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

face of a little boy, bouncing a ball at his companions

by the boarded-up front of a gas station on a desert road; remembers

the animated chatter of two synthetic housewives, one in traditional

black and the other in some imported Eurotrash fashion. “Are you sure

they aren’t real?” she asks.

 

“Quite sure.” But for a moment, she sees Sadeq looking uncertain.

“Shall we go? Do you have the occupiers ready to move in yet?”

 

“Yes to the first, and Pierre’s working on the second. Come on, we

don’t want to get trampled by the squatters.” She waves and opens a

door back onto the piazza where her robot cat - the alien’s nightmare

intruder in the DMZ - sleeps, chasing superintelligent dream mice

through multidimensional realities. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m

conscious. Thinking these thoughts gives me the creeps. Let’s go and

sell some aliens a bridge in Brooklyn.”

 

*

 

Amber confronts the mendacious ghost in the windowless room stolen

from 2001.

 

“You have confined the monster,” the ghost states.

 

“Yes.” Amber waits for a subjective moment, feeling delicate fronds

tickle at the edges of her awareness in what seems to be a timing

channel attack. She feels a momentary urge to sneeze, and a hot flash

of anger that passes almost immediately.

 

“And you have modified yourself to lock out external control,” the

ghost adds. “What is it that you want, Autonome Amber?”

 

“Don’t you have any concept of individuality?” she asks, annoyed by

its presumption at meddling with her internal states.

 

“Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer,”

says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent

reflection of her own body. “It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist

economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are

you sure you have defeated the monster?”

 

“It’ll do as I say,” Amber replies, forcing herself to sound more

confident than she feels - sometimes that damned transhuman cyborg cat

is no more predictable than a real feline. “Now, the matter of payment

arises.”

 

“Payment.” The ghost sounds amused. But Pierre’s filled her in on what

to look for, and Amber can now see the translation membranes around

it. Their color shift maps to a huge semantic distance; the creature

on the other side, even though it looks like a ghost-image of herself,

is very far from human. “How can we-us be expected to pay our own

money for rendering services to us?”

 

Amber smiles. “We want an open channel back to the router we arrived

through.”

 

“Impossible,” says the ghost.

 

“We want an open channel, and for it to stay open for six hundred

million seconds after we clear it.”

 

“Impossible,” the ghost repeats.

 

“We can trade you a whole civilization,” Amber says blandly. “A whole

human nation, millions of individuals. Just let us go, and we’ll see

to it.”

 

“You - please wait.” The ghost shimmers slightly, fuzzing at the

edges.

 

Amber opens a private channel to Pierre while the ghost confers with

its other nodes. Are the Wunch in place yet? she sends.

 

They’re moving in. This bunch don’t remember what happened on the

Field Circus, memories of those events never made it back to them. So

the Slug’s got them to cooperate. It’s kinda scary to watch - like the

Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you know?

 

I don’t care if it’s scary to watch, Amber replies, I need to know if

we’re ready yet.

 

Sadeq says yes, the universe is ready.

 

Right, pack yourself down. We’ll be moving soon.

 

The ghost is firming up in front of her. “A whole civilization?” it

asks. “That is not possible. Your arrival -” It pauses, fuzzing a

little. Hah, Gotcha! thinks Amber. Liar, liar, pants on fire! “You

cannot possibly have found a human civilization in the archives?”

 

“The monster you complain about that came through with us is a

predator,” she asserts blandly. “It swallowed an entire nation before

we heroically attracted its attention and induced it to follow us into

the router. It’s an archivore - everything was inside it, still frozen

until we expanded it again. This civilization will already have been

restored from hot shadows in our own solar system: There is nothing to

gain by taking it home with us. But we need to return to ensure that

no more predators of this type discover the router - or the

high-bandwidth hub we linked to it.”

 

“You are sure you have killed this monster?” asks the ghost. “It would

be inconvenient if it were to emerge from hiding in its digest

archives.”

 

“I can guarantee it won’t trouble you again if you let us go,” says

Amber, mentally crossing her fingers. The ghost doesn’t seem to have

noticed the huge wedge of fractally compressed data that bloats her

personal scope by an order of magnitude. She can still feel Aineko’s

goodbye smile inside her head, an echo of ivory teeth trusting her to

revive it if the escape plan succeeds.

 

“We-us agree.” The ghost twists weirdly, morphs into a

five-dimensional hypersphere. It bubbles violently for a moment, then

spits out a smaller token - a warped distortion in the air, like a

gravityless black hole. “Here is your passage. Show us the

civilization.”

 

“Okay ” - Now! - “catch.” Amber twitches an imaginary muscle, and one

wall of the room dissolves, forming a doorway into Sadeq’s existential

hell, now redecorated as a fair facsimile of a twenty-first-century

industrial city in Iran, and populated by a Wunch of parasites who

can’t believe what they’ve lucked into - an entire continent of

zombies waiting to host their flesh-hungry consciousness.

