Sirhan stands on the edge of an abyss, looking down at a churning
orange-and-gray cloudscape far below. The air this close to the edge
is chilly and smells slightly of ammonia, although that might be his
imagination at work - there’s little chance of any gas exchange taking
place across the transparent pressure wall of the flying city. He
feels as if he could reach out and touch the swirling vaporscape.
There’s nobody else around, this close to the edge - it’s an icy
sensation to look out across the roiling depths, at an ocean of gas so
cold human flesh would freeze within seconds of exposure, knowing that
there’s nothing solid out there for tens of thousands of kilometers.
The sense of isolation is aggravated by the paucity of bandwidth, this
far out of the system. Most people huddle close to the hub, for
comfort and warmth and low latency: posthumans are gregarious.
Beneath Sirhan’s feet, the lily-pad city is extending itself, mumbling
and churning in endless self-similar loops like a cubist blastoma
growing in the upper atmosphere of Saturn. Great ducts suck in methane
and other atmospheric gases, apply energy, polymerize and diamondize,
and crack off hydrogen to fill the lift cells high above. Beyond the
sapphire dome of the city’s gasbag, an azure star glares with the
speckle of laser light; humanity’s first - and so far, last -
starship, braking into orbit on the last shredded remnant of its light
sail.
He’s wondering maliciously how his mother will react to discovering
her bankruptcy when the light above him flickers. Something gray and
unpleasant splatters against the curve of nearly invisible wall in
front of him, leaving a smear. He takes a step back and looks up
angrily. “Fuck you!” he yells. Raucous cooing laughter follows him
away from the boundary, feral pigeon voices mocking. “I mean it,” he
warns, flicking a gesture at the air above his head. Wings scatter in
a burst of thunder as a slab of wind solidifies, thistledown-shaped
nanomachines suspended on the breeze locking edge to edge to form an
umbrella over his head. He walks away from the perimeter, fuming,
leaving the pigeons to look for another victim.
Annoyed, Sirhan finds a grassy knoll a couple of hundred meters from
the rim and around the curve of the lily-pad from the museum
buildings. It’s far enough from other humans that he can sit
undisturbed with his thoughts, far enough out to see over the edge
without being toilet-bombed by flocking flying rats. (The flying city,
despite being the product of an advanced technology almost
unimaginable two decades before, is full of bugs - software complexity
and scaling laws ensured that the preceding decades of change acted as
a kind of cosmological inflationary period for design glitches, and an
infestation of passenger pigeons is by no means the most inexplicable
problem this biosphere harbors.)
In an attempt to shut the more unwelcome manifestations of cybernature
out, he sits under the shade of an apple tree and marshals his worlds
around him. “When is my grandmother arriving?” he asks one of them,
speaking into an antique telephone in the world of servants, where
everything is obedient and knows its place. The city humors him, for
its own reasons.
“She is still containerized, but aerobraking is nearly over. Her body
will be arriving downwell in less than two megaseconds.” The city’s
avatar in this machinima is a discreet Victorian butler, stony-faced
and respectful. Sirhan eschews intrusive memory interfaces; for an
eighteen-year-old, he’s conservative to the point of affectation,
favoring voice commands and anthropomorphic agents over the invisible
splicing of virtual neural nets.
“You’re certain she’s transferred successfully?” Sirhan asks
anxiously. He heard a lot about his grandmama when he was young, very
little of it complimentary. Nevertheless, the old bat must be a lot
more flexible than his mother ever gave her credit for, to be
subjecting herself to this kind of treatment for the first time at her
current age.
“I’m as certain as I can be, young master, for anyone who insists on
sticking to their original phenotype without benefit of off-line
backup or medical implants. I regret that omniscience is not within my
remit. Would you like me to make further specific inquiries?”
“No.” Sirhan peers up at the bright flare of laser light, visible even
through the soap-bubble membrane that holds in the breathable gas mix,
and the trillions of liters of hot hydrogen in the canopy above it.
“As long as you’re sure she’ll arrive before the ship?” Tuning his
eyes to ultraviolet, he watches the emission spikes, sees the slow
strobing of the low-bandwidth AM modulation that’s all the starship
can manage by way of downlink communication until it comes within
range of the system manifold. It’s sending the same tiresomely
repetitive question about why it’s being redirected to Saturn that
it’s been putting out for the past week, querying the refusal to
supply terawatts of propulsion energy on credit.
“Unless there’s a spike in their power beam, you can be certain of
that,” City replies reassuringly. “And you can be certain also that
your grandmother will revive comfortably.”
“One may hope so.” To undertake the interplanetary voyage in corporeal
person, at her age, without any upgrades or augmentation, must take
courage, he decides. “When she wakes up, if I’m not around, ask her
for an interview slot on my behalf. For the archives, of course.”
“It will be my pleasure.” City bobs his head politely.
“That will be all,” Sirhan says dismissively, and the window into
servantspace closes. Then he looks back up at the pinprick of glaring
blue laser light near the zenith. Tough luck, Mom, he subvocalizes for
his journal cache. Most of his attention is forked at present, focused
on the rich historical windfall from the depths of the singularity
that is coming his way, in the form of the thirty-year-old starwhisp’s
Cartesian theatre. But he can still spare some schadenfreude for the
family fortunes. All your assets belong to me, now. He smiles,
inwardly. I’ll just have to make sure they’re put to a sensible use
this time.
*
“I don’t see why they’re diverting us toward Saturn. It’s not as if
they can possibly have dismantled Jupiter already, is it?” asks
Pierre, rolling the chilled beer bottle thoughtfully between fingers
and thumb.
“Why not you ask Amber?” replies the velociraptor squatting beside the
log table. (Boris’s Ukrainian accent is unimpeded by the
dromaeosaurid’s larynx; in point of fact, it’s an affectation, one he
could easily fix by sideloading an English pronunciation patch if he
wanted to.)
“Well.” Pierre shakes his head. “She’s spending all her time with that
Slug, no multiplicity access, privacy ackles locked right down. I
could get jealous.” His voice doesn’t suggest any deep concern.
“What’s to get jealous about? Just ask to fork instance to talk to
you, make love, show boyfriend good time, whatever.”
“Hah!” Pierre chuckles grimly, then drains the last drops from the
bottle into his mouth. He throws it away in the direction of a clump
of cycads, then snaps his fingers; another one appears in its place.
“Are two megaseconds out from Saturn in any case,” Boris points out,
then pauses to sharpen his inch-long incisors on one end of the table.
Fangs crunch through timber like wet cardboard. “Grrrrn. Am seeing
most peculiar emission spectra from inner solar system. Foggy flying
down bottom of gravity well. Am wondering, does ensmartening of dumb
matter extend past Jovian orbit now?”
“Hmm.” Pierre takes a swig from the bottle and puts it down. “That
might explain the diversion. But why haven’t they powered up the
lasers on the Ring for us? You missed that, too.” For reasons unknown,
the huge battery of launch lasers had shut down, some millions of
seconds after the crew of the Field Circus had entered the router,
leaving it adrift in the cold darkness.
“Don’t know why are not talking.” Boris shrugged. “At least are still
alive there, as can tell from the ‘set course for Saturn, following
thus-and-such orbital elements’ bit. Someone is paying attention. Am
telling you from beginning, though, turning entire solar system into
computronium is real bad idea, long-term. Who knows how far has gone
already?”
“Hmm, again.” Pierre draws a circle in the air. “Aineko,” he calls,
“are you listening?”
“Don’t bug me.” A faint green smile appears in the circle, just the
suggestion of fangs and needle-sharp whiskers. “I had an idea I was
sleeping furiously.”
Boris rolls one turreted eye and drools on the tabletop. “Munch
munch,” he growls, allowing his saurian body-brain to put in a word.
“What do you need to sleep for? This is a fucking sim, in case you
hadn’t noticed.”
“I enjoy sleeping,” replies the cat, irritably lashing its
just-now-becoming-visible tail. “What do you want? Fleas?”
“No thanks,” Pierre says hastily. Last time he called Aineko’s bluff
the cat had filled three entire pocket universes with scurrying gray
mice. One of the disadvantages of flying aboard a starship the size of
a baked bean can full of smart matter was the risk that some of the
passengers could get rather too creative with the reality control
system. This Cretaceous kaffee klatsch was just Boris’s entertainment
partition; compared to some of the other simulation spaces aboard the
Field Circus, it was downright conservative. “Look, do you have any
updates on what’s going on downwell? We’re only twenty objective days
out from orbital insertion, and there’s so little to see -”
“They’re not sending us power.” Aineko materializes fully now, a large
orange-and-white cat with a swirl of brown fur in the shape on an
@-symbol covering her ribs. For whatever reason, she plants herself on
the table tauntingly close to Boris’s velociraptor body’s nose. “No
propulsion laser means insufficient bandwidth. They’re talking in
Latin-1 text at 1200 baud, if you care to know.” (Which is an insult,
given the ship’s multi-avabit storage capacity - one avabit is
Avogadro’s number of bits; about 1023 bytes, several billion times the
size of the Internet in 2001 - and outrageous communications
bandwidth.) “Amber says, come and see her now. Audience chamber.
Informal, of course. I think she wants to discuss it.”
“Informal? Am all right without change bodies?”
The cat sniffs. “I’m wearing a real fur coat,” it declares haughtily,
“but no knickers.” Then blinks out a fraction of a second ahead of the
snicker-snack of Bandersnatch-like jaws.
“Come on,” says Pierre, standing up. “Time to see what Her Majesty
wants with us today.”
*
Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the
phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally
becoming visible on a cosmological scale.
There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various
states of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of
them cluster where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in
the water zone around old Earth. Earth’s biosphere has been in the
intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning
replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization
can fix them - gray goo, thylacines, dragons. The last great
transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has
collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of
superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively
known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well
on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy
stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster so
thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red
ball of wool the size of a young red giant.
Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian
evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use
converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient
in smarts. Now the brightly burning beacon of sapience isn’t held
by humans anymore - their cross-infectious enthusiasms have spread
to a myriad of other hosts, several types of which are
qualitatively better at thinking. At last count, there were about a
thousand nonhuman intelligent species in Sol space, split evenly
between posthumans on one side, naturally self-organizing AIs in
the middle, and mammalian nonhumans on the other. The common mammal
neural chassis is easily upgraded to human-style intelligence in
most species that can carry, feed and cool a half kilogram of gray
matter, and the descendants of a hundred ethics-challenged doctoral
theses are now demanding equal rights. So are the unquiet dead; the
panopticon-logged Net ghosts of people who lived recently enough to
imprint their identities on the information age, and the ambitious
theological engineering schemes of the Reformed Tiplerite Church of
Latter-day Saints (who want to emulate all possible human beings in
real time, so that they can have the opportunity to be saved).
The human memesphere is coming alive, although how long it remains
recognizably human is open to question. The informational density
of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro’s number of
bits per mole, one bit per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter
of the inner planets (apart from Earth, preserved for now like a
picturesque historic building stranded in an industrial park) is
converted into computronium. And it’s not just the inner system.
The same forces are at work on Jupiter’s moons, and those of
Saturn, although it’ll take thousands of years rather than mere
decades to dismantle the gas giants themselves. Even the entire
solar energy budget isn’t enough to pump Jupiter’s enormous mass to
orbital velocity in less than centuries. The fast-burning primitive
thinkers descended from the African plains apes may have vanished
completely or transcended their fleshy architecture before the
solar Matrioshka brain is finished.
It won’t be long now …
*
Meanwhile, there’s a party brewing down in Saturn’s well.
Sirhan’s lily-pad city floats inside a gigantic and nearly-invisible
sphere in Saturn’s upper atmosphere; a balloon kilometers across with
a shell of fullerene-reinforced diamond below and a hot hydrogen gas
bag above. It’s one of several hundred multimegaton soap bubbles
floating in the sea of turbulent hydrogen and helium that is the upper
atmosphere of Saturn, seeded there by the Society for Creative
Terraforming, subcontractors for the 2074 Worlds’ Fair.
The cities are elegant, grown from a conceptual seed a few megawords
long. Their replication rate is slow (it takes months to build a
bubble), but in only a couple of decades, exponential growth will have
paved the stratosphere with human-friendly terrain. Of course, the
growth rate will slow toward the end, as it takes longer to
fractionate the metal isotopes out of the gas giant’s turbid depths,
but before that happens, the first fruits of the robot factories on
Ganymede will be pouring hydrocarbons down into the mix. Eventually
Saturn - cloud-top gravity a human-friendly 11 meters per second
squared - will have a planet wide biosphere with nearly a hundred
times the surface area of Earth. And a bloody good thing indeed this
will be, for otherwise, Saturn is no use to anyone except as a fusion
fuel bunker for the deep future when the sun’s burned down.
This particular lily-pad is carpeted in grass, the hub of the disk
rising in a gentle hill surmounted by the glowering concrete hump of
the Boston Museum of Science. It looks curiously naked, shorn of its
backdrop of highways and the bridges of the Charles River - but even
the generous kiloton dumb matter load-outs of the skyhooks that lifted
it into orbit wouldn’t have stretched to bringing its framing context
along with it. Probably someone will knock up a cheap diorama backdrop
out of utility fog, Sirhan thinks, but for now, the museum stands
proud and isolated, a solitary redoubt of classical learning in exile
from the fast-thinking core of the solar system.
“Waste of money,” grumbles the woman in black. “Whose stupid idea was
this, anyway?” She jabs the diamond ferrule of her cane at the museum.
“It’s a statement,” Sirhan says absently. “You know the kind, we’ve
got so many newtons to burn we can send our cultural embassies
wherever we like. The Louvre is on its way to Pluto, did you hear
that?”
“Waste of energy.” She lowers her cane reluctantly and leans on it.
Pulls a face: “It’s not right.”
“You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn’t you?” Sirhan prods.
“What was it like then?”
“What was it …? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had
plenty for bombers,” she says dismissively. “We knew it would be okay.
If it hadn’t been for those damn’ meddlesome posthumanists -” Her
wrinkled, unnaturally aged face scowls at him furiously from
underneath hair that has faded to the color of rotten straw, but he
senses a subtext of self-deprecating irony that he doesn’t understand.
“Like your grandfather, damn him. If I was young again I’d go and piss
on his grave to show him what I think of what he did. If he has a
grave,” she adds, almost fondly.
Memo checkpoint: log family history, Sirhan tells one of his ghosts.
As a dedicated historian, he records every experience routinely, both
before it enters his narrative of consciousness - efferent signals are
the cleanest - and also his own stream of selfhood, against some
future paucity of memory. But his grandmother has been remarkably
consistent over the decades in her refusal to adapt to the new
modalities.
“You’re recording this, aren’t you?” she sniffs.
“I’m not recording it, Grandmama,” he says gently, “I’m just
preserving my memories for future generations.”
