team can keep it running, the Field Circus can continue

its mission of discovery, but they’re part of the posthuman

civilization evolving down in the turbulent depths of Sol system,

part of the runaway train being dragged behind the out-of-control

engine of history.

 

Weird new biologies based on complex adaptive matter take shape in

the sterile oceans of Titan. In the frigid depths beyond Pluto,

supercooled boson gases condense into impossible dreaming

structures, packaged for shipping inward to the fast-thinking core.

 

There are still humans dwelling down in the hot depths, but it’s

getting hard to recognize them. The lot of humanity before the

twenty-first century was nasty, brutish, and short. Chronic

malnutrition, lack of education, and endemic diseases led to

crippled minds and broken bodies. Now, most people multitask: Their

meatbrains sit at the core of a haze of personality, much of it

virtualized on stacked layers of structured reality far from their

physical bodies. Wars and revolutions, or their subtle latter-day

cognates, sweep the globe as constants become variables; many

people find the death of stupidity even harder to accept than the

end of mortality. Some have vitrified themselves to await an

uncertain posthuman future. Others have modified their core

identities to better cope with the changed demands of reality.

Among these are beings whom nobody from a previous century would

recognize as human - human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades

dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels and devils of

software, slyly self-aware financial instruments. Even their

popular fictions are self-deconstructing these days.

 

None of this, other than the barest news summary, reaches the Field

Circus: The starwhisp is a fossil, left behind by the broad sweep

of accelerating progress. But it is aboard the Field Circus that

some of the most important events remaining in humanity’s future

light cone take place.

 

*

 

“Say hello to the jellyfish, Boris.”

 

Boris, in human drag, for once, glares at Pierre, and grips the

pitcher with both hands. The contents of the jug swirl their tentacles

lazily: One of them flips almost out of solution, dislodging an

impaled cocktail cherry. “Will get you for this,” Boris threatens. The

smoky air around his head is a-swirl with daemonic visions of

vengeance.

 

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 - small,

pale blue, with cuboid bells and four clusters of tentacles trailing

from each corner - slips down easily. Boris winces momentarily as the

nematocysts let rip inside his mouth, but in a moment or so, the

cubozoan slips down, and in the meantime, his biophysics model clips

the extent of the damage to his stinger-ruptured oropharynx.

 

“Wow,” he says, taking another slurp of sea wasp margaritas. “Don’t

try this at home, fleshboy.”

 

“Here.” Pierre reaches out. “Can I?”

 

“Invent your own damn poison,” Boris sneers - but he releases the jug

and passes it to Pierre, who raises it and drinks. The cubozoan

cocktail reminds him of fruit jelly drinks in a hot Hong Kong summer.

The stinging in his palate is sharp but fades rapidly, producing an

intimate burn when the alcohol hits the mild welts that are all this

universe will permit the lethal medusa to inflict on him.

 

“Not bad,” says Pierre, wiping a stray loop of tentacle off his chin.

He pushes the pitcher across the table toward Su Ang. “What’s with the

wicker man?” He points a thumb over his back at the table jammed in

the corner opposite the copper-topped bar.

 

“Who cares?” asks Boris. “S part of the scenery, isn’t it?”

 

The bar is a three-hundred-year-old brown caf� with a beer menu that

runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale ale.

The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer’s yeast, and

melatonin spray: and none of it exists. Amber dragged it out of the

Franklin borg’s collective memories, by way of her father’s

scattershot e-mails annotating her corporeal origins - the original is

in Amsterdam, if that city still exists.

 

“I care who it is,” says Pierre.

 

“Save it,” Ang says quietly. “I think it’s a lawyer with a privacy

screen.”

 

Pierre glances over his shoulder and glares. “Really?”

 

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.”

 

The wicker man sits uneasily in the corner. It resembles a

basket-weave silhouette made from dried reeds, dressed in a red

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 glass as

if to take a mouthful, and the beer vanishes into the singular

interior.

 

“Fuck the trial,” Pierre says shortly. And fuck Amber, too, for naming

me her public defender -

 

“Since when do lawsuits come with an invisible man?” asks Donna the

Journalist, blitting into the bar along with a patchy historical trail

hinting that she’s just come from the back room.

 

“Since -” Pierre blinks. “Hell.” When Donna entered, so did Aineko; or

maybe the cat’s been there all the time, curled up loaf-of-bread

fashion on the table in front of the wicker man. “You’re damaging the

continuity,” Pierre complains. “This universe is broken.”

 

“Fix it yourself,” Boris tells him. “Everybody else is coping.” He

snaps his fingers. “Waiter!”

 

“Excuse me.” Donna shakes her head. “I didn’t mean to harm anything.”

 

Ang, as always, is more accommodating. “How are you?” she asks

politely: “Would you like to try this most excellent poison cocktail?”

 

“I am well,” says Donna. A heavily built German woman - blonde and

solidly muscular, according to the avatar she’s presenting to the

public - she’s surrounded by a haze of viewpoints. They’re camera

angles on her society of mind, busily integrating and splicing her

viewpoint threads together in an endless journal of the journey. A

stringer for the CIA media consortium, she uploaded to the ship in the

same packet stream as the lawsuit. “Danke, Ang.”

 

“Are you recording right now?” asks Boris.

 

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 then.”

Pierre glances across the table at Su Ang’s hands; her knuckles are

white and tense. “I am to avoid missing anything if possible,” Donna

continues, oblivious to Ang’s disquiet. “There are eight of me at

present! All recording away.”

 

“That’s all?” Ang asks, raising an eyebrow.

 

“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?”

 

“Right.” Pierre glances in the corner again, avoiding eye contact with

the hearty Girl Friday wannabe. He has a feeling, that if there were

any hills hereabouts to animate, she’d be belting out the music.

“Amber told you about the privacy code here?”

 

“There is a privacy code?” asks Donna, swinging at least three

subjective ghosts to bear on him for some reason - evidently he’s hit

an issue she has mixed feelings about.

 

“A privacy code,” Pierre confirms. “No recording in private, no

recording where people withhold permission in public, and no sandboxes

and cutups.”

 

Donna looks offended. “I would never do such a thing! Trapping a copy

of someone in a virtual space to record their responses would be

assault under Ring legal code, not true?”

 

“Your mother,” Boris says snidely, brandishing a fresh jug of iced

killer jellyfish in her direction.

 

“As long as we all agree,” Ang interrupts, searching for accord. “It’s

all going to be settled soon, isn’t it?”

 

“Except for the lawsuit,” mutters Pierre, glancing at the corner

again.

 

“I don’t see the problem,” says Donna, “that’s just between Amber and

her downlink adversaries!”

 

“Oh, it’s a problem all right,” says Boris, his tone light. “What are

your options worth?”

 

“My -” Donna shakes her head. “I’m not vested.”

 

“Plausible.” Boris doesn’t crack a smile. “Even so, when we go home,

your credibility metric will bulge. Assuming people still use

distributed trust markets to evaluate the stability of their business

partners.”

 

Not vested. Pierre turns it over in his mind, slightly surprised. He’d

assumed that everybody aboard the ship - except, perhaps, the lawyer,

Glashwiecz - was a fully vested member of the expeditionary company.

 

“I am not vested,” Donna insists. “I’m listed independently.” For a

moment, an almost-smile tugs at her face, a charmingly reticent

expression that has nothing to do with her bluff exterior. “Like the

cat.”

 

“The -” Pierre turns round in a hurry. Yes, Aineko appears to be

sitting silently at the table with the wicker man; but who 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 bring this up

with Amber … “but your reputation won’t suffer for being on this

craft, will it?” he asks aloud.

 

“I will be all right,” Donna declares. The waiter comes over: “Mine

will be a bottle of schneiderweisse,” she adds. And then, without

breaking step: “Do you believe in the singularity?”

 

“Am I a singularitarian, do you mean?” asks Pierre, a fixed grin

coming to his face.

 

“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 to ask was whether

you in the concept of a singularity believe, and if so, where it is?”

 

“Is this intended for a public interview?” asks Ang.

 

“Well, I cannot into a simulation drag you off and expose you to an

imitative reality excursion, can I?” Donna leans back as the bartender

places a ceramic stein in front of her.

