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

do you know when my grandfather is due to arrive?”

 

“Your grandfather?” asks City: “Isn’t he dead?”

 

Sirhan looks over the balcony, at the blood-seeping corpse of the

intruder. “Not according to his second wife’s latest incarnation.”

 

*

 

Funding the family reunion isn’t going to be a problem, as Amber

discovers when she receives an offer of reincarnation good for all the

passengers and crew of the Field Circus.

 

She isn’t sure quite where the money is coming from. Presumably it’s

some creaky financial engine designed by Dad, stirring from its

bear-market bunker for the first time in decades to suck dusty

syndication feeds and liquidate long-term assets held against her

return. She’s duly grateful - even fervently so - for the details of

her own impecunious position grow more depressing the more she learns

about them. Her sole asset is the Field Circus, a

thirty-years-obsolete starwhisp massing less than twenty kilograms

including what’s left of its tattered sail, along with its cargo of

uploaded passengers and crew. Without the farsighted trust fund that

has suddenly chugged into life, she’d be stranded in the realm of

ever-circling leptons. But now the fund has sent her its offer of

incarnation, she’s got a dilemma. Because one of the Field Circus’s

passengers has never actually had a meatspace body …

 

Amber finds the Slug browsing quietly in a transparent space filled

with lazily waving branches that resemble violet coral fans. They’re a

ghost-memory of alien life, an order of thermophilic quasi fungi with

hyphae ridged in actin/myosin analogues, muscular and slippery filter

feeders that eat airborne unicellular organisms. The Slug itself is

about two meters long and has a lacy white exoskeleton of curves and

arcs that don’t repeat, disturbingly similar to a Penrose tiling.

Chocolate brown organs pulse slowly under the skeleton. The ground

underfoot is dry but feels swampy.

 

Actually, the Slug is a surgical disguise. Both it and the

quasi-fungal ecosystem have been extinct for millions of years,

existing only as cheap stage props in an interstellar medicine show

run by rogue financial instruments. The Slug itself is one such

self-aware scam, probably a pyramid scheme or even an entire

compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to hide from

its creditors by masquerading as a life-form. But there’s a problem

with incarnating itself down in Sirhan’s habitat - the ecosystem it

evolved for is a cool Venusiform, thirty atmospheres of saturated

steam baked under a sky the color of hot lead streaked with yellow

sulphuric acid clouds. The ground is mushy because it’s melting, not

because it’s damp.

 

“You’re going to have to pick another somatotype,” Amber explains,

laboriously rolling her interface around the red-hot coral reef like a

giant soap bubble. The environmental interface is transparent and

infinitely thin, a discontinuity in the physics model of the

simulation space, mapping signals between the human-friendly

environment on one side and the crushing, roasting hell on the other.

“This one is simply not compatible with any of the supported

environments where we’re going.”

 

“I am not understanding. Surely I can integrate with the available

worlds of our destination?”

 

“Uh, things don’t work that way outside cyberspace.” Suddenly Amber is

at a bit of a loss. “The physics model could be supported, but the

energy input to do so would be prohibitive, and you would not be able

to interact as easily with other physics models as we can now.” She

forks a ghost, demonstrates a transient other-Amber in a refrigerated

tank rolling across the Slug’s backyard, crushing coral and hissing

and clanking noisily. “You’d be like this.”

 

“Your reality is badly constructed, then,” the Slug points out.

 

“It’s not constructed at all, it just evolved, randomly.” Amber

shrugs. “We can’t exercise the same level of control over the

underlying embedded context that we can over this one. I can’t simply

magic you an interface that will let you bathe in steam at three

hundred degrees.”

 

“Why not?” asks the Slug. Translation wetware adds a nasty, sharp

rising whine to the question, turning it into a demand.

 

“It’s a privilege violation,” Amber tries to explain. “The reality

we’re about to enter is, uh, provably consistent. It has to be,

because it’s consistent and stable, and if we could create new local

domains with different rules, they might propagate uncontrollably.

It’s not a good idea, believe me. Do you want to come with us or not?”

 

“I have no alternative,” the Slug says, slightly sulkily. “But do you

have a body I can use?”

 

“I think -” Amber stops, suddenly. She snaps her fingers. “Hey, cat!”

 

A Cheshire grin ripples into view, masked into the domain wall between

the two embedded realities. “Hey, human.”

 

“Whoa!” Amber takes a backward step from the apparition. “Our friend

here’s got a problem, no suitable downloadable body. Us meat puppets

are all too closely tied to our neural ultrastructure, but you’ve got

a shitload of programmable gate arrays. Can we borrow some?”

 

“You can do better than that.” Aineko yawns, gathering substance by

the moment. The Slug is rearing up and backing away like an alarmed

sausage: Whatever it perceives in the membrane seems to frighten it.

“I’ve been designing myself a new body. I figured it was time to

change my style for a while. Your corporate scam artist here can

borrow my old template until something better comes up. How’s that?”

