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

to the edge

is chilly and smells slightly of ammonia, although that might be his

imagination at work - there’s little chance of any gas exchange taking

place across the transparent pressure wall of the flying city. He

feels as if he could reach out and touch the swirling vaporscape.

There’s nobody else around, this close to the edge - it’s an icy

sensation to look out across the roiling depths, at an ocean of gas so

cold human flesh would freeze within seconds of exposure, knowing that

there’s nothing solid out there for tens of thousands of kilometers.

The sense of isolation is aggravated by the paucity of bandwidth, this

far out of the system. Most people huddle close to the hub, for

comfort and warmth and low latency: posthumans are gregarious.

 

Beneath Sirhan’s feet, the lily-pad city is extending itself, mumbling

and churning in endless self-similar loops like a cubist blastoma

growing in the upper atmosphere of Saturn. Great ducts suck in methane

and other atmospheric gases, apply energy, polymerize and diamondize,

and crack off hydrogen to fill the lift cells high above. Beyond the

sapphire dome of the city’s gasbag, an azure star glares with the

speckle of laser light; humanity’s first - and so far, last -

starship, braking into orbit on the last shredded remnant of its light

sail.

 

He’s wondering maliciously how his mother will react to discovering

her bankruptcy when the light above him flickers. Something gray and

unpleasant splatters against the curve of nearly invisible wall in

front of him, leaving a smear. He takes a step back and looks up

angrily. “Fuck you!” he yells. Raucous cooing laughter follows him

away from the boundary, feral pigeon voices mocking. “I mean it,” he

warns, flicking a gesture at the air above his head. Wings scatter in

a burst of thunder as a slab of wind solidifies, thistledown-shaped

nanomachines suspended on the breeze locking edge to edge to form an

umbrella over his head. He walks away from the perimeter, fuming,

leaving the pigeons to look for another victim.

 

Annoyed, Sirhan finds a grassy knoll a couple of hundred meters from

the rim and around the curve of the lily-pad from the museum

buildings. It’s far enough from other humans that he can sit

undisturbed with his thoughts, far enough out to see over the edge

without being toilet-bombed by flocking flying rats. (The flying city,

despite being the product of an advanced technology almost

unimaginable two decades before, is full of bugs - software complexity

and scaling laws ensured that the preceding decades of change acted as

a kind of cosmological inflationary period for design glitches, and an

infestation of passenger pigeons is by no means the most inexplicable

problem this biosphere harbors.)

 

In an attempt to shut the more unwelcome manifestations of cybernature

out, he sits under the shade of an apple tree and marshals his worlds

around him. “When is my grandmother arriving?” he asks one of them,

speaking into an antique telephone in the world of servants, where

everything is obedient and knows its place. The city humors him, for

its own reasons.

 

“She is still containerized, but aerobraking is nearly over. Her body

will be arriving downwell in less than two megaseconds.” The city’s

avatar in this machinima is a discreet Victorian butler, stony-faced

and respectful. Sirhan eschews intrusive memory interfaces; for an

eighteen-year-old, he’s conservative to the point of affectation,

favoring voice commands and anthropomorphic agents over the invisible

splicing of virtual neural nets.

 

“You’re certain she’s transferred successfully?” Sirhan asks

anxiously. He heard a lot about his grandmama when he was young, very

little of it complimentary. Nevertheless, the old bat must be a lot

more flexible than his mother ever gave her credit for, to be

subjecting herself to this kind of treatment for the first time at her

current age.

 

“I’m as certain as I can be, young master, for anyone who insists on

sticking to their original phenotype without benefit of off-line

backup or medical implants. I regret that omniscience is not within my

remit. Would you like me to make further specific inquiries?”

 

“No.” Sirhan peers up at the bright flare of laser light, visible even

through the soap-bubble membrane that holds in the breathable gas mix,

and the trillions of liters of hot hydrogen in the canopy above it.

“As long as you’re sure she’ll arrive before the ship?” Tuning his

eyes to ultraviolet, he watches the emission spikes, sees the slow

strobing of the low-bandwidth AM modulation that’s all the starship

can manage by way of downlink communication until it comes within

range of the system manifold. It’s sending the same tiresomely

repetitive question about why it’s being redirected to Saturn that

it’s been putting out for the past week, querying the refusal to

supply terawatts of propulsion energy on credit.

 

“Unless there’s a spike in their power beam, you can be certain of

that,” City replies reassuringly. “And you can be certain also that

your grandmother will revive comfortably.”

 

“One may hope so.” To undertake the interplanetary voyage in corporeal

person, at her age, without any upgrades or augmentation, must take

courage, he decides. “When she wakes up, if I’m not around, ask her

for an interview slot on my behalf. For the archives, of course.”

 

“It will be my pleasure.” City bobs his head politely.

 

“That will be all,” Sirhan says dismissively, and the window into

servantspace closes. Then he looks back up at the pinprick of glaring

blue laser light near the zenith. Tough luck, Mom, he subvocalizes for

his journal cache. Most of his attention is forked at present, focused

on the rich historical windfall from the depths of the singularity

that is coming his way, in the form of the thirty-year-old starwhisp’s

Cartesian theatre. But he can still spare some schadenfreude for the

family fortunes. All your assets belong to me, now. He smiles,

inwardly. I’ll just have to make sure they’re put to a sensible use

this time.