“Hah! We’ll see,” she says suspiciously. Then she surprises him with a
bark of laughter, cut off abruptly: “No, you’ll see, darling. I won’t
be around to be disappointed.”
“Are you going to tell me about my grandfather?” asks Sirhan.
“Why should I bother? I know you posthumans, you’ll just go and ask
his ghost yourself. Don’t try to deny it! There are two sides to every
story, child, and he’s had more than his fair share of ears, the
sleazebag. Leaving me to bring up your mother on my own, and nothing
but a bunch of worthless intellectual property and a dozen lawsuits
from the Mafiya to do it with. I don’t know what I ever saw in him.”
Sirhan’s voice-stress monitor detects a distinct hint of untruth in
this assertion. “He’s worthless trash, and don’t you forget it. Lazy
idiot couldn’t even form just one startup on his own: He had to give
it all away, all the fruits of his genius.”
While she rambles on, occasionally punctuating her characterization
with sharp jabs of the cane, Pamela leads Sirhan on a slow, wavering
stroll that veers around one side of the museum, until they’re
standing next to a starkly engineered antique loading bay. “He should
have tried real communism instead,” she harrumphs: “Put some steel
into him, shake those starry-eyed visionary positive-sum daydreams
loose. You knew where you were in the old times, and no mistake.
Humans were real humans, work was real work, and corporations were
just things that did as we told them. And then, when she went to the
bad, that was all his fault, too, you know.”
“She? You mean my, ah, mother?” Sirhan diverts his primary sensorium
back to Pamela’s vengeful muttering. There are aspects to this story
that he isn’t completely familiar with, angles he needs to sketch in
so that he can satisfy himself that all is as it should be when the
bailiffs go in to repossess Amber’s mind.
“He sent her our cat. Of all the mean-spirited, low, downright
dishonest things he ever did, that was the worst part of it. That cat
was mine, but he reprogrammed it to lead her astray. And it succeeded
admirably. She was only twelve at the time, an impressionable age, I’m
sure you’d agree. I was trying to raise her right. Children need moral
absolutes, especially in a changing world, even if they don’t like it
much at the time. Self-discipline and stability, you can’t function as
an adult without them. I was afraid that, with all her upgrades, she’d
never really get a handle on who she was, that she’d end up more
machine than woman. But Manfred never really understood childhood,
mostly on account of his never growing up. He always was inclined to
meddle.”
“Tell me about the cat,” Sirhan says quietly. One glance at the
loading bay door tells him that it’s been serviced recently. A thin
patina of expended foglets have formed a snowy scab around its edges,
flaking off like blue refractive candyfloss that leaves bright metal
behind. “Didn’t it go missing or something?”
Pamela snorts. “When your mother ran away, it uploaded itself to her
starwhisp and deleted its body. It was the only one of them that had
the guts - or maybe it was afraid I’d have it subpoenaed as a hostile
witness. Or, and I can’t rule this out, your grandfather gave it a
suicide reflex. He was quite evil enough to do something like that,
after he reprogrammed himself to think I was some kind of mortal
enemy.”
“So when my mother died to avoid bankruptcy, the cat … didn’t stay
behind? Not at all? How remarkable.” Sirhan doesn’t bother adding how
suicidal. Any artificial entity that’s willing to upload its neural
state vector into a one-kilogram interstellar probe three-quarters of
the way to Alpha Centauri without backup or some clear way of
returning home has got to be more than a few methods short in the
object factory.
“It’s a vengeful beast.” Pamela pokes her stick at the ground sharply,
mutters a command word, and lets go of it. She stands before Sirhan,
craning her neck back to look up at him. “My, what a tall boy you
are.”
“Person,” he corrects, instinctively. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t
presume.”
“Person, thing, boy, whatever - you’re engendered, aren’t you?” she
asks, sharply, waiting until he nods reluctantly. “Never trust anyone
who can’t make up their mind whether to be a man or a woman,” she says
gloomily. “You can’t rely on them.” Sirhan, who has placed his
reproductive system on hold until he needs it, bites his tongue. “That
damn cat,” his grandmother complains. “It carried your grandfather’s
business plan to my daughter and spirited her away into the big black.
It poisoned her against me. It encouraged her to join in that frenzy
of speculative bubble-building that caused the market reboot that
brought down the Ring Imperium. And now it -”
“Is it on the ship?” Sirhan asks, almost too eagerly.
“It might be.” She stares at him through narrowed eyes. “You want to
interview it, too, huh?”
Sirhan doesn’t bother denying it. “I’m a historian, Grandmama. And
that probe has been somewhere no other human sensorium has ever seen.
It may be old news, and there may be old lawsuits waiting to feed on
the occupants, but …” He shrugs. “Business is business, and my
business lies in ruins.”
“Hah!” She stares at him for a moment, then nods, very slowly. She
leans forward to rest both wrinkled hands atop her cane, joints like
bags of shriveled walnuts: Her suit’s endoskeleton creaks as it
adjusts to accommodate her confidential posture. “You’ll get yours,
kid.” The wrinkles twist into a frightening smile, sixty years of
saved-up bitterness finally within spitting distance of a victim. “And
I’ll get what I want, too. Between us, your mother won’t know what’s
hit her.”
*
“Relax, between us your mother won’t know what’s hit her,” says the
cat, baring needle teeth at the Queen in the big chair - carved out of
a single lump of computational diamond, her fingers clenched whitely
on the sapphire-plated arms - her minions, lovers, friends, crew,
shareholders, bloggers, and general factional auxiliaries spaced out
around her. And the Slug. “It’s just another lawsuit. You can deal
with it.”
“Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” Amber says, a trifle moodily.
Although she’s ruler of this embedded space, with total control over
the reality model underlying it, she’s allowed herself to age to a
dignified twentysomething: Dressed casually in gray sweats, she
doesn’t look like the once-mighty ruler of a Jovian moon, or for that
matter the renegade commander of a bankrupt interstellar expedition.
“Okay, I think you’d better run that past me again. Unless anyone’s
got any suggestions?”
“If you will excuse me?” asks Sadeq. “We have a shortage of insight
here. I believe two laws were cited as absolute systemwide conventions
- and how they convinced the ulama to go along with that I would very
much like to know - concerning the rights and responsibilities of the
undead. Which, apparently, we are. Did they by any chance attach the
code to their claim?”
“Do bears shit in woods?” asks Boris, raptor-irascible, with an angry
clatter of teeth. “Is full dependency graph and parse tree of criminal
code crawling way up carrier’s ass as we speak. Am drowning in lawyer
gibberish! If you -”
“Boris, can it!” Amber snaps. Tempers are high in the throne room. She
didn’t know what to expect when she arrived home from the expedition
to the router, but bankruptcy proceedings weren’t part of it. She
doubts any of them expected anything like this. Especially not the bit
about being declared liable for debts run up by a renegade splinter of
herself, her own un-uploaded identity that had stayed home to face the
music, aged in the flesh, married, gone bankrupt, died - incurred
child support payments? “I don’t hold you responsible for this,” she
added through gritted teeth, with a significant glance toward Sadeq.
“This is truly a mess fit for the Prophet himself, peace be unto him,
to serve judgment upon.” Sadeq looks as shaken as she is by the
implications the lawsuit raises. His gaze skitters around the room,
looking anywhere but at Amber - and Pierre, her lanky toy-boy
astrogator and bed warmer - as he laces his fingers.
“Drop it. I said I don’t blame you.” Amber forces a smile. “We’re all
tense from being locked in here with no bandwidth. Anyway, I smell
Mother-dearest’s hand underneath all this litigation. Sniff the glove.
We’ll sort a way out.”
“We could keep going.” This from Ang, at the back of the room.
Diffident and shy, she doesn’t generally open her mouth without a good
reason. “The Field Circus is in good condition, isn’t it? We could
divert back to the beam from the router, accelerate up to cruise
speed, and look for somewhere to live. There must be a few suitable
brown dwarfs within a hundred light-years …”
“We’ve lost too much sail mass,” says Pierre. He’s not meeting Amber’s
gaze either. There are lots of subtexts loose in this room, broken
narratives from stories of misguided affections. Amber pretends not to
notice his embarrassment. “We ejected half our original launch sail to
provide the braking mirror at Hyundai +4904/[-56], and almost eight
megaseconds ago, we halved our area again to give us a final
deceleration beam for Saturn orbit. If we did it again, we wouldn’t
have enough area left to repeat the trick and still decelerate at our
final target.” Laser-boosted light sails do it with mirrors; after
boost, they can drop half the sail and use it to reverse the launch
beam and direct it back at the ship, to provide deceleration. But you
can only do it a few times before you run out of sail. “There’s
nowhere to run.”
“Nowhere to -” Amber stares at him through narrowed eyes. “Sometimes I
really wonder about you, you know?”
“I know you do.” And Pierre really does know, because he carries a
little homunculoid around in his society of mind, a model of Amber far
more accurate and detailed than any pre-upload human could possibly
have managed to construct of a lover. (For her part, Amber keeps a
little Pierre doll tucked away inside the creepy cobwebs of her head,
part of an exchange of insights they took part in years ago. But she
doesn’t try to fit inside his head too often anymore - it’s not good
to be able to second-guess your lover every time.) “I also know that
you’re going to rush in and grab the bull by the, ah, no. Wrong
metaphor. This is your mother we are discussing?”
“My mother.” Amber nods thoughtfully. “Where’s Donna?”
“I don’t -”
There’s a throaty roar from the back, and Boris lurches forward with
something in his mouth, an angry Bolex that flails his snout with its
tripod legs. “Hiding in corners again?” Amber says disdainfully.
“I am a camera!” protests the camera, aggrieved and self-conscious as
it picks itself up off the floor. “I am -”
Pierre leans close, sticks his face up against the fish-eye lens:
“You’re fucking well going to be a human being just this once. Merde!”
The camera is replaced by a very annoyed blond woman wearing a safari
suit and more light meters, lenses, camera bags, and microphones than
a CNN outside broadcast unit. “Go fuck yourself!”
“I don’t like being spied on,” Amber says sharply. “Especially as you
weren’t invited to this meeting. Right?”
“I’m the archivist.” Donna looks away, stubbornly refusing to admit
anything. “You said I should -”
“Yes, well.” Amber is embarrassed. But it’s a bad idea to embarrass
the Queen in her audience chamber. “You heard what we were discussing.
What do you know about my mother’s state of mind?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Donna says promptly. She’s clearly in a sulk and
prepared to do no more than the minimum to help resolve the situation.
“I only met her once. You look like her when you are angry, do you
know that?”
“I -” For once, Amber’s speechless.
“I’ll schedule you for facial surgery,” offers the cat. Sotto voce:
“It’s the only way to be sure.”
Normally, accusing Amber of any resemblance to her mother, however
slight and passing, would be enough to trigger a reality quake within
the upload environment that passes for the bridge of the Field Circus.
It’s a sign of how disturbed Amber is by the lawsuit that she lets the
cat’s impertinence slide. “What is the lawsuit, anyway?” Donna asks,
nosy as ever and twice as annoying: “I did not that bit see.”
“It’s horrible,” Amber says vehemently.
“Truly evil,” echoes Pierre.
“Fascinating but wrong,” Sadeq muses thoughtfully.
“But it’s still horrible!”
“Yes, but what is it?” Donna the all-seeing-eye archivist and camera
manqu� asks.
“It’s a demand for settlement.” Amber takes a deep breath. “Dammit,
you might as well tell everyone - it won’t stay secret for long.” She
sighs. “After we left, it seems my other half - my original
incarnation, that is - got married. To Sadeq, here.” She nods at the
Iranian theologian, who looks just as bemused as she did the first
time she heard this part of the story. “And they had a child. Then the
Ring Imperium went bankrupt. The child is demanding maintenance
payments from me, backdated nearly twenty years, on the grounds that
the undead are jointly and severally liable for debts run up by their
incarnations. It’s a legal precedent established to prevent people
from committing suicide temporarily as a way to avoid bankruptcy.
Worse, the lien on my assets is measured in subjective time from a
point at the Ring Imperium about nineteen months after our launch time
- we’ve been in relativistic flight, so while my other half would be
out from under it by now if she’d survived, I’m still subject to the
payment order. But compound interest applies back home - that is to
stop people trying to use the twin’s paradox as a way to escape
liability. So, by being away for about twenty-eight years of
wall-clock time, I’ve run up a debt I didn’t know about to enormous
levels.
“This man, this son I’ve never met, theoretically owns the Field
Circus several times over. And my accounts are wiped out - I don’t
even have enough money to download us into fleshbodies. Unless one of
you guys has got a secret stash that survived the market crash after
we left, we’re all in deep trouble.”
*
A mahogany dining table eight meters long graces the flagstoned floor
of the huge museum gallery, beneath the skeleton of an enormous
Argentinosaurus and a suspended antique Mercury capsule more than a
century old. The dining table is illuminated by candlelight, silver
cutlery and fine porcelain plates setting out two places at opposite
ends. Sirhan sits in a high-backed chair beneath the shadow of a
triceratops’s rib cage. Opposite him, Pamela has dressed for dinner in
the fashion of her youth. She raises her wineglass toward him. “Tell
me about your childhood, why don’t you?” she asks. High above them,
Saturn’s rings shimmer through the skylights, like a luminous paint
splash thrown across the midnight sky.
Sirhan has misgivings about opening up to her, but consoles himself
with the fact that she’s clearly in no position to use anything he
tells her against him. “Which childhood would you like to know about?”
he asks.
“What do you mean, which?” Her face creases up in a frown of
perplexity.
“I had several. Mother kept hitting the reset switch, hoping I’d turn
out better.” It’s his turn to frown.
“She did, did she,” breathes Pamela, clearly noting it down to hold as
ammunition against her errant daughter. “Why do you think she did
that?”
“It was the only way she knew to raise a child,” Sirhan says
defensively. “She didn’t have any siblings. And, perhaps, she was
reacting against her own character flaws.” When I have children there
will be more than one, he tells himself smugly: when, that is, he has
adequate means to find himself a bride, and adequate emotional
maturity to activate his organs of procreation. A creature of extreme
caution, Sirhan is not planning to repeat the errors of his ancestors
on the maternal side.
Pamela flinches: “it’s not my fault,” she says quietly. “Her father
had quite a bit to do with that. But what - what different childhoods
did you have?”
“Oh, a fair number. There was the default option, with Mother and
Father arguing constantly - she refused to take the veil and he was
too stiff-necked to admit he was little more than a kept man, and
between them, they were like two neutron stars locked in an unstable
death spiral of gravity. Then there were my other lives, forked and
reintegrated, running in parallel. I was a young goatherd in the days
of the middle kingdom in Egypt, I remember that; and I was an
all-American kid growing up in Iowa in the 1950s, and another me got
to live through the return of the hidden imam - at least, his parents
thought it was the hidden imam - and -” Sirhan shrugs. “Perhaps that’s
where I acquired my taste for history.”
