Accelerando

Chapter 8: Elector

Half a year passes on Saturn - more than a decade on Earth - and a lot

of things have changed in that time. The great terraforming project is

nearly complete, the festival planet dressed for a jubilee that will

last almost twenty of its years - four presingularity lifetimes -

before the Demolition. The lily-pad habitats have proliferated,

joining edge to edge in continent-sized slabs, drifting in the

Saturnine cloud tops: and the refugees have begun to move in.

 

There’s a market specializing in clothing and fashion accessories

about fifty kilometers away from the transplanted museum where

Sirhan’s mother lives, at a transportation nexus between three

lily-pad habitats where tube trains intersect in a huge maglev

cloverleaf. The market is crowded with strange and spectacular

visuals, algorithms unfolding in faster-than-real time before the

candy-striped awnings of tents. Domed yurts belch aromatic smoke from

crude fireplaces - what is it about hairless primates and their

tendency toward pyromania? - around the feet of diamond-walled

groundscrapers that pace carefully across the smart roads of the city.

The crowds are variegated and wildly mixed, immigrants from every

continent shopping and haggling, and in a few cases, getting out of

their skulls on strange substances on the pavements in front of giant

snail-shelled shebeens and squat bunkers made of thin layers of

concrete sprayed over soap-bubble aerogel. There are no automobiles,

but a bewildering range of personal transport gadgets, from

gyrostabilized pogo sticks and segways to kettenkrads and

spiderpalanquins, jostle for space with pedestrians and animals.

 

Two women stop outside what in a previous century might have been the

store window of a fashion boutique: The younger one (blonde, with her

hair bound up in elaborate cornrows, wearing black leggings and a long

black leather jacket over a camouflage T) points to an elaborately

retro dress. “Wouldn’t my bum look big in that?” she asks, doubtfully.

 

“Ma ch�rie, you have but to try it -” The other woman (tall, wearing a

pin-striped man’s business suit from a previous century) flicks a

thought at the window, and the mannequin morphs, sprouting the younger

woman’s head, aping her posture and expression.

 

“I missed out on the authentic retail experience, you know? It still

feels weird to be back somewhere with shops. ‘S what comes of living

off libraries of public domain designs for too long.” Amber twists her

hips, experimenting. “You get out of the habit of foraging. I don’t

know about this retro thing at all. The Victorian vote isn’t critical,

is it …” She trails off.

 

“You are a twenty-first-century platform selling, to electors

resimulated and incarnated from the Gilded Age. And yes, a bustle your

derriere does enhance. But -” Annette looks thoughtful.

 

“Hmm.” Amber frowns, and the shop window dummy turns and waggles its

hips at her, sending tiers of skirts swishing across the floor. Her

frown deepens. “If we’re really going to go through with this election

shit, it’s not just the resimulant voters I need to convince but the

contemporaries, and that’s a matter of substance, not image. They’ve

lived through too much media warfare. They’re immune to any semiotic

payload short of an active cognitive attack. If I send out partials to

canvass them that look as if I’m trying to push buttons -”

 

“- They will listen to your message, and nothing you wear or say will

sway them. Don’t worry about them, ma ch�rie. The naive resimulated

are another matter, and perhaps might be swayed. This your first

venture into democracy is, in how many years? Your privacy, she is an

illusion now. The question is what image will you project? People will

listen to you only once you gain their attention. Also, the swing

voters you must reach, they are future-shocked, timid. Your platform

is radical. Should you not project a comfortably conservative image?”

 

Amber pulls a face, an expression of mild distaste for the whole

populist program. “Yes, I suppose I must, if necessary. But on second

thoughts, that” - Amber snaps her fingers, and the mannequin turns

around once more before morphing back into neutrality, aureoles

perfect puckered disks above the top of its bodice - “is just too

much.”

 

She doesn’t need to merge in the opinions of several different

fractional personalities, fashion critics and psephologists both, to

figure out that adopting Victorian/Cretan fusion fashion - a

breast-and-ass fetishist’s fantasy - isn’t the way to sell herself as

a serious politician to the nineteenth-century postsingularity fringe.

“I’m not running for election as the mother of the nation, I’m running

because I figure we’ve got about a billion seconds, at most, to get

out of this rat trap of a gravity well before the Vile Offspring get

seriously medieval on our CPU cycles, and if we don’t convince them to

come with us, they’re doomed. Let’s look for something more practical

that we can overload with the right signifiers.”

 

“Like your coronation robe?”

 

Amber winces. “Touch�.” The Ring Imperium is dead, along with whatever

was left over from its early orbital legal framework, and Amber is

lucky to be alive as a private citizen in this cold new age at the

edge of the halo. “But that was just scenery setting. I didn’t fully

understand what I was doing, back then.”

 

“Welcome to maturity and experience.” Annette smiles distantly at some

faint memory: “You don’t feel older, you just know what you’re doing

this time. I wonder, sometimes, what Manny would make of it if he was

here.”

 

“That birdbrain,” Amber says dismissively, stung by the idea that her

father might have something to contribute. She follows Annette past a

gaggle of mendicant street evangelists preaching some new religion and

in through the door of a real department store, one with actual human

sales staff and fitting rooms to cut the clothing to shape. “If I’m

sending out fractional mes tailored for different demographics, isn’t

it a bit self-defeating to go for a single image? I mean, we could

drill down and tailor a partial for each individual elector -”

 

“Perhaps.” The door reforms behind them. “But you need a core

identity.” Annette looks around, hunting for eye contact with the

sales consultant. “To start with a core design, a style, then to work

outward, tailoring you for your audience. And besides, there is

tonight’s - ah, bonjour!”

 

“Hello. How can we help you?” The two female and one male shop

assistants who appear from around the displays - cycling through a

history of the couture industry, catwalk models mixing and matching

centuries of fashion - are clearly chips off a common primary

personality, instances united by their enhanced sartorial obsession.

If they’re not actually a fashion borganism, they’re not far from it,

dressed head to foot in the highest quality Chanel and Armani

replicas, making a classical twentieth-century statement. This isn’t

simply a shop, it’s a temple to a very peculiar art form, its staff

trained as guardians of the esoteric secrets of good taste.

 

“Mais oui. We are looking for a wardrobe for my niece here.” Annette

reaches through the manifold of fashion ideas mapped within the shop’s

location cache and flips a requirement spec one of her ghosts has just

completed at the lead assistant: “She is into politics going, and the

question of her image is important.”

 

“We would be delighted to help you,” purrs the proprietor, taking a

delicate step forward: “Perhaps you could tell us what you’ve got in

mind?”

 

“Oh. Well.” Amber takes a deep breath, glances sidelong at Annette;

Annette stares back, unblinking. It’s your head, she sends. “I’m

involved in the accelerationista administrative program. Are you

familiar with it?”

 

The head coutureborg frowns slightly, twin furrows rippling her brow

between perfectly symmetrical eyebrows, plucked to match her classic

New Look suit. “I have heard reference to it, but a lady of fashion

like myself does not concern herself with politics,” she says, a touch

self-deprecatingly. “Especially the politics of her clients. Your, ah,

aunt said it was a question of image?”

 

“Yes.” Amber shrugs, momentarily self-conscious about her casual rags.

“She’s my election agent. My problem, as she says, is there’s a

certain voter demographic that mistakes image for substance and is

afraid of the unknown, and I need to acquire a wardrobe that triggers

associations of probity, of respect and deliberation. One suitable for

a representative with a radical political agenda but a strong track

record. I’m afraid I’m in a hurry to start with - I’ve got a big

fund-raising party tonight. I know it’s short notice, but I need

something off the shelf for it.”

 

“What exactly is it you’re hoping to achieve?” asks the male

couturier, his voice hoarse and his r’s rolling with some half-shed

Mediterranean accent. He sounds fascinated. “If you think it might

influence your choice of wardrobe …”

 

“I’m running for the assembly,” Amber says bluntly. “On a platform

calling for a state of emergency and an immediate total effort to

assemble a starship. This solar system isn’t going to be habitable for

much longer, and we need to emigrate. All of us, you included, before

the Vile Offspring decide to reprocess us into computronium. I’m going

to be doorstepping the entire electorate in parallel, and the

experience needs to be personalized.” She manages to smile. “That

means, I think, perhaps eight outfits and four different independent

variables for each, accessories, and two or three hats - enough that

each is seen by no more than a few thousand voters. Both physical

fabric and virtual. In addition, I’ll want to see your range of

historical formalwear, but that’s of secondary interest for now.” She

grins. “Do you have any facilities for response-testing the

combinations against different personality types from different

periods? If we could run up some models, that would be useful.”

 

“I think we can do better than that.” The manager nods approvingly,

perhaps contemplating her gold-backed deposit account. “Hansel, please

divert any further visitors until we have dealt with Madam …?”

 

“Macx. Amber Macx.”

 

“- Macx’s requirements.” She shows no sign of familiarity with the

name. Amber winces slightly; it’s a sign of how hugely fractured the

children of Saturn have become, and of how vast the population of the

halo, that only a generation has passed and already barely anyone

remembers the Queen of the Ring Imperium. “If you’d come this way,

please, we can begin to research an eigenstyle combination that

matches your requirements -”

 

*

 

Sirhan walks, shrouded in isolation, through the crowds gathered for

the festival. The only people who see him are the chattering ghosts of

dead politicians and writers, deported from the inner system by order

of the Vile Offspring. The green and pleasant plain stretches toward a

horizon a thousand kilometers away, beneath a lemon-yellow sky. The

air smells faintly of ammonia, and the big spaces are full of small

ideas; but Sirhan doesn’t care because, for now, he’s alone.

 

Except that he isn’t, really.

 

“Excuse me, are you real?” someone asks him in American-accented

English.

 

It takes a moment or two for Sirhan to disengage from his

introspection and realize that he’s being spoken to. “What?” he asks,

slightly puzzled. Wiry and pale, Sirhan wears the robes of a Berber

goatherd on his body and the numinous halo of a utility fogbank above

his head: In his abstraction, he vaguely resembles a saintly shepherd

in a postsingularity nativity play. “I say, what?” Outrage simmers at

the back of his mind - Is nowhere private? - but as he turns, he sees

that one of the ghost pods has split lengthwise across its white

mushroomlike crown, spilling a trickle of leftover construction fluid

and a completely hairless, slightly bemused-looking Anglo male who

wears an expression of profound surprise.

 

“I can’t find my implants,” the Anglo male says, shaking his head.

“But I’m really here, aren’t I? Incarnate?” He glances round at the

other pods. “This isn’t a sim.”

 

Sirhan sighs - another exile - and sends forth a daemon to interrogate

the ghost pod’s abstract interface. It doesn’t tell him much - unlike

most of the resurrectees, this one seems to be undocumented. “You’ve

been dead. Now you’re alive. I suppose that means you’re now almost as

real as I am. What else do you need to know?”

 

“When is -” The newcomer stops. “Can you direct me to the processing

center?” he asks carefully. “I’m disoriented.”

 

Sirhan is surprised - most immigrants take a lot longer to figure that

out. “Did you die recently?” he asks.

 

“I’m not sure I died at all.” The newcomer rubs his bald head, looking

puzzled. “Hey, no jacks!” He shrugs, exasperated. “Look, the

processing center ..?”

 

“Over there.” Sirhan gestures at the monumental mass of the Boston

Museum of Science (shipped all the way from Earth a couple of decades

ago to save it from the demolition of the inner system). “My mother

runs it.” He smiles thinly.

 

“Your mother -” the newly resurrected immigrant stares at him

intensely, then blinks. “Holy shit.” He takes a step toward Sirhan.

“It is you -”

 

Sirhan recoils and snaps his fingers. The thin trail of vaporous cloud

that has been following him all this time, shielding his shaven pate

from the diffuse red glow of the swarming shells of orbital

nanocomputers that have replaced the inner planets, extrudes a staff

of hazy blue mist that stretches down from the air and slams together

in his hand like a quarterstaff spun from bubbles. “Are you

threatening me, sir?” he asks, deceptively mildly.

 

“I -” The newcomer stops dead. Then he throws back his head and

laughs. “Don’t be silly, son. We’re related!”

