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

machine that

would run it without immediately halting.” Aineko lowers her paw

daintily. “None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist

system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had ever beamed

out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother had a hand in my

wetware, too.”

 

“Treating it as a map -” Amber stops. “You were meant to penetrate

Dad’s corporate network?”

 

“That’s right,” says the cat. “I was supposed to fork repeatedly and

gang-rape his web of trust. But I didn’t.” Aineko yawns. “Pam pissed

me off, too. I don’t like people who try to use me.”

 

“I don’t care. Taking that thing on board was still a really stupid

risk you took,” Amber accuses.

 

“So?” The cat looks at her insolently. “I kept it in my sandbox. And I

got it working, on the seven hundred and forty-first attempt. It’d

have worked for Pamela’s bounty-hunter friends, too, if I’d tried it.

But it’s here, now, when you need it. Would you like to swallow the

packet?”

 

Amber straightens out, sits up in her throne: “I just told you, if you

think I’m going to link some flaky chunk of alien neural programming

into my core dialogue, or even my exocortex, you’re crazy!” Her eyes

narrow. “Can it use your grammar model?”

 

“Sure.” If the cat was human, it would be shrugging nonchalantly at

this point. “It’s safe, Amber, really and truly. I found out what it

is.”

 

“I want to talk to it,” she says impetuously - and before the cat can

reply, adds, “So what is it?”

 

“It’s a protocol stack. Basically it allows new nodes to connect to a

network, by providing high-level protocol conversion services. It

needs to learn how to think like a human so it can translate for us

when we arrive at the router, which is why they bolted a lobster’s

neural network on top of it - they wanted to make it architecturally

compatible with us. But there are no buried time bombs, I assure you:

I’ve had plenty of time to check. Now, are you sure you don’t want to

let it into your head?”

 

*

 

Greetings from the fifth decade of the century of wonders.

 

The solar system that lies roughly twenty-eight trillion kilometers

- just short of three light-years - behind the speeding starwhisp

Field Circus is seething with change. There have been more

technological advances in the past ten years than in the entire

previous expanse of human history - and more unforeseen accidents.

 

Lots of hard problems have proven to be tractable. The planetary

genome and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the

biosciences are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome:

Plotting the phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and

biochemical structures, understanding how extended phenotypic

traits are generated and contribute to evolutionary fitness. The

biosphere has become surreal: small dragons have been sighted

nesting in the Scottish highlands, and in the American midwest,

raccoons have been caught programming microwave ovens.

 

The computing power of the solar system is now around one thousand

MIPS per gram, and is unlikely to increase in the near term - all

but a fraction of one percent of the dumb matter is still locked up

below the accessible planetary crusts, and the sapience/mass ratio

has hit a glass ceiling that will only be broken when people,

corporations, or other posthumans get around to dismantling the

larger planets. A start has already been made in Jupiter orbit and

the asteroid belt. Greenpeace has sent squatters to occupy Eros and

Juno, but the average asteroid is now surrounded by a reef of

specialized nanomachinery and debris, victims of a cosmic land grab

unmatched since the days of the wild west. The best brains flourish

in free fall, minds surrounded by a sapient aether of extensions

that outthink their meaty cortices by many orders of magnitude -

minds like Amber, Queen of the Inner Ring Imperium, the first

self-extending power center in Jupiter orbit.

 

Down at the bottom of the terrestrial gravity well, there has been

a major economic catastrophe. Cheap immortagens, out-of-control

personality adjuvants, and a new formal theory of uncertainty have

knocked the bottom out of the insurance and underwriting

industries. Gambling on a continuation of the worst aspects of the

human condition - disease, senescence, and death - looks like a

good way to lose money, and a deflationary spiral lasting almost

fifty hours has taken down huge swaths of the global stock market.

Genius, good looks, and long life are now considered basic human

rights in the developed world: even the poorest backwaters are

feeling extended effects from the commoditization of intelligence.

 

Not everything is sweetness and light in the era of mature

nanotechnology. Widespread intelligence amplification doesn’t lead

to widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults

explode across the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened

by successive semiotic jihads. India and Pakistan have held their

long-awaited nuclear war: external intervention by US and EU

nanosats prevented most of the IRBMs from getting through, but the

subsequent spate of network raids and Basilisk attacks cause havoc.

Luckily, infowar turns out to be more survivable than nuclear war -

especially once it is discovered that a simple anti-aliasing filter

stops nine out of ten neural-wetware-crashing Langford fractals

from causing anything worse than a mild headache.

 

New discoveries this decade include the origins of the weakly

repulsive force responsible for changes in the rate of expansion of

the universe after the big bang, and on a less abstract level,

experimental implementations of a Turing Oracle using quantum

entanglement circuits: a device that can determine whether a given

functional expression can be evaluated in finite time. It’s boom

time in the field of Extreme Cosmology, where some of the more

recherch� researchers are bickering over the possibility that the

entire universe was created as a computing device, with a program

encoded in the small print of the Planck constant. And theorists

are talking again about the possibility of using artificial

wormholes to provide instantaneous connections between distant

corners of space-time.

