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

strange, lacy, supercold

machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable loops as they

slice through Jupiter’s magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock’s

momentum into power. Small robots grovel in the orange dirt,

scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber’s

garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according

to a schema designed by preteens at an industrial school in Poland,

with barely any need for human guidance.

 

High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed

and conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating

trade with the alien intelligences believed to have been detected

eight years earlier by SETI, they function equally well as fiscal

gatekeepers for space colonies. The Sanger’s bank accounts in

California and Cuba are looking acceptable - since entering Jupiter

space, the orphanage has staked a claim on roughly a hundred

gigatons of random rocks and a moon that’s just small enough to

creep in under the International Astronomical Union’s definition of

a sovereign planetary body. The borg are working hard, leading

their eager teams of child stakeholders in their plans to build the

industrial metastructures necessary to support mining helium-three

from Jupiter. They’re so focused that they spend much of their time

being themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared identity

that gives them their messianic drive.

 

Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and slumbers in time to

its ancient orbital dynamics. A religious college in Cairo is

considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to

prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular

level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be

treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a

computing machine’s memory by mapping and simulating all its

synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so,

what are its rights and duties?) Riots in Borneo underline the

urgency of this theotechnological inquiry.

 

More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Marseilles also

underline a rising problem: the social chaos caused by cheap

anti-aging treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of

disaffected youth against the formerly graying gerontocracy of

Europe, insist that people who predate the supergrid and can’t

handle implants aren’t really conscious: Their ferocity is equaled

only by the anger of the dynamic septuagenarians of the baby boom,

their bodies partially restored to the flush of sixties youth, but

their minds adrift in a slower, less contingent century. The

faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the labor pool,

but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the new

millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by

deflationary time.

 

The Bangladeshi economic miracle is typical of the age. With growth

rates running at over twenty percent, cheap out-of-control

bioindustrialization has swept the nation: Former rice farmers

harvest plastics and milk cows for silk, while their children study

mariculture and design seawalls. With cellphone ownership nearing

eighty percent and literacy at ninety, the once-poor country is

finally breaking out of its historical infrastructure trap and

beginning to develop: In another generation, they’ll be richer than

Japan.

 

Radical new economic theories are focusing around bandwidth,

speed-of-light transmission time, and the implications of CETI,

communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Cosmologists and

quants collaborate on bizarre relativistically telescoped financial

instruments. Space (which lets you store information) and structure

(which lets you process it) acquire value while dumb mass - like

gold - loses it. The degenerate cores of the traditional stock

markets are in free fall, the old smokestack microprocessor and

biotech/nanotech industries crumbling before the onslaught of

matter replicators and self-modifying ideas. The inheritors look

set to be a new wave of barbarian communicators, who mortgage their

future for a millennium against the chance of a gift from a

visiting alien intelligence. Microsoft, once the US Steel of the

silicon age, quietly fades into liquidation.

 

An outbreak of green goo - a crude biomechanical replicator that

eats everything in its path - is dealt with in the Australian

outback by carpet-bombing with fuel-air explosives. The USAF

subsequently reactivates two wings of refurbished B-52s and places

them at the disposal of the UN standing committee on

self-replicating weapons. (CNN discovers that one of their newest

pilots, re-enlisting with the body of a twenty-year-old and an

empty pension account, first flew them over Laos and Cambodia.) The

news overshadows the World Health Organization’s announcement of

the end of the HIV pandemic, after more than fifty years of

bigotry, panic, and megadeath.

 

*

 

“Breathe steadily. Remember your regulator drill? If you spot your

heart rate going up or your mouth going dry, take five.”

 

“Shut the fuck up, ‘Neko, I’m trying to concentrate.” Amber fumbles

with the titanium D-ring, trying to snake the strap through it. The

gauntlets are getting in her way. High orbit space suits - little more

than a body stocking designed to hold your skin under compression and

help you breathe - are easy, but this deep in Jupiter’s radiation belt

she has to wear an old Orlan-DM suit that comes in about thirteen

layers. The gloves are stiff and hard to work in. It’s Chernobyl

weather outside, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons storming

through the void, and she really needs the extra protection. “Got it.”

She yanks the strap tight, pulls on the D-ring, then goes to work on

the next strap. Never looking down; because the wall she’s tying

herself to has no floor, just a cutoff two meters below, then empty

space for a hundred kilometers before the nearest solid ground.

 

The ground sings to her moronically: “I love you, you love me, it’s

the law of gravity -”

 

She shoves her feet down onto the platform that juts from the side of

the capsule like a suicide’s ledge: metallized Velcro grabs hold, and

she pulls on the straps to turn her body round until she can see past

the capsule, sideways. The capsule masses about five tonnes, barely

bigger than an ancient Soyuz. It’s packed to overflowing with

environment-sensitive stuff she’ll need, and a honking great high-gain

antenna. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” someone says over the

intercom.

