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

humans anymore - their cross-infectious enthusiasms have spread

to a myriad of other hosts, several types of which are

qualitatively better at thinking. At last count, there were about a

thousand nonhuman intelligent species in Sol space, split evenly

between posthumans on one side, naturally self-organizing AIs in

the middle, and mammalian nonhumans on the other. The common mammal

neural chassis is easily upgraded to human-style intelligence in

most species that can carry, feed and cool a half kilogram of gray

matter, and the descendants of a hundred ethics-challenged doctoral

theses are now demanding equal rights. So are the unquiet dead; the

panopticon-logged Net ghosts of people who lived recently enough to

imprint their identities on the information age, and the ambitious

theological engineering schemes of the Reformed Tiplerite Church of

Latter-day Saints (who want to emulate all possible human beings in

real time, so that they can have the opportunity to be saved).

 

The human memesphere is coming alive, although how long it remains

recognizably human is open to question. The informational density

of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro’s number of

bits per mole, one bit per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter

of the inner planets (apart from Earth, preserved for now like a

picturesque historic building stranded in an industrial park) is

converted into computronium. And it’s not just the inner system.

The same forces are at work on Jupiter’s moons, and those of

Saturn, although it’ll take thousands of years rather than mere

decades to dismantle the gas giants themselves. Even the entire

solar energy budget isn’t enough to pump Jupiter’s enormous mass to

orbital velocity in less than centuries. The fast-burning primitive

thinkers descended from the African plains apes may have vanished

completely or transcended their fleshy architecture before the

solar Matrioshka brain is finished.

 

It won’t be long now …

 

*

 

Meanwhile, there’s a party brewing down in Saturn’s well.

 

Sirhan’s lily-pad city floats inside a gigantic and nearly-invisible

sphere in Saturn’s upper atmosphere; a balloon kilometers across with

a shell of fullerene-reinforced diamond below and a hot hydrogen gas

bag above. It’s one of several hundred multimegaton soap bubbles

floating in the sea of turbulent hydrogen and helium that is the upper

atmosphere of Saturn, seeded there by the Society for Creative

Terraforming, subcontractors for the 2074 Worlds’ Fair.

 

The cities are elegant, grown from a conceptual seed a few megawords

long. Their replication rate is slow (it takes months to build a

bubble), but in only a couple of decades, exponential growth will have

paved the stratosphere with human-friendly terrain. Of course, the

growth rate will slow toward the end, as it takes longer to

fractionate the metal isotopes out of the gas giant’s turbid depths,

but before that happens, the first fruits of the robot factories on

Ganymede will be pouring hydrocarbons down into the mix. Eventually

Saturn - cloud-top gravity a human-friendly 11 meters per second

squared - will have a planet wide biosphere with nearly a hundred

times the surface area of Earth. And a bloody good thing indeed this

will be, for otherwise, Saturn is no use to anyone except as a fusion

fuel bunker for the deep future when the sun’s burned down.

 

This particular lily-pad is carpeted in grass, the hub of the disk

rising in a gentle hill surmounted by the glowering concrete hump of

the Boston Museum of Science. It looks curiously naked, shorn of its

backdrop of highways and the bridges of the Charles River - but even

the generous kiloton dumb matter load-outs of the skyhooks that lifted

it into orbit wouldn’t have stretched to bringing its framing context

along with it. Probably someone will knock up a cheap diorama backdrop

out of utility fog, Sirhan thinks, but for now, the museum stands

proud and isolated, a solitary redoubt of classical learning in exile

from the fast-thinking core of the solar system.

 

“Waste of money,” grumbles the woman in black. “Whose stupid idea was

this, anyway?” She jabs the diamond ferrule of her cane at the museum.

 

“It’s a statement,” Sirhan says absently. “You know the kind, we’ve

got so many newtons to burn we can send our cultural embassies

wherever we like. The Louvre is on its way to Pluto, did you hear

that?”

 

“Waste of energy.” She lowers her cane reluctantly and leans on it.

Pulls a face: “It’s not right.”

 

“You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn’t you?” Sirhan prods.

“What was it like then?”

 

“What was it …? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had

plenty for bombers,” she says dismissively. “We knew it would be okay.

If it hadn’t been for those damn’ meddlesome posthumanists -” Her

wrinkled, unnaturally aged face scowls at him furiously from

underneath hair that has faded to the color of rotten straw, but he

senses a subtext of self-deprecating irony that he doesn’t understand.

“Like your grandfather, damn him. If I was young again I’d go and piss

on his grave to show him what I think of what he did. If he has a

grave,” she adds, almost fondly.

 

Memo checkpoint: log family history, Sirhan tells one of his ghosts.

As a dedicated historian, he records every experience routinely, both

before it enters his narrative of consciousness - efferent signals are

the cleanest - and also his own stream of selfhood, against some

future paucity of memory. But his grandmother has been remarkably

consistent over the decades in her refusal to adapt to the new

modalities.

 

“You’re recording this, aren’t you?” she sniffs.

 

“I’m not recording it, Grandmama,” he says gently, “I’m just

preserving my memories for future generations.”

 

“Hah! We’ll see,” she says suspiciously. Then she surprises him with a

bark of laughter, cut off abruptly: “No, you’ll see, darling. I won’t

be around to be disappointed.”