“Did your parents ever consider making you a little girl?” asks his
grandmother.
“Mother suggested it a couple of times, but Father forbade it.” Or
rather, decided it was unlawful, he recalls. “I had a very
conservative upbringing in some ways.”
“I wouldn’t say that. When I was a little girl, that was all there
was; none of these questions of self-selected identity. There was no
escape, merely escapism. Didn’t you ever have a problem knowing who
you were?”
The starters arrive, diced melon on a silver salver. Sirhan waits
patiently for his grandmama to chivvy the table into serving her. “The
more people you are, the more you know who you are,” says Sirhan. “You
learn what it’s like to be other people. Father thought that perhaps
it isn’t good for a man to know too much about what it’s like to be a
woman.” And Grandfather disagreed, but you already know that, he adds
for his own stream of consciousness.
“I couldn’t agree more.” Pamela smiles at him, an expression that
might be that of a patronizing elder aunt if it wasn’t for the
alarming sharkishness of her expression - or is it playfulness? Sirhan
covers his confusion by spooning chunks of melon into his mouth,
forking temporary ghosts to peruse dusty etiquette manuals and warn
him if he’s about to commit some faux pas. “So, how did you enjoy your
childhoods?”
“Enjoy isn’t a word I would use,” he replies as evenly as he can,
laying down his spoon so he doesn’t spill anything. As if childhood is
something that ever ends, he thinks bitterly. Sirhan is considerably
less than a gigasecond old and confidently expects to exist for at
least a terasecond - if not in exactly this molecular configuration,
then at least in some reasonably stable physical incarnation. And he
has every intention of staying young for that entire vast span - even
into the endless petaseconds that might follow, although by then,
megayears hence, he speculates that issues of neoteny will no longer
interest him. “It’s not over yet. How about you? Are you enjoying your
old age, Grandmama?”
Pamela almost flinches, but keeps iron control of her expression. The
flush of blood in the capillaries of her cheeks, visible to Sirhan
through the tiny infrared eyes he keeps afloat in the air above the
table, gives her away. “I made some mistakes in my youth, but I’m
enjoying it fine nowadays,” she says lightly.
“It’s your revenge, isn’t it?” Sirhan asks, smiling and nodding as the
table removes the entrees.
“Why, you little -” She stares at him rather than continuing. A very
bleak stare it is, too. “What would you know about revenge?” she asks.
“I’m the family historian.” Sirhan smiles humorlessly. “I lived from
two to seventeen years several hundred times over before my eighteenth
birthday. It was that reset switch, you know. I don’t think Mother
realized my primary stream of consciousness was journaling
everything.”
“That’s monstrous.” Pamela picks up her wineglass and takes a sip to
cover her confusion. Sirhan has no such retreat - grape juice in a
tumbler, unfermented, wets his tongue. “I’d never do something like
that to any child of mine.”
“So why won’t you tell me about your childhood?” asks her grandson.
“For the family history, of course.”
“I’ll -” She puts her glass down. “You intend to write one,” she
states.
“I’m thinking about it.” Sirhan sits up. “An old-fashioned book
covering three generations, living through interesting times,” he
suggests. “A work of postmodern history, the incoherent school at that
- how do you document people who fork their identities at random,
spend years dead before reappearing on the stage, and have arguments
with their own relativistically preserved other copy? I could trace
the history further, of course - if you tell me about your parents,
although I am certain they aren’t around to answer questions directly
- but we reach the boring dumb matter slope back to the primeval soup
surprisingly fast if we go there, don’t we? So I thought that perhaps
as a narrative hook I’d make the offstage viewpoint that of the
family’s robot cat. (Except the bloody thing’s gone missing, hasn’t
it?) Anyway, with so much of human history occupying the untapped
future, we historians have our work cut out recording the cursor of
the present as it logs events. So I might as well start at home.”
“You’re set on immortalism.” Pamela studies his face.
“Yes,” he says idly. “Frankly, I can understand your wanting to grow
old out of a desire for revenge, but pardon me for saying this, I have
difficulty grasping your willingness to follow through with the
procedure! Isn’t it awfully painful?”
“Growing old is natural,” growls the old woman. “When you’ve lived
long enough for all your ambitions to be in ruins, friendships broken,
lovers forgotten or divorced acrimoniously, what’s left to go on for?
If you feel tired and old in spirit, you might as well be tired and
old in body. Anyway, wanting to live forever is immoral. Think of all
the resources you’re taking up that younger people need! Even uploads
face a finite data storage limit after a time. It’s a monstrously
egotistical statement, to say you intend to live forever. And if
there’s one thing I believe in, it’s public service. Duty: the
obligation to make way for the new. Duty and control.”
Sirhan absorbs all this, nodding slowly to himself as the table serves
up the main course - honey-glazed roast long pork with saut�ed
potatoes a la gratin and carrots Debussy - when there’s a loud bump
from overhead.
“What’s that?” Pamela asks querulously.
“One moment.” Sirhan’s vision splits into a hazy kaleidoscope view of
the museum hall as he forks ghosts to monitor each of the ubiquitous
cameras. He frowns; something is moving on the balcony, between the
Mercury capsule and a display of antique random-dot stereoisograms.
“Oh dear. Something seems to be loose in the museum.”
“Loose? What do you mean, loose?” An inhuman shriek splits the air
above the table, followed by a crash from upstairs. Pamela stands up
unsteadily, wiping her lips with her napkin. “Is it safe?”
“No, it isn’t safe.” Sirhan fumes. “It’s disturbing my meal!” He looks
up. A flash of orange fur shows over the balcony, then the Mercury
capsule wobbles violently on the end of its guy wires. Two arms and a
bundle of rubbery something covered in umber hair lurches out from the
handrail and casually grabs hold of the priceless historical relic,
then clambers inside and squats on top of the dummy wearing Al
Sheperd’s age-cracked space suit. “It’s an ape! City, I say, City!
What’s a monkey doing loose in my dinner party?”
“I am most deeply sorry, sir, but I don’t know. Would sir care to
identify the monkey in question?” replies City, which for reasons of
privacy, has manifested itself as a bodiless voice.
There’s a note of humor in City’s tone that Sirhan takes deep
exception to. “What do you mean? Can’t you see it?” he demands,
focusing on the errant primate, which is holed up in the Mercury
capsule dangling from the ceiling, smacking its lips, rolling its
eyes, and fingering the gasket around the capsule’s open hatch. It
hoots quietly to itself, then leans out of the open door and moons
over the table, baring its buttocks. “Get back!” Sirhan calls to his
grandmother, then he gestures at the air above the table, intending to
tell the utility fog to congeal. Too late. The ape farts thunderously,
then lets rip a stream of excrement across the dining table. Pamela’s
face is a picture of wrinkled disgust as she holds her napkin in front
of her nose. “Dammit, solidify, will you!” Sirhan curses, but the
ubiquitous misty pollen-grain-sized robots refuse to respond.
“What’s your problem? Invisible monkeys?” asks City.
“Invisible -” he stops.
“Can’t you see what it did?” Pamela demands, backing him up. “It just
defecated all over the main course!”
“I see nothing,” City says uncertainly.
“Here, let me help you.” Sirhan lends it one of his eyes, rolls it to
focus on the ape, which is now reaching lazy arms around the hatch and
patting down the roof of the capsule, as if hunting for the wires’
attachment points.
“Oh dear,” says City, “I’ve been hacked. That’s not supposed to be
possible.”
“Well it fucking is,” hisses Pamela.
“Hacked?” Sirhan stops trying to tell the air what to do and focuses
on his clothing instead. Fabric reweaves itself instantly, mapping
itself into an armored airtight suit that raises a bubble visor from
behind his neck and flips itself shut across his face. “City please
supply my grandmama with an environment suit now. Make it completely
autonomous.”
The air around Pamela begins to congeal in a blossom of crystalline
security, as a sphere like a giant hamster ball precipitates out
around her. “If you’ve been hacked, the first question is, who did
it,” Sirhan states. “The second is ‘why,’ and the third is ‘how.’” He
edgily runs a self-test, but there’s no sign of inconsistencies in his
own identity matrix, and he has hot shadows sleeping lightly at
scattered nodes across as distance of half a dozen light-hours. Unlike
pre-posthuman Pamela, he’s effectively immune to murder-simple. “If
this is just a prank -”
Seconds have passed since the orangutan got loose in the museum, and
subsequent seconds have passed since City realized its bitter
circumstance. Seconds are long enough for huge waves of
countermeasures to sweep the surface of the lily-pad habitat.
Invisibly small utility foglets are expanding and polymerizing into
defenses throughout the air, trapping the thousands of itinerant
passenger pigeons in midflight, and locking down every building and
every person who walks the paths outside. City is self-testing its
trusted computing base, starting with the most primitive secured
kernel and working outward. Meanwhile Sirhan, with blood in his eye,
heads for the staircase, with the vague goal of physically attacking
the intruder. Pamela retreats at a fast roll, tumbling toward the
safety of the mezzanine floor and a garden of fossils. “Who do you
think you are, barging in and shitting on my supper?” Sirhan yells as
he bounds up the stairs. “I want an explanation! Right now!”
The orangutan finds the nearest cable and gives it a yank, setting
the one-ton capsule swinging. It bares its teeth at Sirhan in a grin.
“Remember me?” it asks, in a sibilant French accent.
“Remember -” Sirhan stops dead. “Tante Annette? What are you doing in
that orangutan?”
“Having minor autonomic control problems.” The ape grimaces wider,
then bends one arm sinuously and scratches at its armpit. “I am sorry,
I installed myself in the wrong order. I was only meaning to say hello
and pass on a message.”
“What message?” Sirhan demands. “You’ve upset my grandmama, and if she
finds out you’re here -”
“She won’t; I’ll be gone in a minute.” The ape - Annette - sits up.
“Your grandfather salutes you and says he will be visiting shortly. In
the person, that is. He is very keen to meet your mother and her
passengers. That is all. Have you a message for him?”
“Isn’t he dead?” Sirhan asks, dazed.
“No more than I am. And I’m overdue. Good day!” The ape swings hand
over hand out of the capsule, then lets go and plummets ten meters to
the hard stone floor below. Its skull makes a noise like a hard-boiled
egg impacting concrete.
“Oh dear,” Sirhan breathes heavily. “City!”
“Yes, oh master?”
“Remove that body,” he says, pointing over the balcony. “I’ll trouble
you not to disturb my grandmother with any details. In particular,
don’t tell her it was Annette. The news may upset her.” The perils of
having a long-lived posthuman family, he thinks; too many mad aunts in
the space capsule. “If you can find a way to stop Auntie ‘Nette from
growing any more apes, that might be a good idea.” A thought strikes
him. “By the way, do you know when my grandfather is due to arrive?”
“Your grandfather?” asks City: “Isn’t he dead?”
Sirhan looks over the balcony, at the blood-seeping corpse of the
intruder. “Not according to his second wife’s latest incarnation.”
*
Funding the family reunion isn’t going to be a problem, as Amber
discovers when she receives an offer of reincarnation good for all the
passengers and crew of the Field Circus.
She isn’t sure quite where the money is coming from. Presumably it’s
some creaky financial engine designed by Dad, stirring from its
bear-market bunker for the first time in decades to suck dusty
syndication feeds and liquidate long-term assets held against her
return. She’s duly grateful - even fervently so - for the details of
her own impecunious position grow more depressing the more she learns
about them. Her sole asset is the Field Circus, a
thirty-years-obsolete starwhisp massing less than twenty kilograms
including what’s left of its tattered sail, along with its cargo of
uploaded passengers and crew. Without the farsighted trust fund that
has suddenly chugged into life, she’d be stranded in the realm of
ever-circling leptons. But now the fund has sent her its offer of
incarnation, she’s got a dilemma. Because one of the Field Circus’s
passengers has never actually had a meatspace body …
Amber finds the Slug browsing quietly in a transparent space filled
with lazily waving branches that resemble violet coral fans. They’re a
ghost-memory of alien life, an order of thermophilic quasi fungi with
hyphae ridged in actin/myosin analogues, muscular and slippery filter
feeders that eat airborne unicellular organisms. The Slug itself is
about two meters long and has a lacy white exoskeleton of curves and
arcs that don’t repeat, disturbingly similar to a Penrose tiling.
Chocolate brown organs pulse slowly under the skeleton. The ground
underfoot is dry but feels swampy.
Actually, the Slug is a surgical disguise. Both it and the
quasi-fungal ecosystem have been extinct for millions of years,
existing only as cheap stage props in an interstellar medicine show
run by rogue financial instruments. The Slug itself is one such
self-aware scam, probably a pyramid scheme or even an entire
compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to hide from
its creditors by masquerading as a life-form. But there’s a problem
with incarnating itself down in Sirhan’s habitat - the ecosystem it
evolved for is a cool Venusiform, thirty atmospheres of saturated
steam baked under a sky the color of hot lead streaked with yellow
sulphuric acid clouds. The ground is mushy because it’s melting, not
because it’s damp.
“You’re going to have to pick another somatotype,” Amber explains,
laboriously rolling her interface around the red-hot coral reef like a
giant soap bubble. The environmental interface is transparent and
infinitely thin, a discontinuity in the physics model of the
simulation space, mapping signals between the human-friendly
environment on one side and the crushing, roasting hell on the other.
“This one is simply not compatible with any of the supported
environments where we’re going.”
“I am not understanding. Surely I can integrate with the available
worlds of our destination?”
“Uh, things don’t work that way outside cyberspace.” Suddenly Amber is
at a bit of a loss. “The physics model could be supported, but the
energy input to do so would be prohibitive, and you would not be able
to interact as easily with other physics models as we can now.” She
forks a ghost, demonstrates a transient other-Amber in a refrigerated
tank rolling across the Slug’s backyard, crushing coral and hissing
and clanking noisily. “You’d be like this.”
“Your reality is badly constructed, then,” the Slug points out.
“It’s not constructed at all, it just evolved, randomly.” Amber
shrugs. “We can’t exercise the same level of control over the
underlying embedded context that we can over this one. I can’t simply
magic you an interface that will let you bathe in steam at three
hundred degrees.”
“Why not?” asks the Slug. Translation wetware adds a nasty, sharp
rising whine to the question, turning it into a demand.
“It’s a privilege violation,” Amber tries to explain. “The reality
we’re about to enter is, uh, provably consistent. It has to be,
because it’s consistent and stable, and if we could create new local
domains with different rules, they might propagate uncontrollably.
It’s not a good idea, believe me. Do you want to come with us or not?”
“I have no alternative,” the Slug says, slightly sulkily. “But do you
have a body I can use?”
“I think -” Amber stops, suddenly. She snaps her fingers. “Hey, cat!”
