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

of which carries the energy of an artillery

shell at this speed - and the laser sail is in a constant state of

disintegration. A large chunk of the drive system’s mass is silvery

utility flakes for patching and replacing the soap-bubble-thin

membrane as it ablates away. The skill is in knowing how best to

funnel repair resources to where they’re needed, while minimizing

tension in the suspension lines and avoiding resonance and thrust

imbalance. As he trains the patch ‘bots, he broods about the hate mail

from his elder brother (who still blames him for their father’s

accident), and about Sadeq’s religious injunctions - Superstitious

nonsense, he thinks - and the fickleness of powerful women, and the

endless depths of his own nineteen-year-old soul.

 

While he’s brooding, Ang evidently finishes whatever she was doing and

bangs out - not even bothering to use the polished mahogany door at

the rear of the bridge, just discorporating and rematerializing

somewhere else. Wondering if she’s annoyed, he glances up just as the

first of his ghosts patches into his memory map, and he remembers what

happened when it met the new arrival. His eyes widen: “Oh shit!”

 

It’s not the film producer but the lawyer who’s just uploaded into the

Field Circus’s virtual universe. Someone’s going to have to tell

Amber. And although the last thing he wants to do is talk to her, it

looks like he’s going to have to call her, because this isn’t just a

routine visit. The lawyer means trouble.

 

*

 

Take a brain and put it in a bottle. Better: take a map of the

brain and put it in a map of a bottle - or of a body - and feed

signals to it that mimic its neurological inputs. Read its outputs

and route them to a model body in a model universe with a model of

physical laws, closing the loop. Ren� Descartes would understand.

That’s the state of the passengers of the Field Circus in a

nutshell. Formerly physical humans, their neural software (and a

map of the intracranial wetware it runs on) has been transferred

into a virtual machine environment executing on a honking great

computer, where the universe they experience is merely a dream

within a dream.

 

Brains in bottles - empowered ones, with total, dictatorial,

control over the reality they are exposed to - sometimes stop

engaging in activities that brains in bodies can’t avoid.

Menstruation isn’t mandatory. Vomiting, angina, exhaustion, and

cramp are all optional. So is meatdeath, the decomposition of the

corpus. But some activities don’t cease, because people (even

people who have been converted into a software description,

squirted through a high-bandwidth laser link, and ported into a

virtualization stack) don’t want them to stop. Breathing is wholly

unnecessary, but suppression of the breathing reflex is disturbing

unless you hack your hypothalamic map, and most homomorphic uploads

don’t want to do that. Then there’s eating - not to avoid

starvation, but for pleasure: Feasts on saut�ed dodo seasoned with

silphium are readily available here, and indeed, why not? It seems

the human addiction to sensory input won’t go away. And that’s

without considering sex, and the technical innovations that become

possible when the universe - and the bodies within it - are

mutable.

 

*

 

The public audience with the new arrivals is held in yet another

movie: the Parisian palace of Charles IX, the throne room lifted

wholesale from La Reine Margot by Patrice Ch�reau. Amber insisted on

period authenticity, with the realism dialed right up to eleven. It’s

1572 to the hilt this time, physical to the max. Pierre grunts in

irritation, unaccustomed to his beard. His codpiece chafes, and

sidelong glances tell him he isn’t the only member of the royal court

who’s uncomfortable. Still, Amber is resplendent in a gown worn by

Isabelle Adjani as Marguerite de Valois, and the luminous sunlight

streaming through the stained-glass windows high above the crowd of

actor zimboes lends a certain barbaric majesty to the occasion. The

place is heaving with bodies in clerical robes, doublets, and low-cut

gowns - some of them occupied by real people. Pierre sniffs again:

Someone (Gavin, with his history bug, perhaps?) has been working on

getting the smells right. He hopes like hell that nobody throws up. At

least nobody seems to have come as Catherine de M�dicis …

 

A bunch of actors portraying Huguenot soldiers approach the throne on

which Amber is seated: They pace slowly forward, escorting a rather

bemused-looking fellow with long, lank hair and a brocade jacket that

appears to be made of cloth-of-gold. “His lordship, Attorney at Arms

Alan Glashwiecz!” announces a flunky, reading from a parchment, “here

at the behest of the most excellent guild and corporation of Smoot,

Sedgwick Associates, with matters of legal import to discuss with Her

Royal Highness!”

 

A flourish of trumpets. Pierre glances at Her Royal Highness, who nods

gracefully, but is slightly peaky - it’s a humid summer day and her

many-layered robes look very hot. “Welcome to the furthermost soil of

the Ring Imperium,” she announces in a clear, ringing voice. “I bid

you welcome and invite you to place your petition before me in full

public session of court.”

 

Pierre directs his attention to Glashwiecz, who appears to be worried.

Doubtless he’d absorbed the basics of court protocol in the Ring

(population all of eighteen thousand back home, a growing little

principality), but the reality of it, a genuine old-fashioned monarchy

rooted in Amber’s three-way nexus of power, data, and time, always

takes a while to sink in. “I would be pleased to do so,” he says, a

little stiffly, “but in front of all those -”

 

Pierre misses the next bit, because someone has just goosed him on the

left buttock. He starts and half turns to see Su Ang looking past him

at the throne, a lady-in-waiting for the queen. She wears an apricot

dress with tight sleeves and a bodice that bares everything above her

nipples. There’s a fortune in pearls roped into her hair. As he

notices her, she winks at him.