 

“Son?” Sirhan bristles. “Who do you think you are -” A horrible

thought occurs to him. “Oh. Oh dear.” A wash of adrenaline drenches

him in warm sweat. “I do believe we’ve met, in a manner of speaking

…” Oh boy, this is going to upset so many applecarts, he realizes,

spinning off a ghost to think about the matter. The implications are

enormous.

 

The naked newcomer nods, grinning at some private joke. “You look

different from ground level. And now I’m human again.” He runs his

hands down his ribs, pauses, and glances at Sirhan owlishly. “Um. I

didn’t mean to frighten you. But I don’t suppose you could find your

aged grandfather something to wear?”

 

Sirhan sighs and points his staff straight up at the sky. The rings

are edge on, for the lily pad continent floats above an ocean of cold

gas along Saturn’s equator, and they glitter like a ruby laser beam

slashed across the sky. “Let there be aerogel.”

 

A cloud of wispy soap bubble congeals in a cone shape above the newly

resurrected ancient and drops over him, forming a caftan. “Thanks,” he

says. He looks round, twisting his neck, then winces. “Damn, that

hurt. Ouch. I need to get myself a set of implants.”

 

“They can sort you out in the processing center. It’s in the basement

in the west wing. They’ll give you something more permanent to wear,

too.” Sirhan peers at him. “Your face -” He pages through rarely used

memories. Yes, it’s Manfred as he looked in the early years of the

last century. As he looked around the time Mother-not was born.

There’s something positively indecent about meeting your own

grandfather in the full flush of his youth. “Are you sure you haven’t

been messing with your phenotype?” he asks suspiciously.

 

“No, this is what I used to look like. I think. Back in the naked ape

again, after all these years as an emergent function of a flock of

passenger pigeons.” His grandfather smirks. “What’s your mother going

to say?”

 

“I really don’t know -” Sirhan shakes his head. “Come on, let’s get

you to immigrant processing. You’re sure you’re not just an historical

simulation?”

 

The place is already heaving with the resimulated. Just why the Vile

Offspring seem to feel it’s necessary to apply valuable exaquops to

the job of deriving accurate simulations of dead humans - outrageously

accurate simulations of long-dead lives, annealed until their written

corpus matches that inherited from the presingularity era in the form

of chicken scratchings on mashed tree pulp - much less beaming them at

the refugee camps on Saturn - is beyond Sirhan’s ken: But he wishes

they’d stop.

 

“Just a couple of days ago I crapped on your lawn. Hope you don’t

mind.” Manfred cocks his head to one side and stares at Sirhan with

beady eyes. “Actually, I’m here because of the upcoming election. It’s

got the potential to turn into a major crisis point, and I figured

Amber would need me around.”

 

“Well you’d better come on in, then,” Sirhan says resignedly as he

climbs the steps, enters the foyer, and leads his turbulent

grandfather into the foggy haze of utility nanomachines that fill the

building.

 

He can’t wait to see what his mother will do when she meets her father

in the flesh, after all this time.

 

*

 

Welcome to Saturn, your new home world. This FAQ (Frequently Asked

Questions) memeplex is designed to orient you and explain the

following:

* How you got here

* Where “here” is

* Things you should avoid doing

* Things you might want to do as soon as possible

* Where to go for more information

 

If you are remembering this presentation, you are probably

resimulated. This is not the same as being resurrected. You may

remember dying. Do not worry: Like all your other memories, it is a

fabrication. In fact, this is the first time you have ever been alive.

(Exception: If you died after the singularity, you may be a genuine

resurrectee. In which case, why are you reading this FAQ?)

 

How you got here:

 

The center of the solar system - Mercury, Venus, Earth’s Moon, Mars,

the asteroid belt, and Jupiter - have been dismantled, or are being

dismantled, by weakly godlike intelligences. [NB: Monotheistic clergy

and Europeans who remember living prior to 1600, see alternative

memeplex “in the beginning.”] A weakly godlike intelligence is not a

supernatural agency, but the product of a highly advanced society that

learned how to artificially create souls [late 20th century: software]

and translate human minds into souls and vice versa. [Core concepts:

Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is

not immortal.]

 

Some of the weakly godlike intelligences appear to cultivate an

interest in their human antecedents - for whatever reason is not

known. (Possibilities include the study of history through

horticulture, entertainment through live-action role-playing, revenge,

and economic forgery.) While no definitive analysis is possible, all

the resimulated persons to date exhibit certain common

characteristics: They are all based on well-documented historical

persons, their memories show suspicious gaps [see: smoke and mirrors],

and they are ignorant of or predate the singularity [see: Turing

Oracle, Vinge catastrophe].

 

It is believed that the weakly godlike agencies have created you as a

vehicle for the introspective study of your historical antecedent by

backward-chaining from your corpus of documented works, and the

back-projected genome derived from your collateral descendants, to

generate an abstract description of your computational state vector.

This technique is extremely intensive [see: expTime-complete

algorithms, Turing Oracle, time travel, industrial magic] but

marginally plausible in the absence of supernatural explanations.

 

After experiencing your life, the weakly godlike agencies have

expelled you. For reasons unknown, they chose to do this by

transmitting your upload state and genome/proteome complex to

receivers owned and operated by a consortium of charities based on

Saturn. These charities have provided for your basic needs, including

the body you now occupy.

 

In summary: You are a reconstruction of someone who lived and died a

long time ago, not a reincarnation. You have no intrinsic moral right

to the identity you believe to be your own, and an extensive body of

case law states that you do not inherit your antecedent’s possessions.

Other than that, you are a free individual.

 

Note that fictional resimulation is strictly forbidden. If you have

reason to believe that you may be a fictional character, you must

contact the city immediately. [ See: James Bond, Spider Jerusalem.]

Failure to comply is a felony.

 

Where you are:

 

You are on Saturn. Saturn is a gas giant planet 120,500 kilometers in

diameter, located 1.5 billion kilometers from Earth’s sun. [NB:

Europeans who remember living prior to 1580, see alternative memeplex

“the flat Earth - not”.] Saturn has been partially terraformed by

posthuman emigrants from Earth and Jupiter orbit: The ground beneath

your feet is, in reality, the floor of a hydrogen balloon the size of

a continent, floating in Saturn’s upper atmosphere. [NB: Europeans who

remember living prior to 1790, internalize the supplementary memeplex:

“the Brothers Montgolfier.”] The balloon is very safe, but mining

activities and the use of ballistic weapons are strongly deprecated

because the air outside is unbreathable and extremely cold.

 

The society you have been instantiated in is extremely wealthy within

the scope of Economics 1.0, the value transfer system developed by

human beings during and after your own time. Money exists, and is used

for the usual range of goods and services, but the basics - food,

water, air, power, off-the-shelf clothing, housing, historical

entertainment, and monster trucks - are free. An implicit social

contract dictates that, in return for access to these facilities, you

obey certain laws.

 

If you wish to opt out of this social contract, be advised that other

worlds may run Economics 2.0 or subsequent releases. These

value-transfer systems are more efficient - hence wealthier - than

Economics 1.0, but true participation in Economics 2.0 is not possible

without dehumanizing cognitive surgery. Thus, in absolute terms,

although this society is richer than any you have ever heard of, it is

also a poverty-stricken backwater compared to its neighbors.

 

Things you should avoid doing:

 

Many activities that have been classified as crimes in other societies

are legal here. These include but are not limited to: acts of worship,

art, sex, violence, communication, or commerce between consenting

competent sapients of any species, except where such acts transgress

the list of prohibitions below. [See additional memeplex: competence

defined.]

 

Some activities are prohibited here and may have been legal in your

previous experience. These include willful deprivation of ability to

consent [see: slavery], interference in the absence of consent [see:

minors, legal status of], formation of limited liability companies

[see: singularity], and invasion of defended privacy [see: the Slug,

Cognitive Pyramid Schemes, Brain Hacking, Thompson Trust Exploit].

 

Some activities unfamiliar to you are highly illegal and should be

scrupulously avoided. These include: possession of nuclear weapons,

possession of unlimited autonomous replicators [see: gray goo],

coercive assimilationism [see: borganism, aggressive], coercive

halting of Turing-equivalent personalities [see: basilisks], and

applied theological engineering [see: God bothering].

 

Some activities superficially familiar to you are merely stupid and

should be avoided for your safety, although they are not illegal as

such. These include: giving your bank account details to the son of

the Nigerian Minister of Finance; buying title to bridges,

skyscrapers, spacecraft, planets, or other real assets; murder;

selling your identity; and entering into financial contracts with

entities running Economics 2.0 or higher.

 

Things you should do as soon as possible:

 

Many material artifacts you may consider essential to life are freely

available - just ask the city, and it will grow you clothes, a house,

food, or other basic essentials. Note, however, that the library of

public domain structure templates is of necessity restrictive, and

does not contain items that are highly fashionable or that remain in

copyright. Nor will the city provide you with replicators, weapons,

sexual favors, slaves, or zombies.

 

You are advised to register as a citizen as soon as possible. If the

individual you are a resimulation of can be confirmed dead, you may

adopt their name but not - in law - any lien or claim on their

property, contracts, or descendants. You register as a citizen by

asking the city to register you; the process is painless and typically

complete within four hours. Unless you are registered, your legal

status as a sapient organism may be challenged. The ability to request

citizenship rights is one of the legal tests for sapience, and failure

to comply may place you in legal jeopardy. You can renounce your

citizenship whenever you wish: This may be desirable if you emigrate

to another polity.

 

While many things are free, it is highly likely that you posses no

employable skills, and therefore, no way of earning money with which

to purchase unfree items. The pace of change in the past century has

rendered almost all skills you may have learned obsolete [see:

singularity]. However, owing to the rapid pace of change, many

cooperatives, trusts, and guilds offer on-the-job training or

educational loans.

 

Your ability to learn depends on your ability to take information in

the format in which it is offered. Implants are frequently used to

provide a direct link between your brain and the intelligent machines

that surround it. A basic core implant set is available on request

from the city. [See: implant security, firewall, wetware.]

 

Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and

is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and

in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may be provided

- for a fee. (In event of your murder, you will be furnished with a

new body at the expense of your killer.) If you have any preexisting

medical conditions or handicaps, consult the city.

 

The city is an agoric-annealing participatory democracy with a limited

liability constitution. Its current executive agency is a weakly

godlike intelligence that chooses to associate with human-equivalent

intelligences: This agency is colloquially known as “Hello Kitty,”

“Beautiful Cat,” or “Aineko,” and may manifest itself in a variety of

physical avatars if corporeal interaction is desired. (Prior to the

arrival of “Hello Kitty,” the city used a variety of human-designed

expert systems that provided suboptimal performance.)

 

The city’s mission statement is to provide a mediatory environment for

human-equivalent intelligences and to preserve same in the face of

external aggression. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the

ongoing political processes of determining such responses. Citizens

also have a duty to serve on a jury if called (including senatorial

service), and to defend the city.

 

Where to go for further information:

 

Until you have registered as a citizen and obtained basic implants,

all further questions should be directed to the city. Once you have

learned to use your implants, you will not need to ask this question.

 

*

 

Welcome to decade the ninth, singularity plus one gigasecond (or

maybe more - nobody’s quite sure when, or indeed if, a singularity

has been created). The human population of the solar system is

either six billion, or sixty billion, depending on whether you

class the forked state vectors of posthumans and the simulations of

dead phenotypes running in the Vile Offspring’s Schr�dinger boxes

as people. Most of the physically incarnate still live on Earth,

but the lily-pads floating beneath continent-sized hot-hydrogen

balloons in Saturn’s upper atmosphere already house a few million,

and the writing is on the wall for the rocky inner planets. All the

remaining human-equivalent intelligences with half a clue to rub

together are trying to emigrate before the Vile Offspring decide to

recycle Earth to fill in a gap in the concentric shells of

nanocomputers they’re running on. The half-constructed Matrioshka

brain already darkens the skies of Earth and has caused a massive

crash in the planet’s photosynthetic biomass, as plants starve for

short-wavelength light.

 

Since decade the seventh, the computational density of the solar

system has soared. Within the asteroid belt, more than half the

available planetary mass has been turned into nanoprocessors, tied

together by quantum entanglement into a web so dense that each gram

of matter can simulate all the possible life experiences of an

individual human being in a scant handful of minutes. Economics 2.0

is itself obsolescent, forced to mutate in a furious survivalist

arms race by the arrival of the Slug. Only the name remains as a

vague shorthand for merely human-equivalent intelligences to use

when describing interactions they don’t understand.