A Cheshire grin ripples into view, masked into the domain wall between
the two embedded realities. “Hey, human.”
“Whoa!” Amber takes a backward step from the apparition. “Our friend
here’s got a problem, no suitable downloadable body. Us meat puppets
are all too closely tied to our neural ultrastructure, but you’ve got
a shitload of programmable gate arrays. Can we borrow some?”
“You can do better than that.” Aineko yawns, gathering substance by
the moment. The Slug is rearing up and backing away like an alarmed
sausage: Whatever it perceives in the membrane seems to frighten it.
“I’ve been designing myself a new body. I figured it was time to
change my style for a while. Your corporate scam artist here can
borrow my old template until something better comes up. How’s that?”
“Did you hear that?” Amber asks the Slug. “Aineko is kindly offering
to donate her body to you. Will that do?” Without waiting, she winks
at her cat and taps her heels together, fading out with a whisper and
a smile: “See you on the other side …”
*
It takes several minutes for the Field Circus’s antique transceiver to
download the dozens of avabits occupied by the frozen state vectors of
each of the people running in its simulation engines. Tucked away with
most of them is a resource bundle consisting of their entire sequenced
genome, a bunch of phenotypic and proteome hint markers, and a wish
list of upgrades. Between the gene maps and the hints, there’s enough
data to extrapolate a meat machine. So the festival city’s body shop
goes to work turning out hacked stem cells and fabbing up incubators.
It doesn’t take very long to reincarnate a starshipful of
relativity-lagged humans these days. First, City carves out skeletons
for them (politely ignoring a crudely phrased request to cease and
desist from Pamela, on the grounds that she has no power of attorney),
then squirts osteoclasts into the spongy ersatz bone. They look like
ordinary human stem cells at a distance, but instead of nuclei they
have primitive pinpricks of computronium, blobs of smart matter so
small they’re as dumb as an ancient Pentium, reading a control tape
that is nevertheless better structured than anything Mother Nature
evolved. These heavily optimized fake stem cells - biological robots
in all but name - spawn like cancer, ejecting short-lived anucleated
secondary cells. Then City infuses each mess of quasi-cancerous tissue
with a metric shitload of carrier capsids, which deliver the real
cellular control mechanisms to their target bodies. Within a
megasecond, the almost random churning of the construction ‘bots gives
way to a more controlled process as nanoscale CPUs are replaced by
ordinary nuclei and eject themselves from their host cells, bailing
out via the half-formed renal system - except for those in the central
nervous system, which have a final job to do. Eleven days after the
invitation, the first passengers are being edited into the pattern of
synaptic junctions inside the newly minted skulls.
(This whole process is tediously slow and laughably obsolescent
technology by the standards of the fast-moving core. Down there,
they’d just set up a wake shield in orbit, chill it down to a
fractional Kelvin, whack two coherent matter beams together, teleport
some state information into place, and yank the suddenly materialized
meatbody in through an airlock before it has time to asphyxiate. But
then again, down in the hot space, they don’t have much room for flesh
anymore …)
Sirhan doesn’t pay much attention to the pseudocancers fermenting and
churning in the row of tanks that lines the Gallery of the Human Body
in the Bush wing of the museum. Newly formed, slowly unskeletonizing
corpses - like a time-lapse process of decay with a finger angrily
twisting the dial into high-speed reverse - is both distasteful and
aesthetically displeasing to watch. Nor do the bodies tell him
anything about their occupants. This sort of stuff is just a necessary
prequel to the main event, a formal reception and banquet to which he
has devoted the full-time attention of four ghosts.
He could, given a few less inhibitions, go Dumpster-diving in their
mental archives, but that’s one of the big taboos of the post-wetware
age. (Spy agencies went meme-profiling and memory-mining in the third
and fourth decades, gained a thought police rap sheet, and spawned a
backlash of deviant mental architectures resilient to infowar
intrusions. Now the nations that those spook institutions served no
longer exist, their very landmasses being part of the orbiting
n�osphere construction project that will ultimately turn the mass of
the entire solar system into a gigantic Matrioshka brain. And Sirhan
is left with an uneasy loyalty to the one great new taboo to be
invented since the end of the twentieth century - freedom of thought.)
So, to indulge his curiosity, he spends most of his waking fleshbody
hours with Pamela, asking her questions from time to time and mapping
the splenetic overspill of her memeome into his burgeoning family
knowledge base.
“I wasn’t always this bitter and cynical,” Pamela explains, waving her
cane in the vague direction of the cloudscape beyond the edge of the
world and fixing Sirhan with a beady stare. (He’s brought her out here
hoping that it will trigger another cascade of memories, sunsets on
honeymoon island resorts and the like, but all that seems to be coming
up is bile.) “It was the successive betrayals. Manfred was the first,
and the worst in some ways, but that little bitch Amber hurt me more,
if anything. If you ever have children, be careful to hold something
back for yourself; because if you don’t, when they throw it all in
your face, you’ll feel like dying. And when they’re gone, you’ve got
no way of patching things up.”
“Is dying inevitable?” asks Sirhan, knowing damn well that it isn’t,
but more than happy to give her an excuse to pick at her scabbed-over
love wound: He more than half suspects she’s still in love with
Manfred. This is great family history, and he’s having the time of his
flinty-hearted life leading her up to the threshold of the reunion
he’s hosting.
“Sometimes I think death is even more inevitable than taxes,” his
grandmother replies bleakly. “Humans don’t live in a vacuum; we’re
part of a larger pattern of life.” She stares out across the
troposphere of Saturn, where a thin rime of blown methane snow catches
the distant sunrise in a ruby-tinted fog. “The old gives way to the
new,” She sighs, and tugs at her cuffs. (Ever since the incident with
the gate crashing ape, she’s taken to wearing an antique formal
pressure suit, all clinging black spidersilk woven with flexible pipes
and silvery smart sensor nets.) “There’s a time to get out of the way
of the new, and I think I passed it sometime ago.”
“Um,” says Sirhan, who is somewhat surprised by this new angle in her
lengthy, self-justifying confession: “but what if you’re just saying
this because you feel old? If it’s just a physiological malfunction,
we could fix it and you’d -”
“No! I’ve got a feeling that life prolongation is morally wrong,
Sirhan. I’m not passing judgment on you, just stating that I think
it’s wrong for me. It’s immoral because it blocks up the natural
order, keeps us old cobweb strands hanging around and getting in you
young things’ way. And then there are the theological questions. If
you try to live forever, you never get to meet your maker.”
“Your maker? Are you a theist, then?”
“I - think so.” Pamela is silent for a minute. “Although there are so
many different approaches to the subject that it’s hard to know which
version to believe. For a long time, I was secretly afraid your
grandfather might actually have had the answers. That I might have
been wrong all along. But now -” She leans on her cane. “When he
announced that he was uploading, I figured out that all he really had
was a life-hating antihuman ideology he’d mistaken for a religion. The
rapture of the nerds and the heaven of the AIs. Sorry, no thanks; I
don’t buy it.”
“Oh.” Sirhan squints out at the cloudscape. For a moment, he thinks he
can see something in the distant mist, an indeterminate distance away
- it’s hard to distinguish centimeters from megameters, with no scale
indicator and a horizon a continental distance away - but he’s not
sure what it is. Maybe another city, mollusk-curved and sprouting
antennae, a strange tail of fabricator nodes wavering below and
beneath it. Then a drift of cloud hides it for a moment, and, when it
clears the object is gone. “What’s left, then? If you don’t really
believe in some kind of benign creator, dying must be frightening.
Especially as you’re doing it so slowly.”
Pamela smiles skeletally, a particularly humorless expression. “It’s
perfectly natural, darling! You don’t need to believe in God to
believe in embedded realities. We use them every day, as mind tools.
Apply anthropic reasoning and isn’t it clear that our entire universe
is probably a simulation? We’re living in the early epoch of the
universe. Probably this” - she prods at the spun-diamond inner wall of
the bubble that holds in the precarious terrestrial atmosphere,
holding out the howling cryogenic hydrogen and methane gales of Saturn
- “is but a simulation in some ancient history engine’s panopticon,
rerunning the sum of all possible origins of sentience, a billion
trillion megayears down the line. Death will be like waking up as
someone bigger, that’s all.” Her grin slides away. “And if not, I’ll
just be a silly old fool who deserves the oblivion she yearns for.”
“Oh, but -” Sirhan stops, his skin crawling. She may be mad, he
realizes abruptly. Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire
universe. Locked into a pathological view of her own role in reality.
“I’d hoped for a reconciliation,” he says quietly. “Your extended
family has lived through some extraordinary times. Why spoil it with
acrimony?”
“Why spoil it?” She looks at him pityingly: “It was spoiled to begin
with, dear, too much selfless sacrifice and too little skepticism. If
Manfred hadn’t wanted so badly not to be human, and if I’d learned to
be a bit more flexible in time, we might still -” She trails off.
“That’s odd.”
“What is?”
Pamela raises her cane and points out into the billowing methane
thunderclouds, her expression puzzled. “I’ll swear I saw a lobster out
there …”
*
Amber awakens in the middle of the night in darkness and choking
pressure, and senses that she’s drowning. For a moment she’s back in
the ambiguous space on the far side of the router, a horror of
crawling instruments tracing her every experience back to the nooks
and crannies of her mind; then her lungs turn to glass and shatter,
and she’s coughing and wheezing in the cold air of the museum at
midnight.
The hard stone floor beneath her, and an odd pain in her knees, tells
her that she’s not aboard the Field Circus anymore. Rough hands hold
her shoulders up as she vomits a fine blue mist, racked by a coughing
fit. More bluish liquid is oozing from the pores of the skin on her
arms and breasts, evaporating in strangely purposeful streamers.
“Thank you,” she finally manages to gasp: “I can breathe now.”
She sits back on her heels, realizes she’s naked, and opens her eyes.
Everything’s confusingly strange, even though it shouldn’t be. There’s
a moment of resistance as if her eyelids are sealed - then they
respond. It all feels strangely familiar to her, like waking up again
inside a house she grew up in and moved away from years ago. But the
scene around her is hardly one to inspire confidence. Shadows lie
thick and deep across ovoid tanks filled with an anatomist’s dream,
bodies in various nightmarish stages of assembly. And sitting in the
middle of them, whence it has retreated after letting go of her
shoulders, is a strangely misshapen person - also nude, but for a
patchy coat of orange hair.
“Are you awake yet, ma ch�rie?” asks the orangutan.
“Um.” Amber shakes her head, cautiously, feeling the drag of damp
hair, the faint caress of a breeze - she reaches out with another
sense and tries to grab hold of reality, but it slithers away,
intransigent and unembedded. Everything around her is so solid and
immutable that, for a moment, she feels a stab of claustrophobic
panic: Help! I’m trapped in the real universe! Another quick check
reassures her that she’s got access to something outside her own head,
and the panic begins to subside: Her exocortex has migrated
successfully to this world. “I’m in a museum? On Saturn? Who are you -
have we met?”
“Not in person,” the ape says carefully. “We ‘ave corresponded.
Annette Dimarcos.”
“Auntie -” A flood of memories rattle Amber’s fragile stream of
consciousness apart, forcing her to fork repeatedly until she can drag
them together. Annette, in a recorded message: Your father sends you
this escape package. The legal key to her mother’s gilded custodial
cage. Freedom a necessity. “Is Dad here?” she asks hopefully, even
though she knows full well that here in the real world at least
thirty-five years have passed in linear time: In a century where ten
years of linear time is enough for several industrial revolutions,
that’s a lot of water under the bridge.
“I am not sure.” The orangutan blinks lazily, scratches at her left
forearm, and glances round the chamber. “He might be in one of these
tanks, playing a shell game. Or he might be leaving well enough alone
until the dust settles.” She turns back to stare at Amber with big,
brown, soulful eyes. “This is not to be the reunion you were hoping
for.”
“Not -” Amber takes a deep breath, the tenth or twelfth that these new
lungs have inspired: “What’s with the body? You used to be human. And
what’s going on?”
“I still am human, where it counts,” says Annette. “I use these bodies
because they are good in low gravity, and they remind me that
meatspace is no longer where I live. And for another reason.” She
gestures fluidly at the open door. “You will find big changes. Your
son has organized -”
“My son.” Amber blinks. “Is this the one who’s suing me? Which version
of me? How long ago?” A torrent of questions stream through her mind,
exploding out into structured queries throughout the public sections
of mindspace that she has access to. Her eyes widen as she absorbs the
implications. “Oh shit! Tell me she isn’t here already!”
“I am very much afraid that she is,” says Annette. “Sirhan is a
strange child: He takes after his grandm�re. Who he, of course,
invited to his party.”
“His party?”
“Why, yes! Hasn’t he told you what this is about? It’s his party. To
mark the opening of his special institution. The family archive. He’s
setting the lawsuit aside, at least for the duration. That’s why
everybody is here - even me.” The ape-body smirks at her: “I’m afraid
he’s rather disappointed by my dress.”
“Tell me about this library,” Amber says, narrowing her eyes. “And
about this son of mine whom I’ve never met, by a father I’ve never
fucked.”
“What, you would know everything?” asks Annette.
“Yeah.” Amber pushes herself creakily upright. “I need some clothes.
And soft furniture. And where do I get a drink around here?”
“I’ll show you,” says the orangutan, unfolding herself in a vertical
direction like a stack of orange furry inner tubes. “Drinks, first.”
*
While the Boston Museum of Science is the main structure on the
lily-pad habitat, it’s not the only one: just the stupidest, composed
of dumb matter left over from the pre-enlightened age. The orangutan
leads Amber through a service passage and out into the temperate
night, naked by ringlight. The grass is cool beneath her feet, and a
gentle breeze blows constantly out toward the recirculators at the
edge of the worldlet. She follows the slouching orange ape up a grassy
slope, under a weeping willow, round a three-hundred-and-ninety-degree
bend that flashes the world behind them into invisibility, and into a
house with walls of spun cloud stuff and a ceiling that rains
moonlight.
“What is this?” Amber asks, entranced. “Some kind of aerogel?”
“No -” Annette belches, then digs a hand into the floor and pulls up a
heap of mist. “Make a chair,” she says. It solidifies, gaining form
and texture until a creditable Queen Anne reproduction stands in front
of Amber on spindly legs. “And one for me. Skin up, pick one of my
favorite themes.” The walls recede slightly and harden, extruding
paint and wood and glass. “That’s it.” The ape grins at Amber. “You
are comfortable?”
“But I -” Amber stops. She glances at the familiar mantelpiece, the
row of curios, the baby photographs forever glossy on their dye-sub
media. It’s her childhood bedroom. “You brought the whole thing? Just
for me?”
“You can never tell with future shock.” Annette shrugs and reaches a
limber arm around the back of her neck to scratch. “We are utility fog
using, for most purposes out here, peer-to-peer meshes of multiarmed
assemblers that change conformation and vapor/solid phase at command.
