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

cat. “What’s this all about?”

 

The cat sneezes, then looks disgusted. “This wasn’t my idea, big shot.

Your father is a very weird guy, and your mother hates him lots

because she’s still in love with him. She’s got kinks, y’know? Or

maybe she’s sublimating them, if she’s serious about this church shit

she’s putting you through. He thinks she’s a control freak, and he’s

not entirely wrong. Anyway, after your dad ran off in search of

another dom, she took out an injunction against him. But she forgot to

cover his partner, and she bought this parcel of worms and sent them

to you, okay? Annie is a real bitch, but he’s got her wrapped right

around his finger, or something. Anyway, he built these companies and

this printer - which isn’t hardwired to a filtering proxy, like your

mom’s - specifically to let you get away from her legally. If that’s

what you want to do.”

 

Amber fast-forwards through the dynamic chunks of the README - boring

legal UML diagrams, mostly - soaking up the gist of the plan. Yemen is

one of the few countries to implement traditional Sunni shari’a law

and a limited liability company scam at the same time. Owning slaves

is legal - the fiction is that the owner has an option hedged on the

indentured laborer’s future output, with interest payments that grow

faster than the unfortunate victim can pay them off - and companies

are legal entities. If Amber sells herself into slavery to this

company, she will become a slave and the company will be legally

liable for her actions and upkeep. The rest of the legal instrument -

about ninety percent of it, in fact - is a set of self-modifying

corporate mechanisms coded in a variety of jurisdictions that permit

Turing-complete company constitutions, and which act as an ownership

shell for the slavery contract. At the far end of the corporate shell

game is a trust fund of which Amber is the prime beneficiary and

shareholder. When she reaches the age of majority, she’ll acquire

total control over all the companies in the network and can dissolve

her slave contract; until then, the trust fund (which she essentially

owns) oversees the company that owns her (and keeps it safe from

hostile takeover bids). Oh, and the company network is primed by an

extraordinary general meeting that instructed it to move the trust’s

assets to Paris immediately. A one-way airline ticket is enclosed.

 

“You think I should take this?” she asks uncertainly. It’s hard to

tell how smart the cat really is - there’s probably a yawning vacuum

behind those semantic networks if you dig deep enough - but it tells a

pretty convincing tale.

 

The cat squats and curls its tail protectively around its paws: “I’m

saying nothing, you know what I mean? You take this, you can go live

with your dad. But it won’t stop your ma coming after him with a

horsewhip, and after you with a bunch of lawyers and a set of

handcuffs. You want my advice, you’ll phone the Franklins and get

aboard their off-planet mining scam. In space, no one can serve a writ

on you. Plus, they got long-term plans to get into the CETI market,

cracking alien network packets. You want my honest opinion, you

wouldn’t like it in Paris after a bit. Your Dad and the frog bitch,

they’re swingers, y’know? No time in their lives for a kid. Or a cat

like me, now I think of it. They’re working all day for the Senator,

and out all hours of night doing drugs, fetish parties, raves, opera,

that kind of adult shit. Your Dad dresses in frocks more than your

mom, and your Tante ‘Nettie leads him around the apartment on a chain

when they’re not having noisy sex on the balcony. They’d cramp your

style, kid. You shouldn’t have to put up with parents who have more of

a life than you do.”

 

“Huh.” Amber wrinkles her nose, half-disgusted by the cat’s

transparent scheming, and half-acknowledging its message: I better

think hard about this, she decides. Then she flies off in so many

directions at once that she nearly browns out the household broadband.

Part of her is examining the intricate card pyramid of company

structures; somewhere else, she’s thinking about what can go wrong,

while another bit (probably some of her wet, messy glandular

biological self) is thinking about how nice it would be to see Daddy

again, albeit with some trepidation. Parents aren’t supposed to have

sex - isn’t there a law, or something? “Tell me about the Franklins?

Are they married? Singular?”

 

The 3D printer is cranking up. It hisses slightly, dissipating heat

from the hard vacuum chamber in its supercooled workspace. Deep in its

guts it creates coherent atom beams, from a bunch of Bose-Einstein

condensates hovering on the edge of absolute zero. By superimposing

interference patterns on them, it generates an atomic hologram,

building a perfect replica of some original artifact, right down to

the atomic level - there are no clunky moving nanotechnology parts to

break or overheat or mutate. Something is going to come out of the

printer in half an hour, something cloned off its original right down

to the individual quantum states of its component atomic nuclei. The

cat, seemingly oblivious, shuffles closer to the warm air exhaust

ducts.

 

“Bob Franklin, he died about two, three years before you were born -

your dad did business with him. So did your mom. Anyway, he had chunks

of his noumen preserved and the estate trustees are trying to

re-create his consciousness by cross-loading him in their implants.

