Accelerando, Charles Stross [classic novels for teens .TXT] 📗

naming of her

ex-employers - “decided the best thing to do was to cover up the

second signal and work on it in secret - for competitive advantage,

they say - and as for the first, to pretend it never happened. So

nobody really knows how long it’ll take to figure out whether it’s a

ping from the galactic root domain servers or a pulsar that’s taken to

grinding out the eighteen-quadrillionth digits of pi, or what.”

 

“But,” Monica glances around, “you can’t be sure.”

 

“I think it may be sapient,” says Manfred. He finds the right button

at last, and the bed begins to fold itself back into a lounger. Then

he finds the wrong button; the duvet dissolves into viscous turquoise

slime that slurps and gurgles away through a multitude of tiny nozzles

in the headboard. “Bloody aerogel. Um, where was I?” He sits up.

 

“Sapient network packet?” asks Alan.

 

“Nope.” Manfred shakes his head, grins. “Should have known you’d read

Vinge … or was it the movie? No, what I think is that there’s only

one logical thing to beam backward and forward out there, and you may

remember I asked you to beam it out about, oh, nine years ago?”

 

“The lobsters.” Alan’s eyes go blank. “Nine years. Time to Proxima

Centauri and back?”

 

“About that distance, yes,” says Manfred. “And remember, that’s an

upper bound - it could well have come from somewhere closer. Anyway,

the first SETI signal came from a couple of degrees off and more than

hundred light-years out, but the second signal came from less than

three light-years away. You can see why they didn’t publicize that -

they didn’t want a panic. And no, the signal isn’t a simple echo of

the canned crusty transmission - I think it’s an exchange embassy, but

we haven’t cracked it yet. Now do you see why we have to crowbar the

civil rights issue open again? We need a framework for rights that can

encompass nonhumans, and we need it as fast as possible. Otherwise, if

the neighbors come visiting…”

 

“Okay,” says Alan, “I’ll have to talk with myselves. Maybe we can

agree something, as long as it’s clear that it’s a provisional stab at

the framework and not a permanent solution?”

 

Annette snorts. “No solution is final!” Monica catches her eyes and

winks: Annette is startled by the blatant display of dissent within

the syncitium.

 

“Well,” says Manfred, “I guess that’s all we can ask for?” He looks

hopeful. “Thanks for the hospitality, but I feel the need to lie down

in my own bed for a while. I had to commit a lot to memory while I was

off-line, and I want to record it before I forget who I am,” he adds

pointedly, and Annette breathes a quiet sight of relief.

 

*

 

Later that night, a doorbell rings.

 

“Who’s there?” asks the entryphone.

 

“Uh, me,” says the man on the steps. He looks a little confused. “Ah’m

Macx. Ah’m here tae see” - the name is on the tip of his tongue -

“someone.”

 

“Come in.” A solenoid buzzes; he pushes the door open, and it closes

behind him. His metal-shod boots ring on the hard stone floor, and the

cool air smells faintly of unburned jet fuel.

 

“Ah’m Macx,” he repeats uncertainly, “or Ah wis fer a wee while, an’

it made ma heid hurt. But noo Ah’m me agin, an’ Ah wannae be somebody

else … can ye help?”

 

*

 

Later still, a cat sits on a window ledge, watching the interior of a

darkened room from behind the concealment of curtains. The room is

dark to human eyes, but bright to the cat: Moonlight cascades silently

off the walls and furniture, the twisted bedding, the two naked humans

lying curled together in the middle of the bed.

 

Both the humans are in their thirties: Her close-cropped hair is

beginning to gray, distinguished threads of gunmetal wire threading

it, while his brown mop is not yet showing signs of age. To the cat,

who watches with a variety of unnatural senses, her head glows in the

microwave spectrum with a gentle halo of polarized emissions. The male

shows no such aura: he’s unnaturally natural for this day and age,

although - oddly - he’s wearing spectacles in bed, and the frames

shine similarly. An invisible soup of radiation connects both humans

to items of clothing scattered across the room - clothing that seethes

with unsleeping sentience, dribbling over to their suitcases and hand

luggage and (though it doesn’t enjoy noticing it) the cat’s tail,

which is itself a rather sensitive antenna.

 

The two humans have just finished making love: They do this less often

than in their first few years, but with more tenderness and expertise

- lengths of shocking pink Hello Kitty bondage tape still hang from

the bedposts, and a lump of programmable memory plastic sits cooling

on the side table. The male is sprawled with his head and upper torso

resting in the crook of the female’s left arm and shoulder. Shifting

visualization to infrared, the cat sees that she is glowing,

capillaries dilating to enhance the blood flow around her throat and

chest.