 

The latest generation of posthuman entities is less overtly hostile

to humans, but much more alien than the generations of the fifties

and seventies. Among their less comprehensible activities, the Vile

Offspring are engaged in exploring the phase-space of all possible

human experiences from the inside out. Perhaps they caught a dose

of the Tiplerite heresy along the way, for now a steady stream of

resimulant uploads is pouring through the downsystem relays in

Titan orbit. The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the

Resurrection of the Extremely Confused, except that they’re not

really resurrectees - they’re simulations based on their originals’

recorded histories, blocky and missing chunks of their memories, as

bewildered as baby ducklings as they’re herded into the

wood-chipper of the future.

 

Sirhan al-Khurasani despises them with the abstract contempt of an

antiquarian for a cunning but ultimately transparent forgery. But

Sirhan is young, and he’s got more contempt than he knows what to

do with. It’s a handy outlet for his frustration. He has a lot to

be frustrated at, starting with his intermittently dysfunctional

family, the elderly stars around whom his planet whizzes in chaotic

trajectories of enthusiasm and distaste.

 

Sirhan fancies himself a philosopher-historian of the singular age,

a chronicler of the incomprehensible, which would be a fine thing

to be except that his greatest insights are all derived from

Aineko. He alternately fawns over and rages against his mother, who

is currently a leading light in the refugee community, and honors

(when not attempting to evade the will of) his father, who is

lately a rising philosophical patriarch within the Conservationist

faction. He’s secretly in awe (not to mention slightly resentful)

of his grandfather Manfred. In fact, the latter’s abrupt

reincarnation in the flesh has quite disconcerted him. And he

sometimes listens to his stepgrandmother Annette, who has

reincarnated in more or less her original 2020s body after spending

some years as a great ape, and who seems to view him as some sort

of personal project.

 

OnlyAnnette isn’t being very helpful right now. His mother is

campaigning on an electoral platform calling for a vote to blow up

the world, Annette is helping run her campaign, his grandfather is

trying to convince him to entrust everything he holds dear to a

rogue lobster, and the cat is being typically feline and evasive.

 

Talk about families with problems …

 

*

 

They’ve transplanted imperial Brussels to Saturn in its entirety,

mapped tens of megatonnes of buildings right down to nanoscale and

beamed them into the outer darkness to be reinstantiated downwell on

the lily-pad colonies that dot the stratosphere of the gas giant.

(Eventually the entire surface of the Earth will follow - after which

the Vile Offspring will core the planet like an apple, dismantle it

into a cloud of newly formed quantum nanocomputers to add to their

burgeoning Matrioshka brain.) Due to a resource contention problem in

the festival committee’s planning algorithm - or maybe it’s simply an

elaborate joke - Brussels now begins just on the other side of a

diamond bubble wall from the Boston Museum of Science, less than a

kilometer away as the passenger pigeon flies. Which is why, when it’s

time to celebrate a birthday or name day (meaningless though those

concepts are, out on Saturn’s synthetic surface), Amber tends to drag

people over to the bright lights of the big city.

 

This time she’s throwing a rather special party. At Annette’s canny

prompting, she’s borrowed the Atomium and invited a horde of guests to

a big event. It’s not a family bash - although Annette’s promised her

a surprise - so much as a business meeting, testing the water as a

preliminary to declaring her candidacy. It’s a media coup, an attempt

to engineer Amber’s re-entry into the mainstream politics of the human

system.

 

Sirhan doesn’t really want to be here. He’s got far more important

things to do, like continuing to catalogue Aineko’s memories of the

voyage of the Field Circus. He’s also collating a series of interviews

with resimulated logical positivists from Oxford, England (the ones

who haven’t retreated into gibbering near catatonia upon realizing

that their state vectors are all members of the set of all sets that

do not contain themselves), when he isn’t attempting to establish a

sound rational case for his belief that extraterrestrial

superintelligence is an oxymoron and the router network is just an

accident, one of evolution’s little pranks.

 

But Tante Annette twisted his arm and promised he was in on the

surprise if he came to the party. And despite everything, he wouldn’t

miss being a fly on the wall during the coming meeting between Manfred

and Amber for all the tea in China.

 

Sirhan walks up to the gleaming stainless-steel dome that contains the

entrance to the Atomium, and waits for the lift. He’s in line behind a

gaggle of young-looking women, skinny and soign� in cocktail gowns and

tiaras lifted from 1920s silent movies. (Annette declared an age of

elegance theme for the party, knowing full well that it would force

Amber to focus on her public appearance.) Sirhan’s attention is,

however, elsewhere. The various fragments of his mind are conducting

three simultaneous interviews with philosophers (“whereof we cannot

speak, thereof we must be silent” in spades), controlling two ‘bots

that are overhauling the museum plumbing and air-recycling system, and

he’s busy discussing observations of the alien artifact orbiting the

brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/[-56] with Aineko. What’s left of him

exhibits about as much social presence as a pickled cabbage.

 

The lift arrives and accepts a load of passengers. Sirhan is crowded

into one corner by a bubble of high-society laughter and an aromatic

puff of smoke from an improbable ivory cigarette holder as the lift

surges, racing up the sixty-meter shaft toward the observation deck at

the top of the Atomium. It’s a ten-meter-diameter metal globe, spiral

staircases and escalators connecting it to the seven spheres at the

corners of an octahedron that make up the former centerpiece of the

1950 World’s Fair. Unlike most of the rest of Brussels, it’s the

original bits and atoms, bent alloy structures from before the space

age shipped out to Saturn at enormous expense. The lift arrives with a

slight jerk. “Excuse me,” squeaks one of the good-time girls as she

lurches backward, elbowing Sirhan.

 

He blinks, barely noticing her black bob of hair, chromatophore-tinted

shadows artfully tuned around her eyes: “Nothing to excuse.” In the

background, Aineko is droning on sarcastically about the lack of

interest the crew of the Field Circus exhibited in the cat’s effort to

decompile their hitchhiker, the Slug. It’s distracting as hell, but

Sirhan feels a desperate urge to understand what happened out there.

It’s the key to understanding his not-mother’s obsessions and

weaknesses - which, he senses, will be important in the times to come.

 

He evades the gaggle of overdressed good-time girls and steps out onto

the lower of the two stainless-steel decks that bisect the sphere.

Accepting a fruit cocktail from a discreetly humaniform waitron, he

strolls toward a row of triangular windows that gaze out across the

arena toward the American Pavilion and the World Village. The metal

walls are braced with turquoise-painted girders, and the perspex

transparencies are fogged with age. He can barely see the

one-tenth-scale model of an atomic-powered ocean liner leaving the

pier below, or the eight-engined giant seaplane beside it. “They never

once asked me if the Slug had attempted to map itself into the

human-compatible spaces aboard the ship,” Aineko bitches at him. “I

wasn’t expecting them to, but really! Your mother’s too trusting,

boy.”

 

“I suppose you took precautions?” Sirhan’s ghost murmurs to the cat.

That sets the irascible metafeline off again on a long discursive

tail-washing rant about the unreliability of Economics-2.0-compliant

financial instruments. Economics 2.0 apparently replaces the

single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the

multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of

insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the

parameterized desires and subjective experiential values of the

players, and as far as the cat is concerned, this makes all such

transactions intrinsically untrustworthy.

 

Which is why you’re stuck here with us apes, Sirhan-prime cynically

notes as he spawns an Eliza ghost to carry on nodding at the cat while

he experiences the party.

 

It’s uncomfortably warm in the Atomium sphere - not surprising, there

must be thirty people milling around up here, not counting the

waitrons - and several local multicast channels are playing a variety

of styles of music to synchronize the mood swings of the revelers to

hardcore techno, waltz, raga …

 

“Having a good time, are we?” Sirhan breaks away from integrating one

of his timid philosophers and realizes that his glass is empty, and

his mother is grinning alarmingly at him over the rim of a cocktail

glass containing something that glows in the dark. She’s wearing

spike-heeled boots and a black velvet cat suit that hugs her contours

like a second skin, and she’s already getting drunk. In wall-clock

years she is younger than Sirhan; it’s like having a bizarrely knowing

younger sister mysteriously injected into his life to replace the

eigenmother who stayed home and died with the Ring Imperium decades

ago. “Look at you, hiding in a corner at your grandfather’s party!

Hey, your glass is empty. Want to try this caipirinha? There’s someone

you’ve got to meet over here -”

 

It’s at moments like this that Sirhan really wonders what in Jupiter’s

orbit his father ever saw in this woman. (But then again, in the world

line this instance of her has returned from, he didn’t. So what does

that signify?) “As long as there’s no fermented grape juice in it,” he

says resignedly, allowing himself to be led past a gaggle of

conversations and a mournful-looking gorilla slurping a long drink

through a straw. “More of your accelerationista allies?”

 

“Maybe not.” It’s the girl gang he avoided noticing in the lift, their

eyes sparkling, really getting into this early twen-cen drag party

thing, waving their cigarette holders and cocktail glasses around with

wild abandon. “Rita, I’d like you to meet Sirhan, my other fork’s son.

Sirhan, this is Rita? She’s an historian, too. Why don’t you -”

 

Dark eyes, emphasized not by powder or paint, but by chromatophores

inside her skin cells: black hair, chain of enormous pearls, slim

black dress sweeping the floor, a look of mild embarrassment on her

heart-shaped face: She could be a clone of Audrey Hepburn in any other

century, “Didn’t I just meet you in the elevator?” The embarrassment

shifts to her cheeks, becoming visible.

 

Sirhan flushes, unsure how to reply. Just then, an interloper arrives

on the scene, pushing in between them. “Are you the curator who

reorganized the Precambrian gallery along teleology lines? I’ve got

some things to say about that!” The interloper is tall, assertive, and

blonde. Sirhan hates her from the first sight of her wagging finger.

 

“Oh shut up, Marissa, this is a party, you’ve been being a pain all

evening.” To his surprise, Rita the historian rounds on the interloper

angrily.

 

“It’s not a problem,” he manages to say. In the back of his mind,

something makes the Rogerian puppet-him that’s listening to the cat

sit up and dump-merge a whole lump of fresh memories into his mind -

something important, something about the Vile Offspring sending a

starship to bring something back from the router - but the people

around him are soaking up so much attention that he has to file it for

later.

 

“Yes it is a problem,” Rita declares. She points at the interloper,

who is saying something about the invalidity of teleological

interpretations, trying to justify herself, and says, “Plonk. Phew.

Where were we?”

 

Sirhan blinks. Suddenly everyone but him seems to be ignoring that

annoying Marissa person. “What just happened?” he asks cautiously.

 

“I killfiled her. Don’t tell me, you aren’t running Superplonk yet,

are you?” Rita flicks a location-cached idea at him and he takes it

cautiously, spawning a couple of specialized Turing Oracles to check

it for halting states. It seems to be some kind of optic lobe hack

that accesses a collaborative database of eigenfaces, with some sort

of side interface to Broca’s region. “Share and enjoy,

confrontation-free parties.”

 

“I’ve never seen -” Sirhan trails off as he loads the module

distractedly. (The cat is rambling on about god modules and metastatic

entanglement and the difficulty of arranging to have personalities

custom-grown to order somewhere in the back of his head, while his

fractional-self nods wisely whenever it pauses.) Something like an

inner eyelid descends. He looks round; there’s a vague blob at one

side of the room, making an annoying buzzing sound. His mother seems

to be having an animated conversation with it. “That’s rather

interesting.”

 

“Yes, it helps no end at this sort of event.” Rita startles him by

taking his left arm in hand - her cigarette holder shrivels and

condenses until it’s no more than a slight thickening around the wrist

of her opera glove - and steers him toward a waitron. “I’m sorry about

your foot, earlier, I was a bit overloaded. Is Amber Macx really your

mother?”

 

“Not exactly, she’s my eigenmother,” he mumbles. “The reincarnated

download of the version who went out to Hyundai +4904/[-56] aboard the

Field Circus. She married a French-Algerian confidence-trick analyst

instead of my father, but I think they divorced a couple of years ago.

