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

least one other still alive, but not

accessible for duration of eschatological experiment in progress. Not

all were recorded with version control engine; others were-is lost in

DMZ. We-are can provide you with extreme access to the demilitarized

zone, but query the need for kinetic energy weapons.”

 

Amber sighs. “You guys really are media illiterates, aren’t you?” She

stands up and stretches, feeling a facsimile of sleep’s enervation

leaching from her muscles. “I’ll also need my -” it’s on the tip of

her tongue: There’s something missing. “Hang on. There’s something

I’ve forgotten.” Something important, she thinks, puzzled. Something

that used to be around all the time that would … know? … purr? …

help? “Never mind,” she hears her lips say. “This other human. I

really want her. Non-negotiable. All right?”

 

“That may be difficult,” repeats the ghost. “Entity is looping in a

recursively confined universe.”

 

“Eh?” Amber blinks at it. “Would you mind rephrasing that? Or

illustrating?”

 

“Illustration:” The ghost folds the air in the room into a glowing

ball of plasma, shaped like a Klein bottle. Amber’s eyes cross as she

looks at it. “Closest reference from human historical database is

Descartes’s demon. This entity has retreated within a closed space,

but is now unsure whether it is objectively real or not. In any event,

it refuses to interact.”

 

“Well, can you get me into that space?” asks Amber. Pocket universes

she can deal with; it’s part and parcel of her life. “Give me some

leverage -”

 

“Risk may attach to this course of action,” warns the ghost.

 

“I don’t care,” she says irritably. “Just put me there. It’s someone I

know, isn’t it? Send me into her dream, and I’ll wake her up, okay?”

 

“Understood,” says the ghost. “Prepare yourself.”

 

Without any warning, Amber is somewhere else. She glances around,

taking in an ornate mosaic floor, whitewashed walls set with open

windows through which stars twinkle faintly in the night sky. Her

clothing has somehow been replaced by sexy lingerie under a nearly

transparent robe, and her hair’s grown longer by about half a meter.

It’s all very disorienting. The walls are stone, and she stands in a

doorway to a room with nothing in it but a bed. Occupied by -

 

“Shit,” she exclaims. “Who are you?” The young and incredibly,

classically beautiful woman in the bed looks at her vacantly, then

rolls over on her side. She isn’t wearing a stitch, she’s completely

hairless from the ears down, and her languid posture is one of

invitation. “Yes?” Amber asks. “What is it?”

 

The woman on the bed beckons to her slowly. Amber shakes her head.

“Sorry, that’s just not my scene.” She backs away into the corridor,

unsteady in unaccustomedly high heels. “This is some sort of male

fantasy, isn’t it? And a dumb adolescent one at that.” She looks

around again. In one direction, a corridor heads past more open

doorways, and in the other, it ends with a spiral staircase. Amber

concentrates, trying to tell the universe to take her to the logical

destination, but nothing happens. “Looks like I’m going to have to do

this the hard way. I wish -” she frowns. She was about to wish that

someone else was here, but she can’t remember who. So she takes a deep

breath and heads toward the staircase.

 

“Up or down?” she asks herself. Up - it seems logical, if you’re going

to have a tower, to sleep up at the top of it. So she climbs the steps

carefully, holding the spiraling rail. I wonder who designed this

space? she wonders, and what role am I supposed to fit into in their

scenario? On second thoughts, the latter question strikes her as

laughable. Wait till I give him an earful …

 

There’s a plain wooden door at the top of the staircase, with a latch

that isn’t fastened. Amber pauses for a few seconds, nerving herself

to confront a sleeper so wrapped in solipsism that he’s built this

sex-fantasy castle around himself. I hope it isn’t Pierre, she thinks

grimly as she pushes the door inward.

 

The room is bare and floored in wood. There’s no furniture, just an

open window set high in one wall. A man sits cross-legged and robed,

with his back to her, mumbling quietly to himself and nodding

slightly. Her breath catches as she realizes who it is. Oh shit! Her

eyes widen. Is this what’s been inside his head all along?

 

“I did not summon you,” Sadeq says calmly, not turning round to look

at her. “Go away, tempter. You aren’t real.”

 

Amber clears her throat. “Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re wrong,”

she says. “We’ve got an alien monster to catch. Want to come hunting?”

 

Sadeq stops nodding. He sits up slowly, stretching his spine, then

stands up and turns round. His eyes glint in the moonlight. “That’s

odd.” He undresses her with his gaze. “You look like someone I used to

know. You’ve never done that before.”

 

“For fuck’s sake!” Amber nearly explodes, but catches herself after a

moment. “What is this, a Solipsists United chapterhouse meeting?”

 

“I -” Sadeq looks puzzled. “I’m sorry, are you claiming to be real?”

 

“As real as you are.” Amber reaches out and grabs a hand: He doesn’t

resist as she pulls him toward the doorway.

 

“You’re the first visitor I’ve ever had.” He sounds shocked.

 

“Listen, come on.” She tugs him after her, down the spiral staircase

to the floor below. “Do you want to stay here? Really?” She glances

back at him. “What is this place?”

 

“Hell is a perversion of heaven,” he says slowly, running the fingers

of his free hand through his beard. Abruptly, he reaches out and grabs

her around the waist, then yanks her toward him. “We’ll have to see

how real you are -” Amber, who is not used to this kind of treatment,

responds by stomping on his instep and backhanding him hard.

 

“You’re real!” he cries, as he falls back against the staircase.

