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

ayatollahs and archbishops from the Dark Ages. “My author

sounds like the worst of both. Some guy called Howard, from Rhode

Island. Kept looking at me as if he was afraid I was going to sprout

bat wings and tentacles or something.” Like your son, she doesn’t add.

Just what was he thinking, anyway? she wonders. To be that screwed up

takes serious dedication … “What are you working on, if you don’t

mind me asking?” she asks, trying to change the direction of her

attention.

 

“Oh, pressing the flesh, I guess. Auntie ‘Nette wanted me to meet some

old political hack contact of hers who she figures can help with the

program, but he was holed up with her and Dad all day.” She pulls a

face. “I had another fitting session with the image merchants, they’re

trying to turn me into a political catwalk clotheshorse. Then there’s

the program demographics again. We’re getting about a thousand new

immigrants a day, planetwide, but it’s accelerating rapidly, and we

should be up to eighty an hour by the time of the election. Which is

going to be a huge problem, because if we start campaigning too early,

a quarter of the electorate won’t know what they’re meant to be voting

about.”

 

“Maybe it’s deliberate,” Rita suggests. “The Vile Offspring are trying

to rig the outcome by injecting voters.” She pings a smiley emoticon

off Wednesday’s open channel, raising a flickering grin in return.

“The party of fuckwits will win, no question about it.”

 

“Uh-huh.” Amber snaps her fingers and pulls an impatient face as she

waits for a passing cloud to solidify above her head and lower a glass

of cranberry juice to her. “Dad said one thing that’s spot-on, we’re

framing this entire debate in terms of what we should do to avoid

conflict with the Offspring. The main bone of contention is how to run

away and how far to go and which program to put resources into, not

whether or when to run, let alone what else we could do. Maybe we

should have given it some more thought. Are we being manipulated?”

 

Rita looks vacant for a moment. “Is that a question?” she asks. Amber

nods, and she shakes her head. “Then I’d have to say that I don’t

know. The evidence is inconclusive, so far. But I’m not really happy.

The Offspring won’t tell us what they want, but there’s no reason to

believe they don’t know what we want. I mean, they can think rings

round us, can’t they?”

 

Amber shrugs, then pauses to unlatch a hedge gate that gives admission

to a maze of sweet-smelling shrubs. “I really don’t know. They may not

care about us, or even remember we exist - the resimulants may be

being generated by some autonomic mechanism, not really part of the

higher consciousness of the Offspring. Or it may be some whacked-out

post-Tiplerite meme that’s gotten hold of more processing resources

than the entire presingularity Net, some kind of MetaMormon project

directed at ensuring that everyone who can possibly ever have lived

lives in the right way to fit some weird quasi-religious requirement

we don’t know about. Or it might be a message we’re simply not smart

enough to decode. That’s the trouble, we don’t know.”

 

She vanishes around the curve of the maze. Rita hurries to catch up,

sees her about to turn into another alleyway, and leaps after her.

“What else?” she pants.

 

“Could be” - left turn - “anything, really.” Six steps lead down into

a shadowy tunnel; fork right, five meters forward, then six steps up

lead back to the surface. “Question is, why don’t they” - left turn -

“just tell us what they want?”

 

“Speaking to tapeworms.” Rita nearly manages to catch up with Amber,

who is trotting through the maze as if she’s memorized it perfectly.

“That’s how much the nascent Matrioshka brain can outthink us by, as

humans to segmented worms. Would we do. What they told us?”

 

“Maybe.” Amber stops dead, and Rita glances around. They’re in an open

cell near the heart of the maze, five meters square, hedged in on all

sides. There are three entrances and a slate altar, waist high,

lichen-stained with age. “I think you know the answer to that

question.”

 

“I -” Rita stares at her.

 

Amber stares back, eyes dark and intense. “You’re from one of the

Ganymede orbitals by way of Titan. You knew my eigensister while I was

out of the solar system flying a diamond the size of a Coke can.

That’s what you told me. You’ve got a skill set that’s a perfect match

for the campaign research group, and you asked me to introduce you to

Sirhan, then you pushed his buttons like a pro. Just what are you

trying to pull? Why should I trust you?”

 

“I -” Rita’s face crumples. “I didn’t push his buttons! He thought I

was trying to drag him into bed.” She looks up defiantly. “I wasn’t, I

want to learn, what makes you - him - work -” Huge, dark, structured

information queries batter at her exocortex, triggering warnings.

Someone is churning through distributed time-series databases all over

the outer system, measuring her past with a micrometer. She stares at

Amber, mortified and angry. It’s the ultimate denial of trust, the

need to check her statements against the public record for truth.

“What are you doing?”

 

“I have a suspicion.” Amber stands poised, as if ready to run. Run

away from me? Rita thinks, startled. “You said, what if the

resimulants came from a subconscious function of the Offspring? And

funnily enough, I’ve been discussing that possibility with Dad. He’s

still got the spark when you show him a problem, you know.”

 

“I don’t understand!”