My real mother married an imam, but they died in the aftermath of

Economics 2.0.” She seems to be steering him in the direction of the

window bay Amber dragged him away from earlier. “Why do you ask?”

 

“Because you’re not very good at making small talk,” Rita says

quietly, “and you don’t seem very good in crowds. Is that right? Was

it you who performed that amazing dissection of Wittgenstein’s

cognitive map? The one with the preverbal G�del string in it?”

 

“It was -” He clears his throat. “You thought it was amazing?”

Suddenly, on impulse, he detaches a ghost to identify this Rita person

and find out who she is, what she wants. It’s not normally worth the

effort to get to know someone more closely than casual small talk, but

she seems to have been digging into his background, and he wants to

know why. Along with the him that’s chatting to Aineko, that makes

about three instances pulling in near-realtime resources. He’ll be

running up an existential debt soon if he keeps forking ghosts like

this.

 

“I thought so,” she says. There’s a bench in front of the wall, and

somehow he finds himself sitting on it next to her. There’s no danger,

we’re not in private or anything, he tells himself stiffly. She’s

smiling at him, face tilted slightly to one side and lips parted, and

for a moment, a dizzy sense of possibility washes over him: What if

she’s about to throw all propriety aside? How undignified! Sirhan

believes in self-restraint and dignity. “I was really interested in

this -” She passes him another dynamically loadable blob, encompassing

a detailed critique of his analysis of Wittgenstein’s matriophobia in

the context of gendered language constructs and nineteenth century

Viennese society, along with a hypothesis that leaves Sirhan gasping

with mild indignation at the very idea that he of all people might

share Wittgenstein’s skewed outlook - “What do you think?” she asks,

grinning impishly at him.

 

“Nnngk.” Sirhan tries to unswallow his tongue. Rita crosses her legs,

her gown hissing. “I, ah, that is to say” - At which moment, his

partials reintegrate, dumping a slew of positively pornographic

images into his memories. It’s a trap! they shriek, her breasts and

hips and pubes - clean-shaven, he can’t help noticing - thrusting at

him in hotly passionate abandon, Mother’s trying to make you loose

like her! and he remembers what it would be like to wake up in bed

next to this woman whom he barely knows after being married to her for

a year, because one of his cognitive ghosts has just spent several

seconds of network time (or several subjective months) getting hot and

sweaty with a ghost of her own, and she does have interesting research

ideas, even if she’s a pushy over-westernized woman who thinks she can

run his life for him. “What is this?” he splutters, his ears growing

hot and his garments constricting.

 

“Just speculating about possibilities. We could get a lot done

together.” She snakes an arm round his shoulders and pulls him toward

her, gently. “Don’t you want to find out if we could work out?”

 

“But, but -” Sirhan is steaming. Is she offering casual sex? He

wonders, profoundly embarrassed by his own inability to read her

signals: “What do you want?” he asks.

 

“You do know that you can do more with Superplonk than just killfile

annoying idiots?” she whispers in his ear. “We can be invisible right

now, if you like. It’s great for confidential meetings - other things,

too. We can work beautifully together, our ghosts annealed really well

…”

 

Sirhan jumps up, his face stinging, and turns away: “No thank you!” he

snaps, angry at himself. “Goodbye!” His other instances, interrupted

by his broadcast emotional overload, are distracted from their tasks

and sputtering with indignation. Her hurt expression is too much for

him: The killfile snaps down, blurring her into an indistinct black

blob on the wall, veiled by his own brain as he turns and walks away,

seething with anger at his mother for being so unfair as to make him

behold his own face in the throes of fleshy passion.

 

*

 

Meanwhile, in one of the lower spheres, padded with silvery blue

insulating pillows bound together with duct tape, the movers and

shakers of the accelerationista faction are discussing their bid for

world power at fractional-C velocities.

 

“We can’t outrun everything. For example, a collapse of the false

vacuum,” Manfred insists, slightly uncoordinated and slurring his

vowels under the influence of the first glass of fruit punch he’s

experienced in nigh-on twenty realtime years. His body is young and

still relatively featureless, hair still growing out, and he’s

abandoned his old no-implants fetish at last to adopt an array of

interfaces that let him internalize all the exocortex processes that

he formerly ran on an array of dumb Turing machines outside his body.

He’s standing on his own sense of style and is the only person in the

room who isn’t wearing some variation of dinner jacket or classical

evening dress. “Entangled exchange via routers is all very well, but

it won’t let us escape the universe itself - any phase change will

catch up eventually, the network must have an end. And then where will

we be, Sameena?”

 

“I’m not disputing that.” The woman he’s talking to, wearing a

green-and-gold sari and a medieval maharajah’s ransom in gold and

natural diamonds, nods thoughtfully. “But it hasn’t happened yet, and

we’ve got evidence that superhuman intelligences have been loose in

this universe for gigayears, so there’s a fair bet that the worst

catastrophe scenarios are unlikely. And looking closer to home, we

don’t know what the routers are for, or who made them. Until then …”

She shrugs. “Look what happened last time somebody tried to probe

them. No offense intended.”

 

“It’s already happened. If what I hear is correct, the Vile Offspring

aren’t nearly as negative about the idea of using the routers as we

old-fashioned metahumans might like to believe.” Manfred frowns,

trying to recall some hazy anecdote - he’s experimenting with a new

memory compression algorithm, necessitated by his pack rat mnemonic

habits when younger, and sometimes the whole universe feels as if it’s

nearly on the tip of his tongue. “So, we seem to be in violent

agreement about the need to know more about what’s going on, and to

find out what they’re doing out there. We’ve got cosmic background

anisotropies caused by the waste heat from computing processes

millions of light-years across - it takes a big interstellar

civilization to do that, and they don’t seem to have fallen into the

same rat trap as the local Matrioshka brain civilizations. And we’ve

got worrying rumors about the VO messing around with the structure of

space-time in order to find a way around the Beckenstein bound. If the

VO are trying that, then the folks out near the supercluster already

know the answers. The best way to find out what’s happening is to go

and talk to whoever’s responsible. Can we at least agree on that?”

 

“Probably not.” Her eyes glitter with amusement. “It all depends on

whether one believes in these civilizations in the first place. I know

your people point to deep-field camera images going all the way back

to some wonky hubble-bubble scrying mirror from the late twentieth,

but we’ve got no evidence except some theories about the Casimir

effect and pair production and spinning beakers of helium-3 - much

less proof that whole bunch of alien galactic civilizations are trying

to collapse the false vacuum and destroy the universe!” Her voice

dropped a notch: “At least, not enough proof to convince most people,

Manny dear. I know this comes as a shock to you, but not everyone is a

neophiliac posthuman bodysurfer whose idea of a sabbatical is to spend

twenty years as a flock of tightly networked seagulls in order to try

and to prove the Turing Oracle thesis -”

 

“Not everyone is concerned with the deep future,” Manfred interrupts.

“It’s important! If we live or die, that doesn’t matter - that’s not

the big picture. The big question is whether information originating

in our light cone is preserved, or whether we’re stuck in a lossy

medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It’s downright

embarrassing to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of

curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all

personally! I mean, if there’s going to come a time when there’s

nobody or nothing to remember us then what does -”

 

“Manfred?”

 

He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly.

 

It’s Amber, poised in black cat suit with cocktail glass. Her

expression is open and confused, appallingly vulnerable. Blue liquid

slops, almost spilling out of her glass - the rim barely extends

itself in time to catch the drops. Behind her stands Annette, a deeply

self-satisfied smile on her face.

 

“You.” Amber pauses, her cheek twitching as bits of her mind page in

and out of her skull, polling external information sources. “You

really are -”

 

A hasty cloud materializes under her hand as her fingers relax,

dropping the glass.

 

“Uh.” Manfred stares, at a complete loss for words. “I’d, uh.” After a

moment he looks down. “I’m sorry. I’ll get you another drink ..?”

 

“Why didn’t someone warn me?” Amber complains.

 

“We thought you could use the good advice,” Annette stated into the

awkward silence. “And a family reunion. It was meant to be a

surprise.”

 

“A surprise.” Amber looks perplexed. “You could say that.”

 

“You’re taller than I was expecting,” Manfred says unexpectedly.

“People look different when you’re not using human eyes.”

 

“Yeah?” She looks at him, and he turns his head slightly, facing her.

It’s a historic moment, and Annette is getting it all on memory

diamond, from every angle. The family’s dirty little secret is that

Amber and her father have never met, not face-to-face in physical

meat-machine proximity. She was born years after Manfred and Pamela

separated, after all, decanted prefertilized from a tank of liquid

nitrogen. This is the first time either of them have actually seen the

other’s face without electronic intermediation. And while they’ve said

everything that needed to be said on a businesslike level, anthropoid

family politics is still very much a matter of body language and

pheromones. “How long have you been out and about?” she asks, trying

to disguise her confusion.

 

“About six hours.” Manfred manages a rueful chuckle, trying to take

the sight of her in all at once. “Let’s get you another drink and put

our heads together?”

 

“Okay.” Amber takes a deep breath and glares at Annette. “You set this

up, you clean up the mess.”

 

Annette just stands there smiling at the confusion of her

accomplishment.

 

*

 

The cold light of dawn finds Sirhan angry, sober, and ready to pick a

fight with the first person who comes through the door of his office.

The room is about ten meters across, with a floor of polished marble

and skylights in the intricately plastered ceiling. The walkthrough of

his current project sprouts in the middle of the floor like a ghostly

abstract cauliflower, fractal branches dwindling down to infolded

nodes tagged with compressed identifiers. The branches expand and

shrink as Sirhan paces around it, zooming to readability in response

to his eyeball dynamics. But he isn’t paying it much attention. He’s

too disturbed, uncertain, trying to work out whom to blame. Which is

why, when the door bangs open, his first response is to whirl angrily

and open his mouth - then stop. “What do you want?” he demands.

 

“A word, if you please?” Annette looks around distractedly. “This is

your project?”

 

“Yes,” he says icily, and banishes the walkthrough with a wave of one

hand. “What do you want?”

 

“I’m not sure.” Annette pauses. For a moment she looks weary, tired

beyond mortal words, and Sirhan momentarily wonders if perhaps he’s

spreading the blame too far. This ninetysomething Frenchwoman who is

no blood relative, who was in years past the love of his

scatterbrained grandfather’s life, seems the least likely person to be

trying to manipulate him, at least in such an unwelcome and intimate

manner. But there’s no telling. Families are strange things, and even

though the current instantiations of his father and mother aren’t the

ones who ran his preadolescent brain through a couple of dozen

alternative lifelines before he was ten, he can’t be sure - or that

they wouldn’t enlist Tante Annette’s assistance in fucking with his

mind. “We need to talk about your mother,” she continues.

 

“We do, do we?” Sirhan turns around and sees the vacancy of the room

for what it is, a socket, like a pulled tooth, informed as much by

what is absent as by what is present. He snaps his fingers, and an

intricate bench of translucent bluish utility fog congeals out of the

air behind him. He sits: Annette can do what she wants.

 

“Oui.” She thrusts her hands deep into the pocket of the peasant smock

she’s wearing - a major departure from her normal style - and leans

against the wall. Physically, she looks young enough to have spent her

entire life blitzing around the galaxy at three nines of lightspeed,

but her posture is world-weary and ancient. History is a foreign

country, and the old are unwilling emigrants, tired out by the

constant travel. “Your mother, she has taken on a huge job, but it’s

one that needs doing. You agreed it needed doing, years ago, with the

archive store. She is now trying to get it moving, that is what the

campaign is about, to place before the electors a choice of how best

to move an entire civilization. So I ask, why do you obstruct her?”

 

Sirhan works his jaw; he feels like spitting. “Why?” he snaps.

 

“Yes. Why?” Annette gives in and magics up a chair from the swirling

fogbank beneath the ceiling. She crouches in it, staring at him. “It

is a question.”

 

“I have nothing against her political machinations,” Sirhan says

tensely. “But her uninvited interference in my personal life -”

 

“What interference?”

 

He stares. “Is that a question?” He’s silent for a moment. Then:

“Throwing that wanton at me last night -”

 

Annette stares at him. “Who? What are you talking about?”

