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

a hazy red glow in front of the raised platform at the

back. The Doppler effect has slowly emerged over the past few months

as the ship gathers momentum. In the absence of visible stellar motion

- or a hard link to the ship’s control module - it’s the easiest way

for a drunken passenger to get a feeling for how frighteningly fast

the Field Circus is moving. Some time ago, the ship’s momentum

exceeded half its rest mass, at which point a single kilogram packs

the punch of a multimegaton hydrogen bomb.

 

A ginger-and-brown cat - who has chosen to be female, just to mess

with the heads of those people who think all ginger cats are male -

sprawls indolently across the wooden floorboards in front of the bar,

directly beneath the bridge of the starbow. Predictably, it has

captured the only ray of sunlight to be had within the starship. In

the shadows at the back of the bar, two men slump at a table, lost in

their respective morose thoughts: One nurses a bottle of Czech beer,

the other a half-empty cocktail glass.

 

“It wouldn’t be so bad if she is giving me some sign,” says one of

them, tilting his beer bottle to inspect the bottom for sediment. “No;

that not right. It’s the correct kind of attention. Am not knowing

where I stand with her.”

 

The other one leans back in his chair, squints at the faded brown

paint of the ceiling. “Take it from one who knows,” he says: “If you

knew, you’d have nothing to dream about. Anyway, what she wants and

what you want may not be the same thing.”

 

The first man runs a hand through his hair. Tight-curled black

ringlets briefly turn silver beneath his aging touch. “Pierre, if

talent for making patronizing statements is what you get from tupping

Amber -”

 

Pierre glares at him with all the venom an augmented nineteen-year-old

can muster. “Be glad she has no ears in here,” he hisses. His hand

tightens around his glass reflexively, but the physics model in force

in the bar refuses to let him break it. “You’ve had too fucking much

to drink, Boris.”

 

A tinkle of icy laughter comes from the direction of the cat. “Shut

up, you,” says Boris, glancing at the animal. He tips the bottle back,

lets the dregs trickle down his throat. “Maybe you’re right. Am sorry.

Do not mean to be rude about the queen.” He shrugs, puts the bottle

down. Shrugs again, heavily. “Am just getting depressed.”

 

“You’re good at that,” Pierre observes.

 

Boris sighs again. “Evidently. If our positions are reversed -”

 

“I know, I know, you’d be telling me the fun is in the chase and it’s

not the same when she kicks you out after a fight, and I wouldn’t

believe a word of it, being sad and single and all that.” Pierre

snorts. “Life isn’t fair, Boris - live with it.”

 

“I’d better go - ” Boris stands.

 

“Stay away from Ang,” says Pierre, still annoyed with him. “At least

until you’re sober.”

 

“Okay already, stay cool; Am consciously running a watchdog thread.”

Boris blinks irritably. “Enforcing social behavior. It doesn’t

normally allow this drunk. Not where reputation damage are possible in

public.”

 

He does a slow dissolve into thin air, leaving Pierre alone in the bar

with the cat.

 

“How much longer do we have to put up with this shit?” he asks aloud.

Tempers are frayed, and arguments proliferate indefinitely in the

pocket universe of the ship.

 

The cat doesn’t look round. “In our current reference frame, we drop

the primary reflector and start decelerating in another two million

seconds,” she says. “Back home, five or six megaseconds.”

 

“That’s a big gap. What’s the cultural delta up to now?” Pierre asks

idly. He snaps his fingers: “Waiter, another cocktail. The same, if

you please.”

 

“Oh, probably about ten to twenty times our departure reference,” says

the cat. “If you’d been following the news from back home, you’d have

noted a significant speed-up in the deployment of switched

entanglement routers. They’re having another networking revolution,

only this one will run to completion inside a month because they’re

using dark fiber that’s already in the ground.”

 

“Switched … entanglement?” Pierre shakes his head, bemused. The

waiter, a faceless body in black tie and a long, starched apron, walks

around the bar and offers him a glass. “That almost sounds as if it

makes sense. What else?”

 

The cat rolls over on her flank, stretches, claws extended. “Stroke

me, and I might tell you,” she suggests.

 

“Fuck you, and the dog you rode in on,” Pierre replies. He lifts his

glass, removes a glac� cherry on a cocktail stick, throws it toward

the spiral staircase that leads down to the toilets, and chugs back

half of the drink in one go - freezing pink slush with an afterbite of

caramelized hexose sugars and ethanol. The near spillage as he thumps

the glass down serves to demonstrate that he’s teetering on the edge

of drunkenness. “Mercenary!”

 

“Lovesick drug-using human,” the cat replies without rancor, and rolls

to her feet. She arches her back and yawns, baring ivory fangs at the

world. “You apes - if I cared about you, I’d have to kick sand over

you.” For a moment she looks faintly confused. “I mean, I would bury

you.” She stretches again and glances round the otherwise-empty bar.

“By the way, when are you going to apologize to Amber?”

 

“I’m not going to fucking apologize to her!” Pierre shouts. In the

ensuing silence and confusion, he raises his glass and tries to drain

it, but the ice has all sunk to the bottom, and the resulting coughing

fit makes him spray half of the cocktail across the table. “No way,”

he rasps quietly.

