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

her bosom as she breathes, the dilation of her

pupils. For an endless moment he stares into her eyes and sees his own

reflection - her theory of his mind - staring back. Communication.

Strict machine. She steps back a pace, spike heels clicking, and

smiles ironically. “You’ve got a host body waiting for you, freshly

fabbed: Seems Sirhan was talking to your archived ghost in the temple

of history, and it decided to elect for reincarnation. Quite a day for

huge coincidences, isn’t it? Why don’t you go merge with it - I’ll

meet you, then we can go and ask Aineko some hard questions.”

 

Manfred takes a deep breath and nods. “I suppose so …”

 

*

 

Little Manni - a clone off the family tree, which is actually a

directed cyclic graph - doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about

but he can tell when momma, Rita, is upset. It’s something to do with

the pussycat-thing, that much he knows, but Momma doesn’t want to tell

him: “Go play with your friends, dear,” she says distractedly, not

even bothering to spawn a ghost to watch over him.

 

Manni goes into his room and rummages around in toyspace for a bit,

but there’s nothing quite as interesting as the cat. The

pussycat-thing smells of adventure, the illicit made explicit. Manni

wonders where daddy’s taken it. He tries to call big-Manni-ghost, but

big-self isn’t answering: He’s probably sleeping or something. So

after a distracted irritated fit of play - which leaves the toyspace

in total disarray, Sendak-things cowering under a big bass drum -

Manni gets bored. And because he’s still basically a little kid, and

not fully in control of his own metaprogramming, instead of adjusting

his outlook so that he isn’t bored anymore, he sneaks out through his

bedroom gate (which big-Manni-ghost reprogrammed for him sometime ago

so that it would forward to an underused public A-gate that he’d run a

man-in-the-middle hack on, so he could use it as a proxy teleport

server) then down to the underside of Red Plaza, where skinless things

gibber and howl at their tormentors, broken angels are crucified on

the pillars that hold up the sky, and gangs of semiferal children act

out their psychotic fantasies on mouthless android replicas of parents

and authorities.

 

Lis is there, and Vipul and Kareen and Morgan. Lis has changed into a

warbody, an ominous gray battlebot husk with protruding spikes and a

belt of morningstars that whirl threateningly around her. “Manni! Play

war?”

 

Morgan’s got great crushing pincers instead of hands, and Manni is

glad he came motie-style, his third arm a bony scythe from the elbow

down. He nods excitedly. “Who’s the enemy?”

 

“Them.” Lis precesses and points at a bunch of kids on the far side of

a pile of artistically arranged rubble who are gathered around a

gibbet, poking things that glow into the flinching flesh of whatever

is incarcerated in the cast-iron cage. It’s all make-believe, but the

screams are convincing, all the same, and they take Manni back for an

instant to the last time he died down here, the uneasy edit around a

black hole of pain surrounding his disemboweling. “They’ve got Lucy,

and they’re torturing her, we’ve got to get her back.” Nobody really

dies in these games, not permanently, but children can be very rough

indeed, and the adults of New Japan have found that it’s best to let

them have at each other and rely on City to redact the damage later.

Allowing them this outlet makes it easier to stop them doing really

dangerous things that threaten the structural integrity of the

biosphere.

 

“Fun.” Manni’s eyes light up as Vipul yanks the arsenal doors open and

starts handing out clubs, chibs, spikies, shuriken, and garrotes.

“Let’s go!”

 

About ten minutes of gouging, running, fighting, and screaming later,

Manni is leaning against the back of a crucifixion pillar, panting for

breath. It’s been a good war for him so far, and his arm aches and

itches from the stabbing, but he’s got a bad feeling it’s going to

change. Lis went in hard and got her chains tangled up around the

gibbet supports - they’re roasting her over a fire now, her

electronically boosted screams drowning out his own hoarse gasps.

Blood drips down his arm - not his - spattering from the tip of his

claw. He shakes with a crazed hunger for hurt, a cruel need to inflict

pain. Something above his head makes a scritch, scritch sound, and he

looks up. It’s a crucified angel, wings ripped where they’ve thrust

the spikes in between the joints that support the great, thin low-gee

flight membranes. It’s still breathing, nobody’s bothered

disemboweling it yet, and it wouldn’t be here unless it was bad, so -

 

Manni stands, but as he reaches out to touch the angel’s thin,

blue-skinned stomach with his third arm fingernail, he hears a voice:

“Wait.” It’s innerspeech, and it bears ackles of coercion, superuser

privileges that lock his elbow joint in place. He mewls frustratedly

and turns round, ready to fight.

 

It’s the cat. He sits hunched on a boulder behind him - this is the

odd thing - right where he was looking a moment ago, watching him with

slitty eyes. Manni feels the urge to lash out at him, but his arms

won’t move, and neither will his legs: This may be the Dark Side of

Red Plaza, where the bloody children play and anything goes, and Manni

may have a much bigger claw here than anything the cat can muster, but

City still has some degree of control, and the cat’s ackles

effectively immunize it from the carnage to either side. “Hello,

Manni,” says the pussy-thing. “Your Dad’s worried: You’re supposed to

be in your room, and he’s looking for you. Big-you gave you a back

door, didn’t he?”

 

Manni nods jerkily, his eyes going wide. He wants to shout and lash

out at the pussy-thing but he can’t. “What are you?”