 

“That, that loose woman!” Sirhan is reduced to spluttering. “False

pretenses! If this is one of Father’s matchmaking ideas, it is so very

wrong that -”

 

Annette is shaking her head. “Are you crazy? Your mother simply wanted

you to meet her campaign team, to join in planning the policy. Your

father is not on this planet! But you stormed out, you really upset

Rita, did you know that? Rita, she is the best belief maintenance and

story construction operative I have! Yet you to tears reduce her. What

is wrong with you?”

 

“I -” Sirhan swallows. “She’s what?” he asks again, his mouth dry. “I

thought …” He trails off. He doesn’t want to say what he thought.

The hussy, that brazen trollop, is part of his mother’s campaign

party? Not some plot to lure him into corruption? What if it was all a

horrible misunderstanding?

 

“I think you need to apologize to someone,” Annette says coolly,

standing up. Sirhan’s head is spinning between a dozen dialogues of

actors and ghosts, a journal of the party replaying before his

ghast-stricken inner gaze. Even the walls have begun to flicker,

responding to his intense unease. Annette skewers him with a disgusted

look: “When you can a woman behave toward as a person, not a threat,

we can again talk. Until then.” And she stands up and walks out of the

room, leaving him to contemplate the shattered stump of his anger, so

startled he can barely concentrate on his project, thinking, Is that

really me? Is that what I look like to her? as the cladistic graph

slowly rotates before him, denuded branches spread wide, waiting to be

filled with the nodes of the alien interstellar network just as soon

as he can convince Aineko to stake him the price of the depth-first

tour of darkness.

 

*

 

Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons - literally, his exocortex

dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored

facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels

inexplicably odd, even without the added distractions of his sex

drive, which he has switched off until he gets used to being unitary

again. Not only does he get shooting pains in his neck whenever he

tries to look over his left shoulder with his right eye, but he’s lost

the habit of spawning exocortical agents to go interrogate a database

or bush robot or something, then report back to him. Instead he keeps

trying to fly off in all directions at once, which usually ends with

him falling over.

 

But at present, that’s not a problem. He’s sitting comfortably at a

weathered wooden table in a beer garden behind a hall lifted from

somewhere like Frankfurt, a liter glass of straw-colored liquid at his

elbow and a comforting multiple whispering of knowledge streams

tickling the back of his head. Most of his attention is focused on

Annette, who frowns at him with mingled concern and affection. They

may have lived separate lives for almost a third of a century, since

she declined to upload with him, but he’s still deeply attuned to her.

 

“You are going to have to do something about that boy,” she says

sympathetically. “He is close enough to upset Amber. And without

Amber, there will be a problem.”

 

“I’m going to have to do something about Amber, too,” Manfred retorts.

“What was the idea, not warning her I was coming?”

 

“It was meant to be a surprise.” Annette comes as close to pouting as

Manfred’s seen her recently. It brings back warm memories; he reaches

out to hold her hand across the table.

 

“You know I can’t handle the human niceties properly when I’m a

flock.” He strokes the back of her wrist. She pulls back after a

while, but slowly. “I expected you to manage all that stuff.”

 

“That stuff.” Annette shakes her head. “She’s your daughter, you know?

Did you have no curiosity left?”

 

“As a bird?” Manfred cocks his head to one side so abruptly that he

hurts his neck and winces. “Nope. Now I do, but I think I pissed her

off -”

 

“Which brings us back to point one.”

 

“I’d send her an apology, but she’d think I was trying to manipulate

her” - Manfred takes a mouthful of beer - “and she’d be right.” He

sounds slightly depressed. “All my relationships are screwy this

decade. And it’s lonely.”

 

“So? Don’t brood.” Annette pulls her hand back. “Something will sort

itself out eventually. And in the short term, there is the work, the

electoral problem becomes acute.” When she’s around him the remains of

her once-strong French accent almost vanish in a transatlantic drawl,

he realizes with a pang. He’s been abhuman for too long - people who

meant a lot to him have changed while he’s been away.

 

“I’ll brood if I want to,” he says. “I didn’t ever really get a chance

to say goodbye to Pam, did I? Not after that time in Paris when the

gangsters …” He shrugs. “I’m getting nostalgic in my old age.” He

snorts.

 

“You’re not the only one,” Annette says tactfully. “Social occasions

here are a minefield, one must tiptoe around so many issues, people

have too much, too much history. And nobody knows everything that is

going on.”

 

“That’s the trouble with this damned polity.” Manfred takes another

gulp of hefeweisen. “We’ve already got six million people living on

this planet, and it’s growing like the first-generation Internet.

Everyone who is anyone knows everyone, but there are so many incomers

diluting the mix and not knowing that there is a small world network

here that everything is up for grabs again after only a couple of

megaseconds. New networks form, and we don’t even know they exist

until they sprout a political agenda and surface under us. We’re

acting under time pressure. If we don’t get things rolling now, we’ll

never be able to …” He shakes his head. “It wasn’t like this for you

in Brussels, was it?”

 

“No. Brussels was a mature system. And I had Gianni to look after in

his dotage after you left. It will only get worse from here on in, I

think.”

 

“Democracy 2.0.” He shudders briefly. “I’m not sure about the validity

of voting projects at all, these days. The assumption that all people

are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent. Do you think

we can make this fly?”

 

“I don’t see why not. If Amber’s willing to play the People’s Princess

for us …” Annette picks up a slice of liverwurst and chews on it

meditatively.

 

“I’m not sure it’s workable, however we play it.” Manfred looks

thoughtful. “The whole democratic participation thing looks

questionable to me under these circumstances. We’re under direct

threat, for all that it’s a long-term one, and this whole culture is

in danger of turning into a classical nation-state. Or worse, several

of them layered on top of one another with complete geographical

collocation but no social interpenetration. I’m not certain it’s a

good idea to try to steer something like that - pieces might break

off, you’d get the most unpleasant side-effects. Although, on the

other hand, if we can mobilize enough broad support to become the

first visible planetwide polity …”

 

“We need you to stay focused,” Annette adds unexpectedly.

 

“Focused? Me?” He laughs, briefly. “I used to have an idea a second.

Now it’s maybe one a year. I’m just a melancholy old birdbrain, me.”

 

“Yes, but you know the old saying? The fox has many ideas - the

hedgehog has only one, but it’s a big idea.”

 

“So tell me, what is my big idea?” Manfred leans forward, one elbow on

the table, one eye focused on inner space as a hot-burning thread of

consciousness barks psephological performance metrics at him,

analysing the game ahead. “Where do you think I’m going?”

 

“I think -” Annette breaks off suddenly, staring past his shoulder.

Privacy slips, and for a frozen moment Manfred glances round in mild

horror and sees thirty or forty other guests in the crowded garden,

elbows rubbing, voices raised above the background chatter: “Gianni!”

She beams widely as she stands up. “What a surprise! When did you

arrive?”

 

Manfred blinks. A slim young guy, moving with adolescent grace, but

none of the awkward movements and sullen lack of poise - he’s much

older than he looks, chickenhawk genetics. Gianni? He feels a huge

surge of memories paging through his exocortex. He remembers ringing a

doorbell in dusty, hot Rome: white toweling bathrobe, the economics of

scarcity, autograph signed by the dead hand of von Neumann - “Gianni?”

he asks, disbelieving. “It’s been a long time!”

 

The gilded youth, incarnated in the image of a metropolitan toy-boy

from the noughties, grins widely and embraces Manfred with a friendly

bear hug. Then he slides down onto the bench next to Annette, whom he

kisses with easy familiarity. “Ah, to be among friends again! It’s

been too long!” He glances round curiously. “Hmm, how very Bavarian.”

He snaps his fingers. “Mine will be a, what do you recommend? It’s

been too long since my last beer.” His grin widens. “Not in this

body.”

 

“You’re resimulated?” Manfred asks, unable to stop himself.

 

Annette frowns at him disapprovingly: “No, silly! He came through the

teleport gate -”

 

“Oh.” Manfred shakes his head. “I’m sorry -”

 

“It’s okay.” Gianni Vittoria clearly doesn’t mind being mistaken for a

historical newbie, rather than someone who’s traveled through the

decades the hard way. He must be over a hundred by now, Manfred notes,

not bothering to spawn a search thread to find out.

 

“It was time to move and, well, the old body didn’t want to move with

me, so why not go gracefully and accept the inevitable?”

 

“I didn’t take you for a dualist,” Manfred says ruefully.

 

“Ah, I’m not - but neither am I reckless.” Gianni drops his grin for a

moment. The sometime minister for transhuman affairs, economic

theoretician, then retired tribal elder of the polycognitive liberals

is serious. “I have never uploaded before, or switched bodies, or

teleported. Even when my old one was seriously - tcha! Maybe I left it

too long. But here I am, one planet is as good as another to be cloned

and downloaded onto, don’t you think?”

 

“You invited him?” Manfred asks Annette.

 

“Why wouldn’t I?” There’s a wicked gleam in her eye. “Did you expect

me to live like a nun while you were a flock of pigeons? We may have

campaigned against the legal death of the transubstantiated, Manfred,

but there are limits.”

 

Manfred looks between them, then shrugs, embarrassed. “I’m still

getting used to being human again,” he admits. “Give me time to catch

up? At an emotional level, at least.” The realization that Gianni and

Annette have a history together doesn’t come as a surprise to him:

It’s one of the things you must adapt to if you opt out of the human

species, after all. At least the libido suppression is helping here,

he realizes: He’s not about to embarrass anyone by suggesting a

m�nage. He focuses on Gianni. “I have a feeling I’m here for a

purpose, and it isn’t mine,” he says slowly. “Why don’t you tell me

what you’ve got in mind?”

 

Gianni shrugs. “You have the big picture already. We are human,

metahuman, and augmented human. But the posthumans are things that

were never really human to begin with. The Vile Offspring have reached

their adolescence and want the place to themselves so they can throw a

party. The writing is on the wall, don’t you think?”

 

Manfred gives him a long stare. “The whole idea of running away in

meatspace is fraught with peril,” he says slowly. He picks up his mug

of beer and swirls it around slowly. “Look, we know, now, that a

singularity doesn’t turn into a voracious predator that eats all the

dumb matter in its path, triggering a phase change in the structure of

space - at least, not unless they’ve done something very stupid to the

structure of the false vacuum, somewhere outside our current light

cone.

 

“But if we run away, we are still going to be there. Sooner or later,

we’ll have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence

augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever.

Possibly that’s what happened out past the B�otes void - not a

galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards

fleeing their own exponential transcendence. We carry the seeds of a

singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those

seeds, we cease to be human, don’t we? So … maybe you can tell me

what you think we should do. Hmm?”

 

“It’s a dilemma.” A waitron inserts itself into their privacy-screened

field of view. It plants a spun-diamond glass in front of Gianni, then

pukes beer into it. Manfred declines a refill, waiting for Gianni to

drink. “Ah, the simple pleasures of the flesh! I’ve been corresponding

with your daughter, Manny. She loaned me her experiential digest of

the journey to Hyundai +4904/[-56]. I found it quite alarming.

Nobody’s casting aspersions on her observations, not after that

self-propelled stock market bubble or 419 scam or whatever it was got

loose in the Economics 2.0 sphere, but the implications - the Vile

Offspring will eat the solar system, Manny. Then they’ll slow down.

But where does that leave us, I ask you? What is there for orthohumans

like us to do?”

 

Manfred nods thoughtfully. “You’ve heard the argument between the

accelerationistas and the time-binder faction, I assume?” he asks.

 

“Of course.” Gianni takes a long pull on his beer. “What do you think

of our options?”

 

“The accelerationistas want to upload everyone onto a fleet of

starwhisps and charge off to colonize an uninhabited brown dwarf

planetary system. Or maybe steal a Matrioshka brain that’s succumbed

to senile dementia and turn it back into planetary biomes with cores

of diamond-phase computronium to fulfil some kind of demented

pastoralist nostalgia trip. Rousseau’s universal robots. I gather

Amber thinks this is a good idea because she’s done it before - at

least, the charging off aboard a starwhisp part. ‘To boldly go where

no uploaded metahuman colony fleet has gone before’ has a certain ring

to it, doesn’t it?” Manfred nods to himself. “Like I say, it won’t

work. We’d be right back to iteration one of the waterfall model of

singularity formation within a couple of gigaseconds of arriving.

