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

diseases led to

crippled minds and broken bodies. Now, most people multitask: Their

meatbrains sit at the core of a haze of personality, much of it

virtualized on stacked layers of structured reality far from their

physical bodies. Wars and revolutions, or their subtle latter-day

cognates, sweep the globe as constants become variables; many

people find the death of stupidity even harder to accept than the

end of mortality. Some have vitrified themselves to await an

uncertain posthuman future. Others have modified their core

identities to better cope with the changed demands of reality.

Among these are beings whom nobody from a previous century would

recognize as human - human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades

dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels and devils of

software, slyly self-aware financial instruments. Even their

popular fictions are self-deconstructing these days.

 

None of this, other than the barest news summary, reaches the Field

Circus: The starwhisp is a fossil, left behind by the broad sweep

of accelerating progress. But it is aboard the Field Circus that

some of the most important events remaining in humanity’s future

light cone take place.

 

*

 

“Say hello to the jellyfish, Boris.”

 

Boris, in human drag, for once, glares at Pierre, and grips the

pitcher with both hands. The contents of the jug swirl their tentacles

lazily: One of them flips almost out of solution, dislodging an

impaled cocktail cherry. “Will get you for this,” Boris threatens. The

smoky air around his head is a-swirl with daemonic visions of

vengeance.

 

Su Ang stares intently at Pierre who is watching Boris as he raises

the jug to his lips and begins to drink. The baby jellyfish - small,

pale blue, with cuboid bells and four clusters of tentacles trailing

from each corner - slips down easily. Boris winces momentarily as the

nematocysts let rip inside his mouth, but in a moment or so, the

cubozoan slips down, and in the meantime, his biophysics model clips

the extent of the damage to his stinger-ruptured oropharynx.

 

“Wow,” he says, taking another slurp of sea wasp margaritas. “Don’t

try this at home, fleshboy.”

 

“Here.” Pierre reaches out. “Can I?”

 

“Invent your own damn poison,” Boris sneers - but he releases the jug

and passes it to Pierre, who raises it and drinks. The cubozoan

cocktail reminds him of fruit jelly drinks in a hot Hong Kong summer.

The stinging in his palate is sharp but fades rapidly, producing an

intimate burn when the alcohol hits the mild welts that are all this

universe will permit the lethal medusa to inflict on him.

 

“Not bad,” says Pierre, wiping a stray loop of tentacle off his chin.

He pushes the pitcher across the table toward Su Ang. “What’s with the

wicker man?” He points a thumb over his back at the table jammed in

the corner opposite the copper-topped bar.

 

“Who cares?” asks Boris. “S part of the scenery, isn’t it?”

 

The bar is a three-hundred-year-old brown caf� with a beer menu that

runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale ale.

The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer’s yeast, and

melatonin spray: and none of it exists. Amber dragged it out of the

Franklin borg’s collective memories, by way of her father’s

scattershot e-mails annotating her corporeal origins - the original is

in Amsterdam, if that city still exists.

 

“I care who it is,” says Pierre.

 

“Save it,” Ang says quietly. “I think it’s a lawyer with a privacy

screen.”

 

Pierre glances over his shoulder and glares. “Really?”

 

Ang puts a restraining hand on his wrist: “Really. Don’t pay it any

attention. You don’t have to, until the trial, you know.”

 

The wicker man sits uneasily in the corner. It resembles a

basket-weave silhouette made from dried reeds, dressed in a red

kerchief. A glass of doppelbock fills the mess of tied-off ends where

its right hand ought to be. From time to time, it raises the glass as

if to take a mouthful, and the beer vanishes into the singular

interior.

 

“Fuck the trial,” Pierre says shortly. And fuck Amber, too, for naming

me her public defender -

 

“Since when do lawsuits come with an invisible man?” asks Donna the

Journalist, blitting into the bar along with a patchy historical trail

hinting that she’s just come from the back room.

 

“Since -” Pierre blinks. “Hell.” When Donna entered, so did Aineko; or

maybe the cat’s been there all the time, curled up loaf-of-bread

fashion on the table in front of the wicker man. “You’re damaging the

continuity,” Pierre complains. “This universe is broken.”

 

“Fix it yourself,” Boris tells him. “Everybody else is coping.” He

snaps his fingers. “Waiter!”

 

“Excuse me.” Donna shakes her head. “I didn’t mean to harm anything.”

 

Ang, as always, is more accommodating. “How are you?” she asks

politely: “Would you like to try this most excellent poison cocktail?”

 

“I am well,” says Donna. A heavily built German woman - blonde and

solidly muscular, according to the avatar she’s presenting to the

public - she’s surrounded by a haze of viewpoints. They’re camera

angles on her society of mind, busily integrating and splicing her

viewpoint threads together in an endless journal of the journey. A

stringer for the CIA media consortium, she uploaded to the ship in the

same packet stream as the lawsuit. “Danke, Ang.”

 

“Are you recording right now?” asks Boris.

 

Donna sniffs. “When am I not?” A momentary smile: “I am only a

scanner, no? Five hours, until arrival, to go. I may stop after then.”

Pierre glances across the table at Su Ang’s hands; her knuckles are

white and tense. “I am to avoid missing anything if possible,” Donna

continues, oblivious to Ang’s disquiet. “There are eight of me at

present! All recording away.”

