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

to take him, I said I’d come for him.”

Aineko’s tail lashes from side to side in agitation. “I don’t deal in

primate politics, Sirhan: I’m not a monkey-boy. But I knew you’d react

badly because the way your species socializes” - a dozen metaghosts

reconverge in Sirhan’s mind, drowning Aineko’s voice in an inner

cacophony - “would enter into the situation, and it seemed preferable

to trigger your territorial/reproductive threat display early, rather

than risk it exploding in my face during a more delicate situation.”

 

Sirhan waves a hand vaguely at the cat: “Please wait.” He’s trying to

integrate his false memories - the output from the ghosts, their

thinking finished - and his eyes narrow suspiciously. “It must be bad.

You don’t normally get confrontational - you script your interactions

with humans ahead of time, so that you maneuver them into doing what

you want them to do and thinking it was their idea all along.” He

tenses. “What is it about Manni that brought you here? What do you

want with him? He’s just a kid.”

 

“You’re confusing Manni with Manfred.” Aineko sends a glyph of a smile

to Sirhan: “That’s your first mistake, even though they’re clones in

different subjective states. Think what he’s like when he’s grown up.”

 

“But he isn’t grown-up!” Sirhan complains. “He hasn’t been grown-up

for -”

 

“- Years, Sirhan. That’s the problem. I need to talk to your

grandfather, really, not your son, and not the goddamn stateless ghost

in the temple of history, I need a Manfred with a sense of continuity.

He’s got something that I need, and I promise you I’m not going away

until I get it. Do you understand?”

 

“Yes.” Sirhan wonders if his voice sounds as hollow as the feeling in

his chest. “But he’s our kid, Aineko. We’re human. You know what that

means to us?”

 

“Second childhood.” Aineko stands up, stretches, then curls up in the

cat basket. “That’s the trouble with hacking you naked apes for long

life, you keep needing a flush and reset job - and then you lose

continuity. That’s not my problem, Sirhan. I got a signal from the far

edge of the router network, a ghost that claims to be family. Says

they finally made it out to the big beyond, out past the B�otes

supercluster, found something concrete and important that’s worth my

while to visit. But I want to make sure it’s not like the Wunch before

I answer. I’m not letting that into my mind, even with a sandbox. Do

you understand that? I need to instantiate a reallive adult Manfred

with all his memories, one who hasn’t been a part of me, and get him

to vouch for the sapient data packet. It takes a conscious being to

authenticate that kind of messenger. Unfortunately, the history temple

is annoyingly resistant to unauthorized extraction - I can’t just go

in and steal a copy of him - and I don’t want to use my own model of

Manfred: It knows too much. So -”

 

“What’s it promising?” Sirhan asks tensely.

 

Aineko looks at him through slitted eyes, a purring buzz at the base

of his throat: “Everything.”

 

*

 

“There are different kinds of death,” the woman called Pamela tells

Manni, her bone-dry voice a whisper in the darkness. Manni tries to

move, but he seems to be trapped in a confined space; for a moment, he

begins to panic, but then he works it out. “First and most

importantly, death is just the absence of life - oh, and for human

beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not just the absence of

consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness.” The

darkness is close and disorienting and Manni isn’t sure which way up

he is - nothing seems to work. Even Pamela’s voice is a directionless

ambiance, coming from all around him.

 

“Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity,

used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy

tales about afterlives notwithstanding.” A dry chuckle: “I used to try

to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just

in case Pascal’s wager was right - exploring the phase-space of all

possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can

agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to

certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that

promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example

because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.”

 

Manni tries to say, I’m not dead, but his throat doesn’t seem to be

working. And now that he thinks about it, he doesn’t seem to be

breathing, either.

 

“Now, consciousness. That’s a fun thing, isn’t it? Product of an arms

race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a

mouse, you’ll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most

easily explained by the cat having a theory of mind concerning the

mouse - an internal simulation of the mouse’s likely behavior when it

notices the predator. Which way to run, for example. And the cat will

use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile,

prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a

defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator’s actions.

Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social

ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling - so the

tribe could work collectively - and then reflexively, to simulate the

individual’s own inner states. Put the two things together, signaling

and introspective simulation, and you’ve got human-level

consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus - signaling that

transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals

such as ‘predator here’ or ‘food there.’”

 

Get me out of this! Manny feels panic biting into him with

liquid-helium-lubricated teeth. “G-e-t -” For a miracle the words

actually come out, although he can’t tell quite how he’s uttering

them, his throat being quite as frozen as his innerspeech.

Everything’s off-lined, all systems down.