 

“Of course I -” She stops. Alone in this Energiya NPO surplus iron

maiden with its low-bandwidth coms and bizarre plumbing, she feels

claustrophobic and helpless: Parts of her mind don’t work. When she

was four, Mom took her down a famous cave system somewhere out west.

When the guide turned out the lights half a kilometer underground,

she’d screamed with surprise as the darkness had reached out and

touched her. Now it’s not the darkness that frightens her, it’s the

lack of thought. For a hundred kilometers below her there are no

minds, and even on the surface there’s only the moronic warbling of

‘bots for company. Everything that makes the universe primate-friendly

seems to be locked in the huge spaceship that looms somewhere just

behind the back of her head, and she has to fight down an urge to shed

her straps and swarm back up the umbilical that anchors the capsule to

the Sanger. “I’ll be fine,” she forces herself to say. And even though

she’s unsure that it’s true, she tries to make herself believe it.

“It’s just leaving-home nerves. I’ve read about it, okay?”

 

There’s a funny, high-pitched whistle in her ears. For a moment, the

sweat on the back of her neck turns icy cold, then the noise stops.

She strains for a moment, and when it returns she recognizes the

sound: The hitherto-talkative cat, curled in the warmth of her

pressurized luggage can, has begun to snore.

 

“Let’s go,” she says, “Time to roll the wagon.” A speech macro deep in

the Sanger’s docking firmware recognizes her authority and gently lets

go of the pod. A couple of cold gas clusters pop, sending deep banging

vibrations running through the capsule, and she’s on her way.

 

“Amber. How’s it hanging?” A familiar voice in her ears: She blinks.

Fifteen hundred seconds, nearly half an hour gone.

 

“Robes-Pierre, chopped any aristos lately?”

 

“Heh!” A pause. “I can see your head from here.”

 

“How’s it looking?” she asks. There’s a lump in her throat; she isn’t

sure why. Pierre is probably hooked into one of the smaller proximity

cameras dotted around the outer hull of the big mother ship, watching

over her as she falls.

 

“Pretty much like always,” he says laconically. Another pause, this

time longer. “This is wild, you know? Su Ang says hi, by the way.”

 

“Su Ang, hi,” she replies, resisting the urge to lean back and look up

- up relative to her feet, not her vector - and see if the ship’s

still visible.

 

“Hi,” Ang says shyly. “You’re very brave?”

 

“Still can’t beat you at chess.” Amber frowns. Su Ang and her

overengineered algae. Oscar and his pharmaceutical factory toads.

People she’s known for three years, mostly ignored, and never thought

about missing. “Listen, are you going to come visiting?”

 

“You want us to visit?” Ang sounds dubious. “When will it be ready?”

 

“Oh, soon enough.” At four kilograms per minute of structured-matter

output, the printers on the surface have already built her a bunch of

stuff: a habitat dome, the guts of an algae/shrimp farm, an excavator

to bury it with, an airlock. Even a honey bucket. It’s all lying

around waiting for her to put it together and move into her new home.

“Once the borg get back from Amalthea.”

 

“Hey! You mean they’re moving? How did you figure that?”

 

“Go talk to them,” Amber says. Actually, she’s a large part of the

reason the Sanger is about to crank its orbit up and out toward the

other moon: She wants to be alone in coms silence for a couple of

million seconds. The Franklin collective is doing her a big favor.

 

“Ahead of the curve, as usual,” Pierre cuts in, with something that

sounds like admiration to her uncertain ears.

 

“You too,” she says, a little too fast: “Come visit when I’ve got the

life-support cycle stabilized.”

 

“I’ll do that,” he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the

capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring

blue laser line of the Sanger’s drive torch powering up.

 

*

 

Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, passes.

 

The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic

control display. These days, every shift seems to bring a new crewed

spaceship into Jupiter system: Space is getting positively crowded.

When he arrived, there were fewer than two hundred people here. Now

there’s the population of a small city, and many of them live at the

heart of the approach map centered on his display. He breathes deeply

- trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks - and studies the

map. “Computer, what about my slot?” he asks.

 

“Your slot: Cleared to commence final approach in six-nine-five

seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside ten kilometers,

drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of

forbidden thrust vectors now.” Chunks of the approach map turn red,

gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other craft in the

area.

 

Sadeq sighs. “We’ll go in using Kurs. I assume their Kurs guidance is

active?”

 

“Kurs docking target support available to shell level three.”

 

“Praise Allah.” He pokes around through the guidance subsystem’s

menus, setting up the software emulation of the obsolete (but highly

reliable) Soyuz docking system. At last he can leave the ship to look

after itself for a bit. He glances round. For two years he has lived

in this canister, and soon he will step outside it.