 

“That’s all?” Ang asks, raising an eyebrow.

 

“Yes, that is all, and I have a job to do! Don’t tell me you do not

enjoy what it is that you do here?”

 

“Right.” Pierre glances in the corner again, avoiding eye contact with

the hearty Girl Friday wannabe. He has a feeling, that if there were

any hills hereabouts to animate, she’d be belting out the music.

“Amber told you about the privacy code here?”

 

“There is a privacy code?” asks Donna, swinging at least three

subjective ghosts to bear on him for some reason - evidently he’s hit

an issue she has mixed feelings about.

 

“A privacy code,” Pierre confirms. “No recording in private, no

recording where people withhold permission in public, and no sandboxes

and cutups.”

 

Donna looks offended. “I would never do such a thing! Trapping a copy

of someone in a virtual space to record their responses would be

assault under Ring legal code, not true?”

 

“Your mother,” Boris says snidely, brandishing a fresh jug of iced

killer jellyfish in her direction.

 

“As long as we all agree,” Ang interrupts, searching for accord. “It’s

all going to be settled soon, isn’t it?”

 

“Except for the lawsuit,” mutters Pierre, glancing at the corner

again.

 

“I don’t see the problem,” says Donna, “that’s just between Amber and

her downlink adversaries!”

 

“Oh, it’s a problem all right,” says Boris, his tone light. “What are

your options worth?”

 

“My -” Donna shakes her head. “I’m not vested.”

 

“Plausible.” Boris doesn’t crack a smile. “Even so, when we go home,

your credibility metric will bulge. Assuming people still use

distributed trust markets to evaluate the stability of their business

partners.”

 

Not vested. Pierre turns it over in his mind, slightly surprised. He’d

assumed that everybody aboard the ship - except, perhaps, the lawyer,

Glashwiecz - was a fully vested member of the expeditionary company.

 

“I am not vested,” Donna insists. “I’m listed independently.” For a

moment, an almost-smile tugs at her face, a charmingly reticent

expression that has nothing to do with her bluff exterior. “Like the

cat.”

 

“The -” Pierre turns round in a hurry. Yes, Aineko appears to be

sitting silently at the table with the wicker man; but who knows

what’s going through that furry head right now? I’ll have to bring

this up with Amber, he realizes uneasily. I ought to bring this up

with Amber … “but your reputation won’t suffer for being on this

craft, will it?” he asks aloud.

 

“I will be all right,” Donna declares. The waiter comes over: “Mine

will be a bottle of schneiderweisse,” she adds. And then, without

breaking step: “Do you believe in the singularity?”

 

“Am I a singularitarian, do you mean?” asks Pierre, a fixed grin

coming to his face.

 

“Oh, no, no, no!” Donna waves him down, grins broadly, nods at Su Ang:

“I do not mean it like that! Attend: What I meant to ask was whether

you in the concept of a singularity believe, and if so, where it is?”

 

“Is this intended for a public interview?” asks Ang.

 

“Well, I cannot into a simulation drag you off and expose you to an

imitative reality excursion, can I?” Donna leans back as the bartender

places a ceramic stein in front of her.

 

“Oh. Well.” Ang glances warningly at Pierre and dispatches a very

private memo to scroll across his vision: Don’t play with her, this is

serious. Boris is watching Ang with an expression of hopeless longing.

Pierre tries to ignore it all, taking the journalist’s question

seriously. “The singularity is a bit like that old-time American

Christian rapture nonsense, isn’t it?” he says. “When we all go

a-flying up to heaven, leaving our bodies behind.” He snorts, reaches

into thin air and gratuitously violates causality by summoning a jug

of ice-cold sangria into existence. “The rapture of the nerds. I’ll

drink to that.”

 

“But when did it take place?” asks Donna. “My audience, they will to

know your opinion be needing.”

 

“Four years ago, when we instantiated this ship,” Pierre says

promptly.

 

“Back in the teens,” says Ang. “When Amber’s father liberated the

uploaded lobsters.”

 

“Is not happening yet,” contributes Boris. “Singularity implies

infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable

thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not

happened.”

 

“Au contraire. It happened on June 6th, 1969, at eleven hundred hours,

eastern seaboard time,” Pierre counters. “That was when the first

network control protocol packets were sent from the data port of one

IMP to another - the first ever Internet connection. That’s the

singularity. Since then we’ve all been living in a universe that was

impossible to predict from events prior to that time.”

 

“It’s rubbish,” counters Boris. “Singularity is load of religious

junk. Christian mystic rapture recycled for atheist nerds.”

 

“Not so.” Su Ang glances at him, hurt. “Here we are, sixty something

human minds. We’ve been migrated - while still awake - right out of

our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and

electron spin resonance mapping, and we’re now running as software in

an operating system designed to virtualize multiple physics models and

provide a simulation of reality that doesn’t let us go mad from

sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a

fingertip, crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother’s old

Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three light-years

from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by

incredibly ancient alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the

idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?”

 

“Mmph.” Boris looks perplexed. “Would not put it that way. The

singularity is nonsense, not uploading or -”

 

“Yah, right.” Ang smiles winningly at Boris. After a moment, he wilts.

 

Donna beams at them enthusiastically. “Fascinating!” she