 

“I’m your … fairy godfather.” The cat stares at him intently. “You

know, I do believe you don’t resemble your archetype very closely -

not as he was at your age - but yes, I think on balance you’ll do.”

 

“Do what?” Manni lets his motie-arm drop, perplexed.

 

“Put me in touch with your other self. Big-you.”

 

“I can’t,” Manni begins to explain. But before he can continue, the

pile of rock whines slightly and rotates beneath the cat, who has to

stand and do a little twirl in place, tail bushing up in annoyance.

 

Manni’s father steps out of the T-gate and glances around, his face a

mask of disapproval. “Manni! What do you think you’re doing here? Come

home at -”

 

“He’s with me, history-boy,” interrupts the cat, nettled by Sirhan’s

arrival. “I was just rounding him up.”

 

“Damn you, I don’t need your help to control my son! In fact -”

 

“Mom said I could -” Manni begins.

 

“And what’s that on your sword?” Sirhan’s glare takes in the whole

scene, the impromptu game of capture-the-gibbeted-torture-victim, the

bonfires and screams. The mask of disapproval cracks, revealing a core

of icy anger. “You’re coming home with me!” He glances at the cat.

“You too, if you want to talk to him - he’s grounded.”

 

*

 

Once upon a time there was a pet cat.

 

Except, it wasn’t a cat.

 

Back when a young entrepreneur called Manfred Macx was jetting

around the not-yet-disassembled structures of an old continent

called Europe, making strangers rich and fixing up friends with

serendipitous business plans - a desperate displacement activity,

spinning his wheels in a vain attempt to outrun his own shadow - he

used to travel with a robotic toy of feline form. Programmable and

upgradeable, Aineko was a third-generation descendant of the

original luxury Japanese companion robots. It was all Manfred had

room for in his life, and he loved that robot, despite the alarming

way decerebrated kittens kept turning up on his doorstep. He loved

it nearly as much as Pamela, his fianc�e, loved him, and she knew

it. Pamela, being a whole lot smarter than Manfred gave her credit

for, realized that the quickest way to a man’s heart was through

whatever he loved. And Pamela, being a whole lot more of a control

freak than Manfred realized, was damn well ready to use any

restraint that came to hand. Theirs was a very twenty-first-century

kind of relationship, which is to say one that would have been

illegal a hundred years earlier and fashionably scandalous a

century before that. And whenever Manfred upgraded his pet robot -

transplanting its trainable neural network into a new body with new

and exciting expansion ports - Pamela would hack it.

 

They were married for a while, and divorced for a whole lot longer,

allegedly because they were both strong-willed people with

philosophies of life that were irreconcilable short of death or

transcendence. Manny, being wildly creative and outward-directed

and having the attention span of a weasel on crack, had other

lovers. Pamela … who knows? If on some evenings she put on a

disguise and hung out at encounter areas in fetish clubs, she

wasn’t telling anyone: She lived in uptight America, staidly

straitlaced, and had a reputation to uphold. But they both stayed

in touch with the cat, and although Manfred retained custody for

some reason never articulated, Aineko kept returning Pamela’s calls

- until it was time to go hang out with their daughter Amber,

tagging along on her rush into relativistic exile, then keeping a

proprietorial eye on her eigenson Sirhan, and his wife and child (a

clone off the old family tree, Manfred 2.0) …

 

Now, here’s the rub: Aineko wasn’t a cat. Aineko was an incarnate

intelligence, confined within a succession of catlike bodies that

became increasingly realistic over time, and equipped with

processing power to support a neural simulation that grew rapidly

with each upgrade.

 

Did anyone in the Macx family ever think to ask what Aineko wanted?

 

And if an answer had come, would they have liked it?

 

*

 

Adult-Manfred, still disoriented from finding himself awake and

reinstantiated a couple of centuries downstream from his hurried exile

from Saturn system, is hesitantly navigating his way toward Sirhan and

Rita’s home when big-Manni-with-Manfred’s-memory-ghost drops into his

consciousness like a ton of computronium glowing red-hot at the edges.

 

It’s a classic oh-shit moment. Between one foot touching the ground

and the next, Manfred stumbles hard, nearly twisting an ankle, and

gasps. He remembers. At third hand he remembers being reincarnated as

Manni, a bouncing baby boy for Rita and Sirhan (and just why they want

to raise an ancestor instead of creating a new child of their own is

one of those cultural quirks that is so alien he can scarcely

comprehend it). Then for a while he recalls living as Manni’s amnesic

adult accelerated ghost, watching over his original from the consensus

cyberspace of the city: the arrival of Pamela, adult Manni’s reaction

to her, her dump of yet another copy of Manfred’s memories into Manni,

and now this - How many of me are there? he wonders nervously. Then:

Pamela? What’s she doing here?

 

Manfred shakes his head and looks about. Now he remembers being

big-Manni, he knows where he is implicitly, and more importantly,

knows what all these next-gen City interfaces are supposed to do. The

walls and ceiling are carpeted in glowing glyphs that promise him

everything from instant-access local services to teleportation across

interstellar distances. So they haven’t quite collapsed geography yet,

he realizes gratefully, fastening on to the nearest comprehensible

thought of his own before old-Manni’s memories explain everything for

him. It’s a