 

“So,” Pamela continues remorselessly, “we come to the posthuman. Not

just our own neural wetware, mapped out to the subcellular level and

executed in an emulation environment on a honking great big computer,

like this: That’s not posthuman, that’s a travesty. I’m talking about

beings who are fundamentally better consciousness engines than us

merely human types, augmented or otherwise. They’re not just better at

cooperation - witness Economics 2.0 for a classic demonstration of

that - but better at simulation. A posthuman can build an internal

model of a human-level intelligence that is, well, as cognitively

strong as the original. You or I may think we know what makes other

people tick, but we’re quite often wrong, whereas real posthumans can

actually simulate us, inner states and all, and get it right. And this

is especially true of a posthuman that’s been given full access to our

memory prostheses for a period of years, back before we realized they

were going to transcend on us. Isn’t that the case, Manni?”

 

Manni would be screaming at her right now, if he had a mouth - but

instead the panic is giving way to an enormous sense of d�ja vu.

There’s something about Pamela, something ominous that he knows …

he’s met her before, he’s sure of it. And while most of his systems

are off-line, one of them is very much active: There’s a personality

ghost flagging its intention of merging back in with him, and the

memory delta it carries is enormous, years and years of divergent

experiences to absorb. He shoves it away with a titanic effort - it’s

a very insistent ghost - and concentrates on imagining the feel of

lips moving on teeth, a sly tongue obstructing his epiglottis, words

forming in his throat - “m-e …”

 

“We should have known better than to keep upgrading the cat, Manny. It

knows us too well. I may have died in the flesh, but Aineko remembered

me, as hideously accurately as the Vile Offspring remembered the

random resimulated. And you can run away - like this, this second

childhood - but you can’t hide. Your cat wants you. And there’s more.”

Her voice sends chills up and down his spine, for without him giving

it permission, the ghost has begun to merge its stupendous load of

memories with his neural map, and her voice is freighted with

erotic/repulsive significance, the result of conditioning feedback he

subjected himself to a lifetime - lifetimes? - ago: “He’s been playing

with us, Manny, possibly from before we realized he was conscious.”

 

“Out -” Manfred stops. He can see again, and move, and feel his mouth.

He’s himself again, physically back as he was in his late twenties all

those decades ago when he’d lived a peripatetic life in presingularity

Europe. He’s sitting on the edge of a bed in a charmingly themed

Amsterdam hotel with a recurrent motif of philosophers, wearing jeans

and collarless shirt and a vest of pockets crammed with the detritus

of a long-obsolete personal area network, his crazily clunky

projection specs sitting on the bedside table. Pamela stands stiffly

in front of the door, watching him. She’s not the withered travesty he

remembers seeing on Saturn, a half-blind Fate leaning on the shoulder

of his grandson. Nor is she the vengeful Fury of Paris, or the

scheming fundamentalist devil of the Belt. Wearing a sharply tailored

suit over a red-and-gold brocade corset, blonde hair drawn back like

fine wire in a tight chignon, she’s the focused, driven force of

nature he first fell in love with: repression, domination, his very

own strict machine.

 

“We’re dead,” she says, then gives voice to a tense half laugh: “We

don’t have to live through the bad times again if we don’t want to.”

 

“What is this?” he asks, his mouth dry.

 

“It’s the reproductive imperative.” She sniffs. “Come on, stand up.

Come here.”

 

He stands up obediently, but makes no move toward her. “Whose

imperative?”

 

“Not ours.” Her cheek twitches. “You find things out when you’re dead.

That fucking cat has got a lot of questions to answer.”

 

“You’re telling me that -”

 

She shrugs. “Can you think of any other explanation for all this?”

Then she steps forward and takes his hand. “Division and

recombination. Partitioning of memetic replicators into different

groups, then careful cross-fertilization. Aineko wasn’t just breeding

a better Macx when he arranged all those odd marriages and divorces

and eigenparents and forked uploads - Aineko is trying to breed our

minds.” Her fingers are slim and cool in his hand. He feels a

momentary revulsion, as of the grave, and he shudders before he

realizes it’s his conditioning cutting in. Crudely implanted reflexes

that shouldn’t still be active after all this time. “Even our divorce.

If -”

 

“Surely not.” Manny remembers that much already. “Aineko wasn’t even

conscious back then!”

 

Pamela raises one sharply sculpted eyebrow: “Are you sure?”

 

“You want an answer,” he says.

 

She breathes deeply, and he feels it on his cheek - it raises the fine

hairs on the back of his neck. Then she nods stiffly. “I want to know

how much of our history was scripted by the cat. Back when we thought

we were upgrading his firmware, were we? Or was he letting us think

that we were?” A sharp hiss of breath: “The divorce. Was that us? Or

were we being manipulated?”

 

“Our memories, are they real? Did any of that stuff actually happen to

us? Or -”

 

She’s standing about twenty centimeters away from him, and Manfred

realizes that he’s acutely aware of her presence, of the smell of her

skin, the heave of