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

the same.

Your reaction, should it be unhappy, will excuse and encourage her

selfishness. Sirhan colludes, unknowing, the idiot child. He thinks

the universe of her and thinks by helping her die he is helping her

achieve her goals. He has never met an adult walking backward toward a

cliff before.”

 

“Backward.” Amber takes a deep breath. “You’re telling me Mom is so

unhappy she’s trying to kill herself by growing old? Isn’t that a bit

slow?”

 

Annette shakes her head lugubriously. “She’s had fifty years to

practice. You have been away twenty-eight years! She was thirty when

she bore you. Now she is over eighty, and a telomere refusenik, a

charter member of the genome conservation front. To accept a slow

virus purge and aging reset would be to lay down a banner she has

carried for half a century. To accept uploading, that, too, is wrong

in her mind: She will not admit her identity is a variable, not a

constant. She came out here in a can, frozen, with more radiation

damage. She is not going back home. This is where she plans to end her

days. Do you see? That is why you were brought here. That, and because

of the bailiffs who have bought title to your other self’s business

debts. They are waiting for you in Jupiter system with warrants and

headsuckers to extract your private keys.”

 

“She’s cornered me!”

 

“Oh, I would not say that. We all change our convictions sometime or

other, perhaps. She is inflexible, she will not bend; but she is not

stupid. Nor is she as vindictive as perhaps she herself believes. She

thinks she must a scorned woman be, even though there is more to her

than that. Your father and I, we -”

 

“Is he still alive?” Amber demands eagerly, half-anxious to know,

half-wishing she could be sure the news won’t be bad.

 

“Yes.” Annette grins again, but it’s not a happy expression, more a

baring of teeth at the world. “As I was saying, your father and I, we

have tried to help her. Pamela denies him. He is, she says, not a man.

No more so am I myself a woman? No, but she’ll still talk to me. You

will do better. But his assets, they are spent. He is not a rich man

this epoch, your father.”

 

“Yeah, but.” Amber nods to herself. “He may be able to help me.”

 

“Oh? How so?”

 

“You remember the original goal of the Field Circus? The sapient alien

transmission?”

 

“Yes, of course.” Annette snorts. “Junk bond pyramid schemes from

credulous saucer wisdom airheads.”

 

Amber licks her lips. “How susceptible to interception are we here?”

 

“Here?” Annette glances round. “Very. You can’t maintain a habitat in

a nonbiosphere environment without ubiquitous surveillance.”

 

“Well, then …”

 

Amber dives inward, forks her identity, collects a complex bundle of

her thoughts and memories, marshals them, offers Annette one end of an

encryption tunnel, then stuffs the frozen mindstorm into her head.

Annette sits still for approximately ten seconds, then shudders and

whimpers quietly. “You must ask your father,” she says, growing

visibly agitated. “I must leave, now. I should not have known that! It

is dynamite, you see. Political dynamite. I must return to my primary

sister-identity and warn her.”

 

“Your - wait!” Amber stands up as fast as her ill-coordinated body

will let her, but Annette is moving fast, swarming up a translucent

ladder in the air.

 

“Tell Manfred!” calls her aunt through the body of an ape: “Trust no

one else!” She throws another packet of compressed, encrypted memories

down the tunnel to Amber; then, a moment later, the orange skull

touches the ceiling and dissolves, a liquid flow of dissociating

utility foglets letting go of one another and dispersing into the

greater mass of the building that spawned the fake ape.

 

*

 

Snapshots from the family album: While you were gone …

* Amber, wearing a brocade gown and a crown encrusted with diamond

processors and external neural taps, her royal party gathered

around her, attends the pan-Jovian constitutional conference with

the majesty of a confirmed head of state and ruler of a small

inner moon. She smiles knowingly at the camera viewpoint, with the

professional shine that comes from a good public relations video

filter. “We are very happy to be here,” she says, “and we are

pleased that the commission has agreed to lend its weight to the

continued progress of the Ring Imperium’s deep-space program.”

* A piece of dumb paper, crudely stained with letters written in a

faded brown substance - possibly blood - says “I’m checking out,

don’t delta me.” This version of Pierre didn’t go to the router:

He stayed at home, deleted all his backups, and slit his wrists,

his epitaph sharp and self-inflicted. It comes as a cold shock,

the first chill gust of winter’s gale blowing through the outer

system’s political elite. And it’s the start of a regime of

censorship directed toward the already speeding starwhisp: Amber,

in her grief, makes an executive decision not to tell her embassy

to the stars that one of them is dead and, therefore, unique.

* Manfred - fifty, with the fashionably pale complexion of the

digerati, healthy-looking for his age, standing beside a

transmigration bush with a stupid grin on his face. He’s decided

to take the final step, not simply to spawn external mental

processes running in an exocortex of distributed processors, but

to move his entire persona right out of meatspace, into wherever

it is that the uploads aboard the Field Circus have gone. Annette,

skinny, elegant, and very Parisian, stands beside him, looking as

uncertain as the wife of a condemned man.

* A wedding, shi’ite, Mut’ah - of limited duration. It’s scandalous

to many, but the mamtu’ah isn’t moslem, she wears a crown instead

of a veil, and her groom is already spoken of in outraged terms by

most other members of the trans-Martian Islamic clergy. Besides

which, in addition to being in love, the happy couple have more

strategic firepower than a late-twentieth-century superpower.

