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

into the

area from all the galaxies in the region, very evenly spread in a way

that mirrors the metal distribution in those galaxies, except at the

very cores. And according to the lobsters, who have been indulging in

some very long baseline interferometry, most of the stars in the

nearest cluster are redder than expected and metal-depleted. As if

someone’s been mining them.”

 

“Ah.” Sirhan stares at his grandfather. “Why should they be any

different from the local nodes?”

 

“Look around you. Do you see any indications of large-scale cosmic

engineering within a million light-years of here?” Manfred shrugs.

“Locally, nothing has quite reached … well. We can guess at the life

cycle of a post spike civilization now, can’t we? We’ve felt the

elephant. We’ve seen the wreckage of collapsed Matrioshka minds. We

know how unattractive exploration is to postsingularity intelligences,

we’ve seen the bandwidth gap that keeps them at home.” He points at

the ceiling. “But over there something different happened. They’re

making changes on the scale of an entire galactic supercluster, and

they appear to be coordinated. They did get out and go places, and

their descendants may still be out there. It looks like they’re doing

something purposeful and coordinated, something vast - a timing

channel attack on the virtual machine that’s running the universe,

perhaps, or an embedded simulation of an entirely different universe.

Up or down, is it turtles all the way, or is there something out there

that’s more real than we are? And don’t you think it’s worth trying to

find out?”

 

“No.” Sirhan crosses his arms. “Not particularly. I’m interested in

saving people from the Vile Offspring, not taking a huge gamble on

mystery transcendent aliens who may have built a galaxy-sized reality

hacking machine a billion years ago. I’ll sell you my services, and

even send a ghost along, but if you expect me to bet my entire future

on it …”

 

It’s too much for Rita. Diverting her attention away from the dizzying

inner-space vista, she elbows Sirhan in the ribs. He looks round

blankly for a moment, then with gathering anger as he lets his

killfile filter slip. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be

silent,” she hisses. Then, succumbing to a secondary impulse she knows

she’ll regret later, she drops a private channel into his public

in-tray.

 

“Nobody’s asking you to,” Manfred is saying defensively, arms crossed.

“I view this as a Manhattan project kind of thing, pursue all agendas

in parallel. If we win the election, we’ll have the resources we need

to do that. We should all go through the router, and we will all leave

backups aboard Something Blue. Blue is slow, tops out at about a tenth

of cee, but what he can do is get a sufficient quantity of memory

diamond the hell out of circumsolar space before the Vile Offspring’s

autonomic defenses activate whatever kind of trust exploit they’re

planning in the next few megaseconds -”

 

“What do you want?” Sirhan demands angrily over the channel. He’s

still not looking at her, and not just because he’s focusing on the

vision in blue that dominates the shared space of the team meeting.

 

“Stop lying to yourself,” Rita sends back. “You’re lying about your

own goals and motivations. You may not want to know the truth your own

ghost worked out, but I do. And I’m not going to let you deny it

happened.”

 

“So one of your agents seduced a personality image of me -”

 

“Bullshit -”

 

“Do you mean to declare this platform openly?” asks the young-old guy

near the platform, the Europol. “Because if so, you’re going to

undermine Amber’s campaign -”

 

“That’s all right,” Amber says tiredly, “I’m used to Dad supporting me

in his own inimitable way.”

 

“Is okay,” says a new voice. “I are happy wait-state grazing in

ecliptic.” It’s the friendly lobster lifeboat, light-lagged by its

trajectory outside the ring system.

 

“- You’re happy to hide behind a hypocritical sense of moral purity

when it makes you feel you can look down on other people, but

underneath it you’re just like everyone else -”

 

“- She set you up to corrupt me, didn’t she? You’re just bait in her

scheme -”

 

“The idea was to store incremental backups in the Panuliran’s cargo

cache in case a weakly godlike agency from the inner system attempts

to activate the antibodies they’ve already disseminated throughout the

festival culture,” Annette explains, stepping in on Manfred’s behalf.

 

Nobody else in the discussion space seems to notice that Rita and

Sirhan are busy ripping the shit out of each other over a private

channel, throwing emotional hand grenades back and forth like seasoned

divorcees. “It’s not a satisfactory solution to the evacuation

question, but it ought to satisfy the conservatives’ baseline

requirement, and as insurance -”

 

“- That’s right, blame your eigenmother! Has it occurred to you that

she doesn’t care enough about you to try a stunt like that? I think

you spent too much time with that crazy grandmother of yours. You

didn’t even integrate that ghost, did you? Too afraid of polluting

yourself! I bet you never even bothered to check what it felt like

from inside -”

 

“- I did -” Sirhan freezes for a moment, personality modules paging in

and out of his brain like a swarm of angry bees - “make a fool of

myself,” he adds quietly, then slumps back in his seat. “This is so

embarrassing …” He covers his face with his hands. “You’re right.”

 

“I am?” Rita’s puzzlement slowly gives way to understanding; Sirhan

has finally integrated the memories from the partials they hybridized

earlier. Stuck-up and proud, the cognitive dissonance must be

enormous. “No, I’m not. You’re just overly defensive.”