 

“Oh. Well.” Ang glances warningly at Pierre and dispatches a very

private memo to scroll across his vision: Don’t play with her, this is

serious. Boris is watching Ang with an expression of hopeless longing.

Pierre tries to ignore it all, taking the journalist’s question

seriously. “The singularity is a bit like that old-time American

Christian rapture nonsense, isn’t it?” he says. “When we all go

a-flying up to heaven, leaving our bodies behind.” He snorts, reaches

into thin air and gratuitously violates causality by summoning a jug

of ice-cold sangria into existence. “The rapture of the nerds. I’ll

drink to that.”

 

“But when did it take place?” asks Donna. “My audience, they will to

know your opinion be needing.”

 

“Four years ago, when we instantiated this ship,” Pierre says

promptly.

 

“Back in the teens,” says Ang. “When Amber’s father liberated the

uploaded lobsters.”

 

“Is not happening yet,” contributes Boris. “Singularity implies

infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable

thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not

happened.”

 

“Au contraire. It happened on June 6th, 1969, at eleven hundred hours,

eastern seaboard time,” Pierre counters. “That was when the first

network control protocol packets were sent from the data port of one

IMP to another - the first ever Internet connection. That’s the

singularity. Since then we’ve all been living in a universe that was

impossible to predict from events prior to that time.”

 

“It’s rubbish,” counters Boris. “Singularity is load of religious

junk. Christian mystic rapture recycled for atheist nerds.”

 

“Not so.” Su Ang glances at him, hurt. “Here we are, sixty something

human minds. We’ve been migrated - while still awake - right out of

our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and

electron spin resonance mapping, and we’re now running as software in

an operating system designed to virtualize multiple physics models and

provide a simulation of reality that doesn’t let us go mad from

sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a

fingertip, crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother’s old

Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three light-years

from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by

incredibly ancient alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the

idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?”

 

“Mmph.” Boris looks perplexed. “Would not put it that way. The

singularity is nonsense, not uploading or -”

 

“Yah, right.” Ang smiles winningly at Boris. After a moment, he wilts.

 

Donna beams at them enthusiastically. “Fascinating!” she enthuses.

“Tell me, what are these lobsters you think are important?”

 

“They’re Amber’s friends,” Ang explains. “Years ago, Amber’s father

did a deal with them. They were the first uploads, you know?

Hybridized spiny lobster neural tissue and a heuristic API and some

random mess of backward-chaining expert 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 running a Franklin orbital factory. This was way

back in the early days before they figured out how to do self-assembly

properly. Anyway, the lobsters insisted - part of their contract -

that Bob Franklin pay to have the deep-space tracking network beam

them out into interstellar space. They wanted to emigrate, and looking

at what’s happened to the solar system since then, who can blame

them?”

 

Pierre takes a big mouthful of sangria. “The cat,” he says.

 

“The cat -” Donna’s head swivels round, but Aineko has banged out

again, retroactively editing her presence out of the event history of

this public space. “What about the cat?”

 

“The family cat,” explains Ang. She reaches over for Boris’s pitcher

of jellyfish juice, but frowns as she does so: “Aineko wasn’t

conscious back then, but later … when SETI@home finally received

that message back, oh, however many years ago, Aineko remembered the

lobsters. And cracked it wide open while all the CETI teams were still

thinking in terms of von Neumann architectures and concept-oriented

programming. The message was a semantic net designed to mesh perfectly

with the lobster broadcast all those years ago, and provide a

high-level interface to a communications network we’re going to

visit.” She squeezes Boris’s fingertips. “SETI@home logged these

coordinates as the origin of the transmission, even though the 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 were aliens on our

cosmic doorstep. Anyway, once Amber got established, she decided to

come visiting. Hence this expedition. Aineko created a virtual lobster

and interrogated the ET packet, hence the communications channel we’re

about to open.”

 

“Ah, this is all a bit clearer now,” says Donna. “But the lawsuit - “

She glances at the hollow wicker man in the corner.

 

“Well, there we have a problem,” Ang says diplomatically.

 

“No,” says Pierre. “I have a problem. And it’s all Amber’s fault.”

 

“Hmm?” Donna stares at him. “Why blame the Queen?”

 

“Because she’s the one who picked the lunar month to be the reporting

time period for companies in her domain, and specified trial by combat

for resolving corporate conflicts,” he grumbles. “And compurgation,

but that’s not applicable to this case because there isn’t a

recognized reputation server within three light-years. Trial by

combat, for civil suits in this day and age! And she appointed me her

champion.” In the most traditional way imaginable, he remembers with a

warm frisson of nostalgia. He’d been hers in body and soul before that

disastrous experiment. He isn’t sure whether it still applies, but -

“I’ve got to take on this lawsuit on her behalf, in adversarial

stance.”

 

He glances over his shoulder. The wicker man sits there placidly,

pouring beer down his invisible throat like a tired farm laborer.

 

“Trial by combat,” Su Ang explains to Donna’s perplexed ghost-swarm,

which is crawling all over the new concept in a haze of confusion.

“Not physical combat, but a competition of ability. It seemed like a

good idea at the time, to keep junk litigants out of the Ring

Imperium, but the Queen Mother’s lawyers are very persistent. Probably

because it’s taken on something of a grudge match quality over the

years. I don’t think Pamela cares much anymore, but this ass-hat

lawyer has turned it into a 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 it, because if he wins, he gets to own everything. And I

mean everything.”

 

*

 

Ten million kilometers out and Hyundai +4904/[-56] looms beyond the

parachute-shaped sail of the Field Circus like a rind of darkness

bitten out of the edge of the universe. Heat from the gravitational

contraction of its core keeps it warm, radiating at six hundred

degrees absolute, but the paltry emission does nothing to break the

eternal ice that grips Callidice, Iambe, Celeus, and Metaneira, the

stillborn planets locked in orbit around the brown dwarf.

 

Planets aren’t the only structures that orbit the massive sphere of

hydrogen. Close in, skimming the cloud tops by only twenty thousand

kilometers, Boris’s phased-array eye has blinked at something metallic

and hot. Whatever it is, it orbits out of the ecliptic plane traced by

the icy moons, and in the wrong direction. Farther out, a speckle of

reflected emerald laser light picks out a gaudy gem against the

starscape: their destination, the router.

 

“That’s it,” says Boris. His body shimmers into humanity, retconning

the pocket universe of the bridge into agreeing that he’s been present

in primate form all along. Amber glances sideways. Sadeq is still

wrapped in ivy, his skin the texture of weathered limestone. “Closest

approach is sixty-three light-seconds, due in eight hundred thousand.

Can give you closer contact if we maneuver, but will take time to

achieve a stable orbit.”

 

Amber nods thoughtfully, sending copies of herself out to work the

mechanics. The big light sail is unwieldy, but can take advantage of

two power sources: the original laser beam from Jupiter, and its

reflection bouncing off the now-distant primary light sail. The

temptation is to rely on the laser for constant acceleration, to just

motor on in and squat on the router’s cosmic doorstep. But the risk of

beam interruption is too dangerous. It’s happened before, for seconds

to minutes at a time, on six occasions during the voyage so far. She’s

not sure what causes the beam downtime (Pierre has a theory about Oort

cloud objects occulting the laser, but she figures it’s more likely to

be power cuts back at the Ring), but the consequences of losing power

while maneuvering deep in a quasi-stellar gravity well are much more

serious than a transient loss of thrust during free interstellar

flight. “Let’s just play it safe,” she says. “We’ll go for a straight

orbital insertion and steady cranking after that. We’ve got enough

gravity wells to play pinball with. I don’t want us on a free-flight

trajectory that entails lithobraking if we lose power and can’t get

the sail back.”

 

“Very prudent,” Boris agrees. “Marta, work on it.” A buzzing presence

of not-insects indicates that the heteromorphic 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 want, I can ping it now …?”

 

“No need for protocol analysis,” Amber says casually. “Where’s - ah,

there you are.” She reaches down and picks up Aineko, who twists round

sinuously and licks her arm with a tongue like sandpaper. “What do you

think?”

 

“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.

 

“No, I just want a conversation,” says Amber.

