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

would you like?”

 

“Coffee, if you have it. Bread and hummus. Something to wear.” Amber

crosses her arms, abruptly self-conscious. “I’d prefer to have

management ackles to this universe, though. As realities go, it’s a

bit lacking in creature comforts.” Which isn’t entirely true - it

seems to have a comprehensive, human-friendly biophysics model, it’s

not just a jumped-up first-person shooter. Her eyes focus on her left

forearm, where tanned skin and a puckered dime of scar tissue record a

youthful accident with a pressure seal in Jovian orbit. Amber freezes

for a moment. Her lips move in silence, but she’s locked into place in

this universe, unable to split or conjoin nested realities just by

calling subroutines that have been spliced into the corners of her

mind since she was a teenager. Finally, she asks, “How long have I

been dead?”

 

“Longer than you were alive, by orders of magnitude,” says the ghost.

A tray laden with pita breads, hummus, and olives congeals from the

air above her bed, and a wardrobe appears at one side of the room. “I

can begin the explanation now or wait for you to finish eating. Which

would you prefer?”

 

Amber glances about again, then fixes on the white screen in the

window bay. “Give it to me right now. I can take it,” she says,

quietly bitter. “I like to understand my mistakes as soon as

possible.”

 

“We-us can tell that you are a human of determination,” says the

ghost, a hint of pride entering its voice. “That is a good thing,

Amber. You will need all of your resolve if you are going to survive

here …”

 

*

 

It is the time of repentance in a temple beside a tower that looms

above a dry plain, and the thoughts of the priest who lives in the

tower are tinged with regret. It is Ashura, the tenth day of Muhurram,

according to a realtime clock still tuned to the pace of a different

era: the one thousand, three hundred and fortieth anniversary of the

martyrdom of the Third Imam, the Sayyid ash-Shuhada.

 

The priest of the tower has spent an indefinite time in prayer, locked

in an eternal moment of meditation and recitation. Now, as the vast

red sun drifts close to the horizon of the infinite desert, his

thoughts drift toward the present. Ashura is a very special day, a day

of atonement for collective guilt, evil committed through inactivity;

but it is in Sadeq’s nature to look outwards toward the future. This

is, he knows, a failing - but also characteristic of his generation.

That’s the generation of the Shi’ite clergy that reacted to the

excesses of the previous century, the generation that withdrew the

ulama from temporal power, retreated from the velyat i-faqih of

Khomenei and his successors, left government to the people, and began

to engage fully with the paradoxes of modernity. Sadeq’s focus, his

driving obsession in theology, is a program of reappraisal of

eschatology and cosmology. Here in a tower of white sun-baked clay, on

an endless plain that exists only in the imaginary spaces of a

starship the size of a soft drink can, the priest spends his processor

cycles in contemplation of one of the most vicious problems ever to

confront a mujtahid - the Fermi paradox.

 

(Enrico Fermi was eating his lunch one day, and his colleagues were

discussing the possibility that sophisticated civilizations might

populate other worlds. “Yes,” he said, “but if this is so, why haven’t

they already come visiting?”)

 

Sadeq finishes his evening devotions in near silence, then stands,

stretches as is his wont, and leaves the small and lonely courtyard at

the base of the tower. The gate - a wrought-iron gate, warmed by

sunlight - squeals slightly as he opens it. Glancing at the upper

hinge, he frowns, willing it clean and whole. The underlying physics

model acknowledges his access controls: a thin rim of red around the

pin turns silvery-fresh, and the squeaking ceases. Closing the gate

behind him, Sadeq enters the tower.

 

He climbs with a heavy, even tread a spiral staircase snaking ever

upward above him. Narrow slit-windows line the outer wall of the

staircase. Through each of them he sees a different world. Out there,

nightfall in the month of Ramadan. And through the next, green misty

skies and a horizon too close by far. Sadeq carefully avoids thinking

about the implications of this manifold space. Coming from prayer,

from a sense of the sacred, he doesn’t want to lose his proximity to

his faith. He’s far enough from home as it is, and there is much to

consider. He is surrounded by strange and curious ideas, all but lost

in a corrosive desert of faith.

 

At the top of the staircase, Sadeq comes to a door of aged wood bound

in iron. It doesn’t belong here: It’s a cultural and architectural

anomaly. The handle is a loop of black metal. Sadeq regards it as if

it’s the head of an asp, poised to sting. Nevertheless, he reaches out

and turns the handle, steps across the threshold into a palace out of

fantasy.

 

None of this is real, he reminds himself. It’s no more real than an

illusion conjured by one of the jinni of the thousand nights and one

night. Nevertheless, he can’t save himself from smiling at the scene -

a sardonic smile of self-deprecating humor, tempered by frustration.

 

Sadeq’s captors have stolen his soul and locked it - him - in a very

strange prison, a temple with a tower that rises all the way to

Paradise. It’s the whole classical litany of medievalist desires,

distilled from fifteen hundred years of literature. Colonnaded

courtyards, cool pools lined with rich mosaics, rooms filled with

every imaginable dumb matter luxury, endless banquets awaiting his

appetite - and dozens of beautiful un-women, eager to fulfill his

every fantasy. Sadeq, being human, has fantasies by the dozen, but he

doesn’t dare permit himself to succumb to temptation. I’m not dead, he

reasons. Therefore, how can I be in Paradise? Therefore, this must be

a false paradise, a temptation sent to lead me astray. Probably.