 

“I’m -” Embarrassed. Because Rita knows him, inside out. Has the

ghost-memories of six months in a simspace with him, playing with

ideas, exchanging intimacies, later confidences. She holds

ghost-memories of his embrace, a smoky affair that might have happened

in real space if his instant reaction to realizing that it could

happen hadn’t been to dump the splinter of his mind that was

contaminated by impure thoughts to cold storage and deny everything.

 

“We have no threat profile yet,” Annette says, cutting right across

their private conversation. “If there is a direct threat - and we

don’t know that for sure, yet, the Vile Offspring might be enlightened

enough simply to be leaving us alone - it’ll probably be some kind of

subtle attack aimed directly at the foundations of our identity. Look

for a credit bubble, distributed trust metrics devaluing suddenly as

people catch some kind of weird religion, something like that. Maybe a

perverse election outcome. And it won’t be sudden. They are not

stupid, to start a headlong attack without slow corruption to soften

the way.”

 

“You’ve obviously been thinking about this for some time,” Sameena

says with dry emphasis. “What’s in it for your friend, uh, Blue? Did

you squirrel away enough credit to cover the price of renting a

starship from the Economics 2.0 metabubble? Or is there something you

aren’t telling us?”

 

“Um.” Manfred looks like a small boy with his hand caught in the

sweets jar. “Well, as a matter of fact -”

 

“Yes, Dad, why don’t you tell us just what this is going to cost?”

Amber asks.

 

“Ah, well.” He looks embarrassed. “It’s the lobsters, not Aineko. They

want some payment.”

 

Rita reaches out and grabs Sirhan’s hand: He doesn’t resist. “Do you

know about this?” Rita queries him.

 

“All new to me …” A confused partial thread follows his reply down

the pipe, and for a while, she joins him in introspective reverie,

trying to work out the implications of knowing what they know about

the possibility of a mutual relationship.

 

“They want a written conceptual map. A map of all the accessible meme

spaces hanging off the router network, compiled by human explorers who

they can use as a baseline, they say. It’s quite simple - in return

for a ticket out-system, some of us are going to have to go exploring.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t leave backups behind.”

 

“Do they have any particular explorers in mind?” Amber sniffs.

 

“No,” says Manfred. “Just a team of us, to map out the router network

and ensure they get some warning of threats from outside.” He pauses.

“You’re going to want to come along, aren’t you?”

 

*

 

The pre-election campaign takes approximately three minutes and

consumes more bandwidth than the sum of all terrestrial communications

channels from prehistory to 2008. Approximately six million ghosts of

Amber, individually tailored to fit the profile of the targeted

audience, fork across the dark fiber meshwork underpinning of the

lily-pad colonies, then out through ultrawideband mesh networks,

instantiated in implants and floating dust motes to buttonhole the

voters. Many of them fail to reach their audience, and many more hold

fruitless discussions; about six actually decide they’ve diverged so

far from their original that they constitute separate people and

register for independent citizenship, two defect to the other side,

and one elopes with a swarm of highly empathic modified African

honeybees.

 

Ambers are not the only ghosts competing for attention in the public

zeitgeist. In fact, they’re in a minority. Most of the autonomous

electoral agents are campaigning for a variety of platforms that range

from introducing a progressive income tax - nobody is quite sure why,

but it seems to be traditional - to a motion calling for the entire

planet to be paved, which quite ignores the realities of element

abundance in the upper atmosphere of a metal-poor gas giant, not to

mention playing hell with the weather. The Faceless are campaigning

for everyone to be assigned a new set of facial muscles every six

months, the Livid Pranksters are demanding equal rights for

subsentient entities, and a host of single-issue pressure groups are

yammering about the usual lost causes.

 

Just how the election process anneals is a black mystery - at least,

to those people who aren’t party to the workings of the Festival

Committee, the group who first had the idea of paving Saturn with

hot-hydrogen balloons - but over the course of a complete diurn,

almost forty thousand seconds, a pattern begins to emerge. This

pattern will systematize the bias of the communications networks that

traffic in reputation points across the planetary polity for a long

time - possibly as much as fifty million seconds, getting on for a

whole Martian year (if Mars still existed). It will create a

parliament - a merged group mind borganism that speaks as one

supermind built from the beliefs of the victors. And the news isn’t

great, as the party gathered in the upper sphere of the Atomium (which

Manfred insisted Amber rent for the dead dog party) is slowly

realizing. Amber isn’t there, presumably drowning her sorrows or

engaging in postelection schemes of a different nature somewhere else.

But other members of her team are about.

 

“It could be worse,” Rita rationalizes, late in the evening. She’s

sitting in a corner of the seventh-floor deck, in a 1950s wireframe

chair, clutching a glass of synthetic single malt and watching the

shadows. “We could be in an old-style contested election with seven

shades of shit flying. At least this way we can be decently

anonymous.”

 

One of the blind spots detaches from her peripheral vision and

approaches. It segues into view, suddenly congealing into Sirhan. He

looks morose.

 

“What’s your problem?” she demands. “Your former faction is winning on

the count.”

 

“Maybe so.” He sits down beside her, carefully avoiding her gaze.

“Maybe this is a good thing. And maybe not.”

 

“So when are you going