 

“Well, okay.” The cat dims, moves jerkily, sucking up local processing

power so fast that it disturbs the local physics model. “Opening port

now.”

 

A subjective minute or two passes. “Where’s Pierre?” Amber asks

herself quietly. Some of the maintenance metrics she can read from her

privileged viewpoint are worrying. The Field Circus is running at

almost eighty percent of utilization. Whatever Aineko is doing in

order to establish the interface to the router, it’s taking up an

awful lot of processing power and bandwidth. “And where’s the bloody

lawyer?” she adds, almost as an afterthought.

 

The Field Circus is small, but its light sail is highly controllable.

Aineko takes over a cluster of cells in its surface, turning them from

straight reflectors into phase-conjugate mirrors: A small laser on the

ship’s hull begins to flicker thousands of times a second, and the

beam bounces off the modified segment of mirror, focusing to a

coherent point right in front of the distant blue dot of the router.

Aineko ramps up the modulation frequency, adds a bundle of channels

using different wavelengths, and starts feeding out a complex set of

preplanned signals that provide an encoding format for high-level

data.

 

“Leave the lawyer to me.” She starts, glancing sideways to see Sadeq

watching her. He smiles without showing his teeth. “Lawyers do not mix

with diplomacy,” he explains.

 

“Huh.” Ahead of them, the router is expanding. Strings of nacreous

spheres curl in strange loops around a hidden core, expanding and

turning inside out in systolic pulses that spawn waves of

recomplication through the structure. A loose red speckle of laser

light stains one arm of beads; suddenly it flares up brilliantly,

reflecting data back at the ship. “Ah!”

 

“Contact,” purrs the cat. Amber’s fingertips turn white where she

grips the arms of her chair.

 

“What does it say?” she asks, quietly.

 

“What do they say,” corrects Aineko. “It’s a trade delegation, and

they’re uploading right now. I can use that negotiation network they

sent us to give them an interface to our systems if you want.”

 

“Wait!” Amber half stands in sudden nervousness. “Don’t give them free

access! What are you thinking of? Stick them in the throne room, and

we’ll give them a formal audience in a couple of hours.” She pauses.

“That network layer they sent through. Can you make it accessible to

us, use it to give us a translation layer into their grammar-mapping

system?”

 

The cat looks round, thumps her tail irritably: “You’d do better

loading the network yourself -”

 

“I don’t want anybody on this ship running alien code before we’ve

vetted it thoroughly,” she says urgently. “In fact, I want them

bottled up in the Louvre grounds, just as thoroughly as we can, and I

want them to come to us through our own linguistic bottleneck. Got

that?”

 

“Clear,” Aineko grumbles.

 

“A trade delegation,” Amber thinks aloud. “What would Dad make of

that?”

 

*

 

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 abruptly

precipitated into a very different space.

 

Pierre’s heart seems to tumble within his rib cage, but he forces

himself to stay calm as he glances around the dim, oak-paneled

chamber. This is wrong, so wrong that it signifies either a major

systems crash or the application of frightening privilege levels to

his realm. The only person aboard who’s entitled to those privileges

is -

 

“Pierre?”

 

She’s behind him. He turns angrily. “Why did you drag me in here?

Don’t you know it’s rude to -”

 

“Pierre.”

 

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 eyelashes at him, but

she’s disarmingly cute for all that. Nevertheless, something inside

him feels shriveled and wrong in her presence. “What is it?” he says,

curtly.

 

“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 me! he thinks.

“You know it hurts?”

 

“Yes.” That much of an admission hurts him, too. He can hear his

father yelling over his shoulder, the time he found him with Laurent,

elder brother: It’s a choice between p�re or Amber, but it’s not a

choice he wants to make. The shame. “I didn’t - I have some issues.”

 

“It was the other night?”

 

He nods. Now she takes a step forwards. “We can talk about it, if you

want. Whatever you want,” she says. And she leans toward him, and he

feels his resistance crumbling. He reaches out and hugs her, and she

wraps her arms around him and leans her chin on his shoulder, and this

doesn’t feel wrong: How can anything this good be bad?

 

“It made me uncomfortable,” he mumbles into her hair. “Need to sort

myself out.”

 

“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 don’t want

to.”

 

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, implicitly

changing the subject.

 

Amber lets go of him, backs away almost warily. “What is it?” she

asks.

 

“Something’s wrong?” he half asks, half asserts. “Have we made contact

yet?”

 

“Yeah,” she says, pulling a face. “There’s an alien trade delegation

in the Louvre. That’s the problem.”

 

“An alien trade delegation.” He rolls the words around the inside of

his mouth, tasting them. They feel paradoxical, cold and slow after

the hot words of passion he’s been trying to avoid uttering. It’s his

fault for changing the subject.

 

“A trade delegation,” says Amber. “I should have anticipated. I mean,

we were going to go through the router ourselves, weren’t we?”

 

He sighs. “We thought we were going to do that.” A quick prod at the

universe’s controls determines that he has certain capabilities: He

invokes an armchair, sprawls across it. “A network of point-to-point

wormholes linking routers, self-replicating communication hubs, in

orbit around most of the brown dwarfs of the galaxy. That’s what the

brochure said, right? That’s what we expected. Limited bandwidth, not

a lot of use to a mature superintelligence that has converted the free

mass of its birth solar system into computronium, but sufficient to

allow it to hold conversations with its neighbors. Conversations

carried out via a packet-switched network in real time, not limited by

the speed of light, but bound together by a common reference frame and

the latency between network hops.”

 

“That’s about the size of it,” she agrees from the carved-ruby throne

beside him. “Except there’s a trade delegation waiting for us. In

fact, they’re coming aboard already. And I don’t buy it - something

about the whole setup stinks.”

 

Pierre’s brow wrinkles. “You’re right, it doesn’t make sense,” he

says, finally. “Doesn’t make sense at all.”

 

Amber nods. “I carry a ghost of Dad around. He’s really upset about

it.”

 

“Listen to your old man.” Pierre’s lips quirk humorlessly. “We were

going to jump through the looking glass, but it seems someone has

beaten us to the punch. Question is why?”

 

“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 trial sooner

rather than later.”

 

He lets go of her fingers. “I’d really be much happier if you hadn’t

named me as your champion.”

 

“Hush.” The scenery changes; her throne is gone, and instead she’s

sitting on the arm of his chair, almost on top of him. “Listen. I had

a good reason.”

 

“Reason?”

 

“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’ time.”

She grins, impishly. “The whole point of a legal system that mandates

trial by combat for commercial lawsuits, as opposed to an adjudication

system, is to work out who’s a fitter servant of society and hence

deserving of preferential treatment. It’s crazy to apply the same

legal model to resolving corporate disputes that we use for arguments

among people, especially as most companies are now software

abstractions of business models; the interests of society are better

served by a system that encourages efficient trade activity than by

one that encourages litigation. It cuts down on corporate bullshit

while encouraging the toughest ones to survive, which is why I was

going to set up the trial as a contest to achieve maximum competitive

advantage in a xenocommerce scenario. Assuming they really are

traders, I figure we have more to trade with them than some damn

lawyer from the depths of earth’s light cone.”

 

Pierre blinks. “Um.” Blinks again. “I thought you wanted me to

sideload some kind of fencing kinematics program and skewer the guy?”

 

“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 twists round to

face him in point-blank close-up. “Shit, Pierre, I know you’re not

some kind of macho psychopath!”

 

“But your mother’s lawyers -”

 

She shrugs dismissively. “They’re lawyers. Used to dealing with

precedents. Best way to fuck with their heads is to change the way the

universe works.” She leans against his chest. “You’ll make mincemeat

of them. Profit-to-earnings ratio through the roof, blood on the stock

exchange floor.” His hands meet around the small of her back. “My

hero!”

 

*

 

The Tuileries are full of confused lobsters.

 

Aineko has warped this virtual realm, implanting a symbolic gateway in

the carefully manicured gardens outside. The gateway is about two

meters in diameter, a verdigris-coated orouborous loop of bronze that

sits like an incongruous archway astride 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 field, antennae twitching. They wouldn’t

be able to exist in the real world, but the physics model here has

been amended to permit them to breathe and move, by special

dispensation.