That’s why I came back: to warn her.”

 

“So?” Gianni prods, pretending to ignore the frowns that Annette is

casting his way.

 

“And as for the time-binders,” Manfred nods again, “they’re like

Sirhan. Deeply conservative, deeply suspicious. Holding out for

staying here as long as possible, until the Vile Offspring come for

Saturn - then moving out bit by bit, into the Kuiper belt. Colony

habitats on snowballs half a light-year from anywhere.” He shudders.

“Spam in a fucking can with a light-hour walk to the nearest civilized

company if your fellow inmates decide to reinvent Stalinism or

Objectivism. No thanks! I know they’ve been muttering about quantum

teleportation and stealing toys from the routers, but I’ll believe it

when I see it.”

 

“Which leaves what?” Annette demands. “It is all very well, this

dismissal of both the accelerationista and time-binder programs,

Manny, but what can you propose in their place?” She looks distressed.

“Fifty years ago, you would have had six new ideas before breakfast!

And an erection.”

 

Manfred leers at her unconvincingly. “Who says I can’t still have

both?”

 

She glares. “Drop it!”

 

“Okay.” Manfred chugs back a quarter of a liter of beer, draining his

glass, and puts it down on the table with a bang. “As it happens, I do

have an alternative idea.” He looks serious. “I’ve been discussing it

with Aineko for some time, and Aineko has been seeding Sirhan with it

- if it’s to work optimally, we’ll need to get a rump constituency of

both the accelerationistas and the conservatives on board. Which is

why I’m conditionally going along with this whole election nonsense.

So, what’s it worth to you for me to explain it?”

 

*

 

“So, who was the deadhead you were busy with today?” asks Amber.

 

Rita shrugs. “Some boringly prolix pulp author from the early

twentieth, with a body phobia of extropian proportions - I kept

expecting him to start drooling and rolling his eyes if I crossed my

legs. Funny thing is, he was also close to bolting from fear once I

mentioned implants. We really need to nail down how to deal with these

mind/body dualists, don’t we?” She watches Amber with something

approaching admiration; she’s new to the inner circle of the

accelerationista study faction, and Amber’s social credit is sky-high.

Rita’s got a lot to learn from her, if she can get close enough. And

right now, following her along a path through the landscaped garden

behind the museum seems like a golden moment of opportunity.

 

Amber smiles. “I’m glad I’m not processing immigrants these days; most

of them are so stupid it drives you up the wall after a bit.

Personally I blame the Flynn effect - in reverse. They come from a

background of sensory deprivation. It’s nothing that a course of

neural growth enhancers can’t fix in a year or two, but after the

first few you skullfuck, they’re all the same. So dull. Unless you’re

unlucky enough to get one of the documentees from a puritan religious

period. I’m no fluffragette, but I swear if I get one more

superstitious, woman-hating clergyman, I’m going to consider

prescribing forcible gender reassignment surgery. At least the

Victorian English are mostly just open-minded lechers, when you get

past their social reserve. And they like new technology.”

 

Rita nods. Woman-hating et cetera … The echoes of patriarchy are

still with them today, it seems, and not just in the form of

resimulated ayatollahs and archbishops from the Dark Ages. “My author

sounds like the worst of both. Some guy called Howard, from Rhode

Island. Kept looking at me as if he was afraid I was going to sprout

bat wings and tentacles or something.” Like your son, she doesn’t add.

Just what was he thinking, anyway? she wonders. To be that screwed up

takes serious dedication … “What are you working on, if you don’t

mind me asking?” she asks, trying to change the direction of her

attention.

 

“Oh, pressing the flesh, I guess. Auntie ‘Nette wanted me to meet some

old political hack contact of hers who she figures can help with the

program, but he was holed up with her and Dad all day.” She pulls a

face. “I had another fitting session with the image merchants, they’re

trying to turn me into a political catwalk clotheshorse. Then there’s

the program demographics again. We’re getting about a thousand new

immigrants a day, planetwide, but it’s accelerating rapidly, and we

should be up to eighty an hour by the time of the election. Which is

going to be a huge problem, because if we start campaigning too early,

a quarter of the electorate won’t know what they’re meant to be voting

about.”

 

“Maybe it’s deliberate,” Rita suggests. “The Vile Offspring are trying

to rig the outcome by injecting voters.” She pings a smiley emoticon

off Wednesday’s open channel, raising a flickering grin in return.

“The party of fuckwits will win, no question about it.”

 

“Uh-huh.” Amber snaps her fingers and pulls an impatient face as she

waits for a passing cloud to solidify above her head and lower a glass

of cranberry juice to her. “Dad said one thing that’s spot-on, we’re

framing this entire debate in terms of what we should do to avoid

conflict with the Offspring. The main bone of contention is how to run

away and how far to go and which program to put resources into, not

whether or when to run, let alone what else we could do. Maybe we

should have given it some more thought. Are we being manipulated?”

 

Rita looks vacant for a moment. “Is that a question?” she asks. Amber

nods, and she shakes her head. “Then I’d have to say that I don’t

know. The evidence is inconclusive, so far. But I’m not really happy.

The Offspring won’t tell us what they want, but there’s no reason to

believe they don’t know what we want. I mean, they can think rings

round us, can’t they?”

 

Amber shrugs, then pauses to unlatch a hedge gate that gives admission

to a maze of sweet-smelling shrubs. “I really don’t know. They may not

care about us, or even remember we exist - the resimulants may be

being generated by some autonomic mechanism, not really part of the

higher consciousness of the Offspring. Or it may be some whacked-out

post-Tiplerite meme that’s gotten hold of more processing resources

than the entire presingularity Net, some kind of MetaMormon project

directed at ensuring that everyone who can possibly ever have lived

lives in the right way to fit some weird quasi-religious requirement

we don’t know about. Or it might be a message we’re simply not smart

enough to decode. That’s the trouble, we don’t know.”

 

She vanishes around the curve of the maze. Rita hurries to catch up,

sees her about to turn into another alleyway, and leaps after her.

“What else?” she pants.

 

“Could be” - left turn - “anything, really.” Six steps lead down into

a shadowy tunnel; fork right, five meters forward, then six steps up

lead back to the surface. “Question is, why don’t they” - left turn -

“just tell us what they want?”

 

“Speaking to tapeworms.” Rita nearly manages to catch up with Amber,

who is trotting through the maze as if she’s memorized it perfectly.

“That’s how much the nascent Matrioshka brain can outthink us by, as

humans to segmented worms. Would we do. What they told us?”

 

“Maybe.” Amber stops dead, and Rita glances around. They’re in an open

cell near the heart of the maze, five meters square, hedged in on all

sides. There are three entrances and a slate altar, waist high,

lichen-stained with age. “I think you know the answer to that

question.”

 

“I -” Rita stares at her.

 

Amber stares back, eyes dark and intense. “You’re from one of the

Ganymede orbitals by way of Titan. You knew my eigensister while I was

out of the solar system flying a diamond the size of a Coke can.

That’s what you told me. You’ve got a skill set that’s a perfect match

for the campaign research group, and you asked me to introduce you to

Sirhan, then you pushed his buttons like a pro. Just what are you

trying to pull? Why should I trust you?”

 

“I -” Rita’s face crumples. “I didn’t push his buttons! He thought I

was trying to drag him into bed.” She looks up defiantly. “I wasn’t, I

want to learn, what makes you - him - work -” Huge, dark, structured

information queries batter at her exocortex, triggering warnings.

Someone is churning through distributed time-series databases all over

the outer system, measuring her past with a micrometer. She stares at

Amber, mortified and angry. It’s the ultimate denial of trust, the

need to check her statements against the public record for truth.

“What are you doing?”

 

“I have a suspicion.” Amber stands poised, as if ready to run. Run

away from me? Rita thinks, startled. “You said, what if the

resimulants came from a subconscious function of the Offspring? And

funnily enough, I’ve been discussing that possibility with Dad. He’s

still got the spark when you show him a problem, you know.”

 

“I don’t understand!”

 

“No, I don’t think you do,” says Amber, and Rita can feel vast

stresses in the space around her: The whole ubicomp environment,

dust-sized chips and utility fog and hazy clouds of diamond-bright

optical processors in the soil and the air and her skin, is growing

blotchy and sluggish, thrashing under the load of whatever Amber -

with her management-grade ackles - is ordering it to do. For a moment,

Rita can’t feel half her mind, and she gets the panicky claustrophobic

sense of being trapped inside her own head: Then it stops.

 

“Tell me!” Rita insists. “What are you trying to prove? It’s some

mistake -” And Amber is nodding, much to her surprise, looking weary

and morose. “What do you think I’ve done?”

 

“Nothing. You’re coherent. Sorry about that.”

 

“Coherent?” Rita hears her voice rising with her indignation as she

feels bits of herself, cut off from her for whole seconds, shivering

with relief. “I’ll give you coherent! Assaulting my exocortex -”

 

“Shut up.” Amber rubs her face and simultaneously throws Rita one end

of an encrypted channel.

 

“Why should I?” Rita demands, not accepting the handshake.

 

“Because.” Amber glances round. She’s scared! Rita suddenly realizes.

“Just do it,” she hisses.

 

Rita accepts the endpoint and a huge lump of undigested expository

data slides down it, structured and tagged with entry points and

metainformation directories pointing to -

 

“Holy shit!” she whispers, as she realizes what it is.

 

“Yes.” Amber grins humorlessly. She continues, over the open channel:

It looks like they’re cognitive antibodies, generated by the devil’s

own semiotic immune system. That’s what Sirhan is focusing on, how to

avoid triggering them and bringing everything down at once. Forget the

election, we’re going to be in deep shit sooner rather than later, and

we’re still trying to work out how to survive. Now are you sure you

still want in?

 

“Want in on what?” Rita asks, shakily.

 

The lifeboat Dad’s trying to get us all into under cover of the

accelerationista/conservationista split, before the Vile Offspring’s

immune system figures out how to lever us apart into factions and make

us kill each other …

 

*

 

Welcome to the afterglow of the intelligence supernova, little

tapeworm.

 

Tapeworms have on the order of a thousand neurons, pulsing

furiously to keep their little bodies twitching. Human beings have

on the order of a hundred billion neurons. What is happening in the

inner solar system as the Vile Offspring churn and reconfigure the

fast-thinking structured dust clouds that were once planets is as

far beyond the ken of merely human consciousness as the thoughts of

a G�del are beyond the twitching tropisms of a worm. Personality

modules bounded by the speed of light, sucking down billions of

times the processing power of a human brain, form and re-form in

the halo of glowing nanoprocessors that shrouds the sun in a ruddy

glowing cloud.

 

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Ceres and the asteroids - all gone. Luna is a

silvery iridescent sphere, planed smooth down to micrometer

heights, luminous with diffraction patterns. Only Earth, the cradle

of human civilization, remains untransformed; and Earth, too, will

be dismantled soon enough, for already a trellis of space elevators

webs the planet around its equator, lifting refugee dumb matter

into orbit and flinging it at the wildlife preserves of the outer

system.

 

The intelligence bloom that gnaws at Jupiter’s moons with claws of

molecular machinery won’t stop until it runs out of dumb matter to

convert into computronium. By the time it does, it will have as

much brainpower as you’d get if you placed a planet with a

population of six billion future-shocked primates in orbit around

every star in the Milky Way galaxy. But right now, it’s still

stupid, having converted barely a percentage point of the mass of

the solar system - it’s a mere Magellanic Cloud civilization,

infantile and unsubtle and still perilously close to its

carbon-chemistry roots.

 

It’s hard for tapeworms living in warm intestinal mulch to wrap

their thousand-neuron brains around whatever it is that the vastly

more complex entities who host them are discussing, but one thing’s

sure - the owners have a lot of things going on, not all of them

under conscious control. The churning of gastric secretions and the

steady ventilation of lungs are incomprehensible to the simple

brains of tapeworms, but they serve the purpose of keeping the

humans alive and provide the environment the worms live in. And

other more esoteric functions that contribute to survival - the

intricate dance of specialized cloned lymphocytes in their bone

marrow and lymph nodes, the random permutations of antibodies

constantly churning for possible matches to intruder molecules

warning of the presence of pollution - are all going on beneath the

level of conscious control.