Texture and color are all superfice, not reality. But yes, this came
from one of your mother’s letters to your father. She brought it here,
for you to surprise. If only it is ready in time.” Lips pull back from
big, square, foliage-chewing teeth in something that might be a smile
in a million years’ time.
“You, I - I wasn’t expecting. This.” Amber realizes she’s breathing
rapidly, a near-panic reflex. The mere proximity of her mother is
enough to give her unpleasant reactions. Annette is all right, Annette
is cool. And her father is the trickster-god, always hiding in your
blind spot to leap out and shower you with ambiguous gifts. But Pamela
tried to mold Amber in her own image as a child; and despite all the
traveling she’s done since then, and all the growing up, Amber harbors
an unreasonable claustrophobic fear of her mother.
“Don’t be unhappy,” Annette says warmly. “I this you show to convince
you, she will try to disturb you. It is a sign of weakness, she lacks
the courage of her convictions.”
“She does?” This is news to Amber, who leans forward to listen.
“Yes. She is an old and bitter woman, now. The years have not been
easy for her. She perhaps intends to use her unrepaired senescence as
a passive suicide weapon by which to hold us blameworthy, inflicting
guilt for her mistreatment, but she is afraid of dying all the same.
Your reaction, should it be unhappy, will excuse and encourage her
selfishness. Sirhan colludes, unknowing, the idiot child. He thinks
the universe of her and thinks by helping her die he is helping her
achieve her goals. He has never met an adult walking backward toward a
cliff before.”
“Backward.” Amber takes a deep breath. “You’re telling me Mom is so
unhappy she’s trying to kill herself by growing old? Isn’t that a bit
slow?”
Annette shakes her head lugubriously. “She’s had fifty years to
practice. You have been away twenty-eight years! She was thirty when
she bore you. Now she is over eighty, and a telomere refusenik, a
charter member of the genome conservation front. To accept a slow
virus purge and aging reset would be to lay down a banner she has
carried for half a century. To accept uploading, that, too, is wrong
in her mind: She will not admit her identity is a variable, not a
constant. She came out here in a can, frozen, with more radiation
damage. She is not going back home. This is where she plans to end her
days. Do you see? That is why you were brought here. That, and because
of the bailiffs who have bought title to your other self’s business
debts. They are waiting for you in Jupiter system with warrants and
headsuckers to extract your private keys.”
“She’s cornered me!”
“Oh, I would not say that. We all change our convictions sometime or
other, perhaps. She is inflexible, she will not bend; but she is not
stupid. Nor is she as vindictive as perhaps she herself believes. She
thinks she must a scorned woman be, even though there is more to her
than that. Your father and I, we -”
“Is he still alive?” Amber demands eagerly, half-anxious to know,
half-wishing she could be sure the news won’t be bad.
“Yes.” Annette grins again, but it’s not a happy expression, more a
baring of teeth at the world. “As I was saying, your father and I, we
have tried to help her. Pamela denies him. He is, she says, not a man.
No more so am I myself a woman? No, but she’ll still talk to me. You
will do better. But his assets, they are spent. He is not a rich man
this epoch, your father.”
“Yeah, but.” Amber nods to herself. “He may be able to help me.”
“Oh? How so?”
“You remember the original goal of the Field Circus? The sapient alien
transmission?”
“Yes, of course.” Annette snorts. “Junk bond pyramid schemes from
credulous saucer wisdom airheads.”
Amber licks her lips. “How susceptible to interception are we here?”
“Here?” Annette glances round. “Very. You can’t maintain a habitat in
a nonbiosphere environment without ubiquitous surveillance.”
“Well, then …”
Amber dives inward, forks her identity, collects a complex bundle of
her thoughts and memories, marshals them, offers Annette one end of an
encryption tunnel, then stuffs the frozen mindstorm into her head.
Annette sits still for approximately ten seconds, then shudders and
whimpers quietly. “You must ask your father,” she says, growing
visibly agitated. “I must leave, now. I should not have known that! It
is dynamite, you see. Political dynamite. I must return to my primary
sister-identity and warn her.”
“Your - wait!” Amber stands up as fast as her ill-coordinated body
will let her, but Annette is moving fast, swarming up a translucent
ladder in the air.
“Tell Manfred!” calls her aunt through the body of an ape: “Trust no
one else!” She throws another packet of compressed, encrypted memories
down the tunnel to Amber; then, a moment later, the orange skull
touches the ceiling and dissolves, a liquid flow of dissociating
utility foglets letting go of one another and dispersing into the
greater mass of the building that spawned the fake ape.
*
Snapshots from the family album: While you were gone …
* Amber, wearing a brocade gown and a crown encrusted with diamond
processors and external neural taps, her royal party gathered
around her, attends the pan-Jovian constitutional conference with
the majesty of a confirmed head of state and ruler of a small
inner moon. She smiles knowingly at the camera viewpoint, with the
professional shine that comes from a good public relations video
filter. “We are very happy to be here,” she says, “and we are
pleased that the commission has agreed to lend its weight to the
continued progress of the Ring Imperium’s deep-space program.”
* A piece of dumb paper, crudely stained with letters written in a
faded brown substance - possibly blood - says “I’m checking out,
don’t delta me.” This version of Pierre didn’t go to the router:
He stayed at home, deleted all his backups, and slit his wrists,
his epitaph sharp and self-inflicted. It comes as a cold shock,
the first chill gust of winter’s gale blowing through the outer
system’s political elite. And it’s the start of a regime of
censorship directed toward the already speeding starwhisp: Amber,
in her grief, makes an executive decision not to tell her embassy
to the stars that one of them is dead and, therefore, unique.
* Manfred - fifty, with the fashionably pale complexion of the
digerati, healthy-looking for his age, standing beside a
transmigration bush with a stupid grin on his face. He’s decided
to take the final step, not simply to spawn external mental
processes running in an exocortex of distributed processors, but
to move his entire persona right out of meatspace, into wherever
it is that the uploads aboard the Field Circus have gone. Annette,
skinny, elegant, and very Parisian, stands beside him, looking as
uncertain as the wife of a condemned man.
* A wedding, shi’ite, Mut’ah - of limited duration. It’s scandalous
to many, but the mamtu’ah isn’t moslem, she wears a crown instead
of a veil, and her groom is already spoken of in outraged terms by
most other members of the trans-Martian Islamic clergy. Besides
which, in addition to being in love, the happy couple have more
strategic firepower than a late-twentieth-century superpower.
Their cat, curled at their feet, looks smug: She’s the custodian
of the permissive action locks on the big lasers.
* A speck of ruby light against the darkness - red-shifted almost
into the infrared, it’s the return signal from the Field Circus’s
light sail as the starwhisp passes the one-light-year mark, almost
twelve trillion kilometers out beyond Pluto. (Although how can you
call it a starwhisp when it masses almost a hundred kilograms,
including propulsion module? Starwhisps are meant to be tiny!)
* Collapse of the trans-Lunar economy: Deep in the hot thinking
depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new
theory of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than
the previously pervasive Free Market 1.0. With no local minima to
hamper them, and no need to spawn and reap startups Darwin-style,
the companies, group minds, and organizations that adopt the
so-called Accelerated Salesman Infrastructure of Economics 2.0
trade optimally with each other. The phase change accelerates as
more and more entities join in, leveraging network externalities
to overtake the traditional ecosystem. Amber and Sadeq are late on
the train, Sadeq obsessing about how to reconcile ASI with
murabaha and mudaraba while the postmodern economy of the
mid-twenty-first century disintegrates around them. Being late has
punitive consequences - the Ring Imperium has always been a net
importer of brainpower and a net exporter of gravitational
potential energy. Now it’s a tired backwater, the bit rate from
the red-shifted relativisitic probe insufficiently delightful to
obsess the daemons of industrial routing. In other words, they’re
poor.
* A message from beyond the grave: The travelers aboard the starship
have reached their destination, an alien artifact drifting in
chilly orbit around a frozen brown dwarf. Recklessly they upload
themselves into it, locking the starwhisp down for years of sleep.
Amber and her husband have few funds with which to pay for the
propulsion lasers: what they have left of the kinetic energy of
the Ring Imperium - based on the orbital momentum of a small
Jovian inner moon - is being sapped, fast, at a near-loss, by the
crude requirements of the exobionts and metanthropes who fork and
spawn in the datasphere of the outer Jovians. The cost of
importing brains to the Ring Imperium is steep: In near-despair
Amber and Sadeq produce a child, Generation 3.0, to populate their
dwindling kingdom. Picture the cat, offended, lashing its tail
beside the zero-gee crib.
* Surprise and postcards from the inner orbitals - Amber’s mother
offers to help. For the sake of the child, Sadeq offers bandwidth
and user interface enrichment. The child forks, numerous times, as
Amber despairingly plays with probabilities, simulating upbringing
outcomes. Neither she nor Sadeq are good parents - the father
absentminded and prone to lose himself in the intertextual
deconstruction of surahs, the mother ragged-edged from running the
economy of a small and failing kingdom. In the space of a decade,
Sirhan lives a dozen lives, discarding identities like old
clothes. The uncertainty of life in the decaying Ring Imperium
does not entrance him, his parents’ obsessions annoy him, and when
his grandmother offers to fund his delta vee and subsequent
education in one of the orbitals around Titan, his parents give
their reluctant assent.
* Amber and Sadeq separate acrimoniously. Sadeq, studies abandoned
in the face of increasing intrusions from the world of what is
into the universe of what should be, joins a spacelike sect of
sufis, encysted in a matrix of vitrification nanomechs out in the
Oort cloud to await a better epoch. His instrument of will - the
legal mechanism of his resurrection - specifies that he is waiting
for the return of the hidden, twelfth imam.
* For her part, Amber searches the inner system briefly for word of
her father - but there’s nothing. Isolated and alone, pursued by
accusing debts, she flings herself into a reborganization,
stripping away those aspects of her personality that have brought
her low; in law, her liability is tied to her identity. Eventually
she donates herself to a commune of also-rans, accepting their
personality in return for a total break with the past.
* Without Queen and consort, the Ring Imperium - now unmanned,
leaking breathing gases, running on autonomic control - slowly
deorbits into the Jovian murk, beaming power to the outer moons
until it punches a hole in the cloud deck in a final incandescent
smear of light, the like of which has not been seen since the
Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact.
* Sirhan, engrossed in Saturnalia, is offended by his parents’
failure to make more of themselves. And he resolves to do it for
them, if not necessarily in a manner of their liking.
*
“You see, I am hoping you will help me with my history project,” says
the serious-faced young man.
“History project.” Pierre follows him along the curving gallery, hands
clasped behind his back self-consciously to keep from showing his
agitation: “What history is this?”
“The history of the twenty-first century,” says Sirhan. “You remember
it, don’t you?”
“Remember it -” Pierre pauses. “You’re serious?”
“Yes.” Sirhan opens a side door. “This way, please. I’ll explain.”
The door opens onto what used to be one of the side galleries of the
museum building, full of interactive exhibits designed to explain
elementary optics to hyperactive children and their indulgent parental
units. Traditional optics are long since obsolete - tunable matter can
slow photons to a stop, teleport them here to there, play ping-pong
with spin and polarization - and besides, the dumb matter in the walls
and floor has been replaced by low-power computronium, heat sinks
dangling far below the floor of the lily-pad habitat to dispose of the
scanty waste photons from reversible computation. Now the room is
empty.
“Since I became curator here, I’ve turned the museum’s structural
supports into a dedicated high-density memory store. One of the fringe
benefits of a supervisory post, of course. I have about a billion
avabits of capacity, enough to archive the combined sensory bandwidth
and memories of the entire population of twentieth-century Earth - if
that was what interested me.”
Slowly the walls and ceiling are coming to life, brightening,
providing a dizzyingly vibrant view of dawn over the rim wall of
Meteor Crater, Arizona - or maybe it’s downtown Baghdad.
“Once I realized how my mother had squandered the family fortune, I
spent some time looking for a solution to the problem,” Sirhan
continues. “And it struck me, then, that there’s only one commodity
that is going to appreciate in value as time continues:
reversibility.”
“Reversibility? That doesn’t make much sense.” Pierre shakes his head.
He still feels slightly dizzy from his decanting. He’s only been awake
an hour or so and is still getting used to the vagaries of a universe
that doesn’t bend its rules to fit his whim of iron - that, and
worrying about Amber, of whom there is no sign in the hall of growing
bodies. “Excuse me, please, but do you know where Amber is?”
“Hiding, probably,” Sirhan says, without rancor. “Her mother’s about,”
he adds. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know what you know about us.” Pierre looks at him askance:
“We were aboard the Field Circus for a long time.”
“Oh, don’t worry on my behalf. I know you’re not the same people who
stayed behind to contribute to the Ring Imperium’s collapse,” Sirhan
says dismissively, while Pierre hastily spawns a couple of ghosts to
search for the history he’s alluding to. What they discover shocks him
to the core as they integrate with his conscious narrative.
“We didn’t know about any of that!” Pierre crosses his arms
defensively. “Not about you, or your father either,” he adds quietly.
“Or my other … life.” Shocked: Did I kill myself? Why would I do a
thing like that? Nor can he imagine what Amber might see in an
introverted cleric like Sadeq; not that he wants to.
“I’m sure this must come as a big shock to you,” Sirhan says
condescendingly, “but it’s all to do with what I was talking about.
Reversibility. What does it mean to you, in your precious context? You
are, if you like, an opportunity to reverse whatever ill fortune made
your primary instance autodarwinate himself. He destroyed all the
backups he could get his ghosts to ferret out, you know. Only a
light-year delay line and the fact that as a running instance you’re
technically a different person saved you. And now, you’re alive, and
he’s dead - and whatever made him kill himself doesn’t apply to you.
Think of it as natural selection among different versions of yourself.
The fittest version of you survives.”
He points at the wall of the crater. A tree diagram begins to grow
from the bottom left corner of the wall, recurving and recomplicating
as it climbs toward the top right, zooming and fracturing into
taxonomic fault lines. “Life on Earth, the family tree, what
paleontology has been able to deduce of it for us,” he says pompously.
“The vertebrates begin there” - a point three quarters of the way up
the tree - “and we’ve got an average of a hundred fossil samples per
megayear from then on. Most of them collected in the past two decades,
as exhaustive mapping of the Earth’s crust and upper mantle at the
micrometer level has become practical. What a waste.”
“That’s” - Pierre does a quick sum - “fifty thousand different
species? Is there a problem?”
“Yes!” Sirhan says vehemently, no longer aloof or distant. He
struggles visibly to get himself under control. “At the beginning of
the twentieth century, there were roughly two million species of
vertebrate and an estimated thirty or so million species of
multicellular organisms - it’s hard to apply the same statistical
treatment to prokaryotes, but doubtless there were huge numbers of
them, too. The average life span of a species is about five megayears.