 

“No, I don’t think you do,” says Amber, and Rita can feel vast

stresses in the space around her: The whole ubicomp environment,

dust-sized chips and utility fog and hazy clouds of diamond-bright

optical processors in the soil and the air and her skin, is growing

blotchy and sluggish, thrashing under the load of whatever Amber -

with her management-grade ackles - is ordering it to do. For a moment,

Rita can’t feel half her mind, and she gets the panicky claustrophobic

sense of being trapped inside her own head: Then it stops.

 

“Tell me!” Rita insists. “What are you trying to prove? It’s some

mistake -” And Amber is nodding, much to her surprise, looking weary

and morose. “What do you think I’ve done?”

 

“Nothing. You’re coherent. Sorry about that.”

 

“Coherent?” Rita hears her voice rising with her indignation as she

feels bits of herself, cut off from her for whole seconds, shivering

with relief. “I’ll give you coherent! Assaulting my exocortex -”

 

“Shut up.” Amber rubs her face and simultaneously throws Rita one end

of an encrypted channel.

 

“Why should I?” Rita demands, not accepting the handshake.

 

“Because.” Amber glances round. She’s scared! Rita suddenly realizes.

“Just do it,” she hisses.

 

Rita accepts the endpoint and a huge lump of undigested expository

data slides down it, structured and tagged with entry points and

metainformation directories pointing to -

 

“Holy shit!” she whispers, as she realizes what it is.

 

“Yes.” Amber grins humorlessly. She continues, over the open channel:

It looks like they’re cognitive antibodies, generated by the devil’s

own semiotic immune system. That’s what Sirhan is focusing on, how to

avoid triggering them and bringing everything down at once. Forget the

election, we’re going to be in deep shit sooner rather than later, and

we’re still trying to work out how to survive. Now are you sure you

still want in?

 

“Want in on what?” Rita asks, shakily.

 

The lifeboat Dad’s trying to get us all into under cover of the

accelerationista/conservationista split, before the Vile Offspring’s

immune system figures out how to lever us apart into factions and make

us kill each other …

 

*

 

Welcome to the afterglow of the intelligence supernova, little

tapeworm.

 

Tapeworms have on the order of a thousand neurons, pulsing

furiously to keep their little bodies twitching. Human beings have

on the order of a hundred billion neurons. What is happening in the

inner solar system as the Vile Offspring churn and reconfigure the

fast-thinking structured dust clouds that were once planets is as

far beyond the ken of merely human consciousness as the thoughts of

a G�del are beyond the twitching tropisms of a worm. Personality

modules bounded by the speed of light, sucking down billions of

times the processing power of a human brain, form and re-form in

the halo of glowing nanoprocessors that shrouds the sun in a ruddy

glowing cloud.

 

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Ceres and the asteroids - all gone. Luna is a

silvery iridescent sphere, planed smooth down to micrometer

heights, luminous with diffraction patterns. Only Earth, the cradle

of human civilization, remains untransformed; and Earth, too, will

be dismantled soon enough, for already a trellis of space elevators

webs the planet around its equator, lifting refugee dumb matter

into orbit and flinging it at the wildlife preserves of the outer

system.

 

The intelligence bloom that gnaws at Jupiter’s moons with claws of

molecular machinery won’t stop until it runs out of dumb matter to

convert into computronium. By the time it does, it will have as

much brainpower as you’d get if you placed a planet with a

population of six billion future-shocked primates in orbit around

every star in the Milky Way galaxy. But right now, it’s still

stupid, having converted barely a percentage point of the mass of

the solar system - it’s a mere Magellanic Cloud civilization,

infantile and unsubtle and still perilously close to its

carbon-chemistry roots.

 

It’s hard for tapeworms living in warm intestinal mulch to wrap

their thousand-neuron brains around whatever it is that the vastly

more complex entities who host them are discussing, but one thing’s

sure - the owners have a lot of things going on, not all of them

under conscious control. The churning of gastric secretions and the

steady ventilation of lungs are incomprehensible to the simple

brains of tapeworms, but they serve the purpose of keeping the

humans alive and provide the environment the worms live in. And

other more esoteric functions that contribute to survival - the

intricate dance of specialized cloned lymphocytes in their bone

marrow and lymph nodes, the random permutations of antibodies

constantly churning for possible matches to intruder molecules

warning of the presence of pollution - are all going on beneath the

level of conscious control.

 

Autonomic defenses. Antibodies. Intelligence bloom gnawing at the

edges of the outer system. And humans are not as unsophisticated as

mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any

surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is

not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?

 

*

 

There’s a team meeting early the next morning. It’s still dark

outside, and most of the attendees who are present in vivo have the

faintly haggard look that comes from abusing melatonin antagonists.

Rita stifles a yawn as she glances around the conference room - the

walls expanded into huge virtual spaces to accommodate thirty or so

exocortical ghosts from sleeping partners who will wake with memories

of a particularly vivid lucid dream - and sees Amber talking to her

famous father and a younger-looking man who one of her partials

recognizes as a last-century EU politician. There seems to be some

tension between them.

 

Now that Amber has granted Rita her conditional trust, a whole new

tier of campaigning information has opened up to her inner eye - stuff

steganographically concealed in a hidden layer of the