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

signifier is to invite death or transition to untranslatable

concept #1.”

 

Amber snaps her fingers: time freezes. She glances round at Su Ang,

Pierre, the other members of her primary team. “Opinions, anyone?”

 

Aineko, hitherto invisible, sits up on the carpet at the foot of the

dais. “I’m not sure. The reason those macros are tagged is that

there’s something wrong with their semantics.”

 

“Wrong with - how?” asks Su Ang.

 

The cat grins, cavernously, and begins to fade. “Wait!” snaps Amber.

 

Aineko continues her fade, but leaves a shimmering presence behind:

not a grin, but a neural network weighting map, three-dimensional and

incomprehensibly complicated. “The untranslatable entity concept #1

when mapped onto the lobster’s grammar network has elements of ‘god’

overloaded with attributes of mysticism and zenlike

incomprehensibility. But I’m pretty sure that what it really means is

‘optimized conscious upload that runs much faster than realtime’. A

type-one weakly superhuman entity, like, um, the folks back home. The

implication is that this Wunch wants us to view them as gods.” The cat

fades back in. “Any takers?”

 

“Small-town hustlers,” mutters Amber. “Talking big - or using a dodgy

metagrammar that makes them sound bigger than they are - to bilk the

hayseeds new to the big city.”

 

“Most likely.” Aineko turns and begins to wash her flank.

 

“What are we going to do?” asks Su Ang.

 

“Do?” Amber raises a pencil-lined eyebrow, then flashes a grin that

chops a decade off her apparent age: “We’re going to mess with their

heads!” She snaps her fingers again and time unfreezes. There’s no

change in continuity except that Aineko is still present, at the foot

of the throne. The cat looks up and gives the queen a dirty look. “We

understand your concern,” Amber says smoothly, “but we have already

given you the physiology models and neural architecture of the bodies

that you are wearing. We want to communicate. Why won’t you show us

your real selves or your real language?”

 

“This is trade language!” protests Lobster Number One. “Wunch am/are

metabolically variable coalition from number of worlds. No uniformity

of interface. Easiest to conform to one plan and speak one tongue

optimized for your comprehension.”

 

“Hmm.” Amber leans forward. “Let me see if I understand you. You are a

coalition of individuals from a number of species. You prefer to use

the common user interface model we sent you, and offered us the

language module you’re using for an exchange? And you want to trade

with us.”

 

“Exchange interest,” the Wunch emphasizes, bouncing up and down on its

legs. “Can offer much! Sense of identity of a thousand civilizations.

Safe tunnels to a hundred archives on the net suitable for beings who

are not untranslatable entity signifier. Able to control risks of

communication. Have technique of manipulating matter at molecular

level. Solution to algorithmic iterated systems based on quantum

entanglement.”

 

“Old-fashioned nanotechnology and shiny beads to dazzle the

primitives,” Pierre mutters on Amber’s multicast channel. “How

backward do they think we are?”

 

“The physics model in here is really overdone,” comments Boris. “They

may even think this is real, that we’re primitives coat-tailing it on

the back of the lobsters’ efforts.”

 

Amber forces a smile. “That is most interesting!” she trills at the

Wunch’s representatives. “I have appointed two representatives who

will negotiate with you; this is an internal contest within my own

court. I commend to you Pierre Naqet, my own commercial

representative. In addition, you may want to deal with Alan

Glashwiecz, an independent factor who is not currently present. Others

may come forward in due course if that is acceptable.”

 

“It pleases us,” says Lobster Number One. “We are tired and

disoriented by the long journey through gateways to this place.

Request resumption of negotiations later?”

 

“By all means.” Amber nods. A sergeant-at-arms, a mindless but

impressive zimboe controlled by her spider’s nest of personality

threads, blows a sharp note on his trumpet. The first audience is at

an end.

 

*

 

Outside the light cone of the Field Circus, on the other side of

the spacelike separation between Amber’s little kingdom in motion

and the depths of empire time that grip the solar system’s

entangled quantum networks, a singular new reality is taking shape.

 

Welcome to the moment of maximum change.

 

About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind

surrounded by an exocortex of distributed agents, threads of

personality spun right out of their heads to run on the clouds of

utility fog - infinitely flexible computing resources as thin as

aerogel - in which they live. The foggy depths are alive with

high-bandwidth sparkles; most of Earth’s biosphere has been wrapped

in cotton wool and preserved for future examination. For every

living human, a thousand million software agents carry information

into the farthest corners of the consciousness address space.

 

The sun, for so long an unremarkable mildly variable G2 dwarf, has

vanished within a gray cloud that englobes it except for a narrow

belt around the plane of the ecliptic. Sunlight falls, unchanged,

on the inner planets: Except for Mercury, which is no longer

present, having been dismantled completely and turned into

solar-powered high-temperature nanocomputers. A much fiercer light

falls on Venus, now surrounded by glittering ferns of carbon

crystals that pump angular momentum into the barely spinning planet

via huge superconducting loops wound around its equator. This

planet, too, is due to be dismantled. Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus -

all sprout rings as impressive as Saturn’s. But the task of

cannibalizing the gas giants will take many times longer than the

small rocky bodies of the inner system.

 

The ten billion inhabitants of this radically changed star system

remember being human; almost half of them predate the millennium.