 

“Are you going to tell me about my grandfather?” asks Sirhan.

 

“Why should I bother? I know you posthumans, you’ll just go and ask

his ghost yourself. Don’t try to deny it! There are two sides to every

story, child, and he’s had more than his fair share of ears, the

sleazebag. Leaving me to bring up your mother on my own, and nothing

but a bunch of worthless intellectual property and a dozen lawsuits

from the Mafiya to do it with. I don’t know what I ever saw in him.”

Sirhan’s voice-stress monitor detects a distinct hint of untruth in

this assertion. “He’s worthless trash, and don’t you forget it. Lazy

idiot couldn’t even form just one startup on his own: He had to give

it all away, all the fruits of his genius.”

 

While she rambles on, occasionally punctuating her characterization

with sharp jabs of the cane, Pamela leads Sirhan on a slow, wavering

stroll that veers around one side of the museum, until they’re

standing next to a starkly engineered antique loading bay. “He should

have tried real communism instead,” she harrumphs: “Put some steel

into him, shake those starry-eyed visionary positive-sum daydreams

loose. You knew where you were in the old times, and no mistake.

Humans were real humans, work was real work, and corporations were

just things that did as we told them. And then, when she went to the

bad, that was all his fault, too, you know.”

 

“She? You mean my, ah, mother?” Sirhan diverts his primary sensorium

back to Pamela’s vengeful muttering. There are aspects to this story

that he isn’t completely familiar with, angles he needs to sketch in

so that he can satisfy himself that all is as it should be when the

bailiffs go in to repossess Amber’s mind.

 

“He sent her our cat. Of all the mean-spirited, low, downright

dishonest things he ever did, that was the worst part of it. That cat

was mine, but he reprogrammed it to lead her astray. And it succeeded

admirably. She was only twelve at the time, an impressionable age, I’m

sure you’d agree. I was trying to raise her right. Children need moral

absolutes, especially in a changing world, even if they don’t like it

much at the time. Self-discipline and stability, you can’t function as

an adult without them. I was afraid that, with all her upgrades, she’d

never really get a handle on who she was, that she’d end up more

machine than woman. But Manfred never really understood childhood,

mostly on account of his never growing up. He always was inclined to

meddle.”

 

“Tell me about the cat,” Sirhan says quietly. One glance at the

loading bay door tells him that it’s been serviced recently. A thin

patina of expended foglets have formed a snowy scab around its edges,

flaking off like blue refractive candyfloss that leaves bright metal

behind. “Didn’t it go missing or something?”

 

Pamela snorts. “When your mother ran away, it uploaded itself to her

starwhisp and deleted its body. It was the only one of them that had

the guts - or maybe it was afraid I’d have it subpoenaed as a hostile

witness. Or, and I can’t rule this out, your grandfather gave it a

suicide reflex. He was quite evil enough to do something like that,

after he reprogrammed himself to think I was some kind of mortal

enemy.”

 

“So when my mother died to avoid bankruptcy, the cat … didn’t stay

behind? Not at all? How remarkable.” Sirhan doesn’t bother adding how

suicidal. Any artificial entity that’s willing to upload its neural

state vector into a one-kilogram interstellar probe three-quarters of

the way to Alpha Centauri without backup or some clear way of

returning home has got to be more than a few methods short in the

object factory.

 

“It’s a vengeful beast.” Pamela pokes her stick at the ground sharply,

mutters a command word, and lets go of it. She stands before Sirhan,

craning her neck back to look up at him. “My, what a tall boy you

are.”

 

“Person,” he corrects, instinctively. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t

presume.”

 

“Person, thing, boy, whatever - you’re engendered, aren’t you?” she

asks, sharply, waiting until he nods reluctantly. “Never trust anyone

who can’t make up their mind whether to be a man or a woman,” she says

gloomily. “You can’t rely on them.” Sirhan, who has placed his

reproductive system on hold until he needs it, bites his tongue. “That

damn cat,” his grandmother complains. “It carried your grandfather’s

business plan to my daughter and spirited her away into the big black.

It poisoned her against me. It encouraged her to join in that frenzy

of speculative bubble-building that caused the market reboot that

brought down the Ring Imperium. And now it -”

 

“Is it on the ship?” Sirhan asks, almost too eagerly.

 

“It might be.” She stares at him through narrowed eyes. “You want to

interview it, too, huh?”

 

Sirhan doesn’t bother denying it. “I’m a historian, Grandmama. And

that probe has been somewhere no other human sensorium has ever seen.

It may be old news, and there may be old lawsuits waiting to feed on

the occupants, but …” He shrugs. “Business is business, and my

business lies in ruins.”

 

“Hah!” She stares at him for a moment, then nods, very slowly. She

leans forward to rest both wrinkled hands atop her cane, joints like

bags of shriveled walnuts: Her suit’s endoskeleton creaks as it

adjusts to accommodate her confidential posture. “You’ll get yours,

kid.” The wrinkles twist into a frightening smile, sixty years of

saved-up bitterness finally within spitting distance of a victim. “And

I’ll get what I want, too. Between us, your mother won’t know what’s

hit her.”

 

*

 

“Relax, between us your mother won’t know what’s hit her,” says the

cat, baring needle teeth at the Queen in the big chair -