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

>cumbersome farm ship round to orient on the Barney rock. She damps her

enthusiasm self-consciously, her implants hungrily sequestrating

surplus neurotransmitter molecules floating around her synapses before

reuptake sets in. It doesn’t do to get too excited in free flight. But

the impulse to spin handstands, jump and sing is still there: It’s her

rock, and it loves her, and she’s going to bring it to life.

 

The workspace of Amber’s room is a mass of stuff that probably doesn’t

belong on a spaceship. Posters of the latest Lebanese boy band bump

and grind through their glam routines: Tentacular restraining straps

wave from the corners of her sleeping bag, somehow accumulating a

crust of dirty clothing from the air like a giant inanimate hydra.

(Cleaning robots seldom dare to venture inside the teenager’s

bedroom.) One wall is repeatedly cycling through a simulation of the

projected construction cycle of Habitat One, a big fuzzy sphere with a

glowing core (that Amber is doing her bit to help create). Three or

four small pastel-colored plastic kawaii dolls stalk each other across

its circumference with million-kilometer strides. And her father’s cat

is curled up between the aircon duct and her costume locker, snoring

in a high-pitched tone.

 

Amber yanks open the faded velour curtain that shuts her room off from

the rest of the hive: “I’ve got it!” she shouts. “It’s all mine! I

rule!” It’s the sixteenth rock tagged by the orphanage so far, but

it’s the first that she’s tagged by herself, and that makes it

special. She bounces off the other side of the commons, surprising one

of Oscar’s cane toads - which should be locked down in the farm, it’s

not clear how it got here - and the audio repeaters copy the incoming

signal, noise-fuzzed echoes of a thousand fossilized infants’ video

shows.

 

*

 

“You’re so prompt, Amber,” Pierre whines when she corners him in the

canteen.

 

“Well, yeah!” She tosses her head, barely concealing a smirk of

delight at her own brilliance. She knows it isn’t nice, but Mom is a

long way away, and Dad and Stepmom don’t care about that kind of

thing. “I’m brilliant, me,” she announces. “Now what about our bet?”

 

“Aww.” Pierre thrusts his hands deep into his pockets. “But I don’t

have two million on me in change right now. Next cycle?”

 

“Huh?” She’s outraged. “But we had a bet!”

 

“Uh, Dr. Bayes said you weren’t going to make it this time, either, so

I stuck my smart money in an options trade. If I take it out now, I’ll

take a big hit. Can you give me until cycle’s end?”

 

“You should know better than to trust a sim, Pee.” Her avatar blazes

at him with early-teen contempt: Pierre hunches his shoulders under

her gaze. He’s only twelve, freckled, hasn’t yet learned that you

don’t welsh on a deal. “I’ll let you do it this time,” she announces,

“but you’ll have to pay for it. I want interest.”

 

He sighs. “What base rate are you -”

 

“No, your interest! Slave for a cycle!” She grins malevolently.

 

And his face shifts abruptly into apprehension: “As long as you don’t

make me clean the litter tray again. You aren’t planning on doing

that, are you?”

 

*

 

Welcome to the fourth decade. The thinking mass of the solar system

now exceeds one MIPS per gram; it’s still pretty dumb, but it’s not

dumb all over. The human population is near maximum overshoot,

pushing nine billion, but its growth rate is tipping toward

negative numbers, and bits of what used to be the first world are

now facing a middle-aged average. Human cogitation provides about

10^28 MIPS of the solar system’s brainpower. The real thinking is

mostly done by the halo of a thousand trillion processors that

surround the meat machines with a haze of computation -

individually a tenth as powerful as a human brain, collectively

they’re ten thousand times more powerful, and their numbers are

doubling every twenty million seconds. They’re up to 10^33 MIPS and

rising, although there’s a long way to go before the solar system

is fully awake.

 

Technologies come, technologies go, but nobody even five years ago

predicted that there’d be tinned primates in orbit around Jupiter

by now: A synergy of emergent industries and strange business

models have kick-started the space age again, aided and abetted by

the discovery of (so far undecrypted) signals from ETs. Unexpected

fringe riders are developing new ecological niches on the edge of

the human information space, light-minutes and light-hours from the

core, as an expansion that has hung fire since the 1970s gets under

way.

 

Amber, like most of the postindustrialists aboard the orphanage

ship Ernst Sanger, is in her early teens: While their natural

abilities are in many cases enhanced by germ-line genetic

recombination, thanks to her mother’s early ideals she has to rely

on brute computational enhancements. She doesn’t have a posterior

parietal cortex hacked for extra short-term memory, or an anterior

superior temporal gyrus tweaked for superior verbal insight, but

she’s grown up with neural implants that feel as natural to her as

lungs or fingers. Half her wetware is running outside her skull on

an array of processor nodes hooked into her brain by

quantum-entangled communication channels - her own personal

metacortex. These kids are mutant youth, burning bright: Not quite

incomprehensible to their parents, but profoundly alien - the

generation gap is as wide as the 1960s and as deep as the solar

system. Their parents, born in the gutter years of the twenty-first

century, grew up with white elephant shuttles and a space station

that just went round and round, and computers that went beep when

you pushed their buttons. The idea that Jupiter orbit was somewhere

you could go was as profoundly counterintuitive as the Internet to

a baby boomer.