They’re sort of a borganism, but with money and style. Anyway, Bob got

into the space biz back then, with some financial wizardry a friend of

your father whipped up for him, and now they’re building a spacehab

that they’re going to take all the way out to Jupiter, where they can

dismantle a couple of small moons and begin building helium-three

refineries. It’s that CETI scam I told you about earlier, but they’ve

got a whole load of other angles on it for the long term. See, your

dad’s friends have cracked the broadcast, the one everybody knows

about. It’s a bunch of instructions for finding the nearest router

that plugs into the galactic Internet. And they want to go out there

and talk to some aliens.”

 

This is mostly going right over Amber’s head - she’ll have to learn

what helium-three refineries are later - but the idea of running away

to space has a certain appeal. Adventure, that’s what. Amber looks

around the living room and sees it for a moment as a capsule, a small

wooden cell locked deep in a vision of a middle America that never was

- the one her mom wants to bring her up in, like a misshapen Skinner

box designed to train her to be normal. “Is Jupiter fun?” she asks. “I

know it’s big and not very dense, but is it, like, a happening place?

Are there any aliens there?”

 

“It’s the first place you need to go if you want to get to meet the

aliens eventually,” says the cat as the printer clanks and disgorges a

fake passport (convincingly aged), an intricate metal seal engraved

with Arabic script, and a tailored wide-spectrum vaccine targeted on

Amber’s immature immune system. “Stick that on your wrist, sign the

three top copies, put them in the envelope, and let’s get going. We’ve

got a flight to catch, slave.”

 

*

 

Sadeq is eating his dinner when the first lawsuit in Jupiter orbit

rolls in.

 

Alone in the cramped humming void of his station, he considers the

plea. The language is awkward, showing all the hallmarks of a crude

machine translation: The supplicant is American, a woman, and - oddly

- claims to be a Christian. This is surprising enough, but the nature

of her claim is, at face value, preposterous. He forces himself to

finish his bread, then bag the waste and clean the platter, before he

gives it his full consideration. Is it a tasteless joke? Evidently

not. As the only quadi outside the orbit of Mars, he is uniquely

qualified to hear it, and it is a case that cries out for justice.

 

A woman who leads a God-fearing life - not a correct one, no, but she

shows some signs of humility and progress toward a deeper

understanding - is deprived of her child by the machinations of a

feckless husband who deserted her years before. That the woman was

raising the child alone strikes Sadeq as disturbingly Western, but

pardonable when he reads her account of the feckless one’s behavior,

which is pretty lax; an ill fate indeed would await any child that

this man raises to adulthood. This man deprives her of her child, but

not by legitimate means: He doesn’t take the child into his own

household or make any attempt to raise her, either in accordance with

his own customs or the precepts of shari’a. Instead, he enslaves her

wickedly in the mire of the Western legal tradition, then casts her

into outer darkness to be used as a laborer by the dubious forces of

self-proclaimed “progress”. The same forces Sadeq has been sent to

confront, as representative of the umma in orbit around Jupiter.

 

Sadeq scratches his short beard thoughtfully. A nasty tale, but what

can he do about it? “Computer,” he says, “a reply to this supplicant:

My sympathies lie with you in the manner of your suffering, but I fail

to see in what way I can be of assistance. Your heart cries out for

help before God (blessed be his name), but surely this is a matter for

the temporal authorities of the dar al-Harb.” He pauses: Or is it? he

wonders. Legal wheels begin to turn in his mind. “If you can but find

your way to extending to me a path by which I can assert the primacy

of shari’a over your daughter, I shall apply myself to constructing a

case for her emancipation, to the greater glory of God (blessed be his

name). Ends, sigblock, send.”

 

Releasing the Velcro straps that hold him at the table, Sadeq floats

up and kicks gently toward the forward end of the cramped habitat. The

controls of the telescope are positioned between the ultrasonic

clothing cleaner and the lithium hydroxide scrubbers. They’re already

freed up, because he was conducting a wide-field survey of the inner

ring, looking for the signature of water ice. It is the work of a few

moments to pipe the navigation and tracking system into the

telescope’s controller and direct it to hunt for the big foreign ship

of fools. Something nudges at Sadeq’s mind urgently, an irritating

realization that he may have missed something in the woman’s e-mail:

there were a number of huge attachments. With half his mind he surfs

the news digest his scholarly peers send him daily. Meanwhile, he

waits patiently for the telescope to find the speck of light that the

poor woman’s daughter is enslaved within.

 

This might be a way in, he realizes, a way to enter dialogue with

them. Let the hard questions answer themselves, elegantly. There will

be no need for confrontation if they can be convinced that their plans

are faulty: no need to defend the godly from the latter-day Tower of

Babel these people propose to build. If this woman Pamela means what

she says, Sadeq need not end his days out here in the cold between the

worlds, away from his elderly parents and brother, and his colleagues

and friends. And he will be profoundly grateful, because in his heart

of hearts, he knows that he is less a warrior than a scholar.

 

*