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

project’s

collective memory space. There’s stuff in here she hadn’t suspected,

frightening studies of resimulant demographics, surveys of emigration

rates from the inner system, cladistic trees dissecting different

forms of crude tampering that have been found skulking in the wetware

of refugees. The reason why Amber and Manfred and - reluctantly -

Sirhan are fighting for one radical faction in a planetwide election,

despite their various misgivings over the validity of the entire

concept of democracy in this posthuman era. She blinks it aside,

slightly bewildered, forking a couple of dozen personality subthreads

to chew on it at the edges. “Need coffee,” she mutters to the table,

as it offers her a chair.

 

“Everyone on-line?” asked Manfred. “Then I’ll begin.” He looks tired

and worried, physically youthful but showing the full weight of his

age. “We’ve got a crisis coming, folks. About a hundred kiloseconds

ago, the bit rate on the resimulation stream jumped. We’re now

fielding about one resimulated state vector a second, on top of the

legitimate immigration we’re dealing with. If it jumps again by the

same factor, it’s going to swamp our ability to check the immigrants

for zimboes in vivo - we’d have to move to running them in secure

storage or just resurrecting them blind, and if there are any jokers

in the pack, that’s about the riskiest thing we could do.”

 

“Why do you not spool them to memory diamond?” asks the handsome young

ex-politician to his left, looking almost amused - as if he already

knows the answer.

 

“Politics.” Manfred shrugs.

 

“It would blow a hole in our social contract,” says Amber, looking as

if she’s just swallowed something unpleasant, and Rita feels a flicker

of admiration for the way they’re stage-managing the meeting. Amber’s

even talking to her father, as if she feels comfortable with him

around, although he’s a walking reminder of her own lack of success.

Nobody else has gotten a word in yet. “If we don’t instantiate them,

the next logical step is to deny resimulated minds the franchise.

Which in turn puts us on the road to institutional inequality. And

that’s a very big step to take, even if you have misgivings about the

idea of settling complex policy issues on the basis of a popular vote,

because our whole polity is based on the idea that less competent

intelligences - us - deserve consideration.”

 

“Hrmph.” Someone clears their throat. Rita glances round and freezes,

because it’s Amber’s screwed-up eigenchild, and he’s just about

materialized in the chair next to her. So he adopted Superplonk after

all? she observes cynically. He doggedly avoids looking at her. “That

was my analysis,” he says reluctantly. “We need them alive. For the

ark option, at least, and if not, even the accelerationista platform

will need them on hand later.”

 

Concentration camps, thinks Rita, trying to ignore Sirhan’s presence

near her, for it’s a constant irritant, where most of the inmates are

confused, frightened human beings - and the ones who aren’t think they

are. It’s an eerie thought, and she spawns a couple of full ghosts to

dream it through for her, gaming the possible angles.

 

“How are your negotiations over the lifeboat designs going?” Amber

asks her father. “We need to get a portfolio of design schemata out

before we go into the election -”

 

“Change of plan.” Manfred hunches forward. “This doesn’t need to go

any further, but Sirhan and Aineko have come up with something

interesting.” He looks worried.

 

Sirhan is staring at his eigenmother with narrowed eyes, and Rita has

to resist the urge to elbow him savagely in the ribs. She knows enough

about him now to realize it wouldn’t get his attention - at least, not

the way she’d want it, not for the right reasons - and in any case,

he’s more wrapped up in himself than her ghost ever saw him as likely

to be. (How anyone could be party to such a detailed exchange of

simulated lives and still reject the opportunity to do it in real life

is beyond her; unless it’s an artifact of his youth, when his parents

pushed him through a dozen simulated childhoods in search of knowledge

and ended up with a stubborn oyster-head of a son …) “We still need

to look as if we’re planning on using a lifeboat,” he says aloud.

“There’s the small matter of the price they’re asking in return for

the alternative.”

 

“What? What are you talking about?” Amber sounds confused. “I thought

you were working on some kind of cladistic map. What’s this about a

price?”

 

Sirhan smiles coolly. “I am working on a cladistic map, in a manner of

speaking. You wasted much of your opportunity when you journeyed to

the router, you know. I’ve been talking to Aineko.”

 

“You -” Amber flushes. “What about?” She’s visibly angry, Rita

notices. Sirhan is needling his eigenmother. Why?

 

“About the topology of some rather interesting types of small-world

network.” Sirhan leans back in his chair, watching the cloud above her

head. “And the router. You went through it, then you came back with

your tail between your legs as fast as you could, didn’t you? Not even

checking your passenger to see if it was a hostile parasite.”

 

“I don’t have to take this,” Amber says tightly. “You weren’t there,

and you have no idea what constraints we were working under.”

 

“Really?” Sirhan raises an eyebrow. “Anyway, you missed an

opportunity. We know that the routers - for whatever reason - are

self-replicating. They spread from brown dwarf to brown dwarf, hatch,

tap the protostar for energy and material, and send a bunch of

children out. Von Neumann machines, in other words. We also know that

they provide high-bandwidth communications to other routers. When you

went through the one at Hyundai +4904/[-56], you ended up in an

unmaintained DMZ attached to an alien Matrioshka brain that had

degenerated, somehow. It follows that someone had collected a router

and carried it home, to link into the MB. So why didn’t you bring one

home with you?”