 

Amber sniffs derisively as she enters the great reception room of the

Sully wing. “Can’t trust that cat with anything,” she mutters.

 

“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 line the

passage to either side, forming rows of steel to let the Queen pass

unhindered.

 

“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!”

 

“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 the past.”

Pierre, following the Queen at a distance, shakes his head, knowing

better than to pick a fight with Amber over her idea of stage scenery.

 

“It looks good,” Amber says tightly, standing before her throne and

waiting for the ladies-in-waiting to arrange themselves before her.

She sits down carefully, her back straight as a ruler, voluminous

skirts belling up. Her dress is an intricate piece of sculpture that

uses the human body within as a support. “It impresses the yokels and

looks convincing on narrowcast media. It provides a prefabricated

sense of tradition. It hints at the political depths of fear and

loathing intrinsic to my court’s activities, and tells people not to

fuck with me. It reminds us where we’ve come from … and it doesn’t

give away anything about where we’re going.”

 

“But that doesn’t make any difference to a bunch of alien lobsters,”

points out Su Ang. “They lack the reference points to understand it.”

She moves to stand behind the throne. Amber glances at Pierre, waves

him over.

 

Pierre glances around, seeking real people, not the vacant eigenfaces

of the zombies that give this scenery added biological texture. There

in the red gown, isn’t that Donna the Journalist? And over there, too,

with shorter hair and wearing male drag; she gets everywhere. That’s

Boris, sitting behind the bishop.

 

“You tell her,” Ang implores him.

 

“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 what we are, how we

think. A historical distancing act will keep them from learning too

much about us: The phase-space of technological cultures that could

have descended from these roots is too wide to analyse easily. So

we’re leaving them with the lobster translators and not giving

anything away. Try to stay in character as a fifteenth-century duchess

from Alb� - it’s a matter of national security.”

 

“Humph.” Ang frowns as a flunky hustles forward to place a folding

chair behind her. She turns to face the expanse of red-and-gold carpet

that stretches to the doorway as trumpets blat and the doors swing

open to admit the deputation of lobsters.

 

The lobsters are as large as wolves, black and spiny and ominous.

Their monochrome carapaces are at odds with the brightly colored garb

of the human crowd. Their antennae are large and sharp as swords. But

for all that, they advance hesitantly, eye turrets swiveling from side

to side as they take the scene in. Their tails drag ponderously on the

carpet, but they have no trouble standing.

 

The first of the lobsters halts short of the throne and angles itself

to train an eye on Amber. “Am inconsistent,” it complains. “There is

no liquid hydrogen monoxide here, and you-species am misrepresented by

initial contact. Inconsistency, explain?”

 

“Welcome to the human physical space-traveling interface unit Field

Circus,” Amber replies calmly. “I am pleased to see your translator is

working adequately. You are correct, there is no water here. The

lobsters don’t normally need it when they visit us. And we humans are

not water-dwellers. May I ask who you are when you’re not wearing

borrowed lobster bodies?”

 

Confusion. The second lobster rears up and clatters its long, armored

antennae together. Soldiers to either side tighten their grips on

their spears, but it drops back down again soon enough.

 

“We are the Wunch,” announces the first lobster, speaking clearly.

“This is a body-compliant translation layer. Based on map received

from yourspace, units forty thousand trillion light-kilometers ago?”

 

“He means twenty years,” Pierre whispers on a private channel Amber

has multicast for the other real humans in the audience chamber

reality. “They’ve confused space and time for measurement purposes.

Does this tell us something?”

 

“Relatively little,” comments someone else - Chandra? A round of

polite laughter greets the joke, and the tension in the room eases

slightly.

 

“We are the Wunch,” the lobster repeats. “We come to exchange

interest. What have you got that we want?”

 

Faint frown lines appear on Amber’s forehead. Pierre can see her

thinking very rapidly. “We consider it impolite to ask,” she says

quietly.

 

Clatter of claws on underlying stone floor. Chatter of clicking

mandibles. “You accept our translation?” asks the leader.

 

“Are you referring to the transmission you sent us, uh, thirty

thousand trillion light-kilometers behind?” asks Amber.

 

The lobster bobs up and down on its legs. “True. We send.”

 

“We cannot integrate that network,” Amber replies blandly, and Pierre

forces himself to keep a straight face. (Not that the lobsters can

read human body language yet, but they’ll undoubtedly be recording

everything that happens here for future analysis.) “They come from a

radically different species. Our goal in coming here is to connect our

species to the network. We wish to exchange advantageous information

with many other species.”

 

Concern, alarm, agitation. “You cannot do that! You are not

untranslatable entity signifier.”

 

Amber raises a hand. “You said untranslatable entity signifier. I did

not understand that. Can you paraphrase?”

 

“We, like you, are not untranslatable entity signifier. The network is

for untranslatable entity signifier. We are to the untranslatable

concept #1 as a single-celled organism is to ourselves. You and we

cannot untranslatable concept #2. To attempt trade with untranslatable

entity signifier is to invite death or transition to untranslatable

concept #1.”

 

Amber snaps her fingers: time freezes. She glances round at Su Ang,

Pierre, the other members of her primary team. “Opinions, anyone?”

 

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 that

there’s something wrong with their semantics.”

 

“Wrong with - how?” asks Su Ang.

 

The cat grins, cavernously, and begins to fade. “Wait!” snaps Amber.

 

Aineko continues her fade, but leaves a shimmering presence behind:

not a grin, but a neural network weighting map, three-dimensional and

incomprehensibly complicated. “The untranslatable entity concept #1

when mapped onto the lobster’s grammar network has elements of ‘god’

overloaded with attributes of mysticism and zenlike

incomprehensibility. But I’m pretty sure that what it really means is

‘optimized conscious upload that runs much faster than realtime’. A

type-one weakly superhuman entity, like, um, the folks back home. The

implication is that this Wunch wants us to view them as gods.” The cat

fades back in. “Any takers?”

 

“Small-town hustlers,” mutters Amber. “Talking big - or using a dodgy

metagrammar that makes them sound bigger than they are - to bilk the

hayseeds new to the big city.”

 

“Most likely.” Aineko turns and begins to wash her flank.

 

“What are we going to do?” asks Su Ang.

 

“Do?” Amber raises a pencil-lined eyebrow, then flashes a grin that

chops a decade off her apparent age: “We’re going to mess with their

heads!” She snaps her fingers again and time unfreezes. There’s no

change in continuity except that Aineko is still present, at the foot

of the throne. The cat looks up and gives the queen a dirty look. “We

understand your concern,” Amber says smoothly, “but we have already

given you the physiology models and neural architecture of the bodies

that you are wearing. We want to communicate. Why won’t you show us

your real selves or your real language?”

 

“This is trade language!” protests Lobster Number One. “Wunch am/are

metabolically variable coalition from number of worlds. No uniformity

of interface. Easiest to conform to one plan and speak one tongue

optimized for your comprehension.”

 

“Hmm.” Amber leans forward. “Let me see if I understand you. You are a

coalition of individuals from a number of species. You prefer to use

the common user interface model we sent you, and offered us the

language module you’re using for an exchange? And you want to trade

with us.”

 

“Exchange interest,” the Wunch emphasizes, bouncing up and down on its

legs. “Can offer much! Sense of identity of a thousand civilizations.

Safe tunnels to a hundred archives on the net suitable for beings who

are not untranslatable entity signifier. Able to control risks of

communication. Have technique of manipulating matter at molecular

level. Solution to algorithmic iterated systems based on quantum

entanglement.”

 

“Old-fashioned nanotechnology and shiny beads to dazzle the

primitives,” Pierre mutters on Amber’s multicast channel. “How

backward do they think we are?”

 

“The physics model in here is really overdone,” comments Boris. “They

may even think this is real, that we’re primitives coat-tailing it on

the back of the lobsters’ efforts.”

 

Amber forces a smile. “That is most interesting!” she trills at the

Wunch’s representatives. “I have appointed two representatives who

will negotiate with you; this is an internal contest within my own

court. I commend to you Pierre Naqet, my own commercial

representative. In addition, you may want to deal with Alan

Glashwiecz, an independent factor who is not currently present. Others

may come forward in due course if that is acceptable.”