“Forgive me, please! I had to know -”

 

“Know what?” she snarls. “Lay one finger on me again, and I’ll leave

you here to rot!” She’s already spawning the ghost that will signal

the alien outside to pull her out of this pocket universe: It’s a

serious threat.

 

“But I had to - wait. You have free will. You just demonstrated that.”

He’s breathing heavily and looking up at her imploringly. “I’m sorry,

I apologize! But I had to know whether you were another zombie. Or

not.”

 

“A zombie?” She looks round. Another living doll has appeared behind

her, standing in an open doorway wearing a skintight leather suit with

a cutaway crotch. She beckons to Sadeq invitingly. Another body

wearing strategically placed strips of rubber mewls at her feet,

writhing for attention. Amber raises an eyebrow in disgust. “You

thought I was one of those?”

 

Sadeq nods. “They’ve got cleverer lately. Some of them can talk. I

nearly mistook one for -” He shudders convulsively. “Unclean!”

 

“Unclean.” Amber looks down at him thoughtfully. “This isn’t really

your personal paradise after all, is it?” After a moment she holds out

a hand to him. “Come on.”

 

“I’m sorry I thought you were a zombie,” he repeats.

 

“Under the circumstances, I think I forgive you,” she says. Then the

ghost yanks them both back to the universe outside.

 

*

 

More memories converge on the present moment:

 

The Ring Imperium is a huge cluster of self-replicating robots that

Amber has assembled in low Jupiter orbit, fueled by the mass and

momentum of the small moon J-47 Barney, to provide a launching

platform for the interstellar probe her father’s business partners

are helping her to build. It’s also the seat of her court, the

leading jurisprudential nexus in the outer solar system. Amber is

the Queen, here, arbitrator and ruler. And Sadeq is her judge and

counsel.

 

A plaintiff Amber only knows as a radar blip thirty light-minutes

away has filed a lawsuit in her court, alleging malfeasance,

heresy, and barratry against a semisentient corporate pyramid

scheme that arrived in Jovian space twelve million seconds ago and

currently seems set on converting every other intelligence in the

region to its peculiar memeset. A whole bundle of multithreaded

countersuits are dragging at her attention, in a counterattack

alleging that the light blip is in violation of copyright, patent,

and trade secrecy laws by discussing the interloper’s intentions.

 

Right now, Amber isn’t home on the Ring to hear the case in person.

She’s left Sadeq behind to grapple with the balky mechanics of her

legal system - tailor-designed to make corporate litigation a pain

in the ass - while she drags Pierre off on a diplomatic visit to

another Jovian colony, the Nursery Republic. Planted by the

Franklin Trust’s orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, the Nursery has grown

over the past four years into a spindly snowflake three kilometers

across. A slow-growing O’Neil cylinder sprouts from its hub: Most

of the inhabitants of the space station are less than two years

old, precocious additions to the Trust’s borganism.

 

There’s a piazza, paved with something not unlike rough marble, on

the side of a hill that clings insecurely to the inner edge of a

spinning cup. The sky is a black vastness overhead, wheeling slowly

around a central axis lined up on Jupiter. Amber sprawls in a

wicker chair, her legs stretched out before her and one arm flung

across her forehead. The wreckage of an incredible meal is

scattered across the tables around her. Torpid and full, she

strokes the cat that lies curled in her lap. Pierre is off

somewhere, touring one or another of the prototype ecosystems that

one or another of the borg’s special interest minds is testing.

Amber, for her part, can’t be bothered. She’s just had a great

meal, she doesn’t have any lawsuits to worry about, everything back

home is on the critpath, and quality time like this is so hard to

come by -

 

“Do you keep in touch with your father?” asks Monica.

 

“Mmm.” The cat purrs quietly, and Amber strokes its flank. “We

e-mail. Sometimes.”

 

“I just wondered.” Monica is the local borg den mother, willowy and

brown-eyed and with a deceptively lazy drawl - Yorkshire English

overlaid with Silicon Valley speak. “I hear from him, y’know. From

time to time. Now that Gianni’s retired, he doesn’t have much to do

downwell anymore. So he was talking about coming out here.”

 

“What? To Perijove?” Amber’s eyes open in alarm: Aineko stops

purring and looks round at Monica accusingly.

 

“Don’t worry.” Monica sounds vaguely amused: “He wouldn’t cramp

your style, I think.”

 

“But, out here -” Amber sits up. “Damn,” she says, quietly. “What

got into him?”

 

“Middle-aged restlessness, my downwell sibs say.” Monica shrugs.

“This time Annette didn’t stop him. But he hasn’t made up his mind

to travel yet.”

 

“Good. Then he might not -” Amber stops. “The phrase, ‘made up his

mind’, what exactly do you mean?”

 

Monica’s smile mocks her for a few seconds before the older woman

surrenders. “He’s talking about uploading.”

 

“Is that embarrassing or what?” asks Ang. Amber glances at her,

mildly annoyed, but Ang isn’t looking her way. So much for friends,

Amber thinks. Being queen of all you survey is a great way of

breaking up peer relationships -

 

“He won’t do it,” Amber predicts. “Dad’s burned out.”

 

“He thinks he’ll get it back if he optimizes himself for

re-entrancy.” Monica continues to smile. “I’ve been telling him

it’s just what he needs.”

 

“I do not want my father bugging me. Or my mother. Or Auntie ‘Nette

and Uncle