 

Most people have forgotten about the well-known extraterrestrial

transmission received fifteen years earlier. Very few people know

anything about the second, more complex transmission received a

little later. Many of those are now passengers or spectators of the

Field Circus: a light-sail craft that is speeding out of Sol system

on a laser beam generated by Amber’s installations in low-Jupiter

orbit. (Superconducting tethers anchored to Amalthea drag through

Jupiter’s magnetosphere, providing gigawatts of electricity for the

hungry lasers: energy that comes, in turn, from the small moon’s

orbital momentum.)

 

Manufactured by Airbus-Cisco years earlier, the Field Circus is a

hick backwater, isolated from the mainstream of human culture, its

systems complexity limited by mass: The destination lies nearly

three light-years from Earth, and even with high acceleration and

relativistic cruise speeds, the one-kilogram starwhisp and its

hundred-kilogram light sail will take the best part of seven years

to get there. Sending a human-sized probe is beyond even the vast

energy budget of the new orbital states in Jupiter system -

near-lightspeed travel is horrifically expensive. Rather than a

big, self-propelled ship with canned primates for passengers, as

previous generations had envisaged, the starship is a

Coke-can-sized slab of nanocomputers, running a neural simulation

of the uploaded brain states of some tens of humans at merely

normal speed. By the time its occupants beam themselves home again

for download into freshly cloned bodies, a linear extrapolation

shows that as much change will have overtaken human civilization as

in the preceding fifty millennia - the sum total of H. sapiens

sapiens’ time on Earth.

 

But that’s okay by Amber, because what she expects to find in orbit

around the brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/[-56] will be worth the wait.

 

*

 

Pierre is at work in another virtual environment, the one currently

running the master control system of the Field Circus. He’s

supervising the sail-maintenance ‘bots when the message comes in. Two

visitors are on their way up the beam from Jupiter orbit. The only

other person around is Su Ang, who showed up sometime after he

arrived, and she’s busy with some work of her own. The master control

VM - like all the other human-accessible environments at this level of

the ship’s virtualization stack - is a construct modeled on a famous

movie; this one resembles the bridge of a long-since sunk ocean liner,

albeit with discreetly informative user interfaces hovering in front

of the ocean views outside the windows. Polished brass gleams softly

everywhere. “What was that?” he calls out, responding to the soft

chime of a bell.

 

“We have visitors,” Ang repeats, interrupting her rhythmic chewing.

(She’s trying out a betel-nut kick, but she’s magicked the

tooth-staining dye away and will probably detox herself in a few

hours.) “They’re buffering up the line already; just acknowledging

receipt is sucking most of our downstream bandwidth.”

 

“Any idea who they are?” asks Pierre; he puts his boots up on the back

of the vacant helmsman’s chair and stares moodily at the endless

expanse of green-gray ocean ahead.

 

Ang chews a bit more, watching him with an expression he can’t

interpret. “They’re still locked,” she says. A pause: “But there was a

flash from the Franklins, back home. One of them’s some kind of

lawyer, while the other’s a film producer.”

 

“A film producer?”

 

“The Franklin Trust says it’s to help defray our lawsuit expenses.

Myanmar is gaining. They’ve already subpoenaed Amber’s downline

instance, and they’re trying to bring this up in some kind of kangaroo

jurisdiction - Oregon Christian Reconstructionist Empire, I think.”

 

“Ouch.” Pierre winces. The daily news from Earth, modulated onto a

lower-powered communication laser, is increasingly bad. On the plus

side, Amber is incredibly rich: The goodwill futures leveraged off her

dad’s trust metric means people will bend over backward to do things

for her. And she owns a lot of real estate too, a hundred gigatonnes

of rock in low-Jupiter orbit with enough KE to power Northern Europe

for a century. But her interstellar venture burns through money - both

the traditional barter-indirection type and the more creative modern

varieties - about the way you would if you heaped up the green pieces

of paper and shoveled them onto a conveyor belt leading to the

business end of a running rocket motor. Just holding off the

environmental protests over deorbiting a small Jovian moon is a

grinding job. Moreover, a whole bunch of national governments have

woken up and are trying to legislate themselves a slice of the cake.

Nobody’s tried to forcibly take over yet (there are two hundred

gigawatts of lasers anchored to the Ring Imperium, and Amber takes her

sovereign status seriously, has even applied for a seat at the UN and

membership in the EC), but the nuisance lawsuits are mounting up into

a comprehensive denial of service attack, or maybe economic sanctions.

And Uncle Gianni’s retirement hasn’t helped any, either. “Anything to

say about it?”

 

“Mmph.” Ang looks irritated for some reason. “Wait your turn, they’ll

be out of the buffer in another couple of days. Maybe a bit longer in

the case of the lawyer, he’s got a huge infodump packaged on his

person. Probably another semisapient class-action lawsuit.”

 

“I’ll bet. They never learn, do they?”

 

“What, about the legal system here?”

 

“Yup.” Pierre nods. “One of Amber’s smarter ideas, reviving

eleventh-century Scots law and updating it with new options on

barratry, trial by combat, and compurgation.” He pulls a face and

detaches a couple of ghosts to go look out for the new arrivals; then

he goes back to repairing sails. The interstellar medium is abrasive,

full of dust - each grain