 

“It pleases us,” says Lobster Number One. “We are tired and

disoriented by the long journey through gateways to this place.

Request resumption of negotiations later?”

 

“By all means.” Amber nods. A sergeant-at-arms, a mindless but

impressive zimboe controlled by her spider’s nest of personality

threads, blows a sharp note on his trumpet. The first audience is at

an end.

 

*

 

Outside the light cone of the Field Circus, on the other side of

the spacelike separation between Amber’s little kingdom in motion

and the depths of empire time that grip the solar system’s

entangled quantum networks, a singular new reality is taking shape.

 

Welcome to the moment of maximum change.

 

About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind

surrounded by an exocortex of distributed agents, threads of

personality spun right out of their heads to run on the clouds of

utility fog - infinitely flexible computing resources as thin as

aerogel - in which they live. The foggy depths are alive with

high-bandwidth sparkles; most of Earth’s biosphere has been wrapped

in cotton wool and preserved for future examination. For every

living human, a thousand million software agents carry information

into the farthest corners of the consciousness address space.

 

The sun, for so long an unremarkable mildly variable G2 dwarf, has

vanished within a gray cloud that englobes it except for a narrow

belt around the plane of the ecliptic. Sunlight falls, unchanged,

on the inner planets: Except for Mercury, which is no longer

present, having been dismantled completely and turned into

solar-powered high-temperature nanocomputers. A much fiercer light

falls on Venus, now surrounded by glittering ferns of carbon

crystals that pump angular momentum into the barely spinning planet

via huge superconducting loops wound around its equator. This

planet, too, is due to be dismantled. Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus -

all sprout rings as impressive as Saturn’s. But the task of

cannibalizing the gas giants will take many times longer than the

small rocky bodies of the inner system.

 

The ten billion inhabitants of this radically changed star system

remember being human; almost half of them predate the millennium.

Some of them still are human, untouched by the drive of

meta-evolution that has replaced blind Darwinian change with a

goal-directed teleological progress. They cower in gated

communities and hill forts, mumbling prayers and cursing the

ungodly meddlers with the natural order of things. But eight out of

every ten living humans are included in the phase-change. It’s the

most inclusive revolution in the human condition since the

discovery of speech.

 

A million outbreaks of gray goo - runaway nanoreplicator excursions

- threaten to raise the temperature of the biosphere dramatically.

They’re all contained by the planetary-scale immune system

fashioned from what was once the World Health Organization. Weirder

catastrophes threaten the boson factories in the Oort cloud.

Antimatter factories hover over the solar poles. Sol system shows

all the symptoms of a runaway intelligence excursion, exuberant

blemishes as normal for a technological civilization as skin

problems on a human adolescent.

 

The economic map of the planet has changed beyond recognition. Both

capitalism and communism, bickering ideological children of a

protoindustrial outlook, are as obsolete as the divine right of

kings: Companies are alive, and dead people may live again, too.

Globalism and tribalism have run to completion, diverging

respectively into homogeneous interoperability and the

Schwarzschild radius of insularity. Beings that remember being

human plan the deconstruction of Jupiter, the creation of a great

simulation space that will expand the habitat available within the

solar system. By converting all the nonstellar mass of the solar

system into processors, they can accommodate as many

human-equivalent minds as a civilization with a planet hosting ten

billion humans in orbit around every star in the galaxy.

 

A more mature version of Amber lives down in the surging chaos of

near-Jupiter space; there’s an instance of Pierre, too, although he

has relocated light-hours away, near Neptune. Whether she still

sometimes thinks of her relativistic twin, nobody can tell. In a

way, it doesn’t matter, because by the time the Field Circus

returns to Jupiter orbit, as much subjective time will have elapsed

for the fast-thinkers back home as will flash by in the real

universe between this moment and the end of the era of star

formation, many billions of years hence.

 

*

 

“As your theologian, I am telling you that they are not gods.”

 

Amber nods patiently. She watches Sadeq closely.

 

Sadeq coughs grumpily. “Tell her, Boris.”

 

Boris tilts his chair back and turns it toward the Queen. “He is

right, Amber. They are traders, and not clever ones either. Is hard to

get handle on their semiotics while they hide behind the lobster model

we uploaded in their direction twenty years ago, but are certainly not

crusties, and are definite not human either. Or transhuman. My guess,

they are bunch of dumb hicks who get hands on toys left behind by much

smarter guys. Like the rejectionist factions back home. Imagine they

are waking up one morning and find everyone else is gone to the great

upload environment in the sky. Leaving them with the planet to

themselves. What you think they do with whole world, with any gadgets

they trip over? Some will smash everything they come across, but

others not so stupid. But they think small. Scavengers,

deconstructionists. Their whole economic outlook are negative-sum

game. Go visit aliens to rip them off, take ideas, not expand selves

and transcend.”

 

Amber stands up, walks toward the windows at the front of the bridge.

In black jeans and chunky sweater, she barely resembles the feudal

queen whose role she plays for tourists. “Taking them on board was a

big risk. I’m not happy about it.”

 

“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Sadeq smiles

crookedly. “We have an answer. But they may not even realize they are

dancing with us. These are not the gods you were afraid of finding.”

 

“No.” Amber sighs. “Not too different from us, though. I mean, we

aren’t exactly well adapted to this environment, are we? We tote these

body-images along, rely on fake realities that we can map into our

human-style senses. We’re emulations, not native AIs. Where’s Su Ang?”

 

“I can find her.” Boris frowns.

 

“I asked her to analyse the alien’s arrival times,” Amber adds as an

afterthought. “They’re close - too close. And they showed 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 plugged into probably

use much higher-level protocols to communicate; sapient packets to

build effective communications gateways. This Wunch, they probably

lurk in wait for newbies to exploit. Pedophiles hiding outside the

school gate. I don’t want to give them that opportunity before we make

contact with the real thing!”

 

“You may have little choice,” says Sadeq. “If they are without

insight, as you suspect, they may become afraid if you edit their

environment. They may lash out. I doubt they even understand how they

created the contaminated metagrammar that they transmitted back to us.

It will be to them just a tool that makes simpleminded aliens more

gullible, easier to negotiate with. Who knows where they got it?”

 

“A grammatical weapon.” Boris spins himself round slowly. “Build

propaganda into your translation software if you want to establish a

favorable trading relationship. How cute. Haven’t these guys ever

heard of Newspeak?”

 

“Probably not,” Amber says slowly, pausing for a moment to spawn

spectator threads to run down the book and all three movie versions of

Nineteen Eighty-Four, followed by the sharecropped series of sequel

novels. She shivers uncomfortably as she reintegrates the memories.

“Ick. That’s not a very nice vision. Reminds me of” - she snaps her

fingers, trying to remember Dad’s favorite - “Dilbert.”

 

“Friendly fascism,” says Sadeq. “It matters not, whosoever is in

charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a

revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and

these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us.”

 

“I think we ought to see how Pierre is doing,” Amber says aloud. “I

certainly don’t want them poisoning him.” Grin: “That’s my job.”

 

*

 

Donna the Journalist is everywhere simultaneously. It’s a handy

talent: Makes for even-handed news coverage when you can interview

both sides at the same time.

 

Right now, one of her is in the bar with Alan Glashwiecz, who

evidently hasn’t realized that he can modulate his ethanol

dehydrogenase levels voluntarily and who is consequently well on the

way to getting steaming drunk. Donna is assisting the process: She

finds it fascinating to watch this bitter young man who has lost his

youth to a runaway self-enhancement process.

 

“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 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 some hippie antiglobalist

commune instead.” He drains his glass, demonstrating his oropharyngeal

integrity, snaps his fingers 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 and optimistic outlook, then offered me a minority

stake with stock options that would take five years to vest. The

bastard.”

 

“Tell me about it,” Donna coaxes sympathetically. “Here we are,

stranded among idiopathic types, not among them a single multiplex -”

 

“Damn straight.” Another bottle of Bud appears in Glashwiecz’a hands.