 

Autonomic defenses. Antibodies. Intelligence bloom gnawing at the

edges of the outer system. And humans are not as unsophisticated as

mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any

surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is

not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?

 

*

 

There’s a team meeting early the next morning. It’s still dark

outside, and most of the attendees who are present in vivo have the

faintly haggard look that comes from abusing melatonin antagonists.

Rita stifles a yawn as she glances around the conference room - the

walls expanded into huge virtual spaces to accommodate thirty or so

exocortical ghosts from sleeping partners who will wake with memories

of a particularly vivid lucid dream - and sees Amber talking to her

famous father and a younger-looking man who one of her partials

recognizes as a last-century EU politician. There seems to be some

tension between them.

 

Now that Amber has granted Rita her conditional trust, a whole new

tier of campaigning information has opened up to her inner eye - stuff

steganographically concealed in a hidden layer of the project’s

collective memory space. There’s stuff in here she hadn’t suspected,

frightening studies of resimulant demographics, surveys of emigration

rates from the inner system, cladistic trees dissecting different

forms of crude tampering that have been found skulking in the wetware

of refugees. The reason why Amber and Manfred and - reluctantly -

Sirhan are fighting for one radical faction in a planetwide election,

despite their various misgivings over the validity of the entire

concept of democracy in this posthuman era. She blinks it aside,

slightly bewildered, forking a couple of dozen personality subthreads

to chew on it at the edges. “Need coffee,” she mutters to the table,

as it offers her a chair.

 

“Everyone on-line?” asked Manfred. “Then I’ll begin.” He looks tired

and worried, physically youthful but showing the full weight of his

age. “We’ve got a crisis coming, folks. About a hundred kiloseconds

ago, the bit rate on the resimulation stream jumped. We’re now

fielding about one resimulated state vector a second, on top of the

legitimate immigration we’re dealing with. If it jumps again by the

same factor, it’s going to swamp our ability to check the immigrants

for zimboes in vivo - we’d have to move to running them in secure

storage or just resurrecting them blind, and if there are any jokers

in the pack, that’s about the riskiest thing we could do.”

 

“Why do you not spool them to memory diamond?” asks the handsome young

ex-politician to his left, looking almost amused - as if he already

knows the answer.

 

“Politics.” Manfred shrugs.

 

“It would blow a hole in our social contract,” says Amber, looking as

if she’s just swallowed something unpleasant, and Rita feels a flicker

of admiration for the way they’re stage-managing the meeting. Amber’s

even talking to her father, as if she feels comfortable with him

around, although he’s a walking reminder of her own lack of success.

Nobody else has gotten a word in yet. “If we don’t instantiate them,

the next logical step is to deny resimulated minds the franchise.

Which in turn puts us on the road to institutional inequality. And

that’s a very big step to take, even if you have misgivings about the

idea of settling complex policy issues on the basis of a popular vote,

because our whole polity is based on the idea that less competent

intelligences - us - deserve consideration.”

 

“Hrmph.” Someone clears their throat. Rita glances round and freezes,

because it’s Amber’s screwed-up eigenchild, and he’s just about

materialized in the chair next to her. So he adopted Superplonk after

all? she observes cynically. He doggedly avoids looking at her. “That

was my analysis,” he says reluctantly. “We need them alive. For the

ark option, at least, and if not, even the accelerationista platform

will need them on hand later.”

 

Concentration camps, thinks Rita, trying to ignore Sirhan’s presence

near her, for it’s a constant irritant, where most of the inmates are

confused, frightened human beings - and the ones who aren’t think they

are. It’s an eerie thought, and she spawns a couple of full ghosts to

dream it through for her, gaming the possible angles.

 

“How are your negotiations over the lifeboat designs going?” Amber

asks her father. “We need to get a portfolio of design schemata out

before we go into the election -”

 

“Change of plan.” Manfred hunches forward. “This doesn’t need to go

any further, but Sirhan and Aineko have come up with something

interesting.” He looks worried.

 

Sirhan is staring at his eigenmother with narrowed eyes, and Rita has

to resist the urge to elbow him savagely in the ribs. She knows enough

about him now to realize it wouldn’t get his attention - at least, not

the way she’d want it, not for the right reasons - and in any case,

he’s more wrapped up in himself than her ghost ever saw him as likely

to be. (How anyone could be party to such a detailed exchange of

simulated lives and still reject the opportunity to do it in real life

is beyond her; unless it’s an artifact of his youth, when his parents

pushed him through a dozen simulated childhoods in search of knowledge

and ended up with a stubborn oyster-head of a son …) “We still need

to look as if we’re planning on using a lifeboat,” he says aloud.

“There’s the small matter of the price they’re asking in return for

the alternative.”

 

“What? What are you talking about?” Amber sounds confused. “I thought

you were working on some kind of cladistic map. What’s this about a

price?”

 

Sirhan smiles coolly. “I am working on a cladistic map, in a manner of

speaking. You wasted much of your opportunity when you journeyed to

the router, you know. I’ve been talking to Aineko.”

 

“You -” Amber flushes. “What about?” She’s visibly angry, Rita

notices. Sirhan is needling his eigenmother. Why?

 

“About the topology of some rather interesting types of small-world

network.” Sirhan leans back in his chair, watching the cloud above her

head. “And the router. You went through it, then you came back with

your tail between your legs as fast as you could, didn’t you? Not even

checking your passenger to see if it was a hostile parasite.”

 

“I don’t have to take this,” Amber says tightly. “You weren’t there,

and you have no idea what constraints we were working under.”

 

“Really?” Sirhan raises an eyebrow. “Anyway, you missed an

opportunity. We know that the routers - for whatever reason - are

self-replicating. They spread from brown dwarf to brown dwarf, hatch,

tap the protostar for energy and material, and send a bunch of

children out. Von Neumann machines, in other words. We also know that

they provide high-bandwidth communications to other routers. When you

went through the one at Hyundai +4904/[-56], you ended up in an

unmaintained DMZ attached to an alien Matrioshka brain that had

degenerated, somehow. It follows that someone had collected a router

and carried it home, to link into the MB. So why didn’t you bring one

home with you?”

 

Amber glares at him. “Total payload on board the Field Circus was

about ten grams. How large do you think a router seed is?”

 

“So you brought the Slug home instead, occupying maybe half your

storage capacity and ready to wreak seven shades of havoc on -”

 

“Children!” They both look round automatically. It’s Annette, Rita

realizes, and she doesn’t look amused. “Why do you not save this

bickering for later?” she asks. “We have our own goals to be

pursuing.” Unamused is an understatement. Annette is fuming.

 

“This charming family reunion was your idea, I believe?” Manfred

smiles at her, then nods coolly at the retread EU politician in the

next seat.

 

“Please.” It’s Amber. “Dad, can you save this for later?” Rita sits

up. For a moment, Amber looks ancient, far older than her subjective

gigasecond of age. “She’s right. She didn’t mean to screw up. Let’s

leave the family history for some time when we can work it out in

private. Okay?”

 

Manfred looks abashed. He blinks rapidly. “All right.” He takes a

breath. “Amber, I brought some old acquaintances into the loop. If we

win the election, then to get out of here as fast as possible, we’ll

have to use a combination of the two main ideas we’ve been discussing:

spool as many people as possible into high-density storage until we

get somewhere with space and mass and energy to reincarnate them, and

get our hands on a router. The entire planetary polity can’t afford to

pay the energy budget of a relativistic starship big enough to hold

everyone, even as uploads, and a subrelativistic ship would be too

damn vulnerable to the Vile Offspring. And it follows that, instead of

taking potluck on the destination, we should learn about the network

protocols the routers use, figure out some kind of transferable

currency we can use to pay for our reinstantiation at the other end,

and also how to make some kind of map so we know where we’re going.

The two hard parts are getting at or to a router, and paying - that’s

going to mean traveling with someone who understands Economics 2.0 but

doesn’t want to hang around the Vile Offspring.

 

“As it happens, these old acquaintances of mine went out and fetched

back a router seed, for their own purposes. It’s sitting about thirty

light-hours away from here, out in the Kuiper belt. They’re trying to

hatch it right now. And I think Aineko might be willing to go with us

and handle the trade negotiations.” He raises the palm of his right

hand and flips a bundle of tags into the shared spatial cache of the

inner circle’s memories.

 

Lobsters. Decades ago, back in the dim wastelands of the

depression-ridden naughty oughties, the uploaded lobsters had escaped.

Manfred brokered a deal for them to get their very own cometary

factory colony. Years later, Amber’s expedition to the router had run

into eerie zombie lobsters, upload images that had been taken over and

reanimated by the Wunch. But where the real lobsters had gotten to …

 

For a moment, Rita sees herself hovering in darkness and vacuum, the

distant siren song of a planetary gravity well far below. Off to her -

left? north? - glows a hazy dim red cloud the size of the full moon as

seen from Earth, a cloud that hums with a constant background noise,

the waste heat of a galactic civilization dreaming furious colorless

thoughts to itself. Then she figures out how to slew her unblinking,

eyeless viewpoint round and sees the craft.

 

It’s a starship in the shape of a crustacean three kilometers long.

It’s segmented and flattened, with legs projecting from the abdominal

floor to stretch stiffly sideways and clutch fat balloons of cryogenic

deuterium fuel. The blue metallic tail is a flattened fan wrapped

around the delicate stinger of a fusion reactor. Near the head, things

are different: no huge claws there, but the delicately branching fuzz

of bush robots, nanoassemblers poised ready to repair damage in flight

and spin the parachute of a ramscoop when the ship is ready to

decelerate. The head is massively armored against the blitzkrieg

onslaught of interstellar dust, its radar eyes a glint of hexagonal

compound surfaces staring straight at her.

 

Behind and below the lobster-ship, a planetary ring looms vast and

tenuous. The lobster is in orbit around Saturn, mere light-seconds

away. And as Rita stares at the ship in dumbstruck silence, it winks

at her.

 

“They don’t have names, at least not as individual identifiers,”

Manfred says apologetically, “so I asked if he’d mind being called

something. He said Blue, because he is. So I give you the good lobster

Something Blue.”

 

Sirhan interrupts, “You still need my cladistics project,” he sounds

somewhat smug, “to find your way through the network. Do you have a

specific destination in mind?”

 

“Yeah, to both questions,” Manfred admits. “We need to send duplicate

ghosts out to each possible router end point, wait for an echo, then

iterate and repeat. Recursive depth-first traversal. The goal - that’s

harder.” He points at the ceiling, which dissolves into a chaotic 3-D

spiderweb that Rita recognizes, after some hours of subjective

head-down archive time, as a map of the dark matter distribution

throughout a radius of a billion light-years, galaxies glued like

fluff to the nodes where strands of drying silk meet. “We’ve known for

most of a century that there’s something flaky going on out there, out

past the B�otes void - there are a couple of galactic superclusters,

around which there’s something flaky about the cosmic background

anisotropy. Most computational processes generate entropy as a

by-product, and it looks like something is dumping waste heat into the

area from all the galaxies in the region, very evenly spread in a way

that mirrors the metal distribution in those galaxies, except at the

very cores. And according to the lobsters, who have been indulging in

some very long baseline interferometry, most of the stars in the

nearest cluster are redder than expected and metal-depleted. As if

someone’s been mining them.”

 

“Ah.” Sirhan stares at his grandfather. “Why should they be any

different from the local nodes?”

 

“Look around you. Do you see any indications of large-scale cosmic

engineering within a million light-years of here?” Manfred shrugs.

“Locally, nothing has quite reached … well. We can guess at the life

cycle of a post spike civilization now, can’t we? We’ve felt the

elephant. We’ve seen the wreckage of collapsed Matrioshka minds. We

know how unattractive exploration is to postsingularity intelligences,

we’ve seen the bandwidth gap that keeps them at home.” He points at

the ceiling. “But over there something different happened. They’re

making changes on the scale of an entire galactic supercluster, and

they appear to be coordinated. They did get out and go places, and

their descendants may still be out there. It looks like they’re doing

something purposeful and coordinated, something vast - a timing

channel attack on the virtual machine that’s running the universe,

perhaps, or an embedded simulation of an entirely different universe.

