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

Gianni. Memo to immigration control: No entry rights for

Manfred Macx or the other named individuals without clearance

through the Queen’s secretary.”

 

“What did he do to get you so uptight?” asks Monica idly.

 

Amber sighs, and subsides. “Nothing. It’s not that I’m ungrateful

or anything, but he’s just so extropian, it’s embarrassing. Like,

that was the last century’s apocalypse. Y’know?”

 

“I think he was a really very forward-looking organic,” Monica,

speaking for the Franklin borg, asserts. Amber looks away. Pierre

would get it, she thinks. Pierre would understand her aversion to

Manfred’s showing up. Pierre, too, wants to carve out his own niche

without parents looking over his shoulders, although for very

different reasons. She focuses on someone male and more or less

mature - Nicky, she thinks, though she hasn’t seen him for a long

time - walking toward the piazza, bare-ass naked and beautifully

tanned.

 

“Parents. What are they good for?” asks Amber, with all the

truculence of her seventeen years. “Even if they stay neotenous,

they lose flexibility. And there’s that long Paleolithic tradition

of juvenile slavery. Inhuman, I call it.”

 

“How old were you when it was safe to leave you around the house on

your own?” challenges Monica.

 

“Three. That’s when I had my first implants.” Amber smiles at the

approaching young Adonis, who smiles back: Yes, it’s Nicky, and he

seems pleased to see her. Life is good, she thinks, idly

considering whether or not to tell Pierre.

 

“Times change,” remarks Monica. “Don’t write your family off too

soon; there might come a time when you want their company.”

 

“Huh.” Amber pulls a face at the old borg component. “That’s what

you all say!”

 

*

 

As soon as Amber steps onto the grass, she can feel possibilities open

up around her. She has management authority here, and this universe is

big, wide open, not like Sadeq’s existential trap. A twitch of a

sub-process reasserts her self-image, back to short hair and

comfortable clothing. Another twitch brings up a whole load of useful

diagnostics. Amber has a nasty feeling that she’s running in a

compatibility sandbox here - there are signs that her access to the

simulation system’s control interface is very much via proxy - but at

least she’s got it.

 

“Wow! Back in the real world at last!” She can hardly contain her

excitement, even forgetting to be pissed at Sadeq for thinking she was

just an actor in his Cartesian theatre’s performance of Puritan Hell.

“Look! It’s the DMZ!”

 

They’re standing on a grassy knoll overlooking a gleaming

Mediterranean city. It snoozes beneath a Mandelbrot-fuzzy not-sun that

hangs at the center of a hyperbolic landscape, which dwindles into a

blue yonder that seems incomprehensibly distant. Circular baby-blue

wells open in the walls of the world at regular intervals, connecting

to other parts of the manifold. “How big is it, ghost? In planetary

simulation-equivalents.”

 

“This demilitarized zone is an embedded reality, funneling all

transfers between the local star system’s router and the civilization

that built it. It uses on the order of a thousandth of the capacity of

the Matrioshka brain it is part of, although the runaway excursion

currently in force has absorbed most of that. Matrioshka brain, you

are familiar with the concept?” The ghost sounds fussily pedantic.

 

Sadeq shakes his head. Amber glances at him, askance. “Take all the

planets in a star system and dismantle them,” she explains. “Turn them

into dust - structured nanocomp, powered by heat exchangers, spread in

concentric orbits around the central star. The inner orbitals run

close to the melting point of iron, the outer ones are cold as liquid

nitrogen, and each layer runs off the waste heat of the next shell in.

It’s like a Russian doll made out of Dyson spheres, shell enclosing

shell enclosing shell, but it’s not designed to support human life.

It’s computronium, matter optimized at the atomic level to support

computing, and they’re all running uploads - Dad figured our own solar

system could support, uh, about a hundred billion times as many

inhabitants as Earth. At a conservative estimate. As uploads, living

in simulation space. If you first dismantle all the planets and use

the resulting materials to build a Matrioshka brain.”

 

“Ah.” Sadeq nods thoughtfully. “Is that your definition, too?” he

asks, glancing up at the glowing point the ghost uses to localize its

presence.

 

“Substantially,” it says, almost grudgingly.

 

“Substantially?” Amber glances around. A billion worlds to explore,

she thinks dizzily. And that’s just the firewall? She feels obscurely

cheated: You need to be vaster than human just to count the digits in

the big numbers at play here, but there’s nothing fundamentally

incomprehensible about it. This is the sort of civilization Dad said

she could expect to live in, within her meatbody life expectancy. Dad

and his drinking buddies, singing, “Dismantle the Moon! Melt down

Mars!” in a castle outside Prague as they waited for the results of a

shamelessly gerrymandered election to arrive in the third decade of

the third millennium. The Space and Freedom Party taking over the EU,

and cranking up to escape velocity. But this is supposed to be

kiloparsecs from home, ancient alien civilizations and all that!

Where’s the exotic superscience? What about the neuron stars, strange

matter suns structured for computing at nucleonic, rather than

electronic, speeds? I have a bad feeling about this, she thinks,

spawning a copy of herself to set up a private channel to Sadeq. It’s

not advanced enough. Do you suppose these guys could be like the

Wunch? Parasites or barbarians hitching a ride in the machine?

 

You believe it’s lying to us? Sadeq sends back.

 

“Hmm.” Amber sets off downslope toward the piazza below, at the heart

of the fake town. “It looks a bit too human to me.”

 

“Human,” echoes Sadeq, a curious wistfulness in his voice. “Did you

not say humans are extinct?”