“One moment I’m standing in this apartment in Paris facing total

humiliation by a cross-dressing commie asshole called Macx and his

slimy French manager bitch, and the next I’m 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 weird nonsense that guy Macx was

getting up to is standard business practice, and there’s six of me in

the outer office taking research notes because

myself-as-senior-partner doesn’t trust anyone else to work with him.

It’s humiliating, that’s what it is.”

 

“Which is why you’re here.” Donna waits while he takes a deep swig

from the bottle.

 

“Yeah. Better than working for myself, I can tell you - it’s not like

being self-employed. You know how you sometimes get distant from your

work? It’s really bad when you see yourself from the outside with

another half gigasecond of experience 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 up on artificial intelligence law and

ethics, the jurisprudence of uploading, and recursive tort. Then I

volunteered to come out here. He’s still handling her account, and I

figured -” Glashwiecz shrugged.

 

“Did any of the delta-yous contest the arrangement?” asks Donna,

spawning ghosts to focus in on him from all angles. For a moment, she

wonders if this is wise. Glashwiecz is dangerous - the power he wields

over Amber’s mother, to twist her arm into extending his power of

attorney, hints at dark secrets. Maybe there’s more to her persistent

lawsuits than a simple family feud?

 

Glashwiecz’s face is a study in perspectives. “Oh, one did,” he says

dismissively: One of Donna’s viewports captures the contemptuous

twitch in his cheek. “I left her in my apartment freezer. Figured it’d

be a while before anybody noticed. It’s not 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, if I did it to myself.”

 

“The aliens,” prompts Donna, “and the trial by combat. What’s your

take on that?”

 

Glashwiecz sneers. “Little bitch-queen takes after her father, doesn’t

she? He’s a bastard, too. The competitive selection filter 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 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 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 bottle drunkenly. “Y’see, I know that cat.

One that’s gotta brown @-sign on its side, right? It used to belong to

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 she gave me

the cat’s ackle keys. Access control.” (Hic.) “Get ahold of its brains

and grab that damn translation layer it stole from the CETI@home mob.

Then I can talk to them straight.”

 

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,

y’know?”

 

“Disassembly?” asks the reporter, watching him in disgusted

fascination from behind her mask of objectivity.

 

“Hell, yeah. There’s a singularity going on, that implies

disequilibrium. An’ wherever there’s a disequilibrium, someone is

going to get rich disassembling the leftovers. Listen, I once knew

this econo-economist, that’s what he was. Worked for the Eurofeds,

rubber fetishist. He tole me about this fact’ry near Barcelona. It had

a disassembly line running in it. Spensive servers in boxes’d roll in

at one end. Be unpacked. Then workers’d take the cases off, strip the

disk drives, memory, 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 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 got an enterprise award for ingenuity! All ‘cause they knew that

disassembly was the wave of the future.”

 

“What happened to the factory?” asks Donna, unable to tear her eyes

away.

 

Glashwiecz waves an empty bottle at the starbow that stretches across

the ceiling: “Ah, who gives a fuck? They closedown round about” (hic)

“ten years ‘go. Moore’s Law topped out, killed the market. But

disassembly - production line cannibalism - it’sa way to go. Take old

assets an’ bring new life to them. A fully ‘preciated fortune.” He

grins, eyes unfocussed with greed. “‘S’what I’m gonna do to those

space lobsters. Learn to talk their language an’ll never know what hit

‘em.”

 

*

 

The tiny starship drifts in high orbit above a turbid brown soup of

atmosphere. Deep in the gravity well of Hyundai +4904/[-56], it’s a

speck of dust trapped between two light sources: the brilliant

sapphire stare of Amber’s propulsion lasers in Jovian orbit, and the

emerald insanity of the router itself, a hypertoroid spun from strange

matter.

 

The bridge of the Field Circus is in constant use at this time, a

meeting ground for minds with access to the restricted areas. Pierre

is spending more and more time here, finding it a convenient place to

focus his trading campaign and arbitrage macros. At the same time that

Donna is picking the multiplexed lawyer’s strategy apart, Pierre is

present in neomorphic form - a quicksilver outline of humanity,

six-armed and two-headed, scanning with inhuman speed through tensor

maps of the information traffic density surrounding the router’s clump

of naked singularities.

 

There’s a flicker in the emptiness at the rear of the bridge, then Su

Ang has always been there. She watches Pierre in contemplative silence

for a minute. “Do you have a moment?”

 

Pierre superimposes himself: One shadowy ghost keeps focused on the

front panel, but another instance turns round, crosses his arms, waits

for her to speak.

 

“I know you’re busy -” she begins, then stops. “Is it that important?”

she asks.

 

“It is.” Pierre blurs, resynchronizing his instances. “The router -

there are four wormholes leading off from it, did you know that? Each

of them is radiating at about 1011 Kelvins, and every wavelength is

carrying data connections, multiplexed, with a protocol stack that’s

at least eleven layers deep but maybe more - they show signs of

self-similarity in the framing headers. You know how much data that

is? It’s about 1012 times as much as our high-bandwidth uplink from

home. But compared to what’s on the other side of the ‘holes -” he

shakes his head.

 

“It’s big?”

 

“It’s unimaginably big! These wormholes, they’re a low-bandwidth link

compared to the minds they’re hooking up to.” He blurs 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. With Pierre,

sometimes the two states are indistinguishable. He gets emotional

easily. “I think we have the outline of the answer to the Fermi

paradox. Transcendents don’t go traveling because they can’t get

enough bandwidth - trying to migrate through one of these wormholes

would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly, if they

are what I think they are - and the slower-than-light route is out,

too, because they couldn’t take enough computronium along. Unless -”

 

He’s off again. But before he can blur out, Su Ang steps across and

lays hands on him. “Pierre. Calm down. Disengage. Empty yourself.”

 

“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 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 it.”

 

“Stop.”

 

He pauses his multiplicity of presences, converges on a single

identity focused on the here and now. “Yes?”

 

“That’s better.” She walks round him, slowly. “You’ve got to learn to

deal with stress more appropriately.”

 

“Stress!” Pierre snorts. He shrugs, an impressive gesture with three

sets of shoulder blades. “That’s something I can turn off whenever I

need to. Side effect of this existence; we’re pigs in cyberspace,

wallowing in fleshy simulations, but unable to 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 network to set up.”

 

“We’ve got a problem with the Wunch right now, even if you think

something worse is out there,” Ang says patiently. “Boris thinks

they’re parasites, negative-sum gamers who stalk newbies like us.

Glashwiecz is apparently talking about cutting a deal with them.

Amber’s suggestion is that you ignore them completely, cut them out,

and talk to anyone else who’ll listen.”

 

“Anyone else who’ll listen, right,” Pierre says heavily. “Any other

gems of wisdom to pass on from the throne?”

 

Ang takes a deep breath. He’s infuriating, she realizes. And worst of

all, he doesn’t realize. Infuriating but cute. “You’re setting up a

trading network, yes?” she asks.

 

“Yes. A standard network of independent companies, instantiated as

cellular automata within the Ring Imperium switched legal service

environment.” He relaxes slightly. “Each one has access to a

compartmentalized chunk of intellectual property and can call on the

corrected parser we got from that cat. They’re set up to communicate

with a blackboard system - a 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 listening. Trade …” his eyebrows furrow. “There are at

least two different currency standards in this network, used to buy

quality-of-service precedence and bandwidth. They depreciate with

distance, as if the whole concept of money was invented to promote the

development of long-range network links. If I can get in first, when

Glashwiecz tries to cut in on the dealing by offering IP at discounted

rates -”

 

“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. He’s going

to offer them a deal. Amber wants you to ignore them. Got that?”

 

“Got it.” There’s a hollow bong! from one of the communication bells.

“Hey, that’s interesting.”

 

“What is?” She stretches, neck extending snakelike so that she can see

the window on underlying reality that’s flickered into existence in

the air before him.

 

“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 silvery caul of

light. “… about two hundred light-years away! Someone wants to

talk.” He smiles. Then the front panel workstation bong’s again. “Hey

again. I wonder what that says.”

 

It’s the work of a moment to pipe the second message through the

translator. Oddly, it doesn’t translate at first. Pierre has to

correct for some weird destructive interference in the fake lobster

network before it’ll spill its guts. “That’s interesting,” he says.