 

“I’m getting old,” the male mumbles. “I’m slowing down.”

 

“Not where it counts,” the female replies, gently squeezing his right

buttock.

 

“No, I’m sure of it,” he says. “The bits of me that still exist in

this old head - how many types of processor can you name that are

still in use thirty-plus years after they’re born?”

 

“You’re thinking about the implants again,” she says carefully. The

cat remembers this as a sore point; from being a medical procedure to

help the blind see and the autistic talk, intrathecal implants have

blossomed into a must-have accessory for the now-clade. But the male

is reluctant. “It’s not as risky as it used to be. If they screw up,

there’re neural growth cofactors and cheap replacement stem cells. I’m

sure one of your sponsors can arrange for extra cover.”

 

“Hush: I’m still thinking about it.” He’s silent for a while. “I

wasn’t myself yesterday. I was someone else. Someone too slow to keep

up. Puts a new perspective on everything: I’ve been afraid of losing

my biological plasticity, of being trapped in an obsolete chunk of

skullware while everything moves on - but how much of me lives outside

my own head these days, anyhow?” One of his external threads generates

an animated glyph and throws it at her mind’s eye; she grins at his

obscure humor. “Cross-training from a new interface is going to be

hard, though.”

 

“You’ll do it,” she predicts. “You can always get a discreet

prescription for novotrophin-B.” A receptor agonist tailored for

gerontological wards, it stimulates interest in the new: combined with

MDMA, it’s a component of the street cocktail called sensawunda. “That

should keep you focused for long enough to get comfortable.”

 

“What’s life coming to when I can’t cope with the pace of change?” he

asks the ceiling plaintively.

 

The cat lashes its tail, irritated by his anthropocentrism.

 

“You are my futurological storm shield,” she says, jokingly, and moves

her hand to cup his genitals. Most of her current activities are

purely biological, the cat notes: From the irregular sideloads, she’s

using most of her skullware to run ETItalk@home, one of the

distributed cracking engines that is trying to decode the alien

grammar of the message that Manfred suspects is eligible for

citizenship.

 

Obeying an urge that it can’t articulate, the cat sends out a feeler

to the nearest router. The cybeast has Manfred’s keys; Manfred trusts

Aineko implicitly, which is unwise - his ex-wife tampered with it,

after all, never mind all the kittens it absorbed in its youth.

Tunneling out into the darkness, the cat stalks the Net alone …

 

“Just think about the people who can’t adapt,” he says. His voice

sounds obscurely worried.

 

“I try not to.” She shivers. “You are thirty, you are slowing. What

about the young? Are they keeping up, themselves?”

 

“I have a daughter. She’s about a hundred and sixty million seconds

old. If Pamela would let me message her I could find out …” There

are echoes of old pain in his voice.

 

“Don’t go there, Manfred. Please.” Despite everything, Manfred hasn’t

let go: Amber is a ligature that permanently binds him to Pamela’s

distant orbit.

 

In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in

the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it

drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly

encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and

obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the

vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all

the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle.

 

Beyond the distant lobsters, the cat pings an anonymous distributed

network server - peer-to-peer file storage spread holographically

across a million hosts, unerasable, full of secrets and lies that

nobody can afford to suppress. Rants, music, rip-offs of the latest

Bollywood hits: The cat spiders past them all, looking for the final

sample. Grabbing it - a momentary breakup in Manfred’s spectacles the

only symptom for either human to notice - the cat drags its prey home,

sucks it down, and compares it against the data sample Annette’s

exocortex is analysing.

 

“I’m sorry, my love. I just sometimes feel -” He sighs. “Age is a

process of closing off opportunities behind you. I’m not young enough

anymore - I’ve lost the dynamic optimism.”

 

The data sample on the pirate server differs from the one Annette’s

implant is processing.

 

“You’ll get it back,” she reassures him quietly, stroking his side.

“You are still sad from being mugged. This also will pass. You’ll

see.”

 

“Yeah.” He finally relaxes, dropping back into the reflexive assurance

of his own will. “I’ll get over it, one way or another. Or someone who

remembers being me will …”

 

In the darkness, Aineko bares teeth in a silent grin. Obeying a deeply

hardwired urge to meddle, he moves a file across, making a copy of the

alien download package Annette has been working on. She’s got a copy

of number two, the sequence the deep-space tracking network received

from close to home, which ESA and the other big combines have been

keeping to themselves. Another deeply buried thread starts up, and

Aineko analyses the package from a perspective no human being has yet

established. Presently a braid of processes running on an abstract

virtual machine asks him a question that cannot be encoded in any

human grammar. Watch and wait, he replies to his passenger. They’ll

figure out what we are sooner or later.