Some of them still are human, untouched by the drive of

meta-evolution that has replaced blind Darwinian change with a

goal-directed teleological progress. They cower in gated

communities and hill forts, mumbling prayers and cursing the

ungodly meddlers with the natural order of things. But eight out of

every ten living humans are included in the phase-change. It’s the

most inclusive revolution in the human condition since the

discovery of speech.

 

A million outbreaks of gray goo - runaway nanoreplicator excursions

- threaten to raise the temperature of the biosphere dramatically.

They’re all contained by the planetary-scale immune system

fashioned from what was once the World Health Organization. Weirder

catastrophes threaten the boson factories in the Oort cloud.

Antimatter factories hover over the solar poles. Sol system shows

all the symptoms of a runaway intelligence excursion, exuberant

blemishes as normal for a technological civilization as skin

problems on a human adolescent.

 

The economic map of the planet has changed beyond recognition. Both

capitalism and communism, bickering ideological children of a

protoindustrial outlook, are as obsolete as the divine right of

kings: Companies are alive, and dead people may live again, too.

Globalism and tribalism have run to completion, diverging

respectively into homogeneous interoperability and the

Schwarzschild radius of insularity. Beings that remember being

human plan the deconstruction of Jupiter, the creation of a great

simulation space that will expand the habitat available within the

solar system. By converting all the nonstellar mass of the solar

system into processors, they can accommodate as many

human-equivalent minds as a civilization with a planet hosting ten

billion humans in orbit around every star in the galaxy.

 

A more mature version of Amber lives down in the surging chaos of

near-Jupiter space; there’s an instance of Pierre, too, although he

has relocated light-hours away, near Neptune. Whether she still

sometimes thinks of her relativistic twin, nobody can tell. In a

way, it doesn’t matter, because by the time the Field Circus

returns to Jupiter orbit, as much subjective time will have elapsed

for the fast-thinkers back home as will flash by in the real

universe between this moment and the end of the era of star

formation, many billions of years hence.

 

*

 

“As your theologian, I am telling you that they are not gods.”

 

Amber nods patiently. She watches Sadeq closely.

 

Sadeq coughs grumpily. “Tell her, Boris.”

 

Boris tilts his chair back and turns it toward the Queen. “He is

right, Amber. They are traders, and not clever ones either. Is hard to

get handle on their semiotics while they hide behind the lobster model

we uploaded in their direction twenty years ago, but are certainly not

crusties, and are definite not human either. Or transhuman. My guess,

they are bunch of dumb hicks who get hands on toys left behind by much

smarter guys. Like the rejectionist factions back home. Imagine they

are waking up one morning and find everyone else is gone to the great

upload environment in the sky. Leaving them with the planet to

themselves. What you think they do with whole world, with any gadgets

they trip over? Some will smash everything they come across, but

others not so stupid. But they think small. Scavengers,

deconstructionists. Their whole economic outlook are negative-sum

game. Go visit aliens to rip them off, take ideas, not expand selves

and transcend.”

 

Amber stands up, walks toward the windows at the front of the bridge.

In black jeans and chunky sweater, she barely resembles the feudal

queen whose role she plays for tourists. “Taking them on board was a

big risk. I’m not happy about it.”

 

“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Sadeq smiles

crookedly. “We have an answer. But they may not even realize they are

dancing with us. These are not the gods you were afraid of finding.”

 

“No.” Amber sighs. “Not too different from us, though. I mean, we

aren’t exactly well adapted to this environment, are we? We tote these

body-images along, rely on fake realities that we can map into our

human-style senses. We’re emulations, not native AIs. Where’s Su Ang?”

 

“I can find her.” Boris frowns.

 

“I asked her to analyse the alien’s arrival times,” Amber adds as an

afterthought. “They’re close - too close. And they showed up too damn

fast when we first tickled the router. I think Aineko’s theories are

flawed. The real owners of this network we’ve plugged into probably

use much higher-level protocols to communicate; sapient packets to

build effective communications gateways. This Wunch, they probably

lurk in wait for newbies to exploit. Pedophiles hiding outside the

school gate. I don’t want to give them that opportunity before we make

contact with the real thing!”

 

“You may have little choice,” says Sadeq. “If they are without

insight, as you suspect, they may become afraid if you edit their

environment. They may lash out. I doubt they even understand how they

created the contaminated metagrammar that they transmitted back to us.

It will be to them just a tool that makes simpleminded aliens more

gullible, easier to negotiate with. Who knows where they got it?”

 

“A grammatical weapon.” Boris spins himself round slowly. “Build

propaganda into your translation software if you want to establish a

favorable trading relationship. How cute. Haven’t these guys ever

heard of Newspeak?”

 

“Probably not,” Amber says slowly, pausing for a moment to spawn

spectator threads to run down the book and all three movie versions of

Nineteen Eighty-Four, followed by the sharecropped series of sequel

novels. She shivers uncomfortably as she reintegrates the memories.

“Ick. That’s not a very nice vision. Reminds me of” - she snaps her

fingers, trying to remember Dad’s favorite - “Dilbert.”

 

“Friendly fascism,” says Sadeq. “It matters not, whosoever is in

charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a

revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and

these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us.”