 

“I’ll say.” Ang lets her neck collapse back to normal. “I’d better go

tell Amber.”

 

“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. He’s

wearing his emotions entirely on the surface. “I’m not surprised their

translator didn’t want to pass that message along.”

 

“It’s a deliberately corrupted grammar,” Ang murmurs, and bangs out in

the direction of Amber’s audience chamber; “and they’re actually

making threats.” The Wunch, it seems, have acquired a very bad

reputation somewhere along the line - and Amber needs to know.

 

*

 

Glashwiecz leans toward Lobster Number One, stomach churning. It’s

only a realtime kilosecond since his bar-room interview, but in the

intervening subjective time, he’s abolished a hangover, honed his

brief, and decided to act. In the Tuileries. “You’ve been lied to,” he

confides quietly, trusting the privacy ackles that he browbeat Amber’s

mother into giving him - access lists that give him a degree of

control over the regime within this virtual universe that the cat

dragged in.

 

“Lied? Context rendered horizontal in past, or subjected to

grammatical corruption? Linguistic evil?”

 

“The latter.” Glashwiecz enjoys this, even though it forces him to get

rather closer to the two-meter-long virtual crustacean 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 the cage they’re locked inside.

“They are not telling you the truth about this system.”

 

“We received assurances,” Lobster Number One says clearly. Its

mouthparts move ceaselessly - the noise comes from somewhere inside

its head. “You do not share this phenotype. Why?”

 

“That information will cost you,” says Glashwiecz. “I am willing to

provide it on credit.”

 

They haggle briefly. An exchange rate in questions is agreed, as is a

trust metric to grade the answers by. “Disclose all,” insists the

Wunch negotiator.

 

“There are multiple sentient species on the world we come from,” says

the lawyer. “The form you wear belongs to only one - one that wanted

to get away from the form I wear, the original conscious tool-creating

species. Some of the species today are artificial, but all of us trade

information for self-advantage.”

 

“This is good to know,” the lobster assures him. “We like to buy

species.”

 

“You buy species?” Glashwiecz cocks his head.

 

“We have the unbearable yearning to be not-what-we-are,” says the

lobster. “Novelty, surprise! Flesh rots and wood decays. We seek the

new being-ness of aliens. Give us your somatotype, give us all your

thoughts, and we will dream you over.”

 

“I think something might be arranged,” Glashwiecz concedes. “So you

want to be - no, to lease the rights to temporarily be human? Why is

that?”

 

“Untranslatable concept #3 means untranslatable concept #4. God told

us to.”

 

“Okay, I think I’ll just have to take that on trust for now. What is

your true form?” he asks.

 

“Wait and I show you,” says the lobster. It begins to shudder.

 

“What are you doing -”

 

“Wait.” The lobster twitches, writhing slightly, like a portly

businessman adjusting his underwear after a heavy business lunch.

Disturbing shapes move, barely visible through the thick chitinous

armor. “We want your help,” the lobster explains, voice curiously

muffled. “Want to establish direct trade links. Physical emissaries,

yes?”

 

“Yes, that’s very good,” Glashwiecz agrees excitedly: It’s exactly

what he’s hoped for, the sought-after competitive advantage that will

prove his fitness in Amber’s designated trial by corporate combat.

“You’re going to deal with us directly without using that shell

interface?”

 

“Agreed.” The lobster trails off into muffled silence; little

crunching noises trickle out of its carapace. Then Glashwiecz hears

footsteps behind him on the gravel path.

 

“What are you doing here?” he demands, looking round. It’s Pierre,

back in standard human form - a sword hangs from his belt, and there’s

a big wheel-lock pistol in his hands. “Hey!”

 

“Step away from the alien, lawyer,” Pierre warns, raising the gun.

 

Glashwiecz glances back at Lobster Number One. It’s pulled its front

inside the protective shell, and it’s writhing now, rocking from side

to side alarmingly. Something inside the shell is turning black,

acquiring depth and texture. “I stand on counsel’s privilege,”

Glashwiecz insists. “Speaking as this alien’s attorney, I must protest

in the strongest terms -”

 

Without warning, the lobster lurches forward and rises up on its rear

legs. It reaches out with huge claws, chellipeds coated with spiny

hairs, and grabs Glashwiecz by his arms. “Hey!”

 

Glashwiecz tries to turn away, but the lobster is already looming over

him, maxillipeds and maxillae reaching out from its head. There’s a

sickening crunch as one of his elbow joints crumbles, humerus

shattered by the closing jaws of a chelliped. He draws breath to

scream, then the four small maxillae grip his head and draw it down

toward the churning mandibles.

 

Pierre scurries sideways, trying to find a line of fire on the lobster

that doesn’t pass through the lawyer’s body. The lobster isn’t

cooperating. It turns on the spot, clutching Glashwiecz’s convulsing

body to itself. There’s a stench of shit, and blood is squirting from

its mouthparts. Something is very wrong with the biophysics model

here, the realism turned up way higher than normal.

 

“Merde,” whispers Pierre. He fumbles with the bulky trigger, and

there’s a faint whirring sound but no explosion.

 

More wet crunching sounds follow as the lobster demolishes the

lawyer’s face and swallows convulsively, sucking his head and

shoulders all the way into its gastric mill.

 

Pierre glances at the heavy handgun. “Shit!” he screams. He glances

back at the lobster, then turns and runs for the nearest wall. There

are other lobsters loose in the formal garden. “Amber, emergency!” he

sends over their private channel. “Hostiles in the Louvre!”

 

The lobster that’s taken Glashwiecz hunkers down over the body and

quivers. Pierre desperately winds the spring on his 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 could die in here, he

realizes, momentarily shocked. This instance of me could die forever.

 

The lobster shell sitting in the pool of blood and human wreckage

splits in two. A humanoid form begins to uncurl from within it,

pale-skinned and glistening wet: vacant blue eyes flicker from side to

side as it stretches and stands upright, wobbling uncertainty on its

two unstable legs. Its mouth opens and a strange gobbling hiss comes

forth.

 

Pierre recognizes her. “What are you doing here?” he yells.

 

The nude woman turns toward him. She’s the spitting image of Amber’s

mother, except for the chellipeds she has in place of hands. She

hisses “Equity!” and takes a wobbly step toward him, pincers clacking.

 

Pierre winds the firing handle again. There’s a crash of gunpowder and

smoke, a blow that nearly sprains his elbow, and the nude woman’s

chest erupts in a spray of blood. She snarls at him wordlessly and

staggers - then ragged flaps of bloody meat close together, knitting

shut with improbable speed. She resumes her advance.

 

“I told Amber the Matrix would be more defensible,” Pierre snarls,

dropping the firearm and drawing his sword as the alien turns in his

direction and raises arms that end in pincers. “We need guns, damit!

Lots of guns!”

 

“Waaant equity,” hisses the alien intruder.

 

“You can’t be Pamela Macx,” says Pierre, his back to the wall, keeping

the sword point before the lobster-woman-thing. “She’s in a nunnery in

Armenia or something. You pulled that out of Glashwiecz’s memories -

he worked for her, didn’t he?”

 

Claws go snicker-snack before his face. “Investment partnership!”

screeches the harridan. “Seat on the board! Eat brains for breakfast!”

It lurches sideways, trying to get past his guard.

 

“I don’t fucking believe this,” Pierre snarls. The Wunch-creature

jumps at just the wrong moment and slides onto the point of his blade,

claws clacking hungrily. Pierre slides away, nearly leaving his skin

on the rough bricks of the wall - and what’s good for one is good for

all, as the hacked model in force in this reality compels the attacker

to groan and collapse.

 

Pierre pulls the sword out then, nervously glancing over his shoulder,

whacks at her neck. The impact jars his arm, but he keeps hacking

until there’s blood spraying everywhere, blood on his shirt, blood on

his sword, and a round thing sitting on a stump of savaged neck

nearby, jaw working soundlessly in undeath.

 

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

broadcasts on the private channel. “Hostiles in the Louvre!”

 

He straightens up, gasping for breath. He feels alive, frightened and

appalled and exhilarated simultaneously. The crackle of bursting

shells on all sides drowns out the birdsong as the Wunch’s emissaries

adopt a variety of new and supposedly more lethal forms. “They don’t

seem to be very clear on how to take over a simulation space,” he

adds. “Maybe we already are untranslatable concept number #1 as far as

they’re concerned.”