 

“Your species is obsolete,” the ghost comments smugly.

“Inappropriately adapted to artificial realities. Poorly optimized

circuitry, excessively complex low-bandwidth sensors, messily global

variables -”

 

“Yeah, yeah, I get the picture,” says Amber, turning her attention to

the town. “So why do you think we can deal with this alien god you’ve

got a problem with?”

 

“It asked for you,” says the ghost, narrowing from an ellipse to a

line, then shrinking to a dimensionless point of brilliance. “And now

it’s coming. We-I not willing to risk exposure. Call us-me when you

have slain the dragon. Goodbye.”

 

“Oh shit -” Amber spins round. But she and Sadeq are alone beneath the

hot sunlight from above. The piazza, like the one in the Nursery

Republic, is charmingly rustic - but there’s nobody home, nothing but

ornate cast-iron furniture basking beneath the noon-bright sun, a

table with a parasol over it, and something furry lying sprawled in a

patch of sunlight beside it.

 

“We appear to be alone for now,” says Sadeq. He smiles crookedly, then

nods at the table. “Maybe we should wait for our host to arrive?”

 

“Our host.” Amber peers around. “The ghost is kind of frightened of

this alien. I wonder why?”

 

“It asked for us.” Sadeq heads toward the table, pulls out a chair,

and sits down carefully. “That could be very good news - or very bad.”

 

“Hmm.” Amber finishes her survey, sees no sign of life. For lack of

any better ideas, she ambles over to the table and sits down on the

other side of it from Sadeq. He looks slightly nervous beneath her

inspection, but maybe it’s just embarrassment about having seen her in

her underwear. If I had an afterlife like that, I’d be embarrassed

about it, too, Amber thinks to herself.

 

“Hey, you nearly tripped over -” Sadeq freezes, peering at something

close to Amber’s left foot. He looks puzzled for a moment, then smiles

broadly. “What are you doing here?” he asks her blind spot.

 

“What are you talking to?” she asks, startled.

 

He’s talking to me, dummy, says something tantalizingly familiar from

her blind spot. So the fuckwits are trying to use you to dislodge me,

hmm? That’s not exactly clever.

 

“Who -” Amber squints at the flagstone, spawns a bunch of ghosts who

tear hurriedly at her reality modification ackles. Nothing seems to

shift the blindness. “Are you the alien?”

 

“What else could I be?” the blind spot asks with heavy irony. “No, I’m

your father’s pet cat. Listen, do you want to get out of here?”

 

“Uh.” Amber rubs her eyes. “I can’t see you, whatever you are,” she

says politely. “Do I know you?” She’s got a strange sense that she

does know the blind spot, that it’s really important, and she’s

missing something intimate to her own sense of identity, but what it

might be she can’t tell.

 

“Yeah, kid.” There’s a note of world-weary amusement in the not-voice

coming from the hazy patch on the ground. “They’ve hacked you but

good, both of you. Let me in, and I’ll fix it.”

 

“No!” Exclaims Amber, a second ahead of Sadeq, who looks at her oddly.

“Are you really an invader?”

 

The blind spot sighs. “I’m as much an invader as you are, remember? I

came here with you. Difference is, I’m not going to let some stupid

corporate ghost use me as fungible currency.”

 

“Fungible -” Sadeq stops. “I remember you,” he says slowly, with an

expression of absolute, utter surprise on his face. “What do you

mean?”

 

The blind spot yawns, baring sharp ivory fangs. Amber shakes her head,

dismissing the momentary hallucination. “Lemme guess. You woke up in a

room, and this alien ghost tells you the human species is extinct and

asks you to do a number on me. Is that right?”

 

Amber nods, as an icy finger of fear trails up and down her spine. “Is

it lying?” she asks.

 

“Damn right.” The blind spot is smiling, now, and the smile on the

void won’t go away - she can see the smile, just not the body it’s

attached to. “My reckoning is, we’re about sixteen light-years from

Earth. The Wunch came through here, stripped the dump, then took off

for parts unknown; it’s a trashhole, you wouldn’t believe it. The main

life-form is an incredibly ornate corporate ecosphere, legal

instruments breeding and replicating. They mug passing sapients and

use them as currency.”

 

There’s a triangular, pointy head behind the smile, slit eyes and

sharp ears, a predatory, intelligent-looking but infinitely alien

face. Amber can see it out of the corners of her eyes when she looks

around the piazza. “You mean we, uh, they grabbed us when we appeared,

and they’ve mangled my memories -” Amber suddenly finds it incredibly

difficult to concentrate, but if she focuses on the smile, she can

almost see the body behind it, hunched like a furry chicken, tail

wrapped neatly around its front paws.

 

“Yeah. Except they didn’t bargain on meeting something like me.” The

smile is infinitely wide, a Cheshire-cat grin on front of an

orange-and-brown stripy body that shimmers in front of Amber’s gaze

like a hallucination. “Your mother’s cracking tools are

self-extending, Amber. Do you remember Hong Kong?”

 

“Hong -”

 

There is a moment of painless pressure, then Amber feels huge

invisible barriers sliding away on all sides. She looks around, for

the first time seeing the piazza as it really is, half the crew of the

Field Circus waiting nervously around her, the grinning cat crouched

on the floor at her feet, the enormous walls of recomplicating data

that fence their little town off from the gaping holes - interfaces to

the other routers in the network.

 

“Welcome back,” Pierre says gravely, as Amber gives a squeak