Up or down, is it turtles all the way, or is there something out there

that’s more real than we are? And don’t you think it’s worth trying to

find out?”

 

“No.” Sirhan crosses his arms. “Not particularly. I’m interested in

saving people from the Vile Offspring, not taking a huge gamble on

mystery transcendent aliens who may have built a galaxy-sized reality

hacking machine a billion years ago. I’ll sell you my services, and

even send a ghost along, but if you expect me to bet my entire future

on it …”

 

It’s too much for Rita. Diverting her attention away from the dizzying

inner-space vista, she elbows Sirhan in the ribs. He looks round

blankly for a moment, then with gathering anger as he lets his

killfile filter slip. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be

silent,” she hisses. Then, succumbing to a secondary impulse she knows

she’ll regret later, she drops a private channel into his public

in-tray.

 

“Nobody’s asking you to,” Manfred is saying defensively, arms crossed.

“I view this as a Manhattan project kind of thing, pursue all agendas

in parallel. If we win the election, we’ll have the resources we need

to do that. We should all go through the router, and we will all leave

backups aboard Something Blue. Blue is slow, tops out at about a tenth

of cee, but what he can do is get a sufficient quantity of memory

diamond the hell out of circumsolar space before the Vile Offspring’s

autonomic defenses activate whatever kind of trust exploit they’re

planning in the next few megaseconds -”

 

“What do you want?” Sirhan demands angrily over the channel. He’s

still not looking at her, and not just because he’s focusing on the

vision in blue that dominates the shared space of the team meeting.

 

“Stop lying to yourself,” Rita sends back. “You’re lying about your

own goals and motivations. You may not want to know the truth your own

ghost worked out, but I do. And I’m not going to let you deny it

happened.”

 

“So one of your agents seduced a personality image of me -”

 

“Bullshit -”

 

“Do you mean to declare this platform openly?” asks the young-old guy

near the platform, the Europol. “Because if so, you’re going to

undermine Amber’s campaign -”

 

“That’s all right,” Amber says tiredly, “I’m used to Dad supporting me

in his own inimitable way.”

 

“Is okay,” says a new voice. “I are happy wait-state grazing in

ecliptic.” It’s the friendly lobster lifeboat, light-lagged by its

trajectory outside the ring system.

 

“- You’re happy to hide behind a hypocritical sense of moral purity

when it makes you feel you can look down on other people, but

underneath it you’re just like everyone else -”

 

“- She set you up to corrupt me, didn’t she? You’re just bait in her

scheme -”

 

“The idea was to store incremental backups in the Panuliran’s cargo

cache in case a weakly godlike agency from the inner system attempts

to activate the antibodies they’ve already disseminated throughout the

festival culture,” Annette explains, stepping in on Manfred’s behalf.

 

Nobody else in the discussion space seems to notice that Rita and

Sirhan are busy ripping the shit out of each other over a private

channel, throwing emotional hand grenades back and forth like seasoned

divorcees. “It’s not a satisfactory solution to the evacuation

question, but it ought to satisfy the conservatives’ baseline

requirement, and as insurance -”

 

“- That’s right, blame your eigenmother! Has it occurred to you that

she doesn’t care enough about you to try a stunt like that? I think

you spent too much time with that crazy grandmother of yours. You

didn’t even integrate that ghost, did you? Too afraid of polluting

yourself! I bet you never even bothered to check what it felt like

from inside -”

 

“- I did -” Sirhan freezes for a moment, personality modules paging in

and out of his brain like a swarm of angry bees - “make a fool of

myself,” he adds quietly, then slumps back in his seat. “This is so

embarrassing …” He covers his face with his hands. “You’re right.”

 

“I am?” Rita’s puzzlement slowly gives way to understanding; Sirhan

has finally integrated the memories from the partials they hybridized

earlier. Stuck-up and proud, the cognitive dissonance must be

enormous. “No, I’m not. You’re just overly defensive.”

 

“I’m -” Embarrassed. Because Rita knows him, inside out. Has the

ghost-memories of six months in a simspace with him, playing with

ideas, exchanging intimacies, later confidences. She holds

ghost-memories of his embrace, a smoky affair that might have happened

in real space if his instant reaction to realizing that it could

happen hadn’t been to dump the splinter of his mind that was

contaminated by impure thoughts to cold storage and deny everything.

 

“We have no threat profile yet,” Annette says, cutting right across

their private conversation. “If there is a direct threat - and we

don’t know that for sure, yet, the Vile Offspring might be enlightened

enough simply to be leaving us alone - it’ll probably be some kind of

subtle attack aimed directly at the foundations of our identity. Look

for a credit bubble, distributed trust metrics devaluing suddenly as

people catch some kind of weird religion, something like that. Maybe a

perverse election outcome. And it won’t be sudden. They are not

stupid, to start a headlong attack without slow corruption to soften

the way.”

 

“You’ve obviously been thinking about this for some time,” Sameena

says with dry emphasis. “What’s in it for your friend, uh, Blue? Did

you squirrel away enough credit to cover the price of renting a

starship from the Economics 2.0 metabubble? Or is there something you

aren’t telling us?”

 

“Um.” Manfred looks like a small boy with his hand caught in the

sweets jar. “Well, as a matter of fact -”

 

“Yes, Dad, why don’t you tell us just what this is going to cost?”

Amber asks.

 

“Ah, well.” He looks embarrassed. “It’s the lobsters, not Aineko. They

want some payment.”

 

Rita reaches out and grabs Sirhan’s hand: He doesn’t resist. “Do you

know about this?” Rita queries him.

 

“All new to me …” A confused partial thread follows his reply down

the pipe, and for a while, she joins him in introspective reverie,

trying to work out the implications of knowing what they know about

the possibility of a mutual relationship.

 

“They want a written conceptual map. A map of all the accessible meme

spaces hanging off the router network, compiled by human explorers who

they can use as a baseline, they say. It’s quite simple - in return

for a ticket out-system, some of us are going to have to go exploring.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t leave backups behind.”

 

“Do they have any particular explorers in mind?” Amber sniffs.

 

“No,” says Manfred. “Just a team of us, to map out the router network

and ensure they get some warning of threats from outside.” He pauses.

“You’re going to want to come along, aren’t you?”

 

*

 

The pre-election campaign takes approximately three minutes and

consumes more bandwidth than the sum of all terrestrial communications

channels from prehistory to 2008. Approximately six million ghosts of

Amber, individually tailored to fit the profile of the targeted

audience, fork across the dark fiber meshwork underpinning of the

lily-pad colonies, then out through ultrawideband mesh networks,

instantiated in implants and floating dust motes to buttonhole the

voters. Many of them fail to reach their audience, and many more hold

fruitless discussions; about six actually decide they’ve diverged so

far from their original that they constitute separate people and

register for independent citizenship, two defect to the other side,

and one elopes with a swarm of highly empathic modified African

honeybees.

 

Ambers are not the only ghosts competing for attention in the public

zeitgeist. In fact, they’re in a minority. Most of the autonomous

electoral agents are campaigning for a variety of platforms that range

from introducing a progressive income tax - nobody is quite sure why,

but it seems to be traditional - to a motion calling for the entire

planet to be paved, which quite ignores the realities of element

abundance in the upper atmosphere of a metal-poor gas giant, not to

mention playing hell with the weather. The Faceless are campaigning

for everyone to be assigned a new set of facial muscles every six

months, the Livid Pranksters are demanding equal rights for

subsentient entities, and a host of single-issue pressure groups are

yammering about the usual lost causes.

 

Just how the election process anneals is a black mystery - at least,

to those people who aren’t party to the workings of the Festival

Committee, the group who first had the idea of paving Saturn with

hot-hydrogen balloons - but over the course of a complete diurn,

almost forty thousand seconds, a pattern begins to emerge. This

pattern will systematize the bias of the communications networks that

traffic in reputation points across the planetary polity for a long

time - possibly as much as fifty million seconds, getting on for a

whole Martian year (if Mars still existed). It will create a

parliament - a merged group mind borganism that speaks as one

supermind built from the beliefs of the victors. And the news isn’t

great, as the party gathered in the upper sphere of the Atomium (which

Manfred insisted Amber rent for the dead dog party) is slowly

realizing. Amber isn’t there, presumably drowning her sorrows or

engaging in postelection schemes of a different nature somewhere else.

But other members of her team are about.

 

“It could be worse,” Rita rationalizes, late in the evening. She’s

sitting in a corner of the seventh-floor deck, in a 1950s wireframe

chair, clutching a glass of synthetic single malt and watching the

shadows. “We could be in an old-style contested election with seven

shades of shit flying. At least this way we can be decently

anonymous.”

 

One of the blind spots detaches from her peripheral vision and

approaches. It segues into view, suddenly congealing into Sirhan. He

looks morose.

 

“What’s your problem?” she demands. “Your former faction is winning on

the count.”

 

“Maybe so.” He sits down beside her, carefully avoiding her gaze.

“Maybe this is a good thing. And maybe not.”

 

“So when are you going to join the syncitium?” she asks.

 

“Me? Join that?” He looks alarmed. “You think I want to become part of

a parliamentary borg? What do you take me for?”

 

“Oh.” She shakes her head. “I assumed you were avoiding me because -”

 

“No.” He holds out his hand, and a passing waitron deposits a glass in

it. He takes a deep breath. “I owe you an apology.”

 

About time, she thinks, uncharitably. But he’s like that. Stiff-necked

and proud, slow to acknowledge a mistake, but unlikely to apologize

unless he really means it. “What for?” she asks.

 

“For not giving you the benefit of the doubt,” he says slowly, rolling

the glass between his palms. “I should have listened to myself earlier

instead of locking him out of me.”

 

The self he’s talking about seems self-evident to her. “You’re not an

easy man to get close to,” she says quietly. “Maybe that’s part of

your problem.”

 

“Part of it?” He chuckles bitterly. “My mother -” He bites back

whatever he originally meant to say. “Do you know I’m older than she

is? Than this version, I mean. She gets up my nose with her

assumptions about me …”

 

“They run both ways.” Rita reaches out and takes his hand - and he

grips her right back, no rejection this time. “Listen, it looks as if

she’s not going to make it into the parliament of lies. There’s a

straight conservative sweep, these folks are in solid denial. About

eighty percent of the population are resimulants or old-timers from

Earth, and that’s not going to change before the Vile Offspring turn

on us. What are we going to do?”

 

He shrugs. “I suspect everyone who thinks we’re really under threat

will move on. You know this is going to destroy the accelerationistas

trust in democracy? They’ve still got a viable plan - Manfred’s

friendly lobster will work without the need for an entire planet’s

energy budget - but the rejection is going to hurt. I can’t help

thinking that maybe the real goal of the Vile Offspring was simply to

gerrymander us into not diverting resources away from them. It’s

blunt, it’s unsubtle, so we assumed that wasn’t the point. But maybe

there’s a time for them to be blunt.”

 

She shrugs. “Democracy is a bad fit for lifeboats.” But she’s still

uncomfortable with the idea. “And think of all the people we’ll be

leaving behind.”

 

“Well.” He smiles tightly. “If you can think of any way to encourage

the masses to join us …”

 

“A good start would be to stop thinking of them as masses to be

manipulated.” Rita stares at him. “Your family appears to have been

developing a hereditary elitist streak, and it’s not attractive.”

 

Sirhan looks uncomfortable. “If you think I’m bad, you should talk to

Aineko about it,” he says, self-deprecatingly. “Sometimes I wonder

about that cat.”

 

“Maybe I will.” She pauses. “And you? What are you going to do with

yourself? Are you going to join the explorers?”

 

“I -” He looks sideways at her. “I can see myself sending an

eigenbrother,” he says quietly. “But I’m not going to gamble my entire

future on a bid to reach the far side of the observable universe by

router. I’ve had enough excitement to last me a lifetime, lately. I

think one copy for the backup archive in the icy depths, one to go

exploring - and one to settle down and raise a family. What about

you?”

 

“You’ll go all three ways?” she asks.

 

“Yes, I think so. What about you?”

 

“Where you go, I go.” She leans against him. “Isn’t that what matters

in the end?” she murmurs.