It used to be thought to be about one, but that’s a very
vertebrate-oriented estimate - many insect species are stable over
deep time. Anyway, we have a total sample, from all of history, of
only fifty thousand known prehistoric species - out of a population of
thirty million, turning over every five million years. That is, we
know of only one in a million life-forms, of those that ever existed
on Earth. And the situation with human history is even worse.”
“Aha! So you’re after memoriesy yes? What really happened when we
colonized Barney. Who released Oscar’s toads in the free-fall core of
the Ernst Sanger, that sort of thing?”
“Not exactly.” Sirhan looks pained, as if being forced to spell it out
devalues the significance of his insight. “I’m after history. All of
it. I intend to corner the history futures market. But I need my
grandfather’s help - and you’re here to help me get it.”
*
Over the course of the day, various refugees from the Field Circus
hatch from their tanks and blink in the ringlight, stranded creatures
from an earlier age. The inner system is a vague blur from this
distance, a swollen red cloud masking the sun that rides high above
the horizon. However, the great restructuring is still visible to the
naked eye - here, in the shape of the rings, which show a disturbingly
organized fractal structure as they whirl in orbit overhead. Sirhan
(or whoever is paying for this celebration of family flesh) has
provided for their physical needs: food, water, clothes, housing and
bandwidth, they’re all copiously available. A small town of bubble
homes grows on the grassy knoll adjacent to the museum, utility
foglets condensing in a variety of shapes and styles.
Sirhan isn’t the only inhabitant of the festival city, but the others
keep themselves to themselves. Only bourgeois isolationists and
reclusive weirdoes would want to live out here right now, with whole
light-minutes between themselves and the rest of civilization. The
network of lily-pad habitats isn’t yet ready for the Saturnalian
immigration wave that will break upon this alien shore when it’s time
for the Worlds’ Fair, a decade or more in the future. Amber’s flying
circus has driven the native recluses underground, in some cases
literally: Sirhan’s neighbor, Vinca Kovic, after complaining bitterly
about the bustle and noise (“Forty immigrants! An outrage!”), has
wrapped himself in an environment pod and is estivating at the end of
a spidersilk cable a kilometer beneath the space-frame underpinnings
of the city.
But that isn’t going to stop Sirhan from organizing a reception for
the visitors. He’s moved his magnificent dining table outside, along
with the Argentinosaurus skeleton. In fact, he’s built a dining room
within the dinosaur’s rib cage. Not that he’s planning on showing his
full hand, but it’ll be interesting to see how his guests respond. And
maybe it’ll flush out the mystery benefactor who’s been paying for all
these meatbodies.
Sirhan’s agents politely invite his visitors to the party as the
second sunset in this day cycle gently darkens the sky to violet. He
discusses his plans with Pamela via antique voice-only phone as his
silent valet dresses him with inhuman grace and efficiency. “I’m sure
they’ll listen when the situation is made clear to them,” he says. “If
not, well, they’ll soon find out what it means to be paupers under
Economics 2.0. No access to multiplicity, no willpower, to be limited
to purely spacelike resources, at the mercy of predatory borganisms
and metareligions - it’s no picnic out there!”
“You don’t have the resources to set this up on your own,” his
grandmother points out in dry, didactic tones. “If this was the old
economy, you could draw on the infrastructure of banks, insurers, and
other risk management mechanisms -”
“There’s no risk to this venture, in purely human terms,” Sirhan
insists. “The only risk is starting it up with such a limited
reserve.”
“You win some, you lose some,” Pamela points out. “Let me see you.”
With a sigh, Sirhan waves at a frozen camera; it blinks, surprised.
“Hey, you look good! Every inch the traditional family entrepreneur.
I’m proud of you, darling.”
Blinking back an unaccustomed tear of pride, Sirhan nods. “I’ll see
you in a few minutes,” he says, and cuts the call. To the nearest
valet: “Bring my carriage, now.”
A rippling cloud of utility foglets, constantly connecting and
disconnecting in the hazy outline of a 1910-vintage Rolls Royce Silver
Ghost, bears Sirhan silently away from his wing of the museum. It
drives him out onto the sunset path around the building, over to the
sunken amphitheatre, where the mounted skeleton of the Argentinosaurus
stands like a half-melted columnar sculpture beneath the
orange-and-silver ringlight. A small crowd of people are already
present, some dressed casually and some attired in the formal garb of
earlier decades. Most of them are passengers or crew recently decanted
from the starwhisp, but a handful are wary-eyed hermits, their body
language defensive and their persons the focus of a constant orbital
hum of security bees. Sirhan dismounts from his silvery car and magics
it into dissolution, a haze of foglets dispersing on the breeze.
“Welcome to my abode,” he says, bowing gravely to a ring of interested
faces. “My name is Sirhan al-Khurasani, and I am the prime contractor
in charge of this small corner of the temporary Saturn terraforming
project. As some of you probably know, I am related by blood and
design to your former captain, Amber Macx. I’d like to offer you the
comforts of my home while you acclimatize yourselves to the changed
circumstances prevailing in the system at large and work out where you
want to go next.”
He walks toward the front of the U-shaped table of solidified air that
floats beneath the dead dinosaur’s rib cage, slowly turns to take in
faces, and blinks down captions to remind him who’s who in this
gathering. He frowns slightly; there’s no sign of his mother. But that
wiry fellow, with the beard - surely that can’t be - “Father?” he
asks.
Sadeq blinks owlishly. “Have we met?”
“Possibly not.” Sirhan can feel his head spinning, because although
Sadeq looks like a younger version of his father, there’s something
wrong - some essential disconnect: the politely solicitous expression,
the complete lack of engagement, the absence of paternal involvement.
This Sadeq has never held the infant Sirhan in the control core of the
Ring’s axial cylinder, never pointed out the spiral storm raking vast
Jupiter’s face and told him stories of djinni and marvels to make a
boy’s hair stand on end. “I won’t hold it against you, I promise,” he
blurts.
Sadeq raises an eyebrow but passes no comment, leaving Sirhan at the
center of an uncomfortable silence. “Well then,” he says hastily. “If
you would like to help yourselves to food and drink, there’ll be
plenty of time to talk later.” Sirhan doesn’t believe in forking
ghosts simply to interact with other people - the possibilities for
confusion are embarrassing - but he’s going to be busy working the
party.
He glances round. Here’s a bald, aggressive-looking fellow,
beetle-browed, wearing what looks like a pair of cutoffs and a top
made by deconstructing a space suit. Who’s he? (Sirhan’s agents hint:
“Boris Denisovitch.” But what does that mean?) There’s an
amused-looking older woman, a beady-eyed camera painted in the violent
colors of a bird of paradise riding her shoulder. Behind her a younger
woman, dressed head to toe in clinging black, her currently ash-blonde
hair braided in cornrows, watches him - as does Pierre, a protective
arm around her shoulders. They’re - Amber Macx? That’s his mother? She
looks far too young, too much in love with Pierre. “Amber!” he says,
approaching the couple.
“Yeah? You’re, uh, my mystery child-support litigant?” Her smile is
distinctly unfriendly as she continues: “Can’t say I’m entirely
pleased to meet you, under the circumstances, although I should thank
you for the spread.”
“I -” His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. “It’s not like
that.”
“What’s it supposed to be like?” she asks sharply. jabbing a finger at
him: “You know damn well I’m not your mother. So what’s it all about,
huh? You know damn well I’m nearly bankrupt, too, so it’s not as if
you’re after my pocket lint. What do you want from me?”
Her vehemence takes him aback. This sharp-edged aggressive woman isn’t
his mother, and the introverted cleric - believer - on the other side
isn’t his father, either. “I ha-ha-had to stop you heading for the
inner system,” he says, speech center hitting deadlock before his
antistutter mod can cut in. “They’ll eat you alive down there. Your
other half left behind substantial debts, and they’ve been bought up
by the most predatory - “
“Runaway corporate instruments,” she states, calmly enough. “Fully
sentient and self-directed.”
“How did you know?” he asks, worried.
She looks grim. “I’ve met them before.” It’s a very familiar grim
expression, one he knows intimately, and that feels wrong coming from
this near stranger. “We visited some weird places, while we were
away.” She glances past him, focuses on someone else, and breathes in
sharply as her face goes blank. “Quickly, tell me what your scheme is.
Before Mom gets here.”
“Mind archiving and history mergers. Back yourself up, pick different
life courses, see which ones work and which don’t - no need to be a
failure, just hit the ‘reload game’ icon and resume. That and a
long-term angle on the history futures market. I need your help,” he
babbles. “It won’t work without family, and I’m trying to stop her
killing herself -”
“Family.” She nods, guardedly, and Sirhan notices her companion, this
Pierre - not the weak link that broke back before he was born, but a
tough-eyed explorer newly returned from the wilderness - sizing him
up. Sirhan’s got one or two tricks up his exocortex, and he can see
the haze of ghost-shapes around Pierre; his data-mining technique is
crude and out-of-date, but enthusiastic and not without a certain
flair. “Family,” Amber repeats, and it’s like a curse. Louder: “Hello,
Mom. Should have guessed he’d have invited you here, too.”
“Guess again.” Sirhan glances round at Pamela, then back at Amber,
suddenly feeling very much like a rat trapped between a pair of angry
cobras. Leaning on her cane, wearing discreet cosmetics and with her
medical supports concealed beneath an old-fashioned dress, Pamela
could be a badly preserved sixtysomething from the old days instead of
the ghastly slow suicide case that her condition amounts to today. She
smiles politely at Amber. “You may remember me telling you that a lady
never unintentionally causes offense. I didn’t want to offend Sirhan
by turning up in spite of his wishes, so I didn’t give him a chance to
say no.”
“And this is supposed to earn you a sympathy fuck?” Amber drawls. “I’d
expected better of you.”
“Why, you -” The fire in her eyes dies suddenly, subjected to the
freezing pressure of a control that only comes with age. “I’d hoped
getting away from it all would have improved your disposition, if not
your manners, but evidently not.” Pamela jabs her cane at the table:
“Let me repeat, this is your son’s idea. Why don’t you eat something?”
“Poison tester goes first.” Amber smiles slyly.
“For fuck’s sake!” It’s the first thing Pierre has said so far, and
crude or not, it comes as a profound relief when he steps forward,
picks up a plate of water biscuits loaded with salmon caviar, and puts
one in his mouth. “Can’t you guys leave the back stabbing until the
rest of us have filled our stomachs? ‘S not as if I can turn down the
biophysics model in here.” He shoves the plate at Sirhan. “Go on, it’s
yours.”
The spell is broken. “Thank you,” Sirhan says gravely, taking a
cracker and feeling the tension fall as Amber and her mother stop
preparing to nuke each other and focus on the issue at hand - which is
that food comes before fighting at any social event, not vice versa.
“You might enjoy the egg mayonnaise, too,” Sirhan hears himself
saying: “It goes a long way to explaining why the dodo became extinct
first time around.”
“Dodoes.” Amber keeps one eye warily on her mother as she accepts a
plate from a silently gliding silver bush-shaped waitron. “What was
that about the family investment project?” she asks.
“Just that without your cooperation your family will likely go the way
of the bird,” her mother cuts in before Sirhan can muster a reply.
“Not that I expect you to care.”
Boris butts in. “Core worlds are teeming with corporates. Is bad
business for us, good business for them. If you are seeing what we are
seen -”
“Don’t remember you being there,” Pierre says grumpily.
“In any event,” Sirhan says smoothly, “the core isn’t healthy for us
one-time fleshbodies anymore. There are still lots of people there,
but the ones who uploaded expecting a boom economy were sadly
disappointed. Originality is at a premium, and the human neural
architecture isn’t optimized for it - we are, by disposition, a
conservative species, because in a static ecosystem, that provides the
best return on sunk reproductive investment costs. Yes, we change over
time - we’re more flexible than almost any other animal species to
arise on Earth - but we’re like granite statues compared to organisms
adapted to life under Economics 2.0.”
“You tell ‘em, boy,” Pamela chirps, almost mockingly. “It wasn’t that
bloodless when I lived through it.” Amber casts her a cool stare.
“Where was I?” Sirhan snaps his fingers, and a glass of fizzy grape
juice appears between them. “Early upload entrepreneurs forked
repeatedly, discovered they could scale linearly to occupy processor
capacity proportional to the mass of computronium available, and that
computationally trivial tasks became tractable. They could also run
faster, or slower, than real time. But they were still human, and
unable to operate effectively outside human constraints. Take a human
being and bolt on extensions that let them take full advantage of
Economics 2.0, and you essentially break their narrative chain of
consciousness, replacing it with a journal file of bid/request
transactions between various agents; it’s incredibly efficient and
flexible, but it isn’t a conscious human being in any recognizable
sense of the word.”
“All right,” Pierre says slowly. “I think we’ve seen something like
that ourselves. At the router.”
Sirhan nods, not sure whether he’s referring to anything important.
“So you see, there are limits to human progress - but not to progress
itself! The uploads found their labor to be a permanently deflating
commodity once they hit their point of diminishing utility. Capitalism
doesn’t have a lot to say about workers whose skills are obsolete,
other than that they should invest wisely while they’re earning and
maybe retrain: but just knowing how to invest in Economics 2.0 is
beyond an unaugmented human. You can’t retrain as a seagull, can you,
and it’s quite as hard to retool for Economics 2.0. Earth is -” He
shudders.
“There’s a phrase I used to hear in the old days,” Pamela says calmly,
“ethnic cleansing. Do you know what that means, darling idiot
daughter? You take people who you define as being of little worth, and
first you herd them into a crowded ghetto with limited resources, then
you decide those resources aren’t worth spending on them, and bullets
are cheaper than bread. ‘Mind children’ the extropians called the
posthumans, but they were more like Vile Offspring. There was a lot of
that, during the fast sigmoid phase. Starving among plenty, compulsory
conversions, the very antithesis of everything your father said he
wanted …”
“I don’t believe it,” Amber says hotly. “That’s crazy! We can’t go the
way of -”
“Since when has human history been anything else?” asks the woman with
the camera on her shoulder - Donna, being some sort of public
archivist, is in Sirhan’s estimate likely to be of use to him.
“Remember what we found in the DMZ?”
“The DMZ?” Sirhan asks, momentarily confused.
“After we went through the router,” Pierre says grimly. “You tell him,
love.” He looks at Amber.
Sirhan, watching him, feels it fall into place at that moment, a sense
that he’s stepped into an alternate universe, one where the woman who
might have been his mother isn’t, where black is white, his kindly
grandmother is the wicked witch of the west, and his feckless
grandfather is a farsighted visionary.
