Accelerando by Charles Stross (books to read in a lifetime .txt) 📖

Franklin’s tone of

voice. “You can live forever in me …”

 

*

 

The Church of Latter-Day Saints believes that you can’t get into the

Promised Land unless it’s baptized you - but it can do so if it knows

your name and parentage, even after you’re dead. Its genealogical

databases are among the most impressive artifacts of historical

research ever prepared. And it likes to make converts.

 

The Franklin Collective believes that you can’t get into the future

unless it’s digitized your neural state vector, or at least acquired

as complete a snapshot of your sensory inputs and genome as current

technology permits. You don’t need to be alive for it to do this. Its

society of mind is among the most impressive artifacts of computer

science. And it likes to make converts.

 

*

 

Nightfall in the city. Annette stands impatiently on the doorstep.

“Let me the fuck in,” she snarls impatiently at the speakerphone.

“Merde!”

 

Someone opens the door. “Who -”

 

Annette shoves him inside, kicks the door shut, and leans on it. “Take

me to your bodhisattva,” she demands. “Now.”

 

“I -” he turns and heads inside, along the gloomy hallway that runs

past a staircase. Annette strides after him aggressively. He opens a

door and ducks inside, and she follows before he can close it.

 

Inside, the room is illuminated by a variety of indirect diode

sources, calibrated for the warm glow of a summer afternoon’s

daylight. There’s a bed in the middle of it, a figure lying asleep at

the heart of a herd of attentive diagnostic instruments. A couple of

attendants sit to either side of the sleeping man.

 

“What have you done to him?” Annette snaps, rushing forward. Manfred

blinks up at her from the pillows, bleary-eyed and confused as she

leans overhead: “Hello? Manny?” Over her shoulder: “If you have done

anything to him -”

 

“Annie?” He looks puzzled. A bright orange pair of goggles - not his

own - is pushed up onto his forehead like a pair of beached jellyfish.

“I don’t feel well. ‘F I get my hands on the bastard who did this …”

 

“We can fix that,” she says briskly, declining to mention the deal she

cut to get his memories back. She peels off his glasses and carefully

slides them onto his face, replacing his temporary ones. The brain bag

she puts down next to his shoulder, within easy range. The hairs on

the back of her neck rise as a thin chattering fills the ether around

them: his eyes are glowing a luminous blue behind his shades, as if a

high-tension spark is flying between his ears.

 

“Oh. Wow.” He sits up, the covers fall from his naked shoulders, and

her breath catches.

 

She looks round at the motionless figure sitting to his left. The man

in the chair nods deliberately, ironically. “What have you done to

him?”

 

“We’ve been looking after him - nothing more, nothing less. He arrived

in a state of considerable confusion, and his state deteriorated this

afternoon.”

 

She’s never met this fellow before, but she has a gut feeling that she

knows him. “You would be Robert … Franklin?”

 

He nods again. “The avatar is in.” There’s a thud as Manfred’s eyes

roll up in his head, and he flops back onto the bedding. “Excuse me.

Monica?”

 

The young woman on the other side of the bed shakes her head. “No, I’m

running Bob, too.”

 

“Oh. Well, you tell her - I’ve got to get him some juice.”

 

The woman who is also Bob Franklin - or whatever part of him survived

his battle with an exotic brain tumor eight years earlier - catches

Annette’s eye and shakes her head, smiles faintly. “You’re never alone

when you’re a syncitium.”

 

Annette wrinkles her brow: she has to trigger a dictionary attack to

parse the sentence. “One large cell, many nuclei? Oh, I see. You have

the new implant. The better to record everything.”

 

The youngster shrugs. “You want to die and be resurrected as a

third-person actor in a low-bandwidth re-enactment? Or a shadow of

itchy memories in some stranger’s skull?” She snorts, a gesture that’s

at odds with the rest of her body language.

 

“Bob must have been one of the first borganisms. Humans, I mean. After

Jim Bezier.” Annette glances over at Manfred, who has begun to snore

softly. “It must have been a lot of work.”

 

“The monitoring equipment cost millions, then,” says the woman -

Monica? - “and it didn’t do a very good job. One of the conditions for

our keeping access to his research funding is that we regularly run

his partials. He wanted to build up a kind of aggregate state vector -

patched together out of bits and pieces of other people to supplement

the partials that were all I - he - could record with the then state

of the art.”

 

“Eh, right.” Annette reaches out and absently smooths a stray hair

away from Manfred’s forehead. “What is it like to be part of a group

mind?”

 

Monica sniffs, evidently amused. “What is it like to see red? What’s

it like to be a bat? I can’t tell you - I can only show you. We’re all

free to leave at any time, you know.”

 

“But somehow you don’t.” Annette rubs her head, feels the short hair

over the almost imperceptible scars that conceal a network of implants

- tools that Manfred turned down when they became available a year or

two ago. (“Goop-phase Darwin-design nanotech ain’t designed for clean

interfaces,” he’d said, “I’ll stick to disposable kit, thanks.”) “No

thank you. I don’t think he’ll take up your offer when he wakes up,

either.” (Subtext: I’ll let you have him over my dead body.)

 

Monica shrugs. “That’s his loss: He won’t live forever in the

singularity, along with other followers of our gentle teacher. Anyway,

we have more converts than we know what to do with.”