 

The ghost drifts toward the open window. Amber grabs the hole and

yanks it open, gets a grip on her own thoughts, and sends Open wide!

on the channel everybody is listening in on. For a moment time stands

still, and then -

 

*

 

A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through the cold

vacuum, in high orbit around a brown dwarf. But the vacuum is anything

but dark. A sapphire glare as bright as the noonday sun on Mars shines

on the crazy diamond, billowing and cascading off sails as fine as

soap bubbles that slowly drift and tense away from the can. The

runaway Slug-corporation’s proxy has hacked the router’s firmware, and

the open wormhole gate that feeds power to it is shining with the

brilliance of a nuclear fireball, laser light channeled from a star

many light-years away to power the Field Circus on its return trip to

the once-human solar system.

 

Amber has retreated, with Pierre, into a simulation of her home aboard

the Ring Imperium. One wall of her bedroom is a solid slab of diamond,

looking out across the boiling Jovian ionosphere from an orbit low

enough to make the horizon appear flat. They’re curled together in her

bed, a slightly more comfortable copy of the royal bed of King Henry

VIII of England. It appears to be carved from thousand-year-old oak

beams. As with so much else about the Ring Imperium, appearances are

deceptive; and this is even more true of the cramped simulation spaces

aboard the Field Circus, as it limps toward a tenth the speed of

light, the highest velocity it’s likely to achieve on a fraction of

its original sail area.

 

“Let me get this straight. You convinced. The locals. That a

simulation of Iran, with zombie bodies that had been taken over by

members of the Wunch. Was a human civilization?”

 

“Yeah.” Amber stretches lazily and smirks at him. “It’s their damn

fault; if the corporate collective entities didn’t use conscious

viewpoints as money, they wouldn’t have fallen for a trick like that,

would they?”

 

“People. Money.”

 

“Well.” She yawns, then sits up and snaps her finger imperiously:

Down-stuffed pillows appear behind her back, and a silver salver

bearing two full glasses of wine materializes between them.

“Corporations are life-forms back home, too, aren’t they? And we trade

them. We give our AIs corporations to make them legal entities, but

the analogy goes deeper. Look at any company headquarters, fitted out

with works of art and expensive furniture and staff bowing and

scraping everywhere -”

 

” - They’re the new aristocracy. Right?”

 

“Wrong. When they take over, what you get is more like the new

biosphere. Hell, the new primordial soup: prokaryotes, bacteria, and

algae, mindlessly swarming, trading money for plasmids.” The Queen

passes her consort a wineglass. When he drinks from it, it refills

miraculously. “Basically, sufficiently complex resource-allocation

algorithms reallocate scarce resources … and if you don’t jump to

get out of their way, they’ll reallocate you. I think that’s what

happened inside the Matrioshka brain we ended up in: Judging by the

Slug it happens elsewhere, too. You’ve got to wonder where the

builders of that structure came from. And where they went. And whether

they realized that the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to

be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments.”

 

“Maybe they tried to dismantle the companies before the companies

spent them.” Pierre looks worried. “Running up a national debt,

importing luxurious viewpoint extensions, munching exotic dreams. Once

they plugged into the Net, a primitive Matrioshka civilization would

be like, um.” He pauses. “Tribal. A primitive postsingularity

civilization meeting the galactic net for the first time. Overawed.

Wanting all the luxuries. Spending their capital, their human - or

alien - capital, the meme machines that built them. Until there’s

nothing left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking

for someone to own.”

 

“Speculation.”

 

“Idle speculation,” he agrees.

 

“But we can’t ignore it.” She nods. “Maybe some early corporate

predator built the machines that spread the wormholes around brown

dwarfs and ran the router network on top of them in an attempt to make

money fast. By not putting them in the actual planetary systems likely

to host tool-using life, they’d ensure that only near-singularity

civilizations would stumble over them. Civilizations that had gone too

far to be easy prey probably wouldn’t send a ship out to look … so

the network would ensure a steady stream of yokels new to the big city

to fleece. Only they set the mechanism in motion billions of years ago

and went extinct, leaving the network to propagate, and now there’s

nothing out there but burned-out Matrioshka civilizations and howling

parasites like the angry ghosts and the Wunch. And victims like us.”

She shudders and changes the subject: “Speaking of aliens, is the Slug

happy?”

 

“Last time I checked on him, yeah.” Pierre blows on his wineglass and

it dissolves into a million splinters of light. He looks dubious at

the mention of the rogue corporate instrument they’re taking with

them. “I don’t trust him out in the unrestricted simspaces yet, but

he delivered on the fine control for the router’s laser. I just hope

you don’t ever have to actually use him, if you follow my drift. I’m a

bit worried that Aineko is spending so much time in there.”

 

“So that’s where she is? I’d been worrying.”

 

“Cats never come when you call them, do they?”

 

“There is that,” she agrees. Then, with a worried glance at the vision

of Jupiter’s cloudscape: “I wonder what we’ll find when we get there?”

 

Outside the window, the imaginary Jovian terminator is sweeping toward

them with eerie rapidity, sucking them toward an uncertain nightfall.