 

Most of the passengers on the can have run away from parents who

think that teenagers belong in school, unable to come to terms with

a generation so heavily augmented that they are fundamentally

brighter than the adults around them. Amber was fluent in nine

languages by the age of six, only two of them human and six of them

serializable; when she was seven, her mother took her to the school

psychiatrist for speaking in synthetic tongues. That was the final

straw for Amber: using an illicit anonymous phone, she called her

father. Her mother had him under a restraining order, but it hadn’t

occurred to her to apply for an order against his partner …

 

*

 

Vast whorls of cloud ripple beneath the ship’s drive stinger: Orange

and brown and muddy gray streaks slowly crawl across the bloated

horizon of Jupiter. Sanger is nearing perijove, deep within the gas

giant’s lethal magnetic field; static discharges flicker along the

tube, arcing over near the deep violet exhaust cloud emerging from the

magnetic mirrors of the ship’s VASIMR motor. The plasma rocket is

cranked up to high mass flow, its specific impulse almost as low as a

fission rocket but producing maximum thrust as the assembly creaks and

groans through the gravitational assist maneuver. In another hour, the

drive will flicker off, and the orphanage will fall up and out toward

Ganymede, before dropping back in toward orbit around Amalthea,

Jupiter’s fourth moon (and source of much of the material in the

Gossamer ring). They’re not the first canned primates to make it to

Jupiter subsystem, but they’re one of the first wholly private

ventures. The bandwidth out here sucks dead slugs through a straw,

with millions of kilometers of vacuum separating them from scant

hundreds of mouse-brained microprobes and a few dinosaurs left behind

by NASA or ESA. They’re so far from the inner system that a good chunk

of the ship’s communications array is given over to caching: The news

is whole kiloseconds old by the time it gets out here.

 

Amber, along with about half the waking passengers, watches in

fascination from the common room. The commons are a long axial

cylinder, a double-hulled inflatable at the center of the ship with a

large part of their liquid water supply stored in its wall tubes. The

far end is video-enabled, showing them a realtime 3D view of the

planet as it rolls beneath them: in reality, there’s as much mass as

possible between them and the trapped particles in the Jovian magnetic

envelope. “I could go swimming in that,” sighs Lilly. “Just imagine,

diving into that sea …” Her avatar appears in the window, riding a

silver surfboard down the kilometers of vacuum.

 

“Nice case of wind-burn you’ve got there,” someone jeers - Kas.

Suddenly Lilly’s avatar, hitherto clad in a shimmering metallic

swimsuit, turns to the texture of baked meat and waggles sausage

fingers up at them in warning.

 

“Same to you and the window you climbed in through!” Abruptly the

virtual vacuum outside the window is full of bodies, most of them

human, contorting and writhing and morphing in mock-combat as half the

kids pitch into the virtual death match. It’s a gesture in the face of

the sharp fear that outside the thin walls of the orphanage lies an

environment that really is as hostile as Lilly’s toasted avatar would

indicate.

 

Amber turns back to her slate: She’s working through a complex mess of

forms, necessary before the expedition can start work. Facts and

figures that are never far away crowd around her, intimidating.

Jupiter weighs 1.9 x 1027 kilograms. There are twenty-nine Jovian

moons and an estimated two hundred thousand minor bodies, lumps of

rock, and bits of debris crowded around them - debris above the size

of ring fragments, for Jupiter (like Saturn) has rings, albeit not as

prominent. A total of six major national orbiter platforms have made

it out here - and another two hundred and seventeen microprobes, all

but six of them private entertainment platforms. The first human

expedition was put together by ESA Studios six years ago, followed by

a couple of wildcat mining prospectors and a M-commerce bus that

scattered half a million picoprobes throughout Jupiter subsystem. Now

the Sanger has arrived, along with another three monkey cans (one from

Mars, two more from LEO) and it looks as if colonization is about to

explode, except that there are at least four mutually exclusive Grand

Plans for what to do with old Jove’s mass.

 

Someone prods her. “Hey, Amber, what are you up to?”

 

She opens her eyes. “Doing my homework.” It’s Su Ang. “Look, we’re

going to Amalthea, aren’t we? But we file our accounts in Reno, so we

have to do all this paperwork. Monica asked me to help. It’s insane.”

 

Ang leans over and reads, upside down. “Environmental Protection

Agency?”

 

“Yeah. Estimated Environmental Impact Forward Analysis 204.6b, Page

Two. They want me to ‘list any bodies of standing water within five

kilometers of the designated mining area. If excavating below the

water table, list any wellsprings, reservoirs, and streams within

depth of excavation in meters multiplied by five hundred meters up to

a maximum distance of ten kilometers downstream of direction of

bedding plane flow. For each body of water, itemize any endangered or

listed species of bird, fish, mammal, reptile, invertebrate, or plant

living within ten kilometers -’”

 

” - of a mine on Amalthea. Which orbits one hundred and eighty

thousand kilometers above Jupiter, has no atmosphere, and where you

can pick up a whole body radiation dose of ten Grays in half an hour

on the surface.” Ang shakes her head, then spoils it by giggling.

Amber glances up.

 

On the wall in front of her someone - Nicky or Boris, probably - has

pasted a caricature of her own avatar into the virch fight. She’s

being