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

of

surprise and leans forward to pick up her cat. “Now you’re out from

under, how about we start trying to figure out how to get home?”

 

*

 

Welcome to decade the sixth, millennium three. These old datelines

don’t mean so much anymore, for while some billions of fleshbody

humans are still infected with viral memes, the significance of

theocentric dating has been dealt a body blow. This may be the

fifties, but what that means to you depends on how fast your

reality rate runs. The various upload clades exploding across the

reaches of the solar system vary by several orders of magnitude -

some are barely out of 2049, while others are exploring the

subjective thousandth millennium.

 

While the Field Circus floats in orbit around an alien router

(itself orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/[-56]), while Amber

and her crew are trapped on the far side of a wormhole linking the

router to a network of incomprehensibly vast alien mindscapes -

while all this is going on, the damnfool human species has finally

succeeded in making itself obsolete. The proximate cause of its

displacement from the pinnacle of creation (or the pinnacle of

teleological self-congratulation, depending on your stance on

evolutionary biology) is an attack of self-aware corporations. The

phrase “smart money” has taken on a whole new meaning, for the

collision between international business law and neurocomputing

technology has given rise to a whole new family of species -

fast-moving corporate carnivores in the Net. The planet Mercury has

been broken up by a consortium of energy brokers, and Venus is an

expanding debris cloud, energized to a violent glare by the trapped

and channeled solar output. A million billion fist-sized computing

caltrops, backsides glowing dull red with the efflux from their

thinking, orbit the sun at various inclinations no farther out than

Mercury used to be.

 

Billions of fleshbody humans refuse to have anything to do with the

blasphemous new realities. Many of their leaders denounce the

uploads and AIs as soulless machines. Many more are timid,

harboring self-preservation memes that amplify a previously healthy

aversion to having one’s brain peeled like an onion by mind-mapping

robots into an all-pervading neurosis. Sales of electrified

tinfoil-lined hats are at an all-time high. Still, hundreds of

millions have already traded their meat puppets for mind machines,

and they breed fast. In another few years, the fleshbody populace

will be an absolute minority of the posthuman clade. Sometime

later, there will probably be a war. The dwellers in the

thoughtcloud are hungry for dumb matter to convert, and the

fleshbodies make notoriously poor use of the collection of silicon

and rare elements that pool at the bottom of the gravity well that

is Earth.

 

Energy and thought are driving a phase-change in the condensed

matter substance of the solar system. The MIPS per kilogram metric

is on the steep upward leg of a sigmoid curve - dumb matter is

coming to life as the mind children restructure everything with

voracious nanomechanical servants. The thoughtcloud forming in

orbit around the sun will ultimately be the graveyard of a

biological ecology, another marker in space visible to the

telescopes of any new iron-age species with the insight to

understand what they’re seeing: the death throes of dumb matter,

the birth of a habitable reality vaster than a galaxy and far

speedier. Death throes that, within a few centuries, will mean the

extinction of biological life within a light-year or so of that

star - for the majestic Matrioshka brains, though they are the

pinnacles of sentient civilization, are intrinsically hostile

environments for fleshy life.

 

*

 

Pierre, Donna-the-all-seeing-eye, and Su Ang fill Amber in on what

they’ve discovered about the bazaar - as they call the space the ghost

referred to as the demilitarized zone - over ice-cold margaritas and a

very good simulation of a sociable joint. Some of them have been on

the loose in here for subjective years. There’s a lot of information

to absorb.

 

“The physical layer is half a light-hour in diameter, four hundred

times as massive as Earth,” Pierre explains. “Not solid, of course -

the largest component is about the size my fist used to be.” Amber

squints, trying to remember how big that was - scale factors are hard

to remember accurately. “I met this old chatbot that said it’s

outlived its original star, but I’m not sure it’s running with a full

deck. Anyway, if it’s telling the truth, we’re a third of a light year

out from a closely coupled binary system - they use orbital lasers the

size of Jupiter to power it without getting too close to all those

icky gravity wells.”

 

Amber is intimidated, despite her better judgment, because this

bizarre bazaar is several hundred billion times as big as the totality

of human presingularity civilization. She tries not to show it in

front of the others, but she’s worried that getting home may be

impossible - requiring enterprise beyond the economic event horizon,

as realistic a proposition as a dime debuting as a dollar bill. Still,

she’s got to at least try. Just knowing about the existence of the

bazaar will change so many things …

 

“How much money can we lay our hands on?” She asks. “What is money

hereabouts, anyway? Assuming they’ve got a scarcity-mediated economy.

Bandwidth, maybe?”

 

“Ah, well.” Pierre looks at her oddly. “That’s the problem. Didn’t the

ghost tell you?”

 

“Tell me?” Amber raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, but it hasn’t exactly

proven to be a reliable guide to anything, has it?”

 

“Tell her,” Su Ang says quietly. She looks away, embarrassed by

something.

 

“They’ve got a scarcity economy all right,” says Pierre. “Bandwidth is

the limited resource, that and matter. This whole civilization is tied

together locally because if you move too far away, well, it takes ages

to catch up on the gossip. Matrioshka brain intelligences are much

more likely to stay at home than anybody realized, even though they

chat on the phone a lot. And they use things that come from other

cognitive universes as, well, currency. We came in through the coin

slot, is it any wonder we ended up in the bank?”