 

Amber glares at him. “Total payload on board the Field Circus was

about ten grams. How large do you think a router seed is?”

 

“So you brought the Slug home instead, occupying maybe half your

storage capacity and ready to wreak seven shades of havoc on -”

 

“Children!” They both look round automatically. It’s Annette, Rita

realizes, and she doesn’t look amused. “Why do you not save this

bickering for later?” she asks. “We have our own goals to be

pursuing.” Unamused is an understatement. Annette is fuming.

 

“This charming family reunion was your idea, I believe?” Manfred

smiles at her, then nods coolly at the retread EU politician in the

next seat.

 

“Please.” It’s Amber. “Dad, can you save this for later?” Rita sits

up. For a moment, Amber looks ancient, far older than her subjective

gigasecond of age. “She’s right. She didn’t mean to screw up. Let’s

leave the family history for some time when we can work it out in

private. Okay?”

 

Manfred looks abashed. He blinks rapidly. “All right.” He takes a

breath. “Amber, I brought some old acquaintances into the loop. If we

win the election, then to get out of here as fast as possible, we’ll

have to use a combination of the two main ideas we’ve been discussing:

spool as many people as possible into high-density storage until we

get somewhere with space and mass and energy to reincarnate them, and

get our hands on a router. The entire planetary polity can’t afford to

pay the energy budget of a relativistic starship big enough to hold

everyone, even as uploads, and a subrelativistic ship would be too

damn vulnerable to the Vile Offspring. And it follows that, instead of

taking potluck on the destination, we should learn about the network

protocols the routers use, figure out some kind of transferable

currency we can use to pay for our reinstantiation at the other end,

and also how to make some kind of map so we know where we’re going.

The two hard parts are getting at or to a router, and paying - that’s

going to mean traveling with someone who understands Economics 2.0 but

doesn’t want to hang around the Vile Offspring.

 

“As it happens, these old acquaintances of mine went out and fetched

back a router seed, for their own purposes. It’s sitting about thirty

light-hours away from here, out in the Kuiper belt. They’re trying to

hatch it right now. And I think Aineko might be willing to go with us

and handle the trade negotiations.” He raises the palm of his right

hand and flips a bundle of tags into the shared spatial cache of the

inner circle’s memories.

 

Lobsters. Decades ago, back in the dim wastelands of the

depression-ridden naughty oughties, the uploaded lobsters had escaped.

Manfred brokered a deal for them to get their very own cometary

factory colony. Years later, Amber’s expedition to the router had run

into eerie zombie lobsters, upload images that had been taken over and

reanimated by the Wunch. But where the real lobsters had gotten to …

 

For a moment, Rita sees herself hovering in darkness and vacuum, the

distant siren song of a planetary gravity well far below. Off to her -

left? north? - glows a hazy dim red cloud the size of the full moon as

seen from Earth, a cloud that hums with a constant background noise,

the waste heat of a galactic civilization dreaming furious colorless

thoughts to itself. Then she figures out how to slew her unblinking,

eyeless viewpoint round and sees the craft.

 

It’s a starship in the shape of a crustacean three kilometers long.

It’s segmented and flattened, with legs projecting from the abdominal

floor to stretch stiffly sideways and clutch fat balloons of cryogenic

deuterium fuel. The blue metallic tail is a flattened fan wrapped

around the delicate stinger of a fusion reactor. Near the head, things

are different: no huge claws there, but the delicately branching fuzz

of bush robots, nanoassemblers poised ready to repair damage in flight

and spin the parachute of a ramscoop when the ship is ready to

decelerate. The head is massively armored against the blitzkrieg

onslaught of interstellar dust, its radar eyes a glint of hexagonal

compound surfaces staring straight at her.

 

Behind and below the lobster-ship, a planetary ring looms vast and

tenuous. The lobster is in orbit around Saturn, mere light-seconds

away. And as Rita stares at the ship in dumbstruck silence, it winks

at her.

 

“They don’t have names, at least not as individual identifiers,”

Manfred says apologetically, “so I asked if he’d mind being called

something. He said Blue, because he is. So I give you the good lobster

Something Blue.”

 

Sirhan interrupts, “You still need my cladistics project,” he sounds

somewhat smug, “to find your way through the network. Do you have a

specific destination in mind?”

 

“Yeah, to both questions,” Manfred admits. “We need to send duplicate

ghosts out to each possible router end point, wait for an echo, then

iterate and repeat. Recursive depth-first traversal. The goal - that’s

harder.” He points at the ceiling, which dissolves into a chaotic 3-D

spiderweb that Rita recognizes, after some hours of subjective

head-down archive time, as a map of the dark matter distribution

throughout a radius of a billion light-years, galaxies glued like

fluff to the nodes where strands of drying silk meet. “We’ve known for

most of a century that there’s something flaky going on out there, out

past the B�otes void - there are a couple of galactic superclusters,

around which there’s something flaky about the cosmic background

anisotropy. Most computational processes generate entropy as a

by-product, and it looks like something is dumping waste heat