Their cat, curled at their feet, looks smug: She’s the custodian

of the permissive action locks on the big lasers.

* A speck of ruby light against the darkness - red-shifted almost

into the infrared, it’s the return signal from the Field Circus’s

light sail as the starwhisp passes the one-light-year mark, almost

twelve trillion kilometers out beyond Pluto. (Although how can you

call it a starwhisp when it masses almost a hundred kilograms,

including propulsion module? Starwhisps are meant to be tiny!)

* Collapse of the trans-Lunar economy: Deep in the hot thinking

depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new

theory of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than

the previously pervasive Free Market 1.0. With no local minima to

hamper them, and no need to spawn and reap startups Darwin-style,

the companies, group minds, and organizations that adopt the

so-called Accelerated Salesman Infrastructure of Economics 2.0

trade optimally with each other. The phase change accelerates as

more and more entities join in, leveraging network externalities

to overtake the traditional ecosystem. Amber and Sadeq are late on

the train, Sadeq obsessing about how to reconcile ASI with

murabaha and mudaraba while the postmodern economy of the

mid-twenty-first century disintegrates around them. Being late has

punitive consequences - the Ring Imperium has always been a net

importer of brainpower and a net exporter of gravitational

potential energy. Now it’s a tired backwater, the bit rate from

the red-shifted relativisitic probe insufficiently delightful to

obsess the daemons of industrial routing. In other words, they’re

poor.

* A message from beyond the grave: The travelers aboard the starship

have reached their destination, an alien artifact drifting in

chilly orbit around a frozen brown dwarf. Recklessly they upload

themselves into it, locking the starwhisp down for years of sleep.

Amber and her husband have few funds with which to pay for the

propulsion lasers: what they have left of the kinetic energy of

the Ring Imperium - based on the orbital momentum of a small

Jovian inner moon - is being sapped, fast, at a near-loss, by the

crude requirements of the exobionts and metanthropes who fork and

spawn in the datasphere of the outer Jovians. The cost of

importing brains to the Ring Imperium is steep: In near-despair

Amber and Sadeq produce a child, Generation 3.0, to populate their

dwindling kingdom. Picture the cat, offended, lashing its tail

beside the zero-gee crib.

* Surprise and postcards from the inner orbitals - Amber’s mother

offers to help. For the sake of the child, Sadeq offers bandwidth

and user interface enrichment. The child forks, numerous times, as

Amber despairingly plays with probabilities, simulating upbringing

outcomes. Neither she nor Sadeq are good parents - the father

absentminded and prone to lose himself in the intertextual

deconstruction of surahs, the mother ragged-edged from running the

economy of a small and failing kingdom. In the space of a decade,

Sirhan lives a dozen lives, discarding identities like old

clothes. The uncertainty of life in the decaying Ring Imperium

does not entrance him, his parents’ obsessions annoy him, and when

his grandmother offers to fund his delta vee and subsequent

education in one of the orbitals around Titan, his parents give

their reluctant assent.

* Amber and Sadeq separate acrimoniously. Sadeq, studies abandoned

in the face of increasing intrusions from the world of what is

into the universe of what should be, joins a spacelike sect of

sufis, encysted in a matrix of vitrification nanomechs out in the

Oort cloud to await a better epoch. His instrument of will - the

legal mechanism of his resurrection - specifies that he is waiting

for the return of the hidden, twelfth imam.

* For her part, Amber searches the inner system briefly for word of

her father - but there’s nothing. Isolated and alone, pursued by

accusing debts, she flings herself into a reborganization,

stripping away those aspects of her personality that have brought

her low; in law, her liability is tied to her identity. Eventually

she donates herself to a commune of also-rans, accepting their

personality in return for a total break with the past.

* Without Queen and consort, the Ring Imperium - now unmanned,

leaking breathing gases, running on autonomic control - slowly

deorbits into the Jovian murk, beaming power to the outer moons

until it punches a hole in the cloud deck in a final incandescent

smear of light, the like of which has not been seen since the

Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact.

* Sirhan, engrossed in Saturnalia, is offended by his parents’

failure to make more of themselves. And he resolves to do it for

them, if not necessarily in a manner of their liking.

 

*

 

“You see, I am hoping you will help me with my history project,” says

the serious-faced young man.

 

“History project.” Pierre follows him along the curving gallery, hands

clasped behind his back self-consciously to keep from showing his

agitation: “What history is this?”

 

“The history of the twenty-first century,” says Sirhan. “You remember

it, don’t you?”

 

“Remember it -” Pierre pauses. “You’re serious?”

 

“Yes.” Sirhan opens a side door. “This way, please. I’ll explain.”

 

The door opens onto what used to be one of the side galleries of the

museum building, full of interactive exhibits designed to explain

elementary optics to hyperactive children and their indulgent parental

units. Traditional optics are long since obsolete - tunable matter can

slow photons to a stop, teleport them here to there, play ping-pong

with spin and polarization - and besides, the dumb matter in the walls

and floor has been replaced by low-power computronium, heat sinks

dangling far below the floor of the lily-pad habitat to dispose of