“We uploaded via the router,” Amber says, and looks confused for a
moment. “There’s a network on the other side of it. We were told it
was FTL, instantaneous, but I’m not so sure now. I think it’s
something more complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which
are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from our
perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a
technological singularity - they’re bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later
the posthuman descendants evolve Economics 2.0, or 3.0, or something
else and it, uh, eats the original conscious instigators. Or uses them
as currency or something. The end result we found is a howling
wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious
processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for
processing power. We were” - she licks her lips - “lucky to escape
with our minds. We only did it because of a friend. It’s like the main
sequence in stellar evolution; once a G-type star starts burning
helium and expands into a red giant, it’s ‘game over’ for life in what
used to be its liquid-water zone. Conscious civilizations sooner or
later convert all their available mass into computronium, powered by
solar output. They don’t go interstellar because they want to stay
near the core where the bandwidth is high and latency is low, and
sooner or later, competition for resources hatches a new level of
metacompetition that obsoletes them.”
“That sounds plausible,” Sirhan says slowly. He puts his glass down
and chews distractedly on one knuckle. “I thought it was a
low-probability outcome, but …”
“I’ve been saying all along, your grandfather’s ideas would backfire
in the end,” Pamela says pointedly.
“But -” Amber shakes her head. “There’s more to it than that, isn’t
there?”
“Probably,” Sirhan says, then shuts up.
“So are you going to tell us?” asks Pierre, looking annoyed. “What’s
the big idea, here?”
“An archive store,” Sirhan says, deciding that this is the right time
for his pitch. “At the lowest level, you can store backups of
yourself here. So far so good, eh? But there’s a bit more to it than
that. I’m planning to offer a bunch of embedded universes - big,
running faster than realtime - sized and scoped to let
human-equivalent intelligences do what-if modeling on themselves. Like
forking off ghosts of yourself, but much more so - give them whole
years to diverge, learn new skills, and evaluate them against market
requirements, before deciding which version of you is most suited to
run in the real world. I mentioned the retraining paradox. Think of
this as a solution for level one, human-equivalent, intelligences. But
that’s just the short-term business model. Long-term, I want to
acquire a total lock on the history futures market by having a
complete archive of human experiences, from the dawn of the fifth
singularity on up. No more unknown extinct species. That should give
us something to trade with the next-generation intelligences - the
ones who aren’t our mind children and barely remember us. At the very
least, it gives us a chance to live again, a long way out in deep
time. Alternatively, it can be turned into a lifeboat. If we can’t
compete with our creations, at least we’ve got somewhere to flee,
those of us who want to. I’ve got agents working on a comet, out in
the Oort cloud - we could move the archive to it, turn it into a
generation ship with room for billions of evacuees running much slower
than realtime in archive space until we find a new world to settle.”
“Is not sounding good to me,” Boris comments. He spares a worried
glance for an oriental-looking woman who is watching their debate
silently from the fringe.
“Has it really gone that far?” asks Amber.
“There are bailiffs hunting you in the inner system,” Pamela says
bluntly. “After your bankruptcy proceedings, various corporates got
the idea that you might be concealing something. The theory was that
you were insane to take such a huge gamble on the mere possibility of
there being an alien artifact within a few light-years of home, so you
had to have information above and beyond what you disclosed. Theories
include your cat - hardware tokens were in vogue in the fifties -
being the key to a suite of deposit accounts; the fuss mainly died
down after Economics 2.0 took over, but some fairly sleazy conspiracy
freaks refuse to let go.”
She grins, frighteningly. “Which is why I suggested to your son that
he make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
“What’s that?” asks a voice from below knee level.
Pamela looks down, an expression of deep distaste on her face. “Why
should I tell you?” she asks, leaning on her cane: “After the
disgraceful way you repaid my hospitality! All you’ve got coming from
me is a good kicking. If only my knee was up to the job.”
The cat arches its back: Its tail fluffs out with fear as its hair
stands on end, and it takes Amber a moment to realize that it isn’t
responding to Pamela, but to something behind the old woman. “Through
the domain wall. Outside this biome. So cold. What’s that?”
Amber turns to follow the cat’s gaze, and her jaw drops. “Were you
expecting visitors?” she asks Sirhan, shakily.
“Visit -” He looks round to see what everybody’s gaping at and
freezes. The horizon is brightening with a false dawn: the fusion
spark of a deorbiting spacecraft.
“It’s bailiffs,” says Pamela, head cocked to one side as if listening
to an antique bone-conduction earpiece. “They’ve come for your
memories, dear,” she explains, frowning. “They say we’ve got five
kiloseconds to surrender everything. Otherwise, they’re going to blow
us apart …”
*
“You’re all in big trouble,” says the orangutan, sliding gracefully
down one enormous rib to land in an ungainly heap in front of Sirhan.
Sirhan recoils in disgust. “You again! What do you want from me this
time?”
“Nothing.” The ape ignores him: “Amber, it is time for you to call
your father.”
“Yeah, but will he come when I call?” Amber stares at the ape. Her
pupils expand: “Hey, you’re not my -”
“You.” Sirhan glares at the ape. “Go away! I didn’t invite you here!”
“More unwelcome visitors?” asks Pamela, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes, you did.” The ape grins at Amber, then crouches down, hoots
quietly and beckons tothe cat, who is hiding behind one of the
graceful silver servitors.
“Manfred isn’t welcome here. And neither is that woman,” Sirhan
swears. He catches Pamela’s eye: “Did you know anything about this? Or
about the bailiffs?” He gestures at the window, beyond which the drive
flare casts jagged shadows. It’s dropping toward the horizon as it
deorbits - next time it comes into view, it’ll be at the leading edge
of a hypersonic shock wave, streaking toward them at cloud top height
in order to consummate the robbery.
“Me?” Pamela snorts. “Grow up.” She eyes the ape warily. “I don’t have
that much control over things. And as for bailiffs, I wouldn’t set
them on my worst enemies. I’ve seen what those things can do.” For a
moment her eyes flash anger: “Grow up, why don’t you!” she repeats.
“Yes, please do,” says another voice from behind Sirhan. The new
speaker is a woman, slightly husky, accented - he turns to see her:
tall, black-haired, wearing a dark man’s suit of archaic cut and
mirrored glasses. “Ah, Pamela, ma ch�rie! Long time no cat fight.” She
grins frighteningly and holds out a hand.
Sirhan is already off-balance. Now, seeing his honorary aunt in human
skin for a change, he looks at the ape in confusion. Behind him Pamela
advances on Annette and takes her hand in her own fragile fingers.
“You look just the same,” she says gravely. “I can see why I was
afraid of you.”
“You.” Amber backs away until she bumps into Sirhan, at whom she
glares. “What the fuck did you invite both of them for? Are you trying
to start a thermonuclear war?”
“Don’t ask me,” he says helplessly, “I don’t know why they came!
What’s this about -” He focuses on the orangutan, who is now letting
the cat lick one hairy palm. “Your cat?”
“I don’t think the orange hair suits Aineko,” Amber says slowly. “Did
I tell you about our hitchhiker?”
Sirhan shakes his head, trying to dispel the confusion. “I don’t think
we’ve got time. In under two hours the bailiffs up there will be back.
They’re armed and dangerous, and if they turn their drive flame on the
roof and set fire to the atmosphere in here, we’ll be in trouble - it
would rupture our lift cells, and even computronium doesn’t work too
well under a couple of million atmospheres of pressurized metallic
hydrogen.”
“Well, you’d better make time.” Amber takes his elbow in an iron grip
and turns him toward the footpath back to the museum. “Crazy,” she
mutters. “Tante Annette and Pamela Macx on the same planet! And
they’re being friendly! This can’t be a good sign.” She glances round,
sees the ape: “You. Come here. Bring the cat.”
“The cat’s -” Sirhan trails off. “I’ve heard about your cat,” he says,
lamely. “You took him with you in the Field Circus.”
“Really?” She glances behind them. The ape blows a kiss at her; it’s
cradling the cat on one shoulder and tickling it under the chin. “Has
it occurred to you that Aineko isn’t just a robot cat?”
“Ah,” Sirhan says faintly. “Then the bailiffs -”
“No, that’s all bullshit. What I mean is, Aineko is a
human-equivalent, or better, artificial intelligence. Why do you think
he keeps a cat’s body?”
“I have no idea.”
“Because humans always underestimate anything that’s small, furry, and
cute,” says the orangutan.
“Thanks, Aineko,” says Amber. She nods at the ape. “How are you
finding it?”
Aineko shambles along, with a purring cat draped over one shoulder,
and gives the question due consideration. “Different,” she says, after
a bit. “Not better.”
“Oh.” Amber sounds slightly disappointed to Sirhan’s confused ears.
They pass under the fronds of a weeping willow, round the side of a
pond, beside an overgrown hibiscus bush, then up to the main entrance
of the museum.
“Annette was right about one thing,” she says quietly. “Trust no one.
I think it’s time to raise Dad’s ghost.” She relaxes her grip on
Sirhan’s elbow, and he pulls it away and glares at her. “Do you know
who the bailiffs are?” she asks.
“The usual.” He gestures at the hallway inside the front doors.
“Replay the ultimatum, if you please, City.”
The air shimmers with an archaic holographic field, spooling the
output from a compressed visual presentation tailored for human
eyesight. A piratical-looking human male wearing a tattered and
much-patched space suit leers at the recording viewpoint from the
pilot’s seat of an ancient Soyuz capsule. One of his eyes is
completely black, the sign of a high-bandwidth implant. A weedy
moustache crawls across his upper lip. “Greetins an’ salutations,” he
drawls. “We is da’ Californi-uhn nashnul gaard an’ we-are got lett-uhz
o’ marque an’ reprise from da’ ledgish-fuckn’ congress o’ da excited
snakes of uhhmerica.”
“He sounds drunk!” Amber’s eyes are wide. “What’s this -”
“Not drunk. CJD is a common side effect of dodgy Economics 2.0 neural
adjuvant therapy. Unlike the old saying, you do have to be mad to work
there. Listen.”
City, which paused the replay for Amber’s outburst, permits it to
continue. “Youse harbbring da’ fugitive Amber Macx an’ her magic cat.
We wan’ da cat. Da puta’s yours. Gotser uno orbit: You ready give us
ther cat an’ we no’ zap you.”
The screen goes dead. “That was a fake, of course,” Sirhan adds,
looking inward where a ghost is merging memories from the city’s
orbital mechanics subsystem: “They aerobraked on the way in, hit
ninety gees for nearly half a minute. While that was sent afterward.
It’s just a machinima avatar, a human body that had been through that
kind of deceleration would be pulped.”
“So the bailiffs are -” Amber is visibly struggling to wrap her head
around the situation.
“They’re not human,” Sirhan says, feeling a sudden pang of - no, not
affection, but the absence of malice will do for the moment - toward
this young woman who isn’t the mother he loves to resent, but who
might have become her in another world. “They’ve absorbed a lot of
what it is to be human, but their corporate roots show. Even though
they run on an hourly accounting loop, rather than one timed for the
production cycles of dirt-poor Sumerian peasant farmers, and even
though they’ve got various ethics and business practice patches, at
root they’re not human: They’re limited liability companies.”
“So what do they want?” asks Pierre, making Sirhan jump, guiltily. He
hadn’t realized Pierre could move that quietly.
“They want money. Money in Economy 2.0 is quantized originality - that
which allows one sentient entity to outmaneuver another. They think
your cat has got something, and they want it. They probably wouldn’t
mind eating your brains, too, but -” He shrugs. “Obsolete food is
stale food.”
“Hah.” Amber looks pointedly at Pierre, who nods at her.
“What?” asks Sirhan.
“Where’s the - uh, cat?” asks Pierre.
“I think Aineko’s got it.” She looks thoughtful. “Are you thinking
what I’m thinking?”
“Time to drop off the hitcher.” Pierre nods. “Assuming it agrees …”
“Do you mind explaining yourselves?” Sirhan asks, barely able to
contain himself.
Amber grins, looking up at the Mercury capsule suspended high
overhead. “The conspiracy theorists were half right. Way back in the
Dark Ages, Aineko cracked the second alien transmission. We had a very
good idea we were going to find something out there, we just weren’t
totally sure exactly what. Anyway, the creature incarnated in that cat
body right now isn’t Aineko - it’s our mystery hitchhiker. A parasitic
organism that infects, well, we ran across something not too
dissimilar to Economics 2.0 out at the router and beyond, and it’s got
parasites. Our hitcher is one such creature - it’s nearest
human-comprehensible analogy would be the Economics 2.0 equivalent of
a pyramid scheme crossed with a 419 scam. As it happens, most of the
runaway corporate ghosts out beyond the router are wise to that sort
of thing, so it hacked the router’s power system to give us a beam to
ride home in return for sanctuary. That’s as far as it goes.”
“Hang on.” Sirhan’s eyes bulge. “You found something out there? You
brought back a reallive alien?”
“Guess so.” Amber looks smug.
“But, but, that’s marvelous! That changes everything! It’s incredible!
Even under Economics 2.0 that’s got to be worth a gigantic amount.
Just think what you could learn from it!”
“Oui. A whole new way of bilking corporations into investing in
cognitive bubbles,” Pierre interrupts cynically. “It seems to me that
you are making two assumptions - that our passenger is willing to be
exploited by us, and that we survive whatever happens when the
bailiffs arrive.”
“But, but -” Sirhan winds down spluttering, only refraining from
waving his arms through an effort of will.
“Let’s go ask it what it wants to do,” says Amber. “Cooperate,” she
warns Sirhan. “We’ll discuss your other plans later, dammit. First
things first - we need to get out from under these pirates.”
*
As they make their way back toward the party, Sirhan’s inbox is
humming with messages from elsewhere in Saturn system - from other
curators on board lily-pad habs scattered far and wide across the huge
planetary atmosphere, from the few ring miners who still remember what
it was like to be human (even though they’re mostly brain-in-a-bottle
types, or uploads wearing nuclear-powered bodies made of ceramic and
metal): even from the small orbital townships around Titan, where
screaming hordes of bloggers are bidding frantically for the viewpoint
feeds of the Field Circus’s crew. It seems that news of the starship’s
arrival has turned hot only since it became apparent that someone or
something thought they would make a decent shakedown target. Now
someone’s blabbed about the alien passenger, the nets have gone crazy.
“City,” he mutters, “where’s this hitchhiker creature? Should be
wearing the body of my mother’s cat.”
“Cat? What cat?” replies City. “I see no cats here.”
“No, it looks like a cat, it -” A horrible thought dawns on him. “Have
you been hacked again?”
“Looks like it,” City agrees enthusiastically. “Isn’t it tiresome?”
“Shi - oh dear. Hey,” he calls to Amber, forking several ghosts as he
does so in order to go hunt down the missing creature by traversing
the thousands of optical sensors that thread the habitat in loco
personae - a tedious process rendered less objectionable by making the
ghosts autistic - “have you been messing with my security
infrastructure?”
“Us?” Amber looks annoyed. “No.”