Unless I am dead, because Allah, peace be unto him, considers a human

soul separated from its body to be dead. But if that’s so, isn’t

uploading a sin? In which case, this can’t be Paradise because I am a

sinner. Besides which, this whole setup is so puerile!

 

Sadeq has always been inclined to philosophical inquiry, and his

vision of the afterlife is more cerebral than most, involving ideas as

questionable within the framework of Islam as those of Teilhard de

Chardin were to the twentieth-century Catholic church. If there’s one

key indicator of a false paradise in his eschatology, it’s

two-and-seventy brainlessly beautiful houris waiting to do his

bidding. So it follows that he can’t really be dead …

 

The whole question of reality is so vexing that Sadeq does what he

does every night. He strides heedlessly across priceless works of art,

barging hastily through courtyards and passageways, ignoring niches in

which nearly naked supermodels lie with their legs apart, climbing

stairs - until he comes to a small unfurnished room with a single high

window in one wall. There he sits on the floor, legs crossed,

meditating; not in prayer, but in a more tightly focused

ratiocination. Every false night (for there is no way to know how fast

time is passing, outside this cyberspace pocket), Sadeq sits and

thinks, grappling with Descartes’s demon in the solitude of his own

mind. And the question he asks himself every night is the same: Can I

tell if this is the true hell? And if it is not, how can I escape?

 

*

 

The ghost tells Amber that she has been dead for just under a third of

a million years. She has been reinstantiated from storage - and has

died again - many times in the intervening period, but she has no

memory of this; she is a fork from the main bough, and the other

branches expired in lonely isolation.

 

The business of resurrection does not, in and of itself, distress

Amber unduly. Born in the post-Moravec era, she merely finds some

aspects of the ghost’s description dissatisfyingly incomplete. It’s

like saying she was drugged and brought hither without stating whether

by plane, train, or automobile.

 

She doesn’t have a problem with the ghost’s assertion that she is

nowhere near Earth - indeed, that she is approximately eighty thousand

light-years away. When she and the others took the risk of uploading

themselves through the router they found in orbit around Hyundai

+4904/[-56] they’d understood that they could end up anywhere or

nowhere. But the idea that she’s still within the light cone of her

departure strikes her as dubious. The original SETI broadcast strongly

implied that the router is part of a network of self-replicating

instantaneous communicators, spawning and spreading between the cold

brown dwarf stars that litter the galaxy. She’d somehow expected to be

much farther from home by now.

 

Somewhat more disturbing is the ghost’s assertion that the human

genotype has rendered itself extinct at least twice, that its home

planet is unknown, and that Amber is nearly the only human left in the

public archives. At this point, she interrupts. “I hardly see what

this has to do with me!” Then she blows across her coffee glass,

trying to cool the contents. “I’m dead,” she explains, with an

undertone of knowing sarcasm in her voice. “Remember? I just got here.

A thousand seconds ago, subjective time, I was in the control node of

a starship, discussing what to do with the router we were in orbit

around. We agreed to send ourselves through it, as a trade mission.

Then I woke up in bed here in the umpty-zillionth century, wherever

and whatever here is. Without access to any reality ackles or

augmentation, I can’t even tell whether this is real or an embedded

simulation. You’re going to have to explain why you need an old

version of me before I can make sense of my situation - and I can tell

you, I’m not going to help you until I know who you are. And speaking

of that, what about the others? Where are they? I wasn’t the only one,

you know?”

 

The ghost freezes in place for a moment, and Amber feels a watery rush

of terror: Have I gone too far? she wonders.

 

“There has been an unfortunate accident,” the ghost announces

portentously. It morphs from a translucent copy of Amber’s own body

into the outline of a human skeleton, elaborate bony extensions

simulating an osteosarcoma of more-than-lethal proportions.

“Consensus-we believe that you are best positioned to remediate the

situation. This applies within the demilitarized zone.”

 

“Demilitarized?” Amber shakes her head, pauses to sip her coffee.

“What do you mean? What is this place?”

 

The ghost flickers again, adopting an abstract rotating hypercube as

its avatar. “This space we occupy is a manifold adjacent to the

demilitarized zone. The demilitarized zone is a space outside our core

reality, itself exposed to entities that cross freely through our

firewall, journeying to and from the network outside. We-us use the

DMZ to establish the informational value of migrant entities, sapient

currency units and the like. We-us banked you upon arrival against

future options trades in human species futures.”

 

“Currency!” Amber doesn’t know whether to be amused or horrified -

both reactions seem appropriate. “Is that how you treat all your

visitors?”

 

The ghost ignores her question. “There is a runaway semiotic excursion

under way in the zone. We-us believe only you can fix it. If you agree

to do, so we will exchange value, pay, reward cooperation, expedite

remuneration, manumit, repatriate.”