 

A thought occurs to Annette. “Ah. You are all of one mind? Partially?

A question to you is a question to all?”

 

“It can be.” The words come simultaneously from Monica and the other

body, Alan, who is standing in the doorway with a boxy thing that

looks like an improvised diagnostician. “What do you have in mind?”

adds the Alan body.

 

Manfred, lying on the bed, groans: There’s an audible hiss of pink

noise as his glasses whisper in his ears, bone conduction providing a

serial highway to his wetware.

 

“Manfred was sent to find out why you’re opposing the ERA,” Annette

explains. “Some parts of our team operate without the other’s

knowledge.”

 

“Indeed.” Alan sits down on the chair beside the bed and clears his

throat, puffing his chest out pompously. “A very important theological

issue. I feel -”

 

“I, or we?” Annette interrupts.

 

“We feel,” Monica snaps. Then she glances at Alan. “Soo-rrry.”

 

The evidence of individuality within the group mind is disturbing to

Annette: Too many reruns of the Borgish fantasy have conditioned her

preconceptions, and their quasi-religious belief in a singularity

leaves her cold. “Please continue.”

 

“One person, one vote, is obsolete,” says Alan. “The broader issue of

how we value identity needs to be revisited, the franchise

reconsidered. Do you get one vote for each warm body? Or one vote for

each sapient individual? What about distributed intelligences? The

proposals in the Equal Rights Act are deeply flawed, based on a cult

of individuality that takes no account of the true complexity of

posthumanism.”

 

“Like the proposals for a feminine franchise in the nineteenth century

that would grant the vote to married wives of land-owning men,” Monica

adds slyly: “It misses the point.”

 

“Ah, oui.” Annette crosses her arms, suddenly defensive. This isn’t

what she’d expected to hear. This is the elitist side of the

posthumanism shtick, potentially as threatening to her post

enlightenment ideas as the divine right of kings.

 

“It misses more than that.” Heads turn to face an unexpected

direction: Manfred’s eyes are open again, and as he glances around the

room Annette can see a spark of interest there that was missing

earlier. “Last century, people were paying to have their heads frozen

after their death - in hope of reconstruction, later. They got no

civil rights: The law didn’t recognize death as a reversible process.

Now how do we account for it when you guys stop running Bob? Opt out

of the collective borganism? Or maybe opt back in again later?” He

reaches up and rubs his forehead, tiredly. “Sorry, I haven’t been

myself lately.” A crooked, slightly manic grin flickers across his

face. “See, I’ve been telling Gianni for a whole while, we need a new

legal concept of what it is to be a person. One that can cope with

sentient corporations, artificial stupidities, secessionists from

group minds, and reincarnated uploads. The religiously inclined are

having lots of fun with identity issues right now - why aren’t we

posthumanists thinking about these things?”

 

Annette’s bag bulges: Aineko pokes his head out, sniffs the air,

squeezes out onto the carpet, and begins to groom himself with perfect

disregard for the human bystanders. “Not to mention A-life experiments

who think they’re the real thing,” Manfred adds. “And aliens.”

 

Annette freezes, staring at him. “Manfred! You’re not supposed to -”

 

Manfred is watching Alan, who seems to be the most deeply integrated

of the dead venture billionaire’s executors: Even his expression

reminds Annette of meeting Bob Franklin back in Amsterdam, early in

the decade, when Manny’s personal dragon still owned him. “Aliens,”

Alan echoes. An eyebrow twitches. “Would this be the signal SETI

announced, or the, uh, other one? And how long have you known about

them?”

 

“Gianni has his fingers in a lot of pies,” Manfred comments blandly.

“And we still talk to the lobsters from time to time - you know,

they’re only a couple of light-hours away, right? They told us about

the signals.”

 

“Er.” Alan’s eyes glaze over for a moment; Annette’s prostheses paint

her a picture of false light spraying from the back of his head, his

entire sensory bandwidth momentarily soaking up a huge peer-to-peer

download from the server dust that wallpapers every room in the

building. Monica looks irritated, taps her fingernails on the back of

her chair. “The signals. Right. Why wasn’t this publicized?”

 

“The first one was.” Annette’s eyebrows furrow. “We couldn’t exactly

cover it up, everyone with a backyard dish pointed in the right

direction caught it. But most people who’re interested in hearing

about alien contacts already think they drop round on alternate

Tuesdays and Thursdays to administer rectal exams. Most of the rest

think it’s a hoax. Quite a few of the remainder are scratching their

heads and wondering whether it isn’t just a new kind of cosmological

phenomenon that emits a very low entropy signal. Of the six who are

left over, five are trying to get a handle on the message contents,

and the last is convinced it’s a practical joke. And the other signal,

well, that was weak enough that only the deep-space tracking network

caught it.”

 

Manfred fiddles with the bed control system. “It’s not a practical

joke,” he adds. “But they only captured about sixteen megabits of data

from the first one, maybe double that in the second. There’s quite a

bit of noise, the signals don’t repeat, their length doesn’t appear to

be a prime, there’s no obvious metainformation that describes the

internal format, so there’s no easy way of getting a handle on them.

To make matters worse, pointy-haired management at Arianespace” - he

glances at Annette, as if seeking a response to the