 

“That’s so deeply wrong that I don’t know where to begin,” Amber

grumbles. “How did they get into this mess?”

 

“Don’t ask me.” Pierre shrugs. “I have the distinct feeling that

anyone or anything we meet in this place won’t have any more of a clue

than we do - whoever or whatever built this brain, there ain’t nobody

home anymore except the self-propelled corporations and hitchhikers

like the Wunch. We’re in the dark, just like they were.”

 

“Huh. You mean they built something like this, then they went extinct?

That sounds so dumb …”

 

Su Ang sighs. “They got too big and complex to go traveling once they

built themselves a bigger house to live in. Extinction tends to be

what happens to overspecialized organisms that are stuck in one

environmental niche for too long. If you posit a singularity, then

maximization of local computing resources - like this - as the usual

end state for tool users, is it any wonder none of them ever came

calling on us?”

 

Amber focuses on the table in front of her, rests the heel of her palm

on the cool metal, and tries to remember how to fork a second copy of

her state vector. A moment later, her ghost obligingly fucks with the

physics model of the table. Iron gives way like rubber beneath her

fingertips, a pleasant elasticity. “Okay, we have some control over

the universe, at least that’s something to work with. Have any of you

tried any self-modification?”

 

“That’s dangerous,” Pierre says emphatically. “The more of us the

better before we start doing that stuff. And we need some firewalling

of our own.”

 

“How deep does reality go, here?” asks Sadeq. It’s almost the first

question he’s asked of his own volition, and Amber takes it as a

positive sign that he’s finally coming out of his shell.

 

“Oh, the Planck length is about a hundredth of a millimeter in this

world. Too small to see, comfortably large for the simulation engines

to handle. Not like real space-time.”

 

“Well, then.” Sadeq pauses. “They can zoom their reality if they need

to?”

 

“Yeah, fractals work in here.” Pierre nods. “I didn’t -”

 

“This place is a trap,” Su Ang says emphatically.

 

“No it isn’t,” Pierre replies, nettled.

 

“What do you mean, a trap?” asks Amber.

 

“We’ve been here a while,” says Ang. She glances at Aineko, who

sprawls on the flagstones, snoozing or whatever it is that weakly

superhuman AIs do when they’re emulating a sleeping cat. “After your

cat broke us out of bondage, we had a look around. There are things

out there that -” She shivers. “Humans can’t survive in most of the

simulation spaces here. Universes with physics models that don’t

support our kind of neural computing. You could migrate there, but

you’d need to be ported to a whole new type of logic - by the time you

did that, would you still be you? Still, there are enough entities

roughly as complex as we are to prove that the builders aren’t here

anymore. Just lesser sapients, rooting through the wreckage. Worms and

parasites squirming through the body after nightfall on the

battlefield.”

 

“I ran into the Wunch,” Donna volunteers helpfully. “The first couple

of times they ate my ghost, but eventually I figured out how to talk

to them.”

 

“And there’s other aliens, too,” Su Ang adds gloomily. “Just nobody

you’d want to meet on a dark night.”

 

“So there’s no hope of making contact,” Amber summarizes. “At least,

not with anything transcendent and well-intentioned toward visiting

humans.”

 

“That’s probably right,” Pierre concedes. He doesn’t sound happy about

it.

 

“So we’re stuck in a pocket universe with limited bandwidth to home

and a bunch of crazy slum dwellers who’ve moved into the abandoned and

decaying mansion and want to use us for currency. ‘Jesus saves, and

redeems souls for valuable gifts.’ Yeah?”

 

“Yeah.” Su Ang looks depressed.

 

“Well.” Amber glances at Sadeq speculatively. Sadeq is staring into

the distance, at the crazy infinite sunspot that limns the square with

shadows. “Hey, god-man. Got a question for you.”

 

“Yes?” Sadeq looks at her, a slightly dazed expression on his face.

“I’m sorry, I am just feeling the jaws of a larger trap around my

throat -”

 

“Don’t be.” Amber grins, and it is not a pleasant expression. “Have

you ever been to Brooklyn?”

 

“No, why -”

 

“Because you’re going to help me sell these lying bastards a bridge.

Okay? And when we’ve sold it we’re going to use the money to pay the

purchasing fools to drive us across, so we can go home. Listen, this

is what I’m planning …”

 

*

 

“I can do this, I think,” Sadeq says, moodily examining the Klein

bottle on the table. The bottle is half-empty, its fluid contents

invisible around the corner of the fourth-dimensional store. “I spent

long enough alone in there to -” He shivers.

 

“I don’t want you damaging yourself,” Amber says, calmly enough,

because she has an ominous feeling that their survival in this place

has an expiry date attached.

 

“Oh, never fear.” Sadeq grins lopsidedly. “One pocket hell is much

like another.”

 

“Do you understand why -”

 

“Yes, yes,” he says dismissively. “We can’t send copies of ourselves

into it, that would be an abomination. It needs to be unpopulated,

yes?”

 

“Well, the idea is to get us home, not leave thousands of copies of

ourselves trapped in a pocket universe here.