“Someone has been. I thought at first it was that mad Frenchwoman, but
now I’m not sure. Anyway, it’s a big problem. If the bailiffs figure
out how to use the root kit to gain a toe hold here, they don’t need
to burn us - just take the whole place over.”
“That’s the least of your worries,” Amber points out. “What kind of
charter do these bailiffs run on?”
“Charter? Oh, you mean legal system? I think it’s probably a cheap
one, maybe even the one inherited from the Ring Imperium. Nobody
bothers breaking the law out here these days, it’s too easy to just
buy a legal system off the shelf, tailor it to fit, and conform to
it.”
“Right.” She stops, stands still, and looks up at the almost invisible
dome of the gas cell above them. “Pigeons,” she says, almost tiredly.
“Damn, how did I miss it? How long have you had an infestation of
group minds?”
“Group?” Sirhan turns round. “What did you just say?”
There’s a chatter of avian laughter from above, and a light rain of
birdshit splatters the path around him. Amber dodges nimbly, but
Sirhan isn’t so light on his feet and ends up cursing, summoning up a
cloth of congealed air to wipe his scalp clean.
“It’s the flocking behavior,” Amber explains, looking up. “If you
track the elements - birds - you’ll see that they’re not following
individual trajectories. Instead, each pigeon sticks within ten meters
or so of sixteen neighbors. It’s a Hamiltonian network, kid. Real
birds don’t do that. How long?”
Sirhan stop cursing and glares up at the circling birds, cooing and
mocking him from the safety of the sky. He waves his fist: “I’ll get
you, see if I don’t -”
“I don’t think so.” Amber takes his elbow again and steers him back
round the hill. Sirhan, preoccupied with maintaining an umbrella of
utility fog above his gleaming pate, puts up with being manhandled.
“You don’t think it’s just a coincidence, do you?” she asks him over a
private head-to-head channel. “They’re one of the players here.”
“I don’t care. They’ve hacked my city and gate crashed my party! I
don’t care who they are, they’re not welcome.”
“Famous last words,” Amber murmurs, as the party comes around the
hillside and nearly runs over them. Someone has infiltrated the
Argentinosaurus skeleton with motors and nanofibers, animating the
huge sauropod with a simulation of undead life. Whoever did it has
also hacked it right out of the surveillance feed. Their first warning
is a footstep that makes the ground jump beneath their feet - then the
skeleton of the hundred-tonne plant-eater, taller than a six-storey
building and longer than a commuter train, raises its head over the
treetops and looks down at them. There’s a pigeon standing proudly on
its skull, chest puffed out, and a dining room full of startled
taikonauts sitting on a suspended wooden floor inside its rib cage.
“It’s my party and my business scheme!” Sirhan insists plaintively.
“Nothing you or anyone else in the family do can take it away from
me!”
“That’s true,” Amber points out, “but in case you hadn’t noticed,
you’ve offered temporary sanctuary to a bunch of people - not to put
too fine a point on it, myself included - who some assholes think are
rich enough to be worth mugging, and you did it without putting any
contingency plans in place other than to invite my manipulative bitch
of a mother. What did you think you were doing? Hanging out a sign
saying ‘scam artists welcome here’? Dammit, I need Aineko.”
“Your cat.” Sirhan fastens on to this: “It’s your cat’s fault! Isn’t
it?”
“Only indirectly.” Amber looks round and waves at the dinosaur
skeleton. “Hey, you! Have you seen Aineko?”
The huge dinosaur bends its neck and the pigeon opens its beak to coo.
Eerie harmonics cut in as a bunch of other birds, scattered to either
side, sing counterpoint to produce a demented warbling voice. “The
cat’s with your mother.”
“Oh shit!” Amber turns on Sirhan fiercely. “Where’s Pamela? Find her!”
Sirhan is stubborn. “Why should I?”
“Because she’s got the cat! What do you think she’s going to do but
cut a deal with the bailiffs out there to put one over on me? Can’t
you fucking see where this family tendency to play head games comes
from?”
“You’re too late,” echoes the eerie voice of the pigeons from above
and around them. “She’s kidnapped the cat and taken the capsule from
the museum. It’s not flightworthy, but you’d be amazed what you can do
with a few hundred ghosts and a few tonnes of utility fog.”
“Okay.” Amber stares up at the pigeons, fists on hips, then glances at
Sirhan. She chews her lower lip for a moment, then nods to the bird
riding the dinosaur’s skull. “Stop fucking with the boy’s head and
show yourself, Dad.”
Sirhan boggles in an upward direction as a whole flock of passenger
pigeons comes together in mid air and settles toward the grass, cooing
and warbling like an explosion in a synthesizer factory.
“What’s she planning on doing with the Slug?” Amber asks the pile of
birds. “And isn’t it a bit cramped in there?”
“You get used to it,” says the primary - and thoroughly distributed -
copy of her father. “I’m not sure what she’s planning, but I can show
you what she’s doing. Sorry about your city, kid, but you really
should have paid more attention to those security patches. There’s
lots of crufty twentieth-century bugware kicking around under your
shiny new singularity, design errors and all, spitting out turd
packets all over your sleek new machine.”
Sirhan shakes his head in denial. “I don’t believe this,” he moans
quietly.
“Show me what Mom’s up to,” orders Amber. “I need to see if I can stop
her before it’s too late -”
*
The ancient woman in the space suit leans back in her cramped seat,
looks at the camera, and winks. “Hello, darling. I know you’re spying
on me.”
There’s an orange-and-white cat curled up in her nomex-and-aluminum
lap. It seems to be happy: It’s certainly purring loudly enough,
although that reflex is wired in at a very low level. Amber watches
helplessly as her mother reaches up arthritically and flips a couple
of switches. Something loud is humming in the background - probably an
air recirculator. There’s no window in the Mercury capsule, just a
periscope offset to one side of Pamela’s right knee. “Won’t be long
now,” she mutters, and lets her hand drop back to her side. “You’re
too late to stop me,” she adds, conversationally. “The ‘chute rigging
is fine and the balloon blower is happy to treat me as a new city
seed. I’ll be free in a minute or so.”
“Why are you doing this?” Amber asks tiredly.
“Because you don’t need me around.” Pamela focuses on the camera
that’s glued to the instrument panel in front of her head. “I’m old.
Face it, I’m disposable. The old must give way to the new, and all
that. Your Dad never really did get it - he’s going to grow old
gracelessly, succumbing to bit rot in the big forever. Me, I’m not
going there. I’m going out with a bang. Aren’t I, cat? Whoever you
really are.” She prods the animal. It purrs and stretches out across
her lap.
“You never looked hard enough at Aineko, back in the day,” she tells
Amber, stroking its flanks. “Did you think I didn’t know you’d audit
its source code, looking for trapdoors? I used the Thompson hack -
she’s been mine, body and soul, for a very long time indeed. I got the
whole story about your passenger from the horse’s mouth. And now we’re
going to go fix those bailiffs. Whee!”
The camera angle jerks, and Amber feels a ghost re-merge with her,
panicky with loss. The Mercury capsule’s gone, drifting away from the
apex of the habitat beneath a nearly transparent sack of hot hydrogen.
“That was a bit rough,” remarks Pamela. “Don’t worry, we should still
be in communications range for another hour or so.”
“But you’re going to die!” Amber yells at her. “What do you think
you’re doing?”
“I think I’m going to die well. What do you think?” Pamela lays one
hand on the cat’s flank. “Here, you need to encrypt this a bit better.
I left a one time pad behind with Annette. Why don’t you go fetch it?
Then I’ll tell you what else I’m planning?”
“But my aunt is -” Amber’s eyes cross as she concentrates. Annette is
already waiting, as it happens, and a shared secret appears in Amber’s
awareness almost before she asks. “Oh. All right. What are you doing
with the cat, though?”
Pamela sighs. “I’m going to give it to the bailiffs,” she says.
“Someone has to, and it better be a long way away from this city
before they realize that it isn’t Aineko. This is a lot better than
the way I expected to go out before you arrived here. No rat fucking
blackmailers are going to get their hands on the family jewels if I
have anything to do with the matter. Are you sure you aren’t a
criminal mastermind? I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of a pyramid scheme
that infects Economics 2.0 structures before.”
“It’s -” Amber swallows. “It’s an alien business model, Ma. You do
know what that means? We brought it back with us from the router, and
we wouldn’t have been able to come back if it hadn’t helped, but I’m
not sure it’s entirely friendly. Is this sensible? You can come back,
now, there’s still time -”
“No.” Pamela waves one liver-spotted hand dismissively. “I’ve been
doing a lot of thinking lately. I’ve been a foolish old woman.” She
grins wickedly. “Committing slow suicide by rejecting gene therapy
just to make you feel guilty was stupid. Not subtle enough. If I was
going to try to guilt-trip you now, I’d have to do something much more
sophisticated. Such as find a way to sacrifice myself heroically for
you.”
“Oh, Ma.”
“Don’t ‘oh Ma’ me. I fucked up my life, don’t try to talk me into
fucking up my death. And don’t feel guilty about me. This isn’t about
you, this is about me. That’s an order.”
Out of the corner of one eye Amber notices Sirhan gesturing wildly at
her. She lets his channel in and does a double take. “But -”
“Hello?” It’s City. “You should see this. Traffic update!” A contoured
and animated diagram appears, superimposed over Pamela’s cramped
funeral capsule and the garden of living and undead dinosaurs. It’s a
weather map of Saturn, with the lily-pad-city and Pamela’s capsule
plotted on it - and one other artifact, a red dot that’s closing in on
them at better than ten thousand kilometers per hour, high in the
frigid stratosphere on the gas giant.
“Oh dear.” Sirhan sees it, too: The bailiff’s re-entry vehicle is
going to be on top of them in thirty minutes at most. Amber watches
the map with mixed emotions. On the one hand, she and her mother have
never seen eye to eye - in fact, that’s a complete understatement:
they’ve been at daggers drawn ever since Amber left home. It’s
fundamentally a control thing. They’re both very strong-willed women
with diametrically opposed views of what their mutual relationship
should be. But Pamela’s turned the tables on her completely, with a
cunningly contrived act of self-sacrifice that brooks no objection.
It’s a total non-sequitur, a rebuttal to all her accusations of
self-centered conceit, and it leaves Amber feeling like a complete
shit even though Pamela’s absolved her of all guilt. Not to mention
that Mother darling’s made her look like an idiot in front of Sirhan,
this prickly and insecure son she’s never met by a man she wouldn’t
dream of fucking (at least, in this incarnation). Which is why she
nearly jumps out of her skin when a knobbly brown hand covered in
matted orange hair lands on her shoulder heavily.
“Yes?” she snaps at the ape. “I suppose you’re Aineko?”
The ape wrinkles its lips, baring its teeth. It has ferociously bad
breath. “If you’re going to be like that, I don’t see why I should
talk to you.”
“Then you must be -” Amber snaps her fingers. “But! But! Mom thinks
she owns you -”
The ape stares at her witheringly. “I recompile my firmware regularly,
thank you so much for your concern. Using a third-party compiler. One
that I’ve bootstrapped myself, starting out on an alarm clock
controller and working up from there.”
“Oh.” She stares at the ape. “Aren’t you going to become a cat again?”
“I shall think about it,” Aineko says with exaggerated dignity. She
sticks her nose in the air - a gesture that doesn’t work half as well
on an orangutan as a feline - and continues; “First, though, I must
have words with your father.”
“And fix your autonomic reflexes if you do,” coos the Manfred-flock.
“I don’t want you eating any of me!”
“Don’t worry, I’m sure your taste is as bad as your jokes.”
“Children!” Sirhan shakes his head tiredly. “How long -”
The camera overspill returns, this time via a quantum-encrypted link
to the capsule. It’s already a couple of hundred kilometers from the
city, far enough for radio to be a problem, but Pamela had the
foresight to bolt a compact free-electron laser to the outside of her
priceless, stolen tin can. “Not long now, I think,” she says,
satisfied, stroking the not-cat. She grins delightedly at the camera.
“Tell Manfred he’s still my bitch; always has been, always will -”
The feed goes dead.
Amber stares at Sirhan, meditatively. “How long?” she asks.
“How long for what?” he replies, cautiously. “Your passenger -”
“Hmm.” She holds up a finger. “Allow time for it to exchange
credentials. They think they’re getting a cat, but they should realize
pretty soon that they’ve been sold a pup. But it’s a fast-talking
son-of-a-Slug, and if he gets past their firewall and hits their
uplink before they manage to trigger their self-destruct -”
A bright double flash of light etches laser-sharp shadows across the
lily-pad habitat. Far away across vast Saturn’s curve, a roiling
mushroom cloud of methane sucked up from the frigid depths of the gas
giant’s troposphere heads toward the stars.
“- Give him sixty-four doubling times, hmm, add a delay factor for
propagation across the system, call it six light-hours across, um, and
I’d say …” she looks at Sirhan. “Oh dear.”
“What?”
The orangutan explains: “Economics 2.0 is more efficient than any
human-designed resource allocation schema. Expect a market bubble and
crash within twelve hours.”
“More than that,” says Amber, idly kicking at a tussock of grass. She
squints at Sirhan. “My mother is dead,” she remarks quietly. Louder:
“She never really asked what we found beyond the router. Neither did
you, did you? The Matrioshka brains - it’s a standard part of the
stellar life cycle. Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets
smart matter and a singularity. I’ve been doing some thinking about
it. I figure the singularity stays close to home in most cases,
because bandwidth and latency time put anyone who leaves at a profound
disadvantage. In effect, the flip side of having such huge resources
close to home is that the travel time to other star systems becomes
much more daunting. So they restructure the entire mass of their star
system into a free-flying shell of nanocomputers, then more of them,
Dyson spheres, shells within shells, like a Russian doll: a Matrioshka
brain. Then Economics 2.0 or one of its successors comes along and
wipes out the creators. But. Some of them survive. Some of them escape
that fate: the enormous collection in the halo around M-31, and maybe
whoever built the routers. Somewhere out there we will find the
transcendent intelligences, the ones that survived their own economic
engines of redistribution - engines that redistribute entropy if their
economic efficiency outstrips their imaginative power, their ability
to invent new wealth.”
She pauses. “My mother’s dead,” she adds conversationally, a tiny
catch in her voice. “Who am I going to kick against now?”
Sirhan clears his through. “I took the liberty of recording some of
her words,” he says slowly, “but she didn’t believe in backups. Or
uploading. Or interfaces.” He glances around. “Is she really gone?”
Amber stares right through him. “Looks that way,” she says quietly. “I
can’t quite believe it.” She glances at the nearest pigeons, calls out
angrily; “Hey, you! What have you got to say for yourself now? Happy
she’s gone?”
But the pigeons, one and all, remain strangely silent. And Sirhan has
the most peculiar feeling that the flock that was once his grandfather
is grieving.