 

“Don’t worry, I’ve cut off the incoming connection,” sends Su Ang.

“This is just a bridgehead force; the invasion packets are being

filtered out.”

 

Blank-eyed men and women in dusty black uniforms are hatching from the

lobster shells, stumbling and running around the grounds of the royal

palace like confused Huguenot invaders.

 

Boris winks into reality behind Pierre. “Which way?” he demands,

pulling out an anachronistic but lethal katana.

 

“Over here. Let’s work this together.” Pierre jacks his emotional

damper up to a dangerously high setting, suppressing natural aversion

reflexes and temporarily turning himself into a sociopathic killer. He

stalks toward an infant lobster-thing with big 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 the larger ones makes the

mistake of lunging at Boris, and he chops at it reflexively.

 

Some of the Wunch try to fight back when Pierre and Boris try to kill

them, but they’re handicapped by their anatomy, a curious mixture of

crustacean and human, claw and mandible against sword and dagger. When

they bleed the ground soaks with the cuprous hue of lobster juice.

 

“Let’s fork,” suggests Boris. “Get this over with.” Pierre nods, dully

- everything around him is wrapped in a layer of don’t-care, except

for a glowing dot of artificial hatred - and they fork, multiplying

their state vectors to take full advantage of the virtualization

facilities of this universe. There’s no need for reinforcements; the

Wunch focused on attacking the biophysics model of the universe,

making it mimic a physical reality as closely as possible, and paid no

attention to learning the more intricate tactics that war in a virtual

space permits.

 

Presently Pierre finds himself in the audience chamber, face and hands

and clothing caked in hideous gore, leaning on the 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 barely remember what has happened,

the horrors of parallel instances of mass murder blocked from his

long-term memory by a high-pass trauma filter. “It looks clear,” he

calls aloud. “What shall we do now?”

 

“Wait for Catherine de M�dicis to show up,” says the cat, its grin

materializing before him like a numinous threat. “Amber always finds a

way to blame her mother. Or didn’t you already know that?”

 

Pierre glances at the bloody mess on the footpath outside where the

first lobster-woman attacked Glashwiecz. “I already did for her, I

think.” He remembers the action in the third person, all subjectivity

edited out. “The family resemblance was striking,” the thread that

still remembers her in working memory murmurs: “I just hope it’s only

skin-deep.” Then he forgets the act of apparent murder forever. “Tell

the Queen I’m ready to talk.”

 

*

 

Welcome to the downslope on the far side of the curve of

accelerating progress.

 

Back in the solar system, Earth orbits through a dusty tunnel in

space. Sunlight still reaches the birth world, but much of the rest

of the star’s output has been trapped by the growing concentric

shells of computronium built from the wreckage of the innermost

planets.

 

Two billion or so mostly unmodified humans scramble in the wreckage

of the phase transition, not understanding why the vasty

superculture they so resented has fallen quiet. Little information

leaks through their fundamentalist firewalls, but what there is

shows a disquieting picture of a society where there are no bodies

anymore. Utility foglets blown on the wind form aerogel towers

larger than cyclones, removing the last traces of physical human

civilization from most of Europe and the North American coastlines.

Enclaves huddle behind their walls and wonder at the monsters and

portents roaming the desert of postindustrial civilization,

mistaking acceleration for collapse.

 

The hazy shells of computronium that ring the sun - concentric

clouds of nanocomputers the size of rice grains, powered by

sunlight, orbiting in shells like the packed layers of a Matrioshka

doll - are still immature, holding barely a thousandth of the

physical planetary mass of the system, but they already support a

classical computational density of 10^42 MIPS; enough to support a

billion civilizations as complex as the one that existed

immediately before the great disassembly. The conversion hasn’t yet

reached the gas giants, and some scant outer-system enclaves remain

independent - Amber’s Ring Imperium still exists as a separate

entity, and will do so for some years to come - but the inner solar

system planets, with the exception of Earth, have been colonized

more thoroughly than any dusty NASA proposal from the dawn of the

space age could have envisaged.

 

From outside the Accelerated civilization, it isn’t really possible

to know what’s going on inside. The problem is bandwidth: While

it’s possible to send data in and get data out, the sheer amount of

computation going on in the virtual spaces of the Acceleration

dwarfs any external observer. Inside that swarm, minds a trillion

or more times as complex as humanity think thoughts as far beyond

human imagination as a microprocessor is beyond a nematode worm. A

million random human civilizations flourish in worldscapes tucked

in the corner of this world-mind. Death is abolished, life is

triumphant. A thousand ideologies flower, human nature adapted

where necessary to make this possible. Ecologies of thought are

forming in a Cambrian explosion of ideas: For the solar system is

finally rising to consciousness, and mind is no longer restricted

to the mere kilotons of gray fatty meat harbored in fragile human

skulls.

 

Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in

furious sleep remember a tiny starship launched years ago, and pay

attention. Soon, they realize, the starship will be in position to

act as their proxy in an ages-long conversation. Negotiations for

access to Amber’s extrasolar asset commence; the Ring Imperium

prospers, at least for a while.

 

But first, the operating software on the human side of the network

link will require an upgrade.

 

*

 

The audience chamber in the Field Circus is crammed. Everybody aboard

the ship - except the still-frozen lawyer and the alien barbarian

intruders - is present. They’ve just finished reviewing the recordings

of what happened in the Tuileries, of Glashwiecz’s fatal last

conversation with the Wunch, the resulting fight for survival. And now

the time has come for decisions.

 

“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 that

there’s enough bandwidth to transmit people and their necessary

support VMs; we’ve got some basic expectancy of goodwill at the other

end, or at least an agalmic willingness to gift us with advice about

the untrustworthiness of the Wunch. I 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 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 yet. Are you guys happy to join me?”

 

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 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 with our

personalities. After seeing the Wunch. Does this make sense?

 

“Forgive, please, but am not stupid,” says Boris. “This is Fermi

paradox territory, no? Instantaneous network exists, is traversable,

with bandwidth adequate for human-equivalent minds. Where are alien

visitors, in history? Must be overriding reason for absence. Think

will wait here and see what comes back. Then make up mind to drink the

poison kool-aid.”

 

“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 we’ve got the

bandwidth for.” Halfhearted laughter shores up his wisecrack, supports

a flagging determination to press through.

 

“I’m with Boris,” says Su Ang. She glances at Pierre, catches his eye:

Suddenly a number of things become clear to him. He shakes his head

minutely. You never had a chance - I belong to Amber, he thinks, but

deletes the thought before he can send it to her. Maybe in another

instantiation his issues with the Queen’s droit de seigneur would have

bulked up larger, splintered his determination; maybe in another world

it has already happened? “I think this is very rash,” she says in a

hurry. “We don’t know enough about postsingularity civilizations.”

 

“It’s not a singularity,” Amber says waspishly. “It’s just a brief

burst of acceleration. Like cosmological inflation.”

 

“Smooths out inhomogeneities in the initial structure of

consciousness,” purrs the cat. “Don’t I get a vote?”

 

“You do.” Amber sighs. She glances round. “Pierre?”

 

Heart in his mouth: “I’m with you.”

 

She smiles, brilliantly. “Well then. Will the nay sayers please leave

the universe?”

 

Suddenly, the audience chamber is half-empty.

 

“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 anyone back

in the intervening time,” she announces gravely, taking in the

serious-faced avatars of those who remain. Surprised: “Sadeq! I didn’t

think this was your type of -”

 

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 those who may never

have heard his name?”

 

Amber nods. “I guess.”

 

“Do it,” Pierre says urgently. “You can’t keep putting it off

forever.”

 

Aineko raises her head: “Spoilsport!”

 

“Okay.” Amber nods. “Let’s do -”

 

She punches an imaginary switch, and time stops.

 

*

 

At the far end of a wormhole, two hundred light-years distant in real

space, coherent photons begin to dance a story of human identity

before the sensoria of those who watch. And all is at peace in orbit

around Hyundai +4904/[-56], for a while …

 

*