 

Pierre freezes the scene, decoupling them from reality, and she faces

him. “Are we alone now?” she asks.

 

“Guess so. You want to talk about something?” he asks, heat rising in

his cheeks. The noise around them is a random susurrus of

machine-generated crowd scenery, the people motionless as their shared

reality thread proceeds independently of the rest of the universe.

 

“Of course!” She smiles at him and shrugs. The effect on her chest is

remarkable - those period bodices could give a skeleton a cleavage -

and she winks at him again. “Oh, Pierre.” She smiles. “So easily

distracted!” She snaps her fingers, and her clothing cycles through

Afghani burqua, nudity, trouser suit, then back to court finery. Her

grin is the only constant. “Now that I’ve got your attention, stop

looking at me and start looking at him.”

 

Even more embarrassed, Pierre follows her outstretched arm all the way

to the momentarily frozen Moorish emissary. “Sadeq?”

 

“Sadeq knows him, Pierre. This guy, there’s something wrong.”

 

“Shit. You think I don’t know that?” Pierre looks at her with

annoyance, embarrassment forgotten. “I’ve seen him before. Been

tracking his involvement for years. Guy’s a front for the Queen

Mother. He acted as her divorce lawyer when she went after Amber’s

Dad.”

 

“I’m sorry.” Ang glances away. “You haven’t been yourself lately,

Pierre. I know it’s something wrong between you and the Queen. I was

worried. You’re not paying attention to the little details.”

 

“Who do you think warned Amber?” he asks.

 

“Oh. Okay, so you’re in the loop,” she says. “I’m not sure. Anyway,

you’ve been distracted. Is there anything I can do to help?”

 

“Listen.” Pierre puts his hands on her shoulders. She doesn’t move,

but looks up into his eyes - Su Ang is only one-sixty tall - and he

feels a pang of something odd: teenage male uncertainty about the

friendship of women. What does she want? “I know, and I’m sorry, and

I’ll try to keep my eyes on the ball some more, but I’ve been in my

own headspace a lot lately. We ought to go back into the audience

before anybody notices.”

 

“Do you want to talk about the problem first?” she asks, inviting his

confidence.

 

“I -” Pierre shakes his head. I could tell her everything, he realizes

shakily as his metaconscience prods him urgently. He’s got a couple of

agony-aunt agents, but Ang is a real person and a friend. She won’t

pass judgment, and her model of human social behavior is a hell of a

lot better than any expert system’s. But time is in danger of

slipping, and besides, Pierre feels dirty. “Not now,” he says. “Let’s

go back.”

 

“Okay.” She nods, then turns away, steps behind him with a swish of

skirts, and he unfreezes time again as they snap back into place

within the larger universe, just in time to see the respected visitor

serve the queen with a class-action lawsuit, and the Queen respond by

referring adjudication to trial by combat.

 

*

 

Hyundai +4904/[-56] is a brown dwarf, a lump of dirty hydrogen

condensed from a stellar nursery, eight times as massive as Jupiter

but not massive enough to ignite a stable fusion reaction at its core.

The relentless crush of gravity has overcome the mutual repulsion of

electrons trapped at its core, shrinking it into a shell of slush

around a sphere of degenerate matter. It’s barely larger than the gas

giant the human ship uses as an energy source, but it’s much denser.

Gigayears ago, a chance stellar near miss sent it careening off into

the galaxy on its own, condemned to drift in eternal darkness along

with a cluster of frozen moons that dance attendance upon it.

 

By the time the Field Circus is decelerating toward it at short range

- having shed the primary sail, which drifts farther out into

interstellar space while reflecting light back onto the remaining

secondary sail surface to slow the starwhisp - Hyundai +4904/[-56] is

just under one parsec distant from Earth, closer even than Proxima

Centauri. Utterly dark at visible wavelengths, the brown dwarf could

have drifted through the outer reaches of the solar system before

conventional telescopes would have found it by direct observation.

Only an infrared survey in the early years of the current century gave

it a name.

 

A bunch of passengers and crew have gathered on the bridge (now

running at one-tenth of real time) to watch the arrival. Amber sits

curled up in the captain’s chair, moodily watching the gathered

avatars. Pierre is still avoiding her at every opportunity, formal

audiences excepted, and the damned shark and his pet hydra aren’t

invited, but apart from that, most of the gang is here. There are

sixty-three uploads running on the Field Circus’s virtualization

stack, software copied out of meatbodies who are mostly still walking

around back home. It’s a crowd, but it’s possible to feel lonely in a

crowd, even when it’s your party. And especially when you’re worried

about debt, even though you’re a billionairess, beneficiary of the

human species’ biggest reputations-rating trust fund. Amber’s clothing

- black leggings, black sweater - is as dark as her mood.

 

“Something troubles you.” A hand descends on the back of the chair

next to her.

 

She glances round momentarily, nods in recognition. “Yeah. Have a

seat. You missed the audience?”

 

The thin, brown-skinned man with a neatly cropped beard and deeply

lined forehead slips into the seat next to her. “It was not part of my

heritage,” he explains carefully, “although the situation is not

unfamiliar.” A momentary smile threatens to crack his stony face.