 

“Too much pride, huh?” The cat stalks toward the edge of the bar, tail

held high with tip bent over in a feline question mark. “Like Boris

with his adolescent woman trouble, too? You primates are so

predictable. Whoever thought of sending a starship crewed by posthuman

adolescents -”

 

“Go ‘way,” says Pierre: “I’ve got serious drinking to do.”

 

“To the Macx, I suppose,” puns the cat, turning away. But the moody

youth has no answer for her, other than to conjure a refill from the

vasty deeps.

 

*

 

Meanwhile, in another partition of the Field Circus’s reticulated

reality, a different instance of the selfsame cat - Aineko by name,

sarcastic by disposition - is talking to its former owner’s daughter,

the Queen of the Ring Imperium. Amber’s avatar looks about sixteen,

with disheveled blonde hair and enhanced cheekbones. It’s a lie, of

course, because in subjective life experience, she’s in her

mid-twenties, but apparent age signifies little in a simulation space

populated by upload minds, or in real space, where posthumans age at

different rates.

 

Amber wears a tattered black dress over iridescent purple leggings,

and sprawls lazily across the arms of her informal throne - an

ostentatious lump of nonsense manufactured from a single carbon

crystal doped with semiconductors. (Unlike the real thing back home in

Jupiter orbit, this one is merely a piece of furniture for a virtual

environment.) The scene is very much the morning after the evening

before, like a goth nightclub gone to seed: all stale smoke and

crumpled velvet, wooden church pews, burned-out candles, and gloomy

Polish avant-garde paintings. Any hint of a regal statement the queen

might be making is spoiled by the way she’s hooked one knee over the

left arm of the throne and is fiddling with a six-axis pointing

device. But these are her private quarters, and she’s off duty: The

regal person of the Queen is strictly for formal, corporate occasions.

 

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” she suggests.

 

“Nope,” replies the cat. “It was more like: ‘Greetings, earthlings,

compile me on your leader.’”

 

“Well, you got me there,” Amber admits. She taps her heel on the

throne and fidgets with her signet ring. “No damn way I’m loading some

buggy alien wetware on my sweet gray stuff. Weird semiotics, too. What

does Dr. Khurasani say?”

 

Aineko sits down in the middle of the crimson carpet at the foot of

the dais and idly twists round to sniff her crotch. “Sadeq is immersed

in scriptural interpretations. He refused to be drawn.”

 

“Huh.” Amber stares at the cat. “So. You’ve been carrying this lump of

source code since when …?”

 

“At the signal, for precisely two hundred and sixteen million, four

hundred and twenty-nine thousand, and fifty-two seconds,” Aineko

supplies, then beeps smugly. “Call it just under six years.”

 

“Right.” Amber squeezes her eyes shut. Uneasy possibilities whisper in

her mind’s ears. “And it began talking to you -”

 

“- About three million seconds after I picked it up and ran it on a

basic environment hosted on a neural network emulator modeled on the

components found in the stomatogastric ganglion of a spiny lobster.

Clear?”

 

Amber sighs. “I wish you’d told Dad about it. Or Annette. Things could

have been so different!”

 

“How?” The cat stops licking her arse and looks up at the queen with a

peculiarly opaque stare. “It took the specialists a decade to figure

out the first message was a map of the pulsar neighborhood with

directions to the nearest router on the interstellar network. Knowing

how to plug into the router wouldn’t help while it was three

light-years away, would it? Besides, it was fun watching the idiots

trying to ‘crack the alien code’ without ever wondering if it might be

a reply in a language we already know to a message we sent out years

ago. Fuckwits. And, too, Manfred pissed me off once too often. He kept

treating me like a goddamn house pet.”

 

“But you -” Amber bites her lip. But you were, when he bought you, she

had been about to say. Engineered consciousness is still relatively

new: It didn’t exist when Manfred and Pamela first hacked on Aineko’s

cognitive network, and according to the flat-earth wing of the AI

community, it still doesn’t. Even she hadn’t really believed Aineko’s

claims to self-awareness until a couple of years ago, finding it

easier to think of the cat as a zimboe - a zombie with no

self-awareness, but programmed to claim to be aware in an attempt to

deceive the truly conscious beings around it. “I know you’re conscious

now, but Manfred didn’t know back then. Did he?”

 

Aineko glares at her, then slowly narrows her eyes to slits - either

feline affection, or a more subtle gesture. Sometimes Amber finds it

hard to believe that, twenty five years ago, Aineko started out as a

crude neural network driven toy from a Far Eastern amusement factory -

upgradeable, but still basically a mechanical animal emulator.

 

“I’m sorry. Let me start again. You actually figured out what the

second alien packet was, you, yourself, and nobody else. Despite the

combined efforts of the entire CETI analysis team who spent Gaia knows

how many human-equivalent years of processing power trying to crack

its semantics. I hope you’ll pardon me for saying I find that hard to

believe?”

 

The cat yawns. “I could have told Pierre instead.” Aineko glances at

Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily changes the

subject: “The solution was intuitively obvious, just not to humans.

You’re so verbal.” Lifting a hind paw, she scratches behind her left

ear for a moment then pauses, foot waving absentmindedly. “Besides,

the CETI team was searching under the street lights while I was

sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find primes; when

that didn’t work, they started trying to breed a Turing