 

*

 

“I don’t see why they’re diverting us toward Saturn. It’s not as if

they can possibly have dismantled Jupiter already, is it?” asks

Pierre, rolling the chilled beer bottle thoughtfully between fingers

and thumb.

 

“Why not you ask Amber?” replies the velociraptor squatting beside the

log table. (Boris’s Ukrainian accent is unimpeded by the

dromaeosaurid’s larynx; in point of fact, it’s an affectation, one he

could easily fix by sideloading an English pronunciation patch if he

wanted to.)

 

“Well.” Pierre shakes his head. “She’s spending all her time with that

Slug, no multiplicity access, privacy ackles locked right down. I

could get jealous.” His voice doesn’t suggest any deep concern.

 

“What’s to get jealous about? Just ask to fork instance to talk to

you, make love, show boyfriend good time, whatever.”

 

“Hah!” Pierre chuckles grimly, then drains the last drops from the

bottle into his mouth. He throws it away in the direction of a clump

of cycads, then snaps his fingers; another one appears in its place.

 

“Are two megaseconds out from Saturn in any case,” Boris points out,

then pauses to sharpen his inch-long incisors on one end of the table.

Fangs crunch through timber like wet cardboard. “Grrrrn. Am seeing

most peculiar emission spectra from inner solar system. Foggy flying

down bottom of gravity well. Am wondering, does ensmartening of dumb

matter extend past Jovian orbit now?”

 

“Hmm.” Pierre takes a swig from the bottle and puts it down. “That

might explain the diversion. But why haven’t they powered up the

lasers on the Ring for us? You missed that, too.” For reasons unknown,

the huge battery of launch lasers had shut down, some millions of

seconds after the crew of the Field Circus had entered the router,

leaving it adrift in the cold darkness.

 

“Don’t know why are not talking.” Boris shrugged. “At least are still

alive there, as can tell from the ‘set course for Saturn, following

thus-and-such orbital elements’ bit. Someone is paying attention. Am

telling you from beginning, though, turning entire solar system into

computronium is real bad idea, long-term. Who knows how far has gone

already?”

 

“Hmm, again.” Pierre draws a circle in the air. “Aineko,” he calls,

“are you listening?”

 

“Don’t bug me.” A faint green smile appears in the circle, just the

suggestion of fangs and needle-sharp whiskers. “I had an idea I was

sleeping furiously.”

 

Boris rolls one turreted eye and drools on the tabletop. “Munch

munch,” he growls, allowing his saurian body-brain to put in a word.

 

“What do you need to sleep for? This is a fucking sim, in case you

hadn’t noticed.”

 

“I enjoy sleeping,” replies the cat, irritably lashing its

just-now-becoming-visible tail. “What do you want? Fleas?”

 

“No thanks,” Pierre says hastily. Last time he called Aineko’s bluff

the cat had filled three entire pocket universes with scurrying gray

mice. One of the disadvantages of flying aboard a starship the size of

a baked bean can full of smart matter was the risk that some of the

passengers could get rather too creative with the reality control

system. This Cretaceous kaffee klatsch was just Boris’s entertainment

partition; compared to some of the other simulation spaces aboard the

Field Circus, it was downright conservative. “Look, do you have any

updates on what’s going on downwell? We’re only twenty objective days

out from orbital insertion, and there’s so little to see -”

 

“They’re not sending us power.” Aineko materializes fully now, a large

orange-and-white cat with a swirl of brown fur in the shape on an

@-symbol covering her ribs. For whatever reason, she plants herself on

the table tauntingly close to Boris’s velociraptor body’s nose. “No

propulsion laser means insufficient bandwidth. They’re talking in

Latin-1 text at 1200 baud, if you care to know.” (Which is an insult,

given the ship’s multi-avabit storage capacity - one avabit is

Avogadro’s number of bits; about 1023 bytes, several billion times the

size of the Internet in 2001 - and outrageous communications

bandwidth.) “Amber says, come and see her now. Audience chamber.

Informal, of course. I think she wants to discuss it.”

 

“Informal? Am all right without change bodies?”

 

The cat sniffs. “I’m wearing a real fur coat,” it declares haughtily,

“but no knickers.” Then blinks out a fraction of a second ahead of the

snicker-snack of Bandersnatch-like jaws.

 

“Come on,” says Pierre, standing up. “Time to see what Her Majesty

wants with us today.”

 

*

 

Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the

phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally

becoming visible on a cosmological scale.

 

There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various

states of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of

them cluster where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in

the water zone around old Earth. Earth’s biosphere has been in the

intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning

replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization

can fix them - gray goo, thylacines, dragons. The last great

transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has

collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of

superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively

known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well

on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy

stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster so

thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red

ball of wool the size of a young red giant.

 

Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian

evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use

converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient

in smarts. Now the brightly burning beacon of sapience isn’t held

by