 

“Did you hear that?” Amber asks the Slug. “Aineko is kindly offering

to donate her body to you. Will that do?” Without waiting, she winks

at her cat and taps her heels together, fading out with a whisper and

a smile: “See you on the other side …”

 

*

 

It takes several minutes for the Field Circus’s antique transceiver to

download the dozens of avabits occupied by the frozen state vectors of

each of the people running in its simulation engines. Tucked away with

most of them is a resource bundle consisting of their entire sequenced

genome, a bunch of phenotypic and proteome hint markers, and a wish

list of upgrades. Between the gene maps and the hints, there’s enough

data to extrapolate a meat machine. So the festival city’s body shop

goes to work turning out hacked stem cells and fabbing up incubators.

 

It doesn’t take very long to reincarnate a starshipful of

relativity-lagged humans these days. First, City carves out skeletons

for them (politely ignoring a crudely phrased request to cease and

desist from Pamela, on the grounds that she has no power of attorney),

then squirts osteoclasts into the spongy ersatz bone. They look like

ordinary human stem cells at a distance, but instead of nuclei they

have primitive pinpricks of computronium, blobs of smart matter so

small they’re as dumb as an ancient Pentium, reading a control tape

that is nevertheless better structured than anything Mother Nature

evolved. These heavily optimized fake stem cells - biological robots

in all but name - spawn like cancer, ejecting short-lived anucleated

secondary cells. Then City infuses each mess of quasi-cancerous tissue

with a metric shitload of carrier capsids, which deliver the real

cellular control mechanisms to their target bodies. Within a

megasecond, the almost random churning of the construction ‘bots gives

way to a more controlled process as nanoscale CPUs are replaced by

ordinary nuclei and eject themselves from their host cells, bailing

out via the half-formed renal system - except for those in the central

nervous system, which have a final job to do. Eleven days after the

invitation, the first passengers are being edited into the pattern of

synaptic junctions inside the newly minted skulls.

 

(This whole process is tediously slow and laughably obsolescent

technology by the standards of the fast-moving core. Down there,

they’d just set up a wake shield in orbit, chill it down to a

fractional Kelvin, whack two coherent matter beams together, teleport

some state information into place, and yank the suddenly materialized

meatbody in through an airlock before it has time to asphyxiate. But

then again, down in the hot space, they don’t have much room for flesh

anymore …)

 

Sirhan doesn’t pay much attention to the pseudocancers fermenting and

churning in the row of tanks that lines the Gallery of the Human Body

in the Bush wing of the museum. Newly formed, slowly unskeletonizing

corpses - like a time-lapse process of decay with a finger angrily

twisting the dial into high-speed reverse - is both distasteful and

aesthetically displeasing to watch. Nor do the bodies tell him

anything about their occupants. This sort of stuff is just a necessary

prequel to the main event, a formal reception and banquet to which he

has devoted the full-time attention of four ghosts.

 

He could, given a few less inhibitions, go Dumpster-diving in their

mental archives, but that’s one of the big taboos of the post-wetware

age. (Spy agencies went meme-profiling and memory-mining in the third

and fourth decades, gained a thought police rap sheet, and spawned a

backlash of deviant mental architectures resilient to infowar

intrusions. Now the nations that those spook institutions served no

longer exist, their very landmasses being part of the orbiting

n�osphere construction project that will ultimately turn the mass of

the entire solar system into a gigantic Matrioshka brain. And Sirhan

is left with an uneasy loyalty to the one great new taboo to be

invented since the end of the twentieth century - freedom of thought.)

 

So, to indulge his curiosity, he spends most of his waking fleshbody

hours with Pamela, asking her questions from time to time and mapping

the splenetic overspill of her memeome into his burgeoning family

knowledge base.

 

“I wasn’t always this bitter and cynical,” Pamela explains, waving her

cane in the vague direction of the cloudscape beyond the edge of the

world and fixing Sirhan with a beady stare. (He’s brought her out here

hoping that it will trigger another cascade of memories, sunsets on

honeymoon island resorts and the like, but all that seems to be coming

up is bile.) “It was the successive betrayals. Manfred was the first,

and the worst in some ways, but that little bitch Amber hurt me more,

if anything. If you ever have children, be careful to hold something

back for yourself; because if you don’t, when they throw it all in

your face, you’ll feel like dying. And when they’re gone, you’ve got

no way of patching things up.”

 

“Is dying inevitable?” asks Sirhan, knowing damn well that it isn’t,

but more than happy to give her an excuse to pick at her scabbed-over

love wound: He more than half suspects she’s still in love with

Manfred. This is great family history, and he’s having the time of his

flinty-hearted life leading her up to the threshold of the reunion

he’s hosting.

 

“Sometimes I think death is even more inevitable than taxes,” his

grandmother replies bleakly. “Humans don’t live in a vacuum; we’re

part of a larger pattern of life.” She stares out across the

troposphere of Saturn, where a thin rime of blown methane snow catches

the distant sunrise in a ruby-tinted fog. “The old gives way to the

new,” She sighs, and tugs at her cuffs. (Ever since the incident with

the gate crashing ape, she’s taken to wearing an antique formal

pressure suit, all clinging black spidersilk woven with flexible pipes

and silvery smart sensor nets.) “There’s a time to get out of the way

of the new, and I think I passed it sometime ago.”

 

“Um,” says Sirhan, who is somewhat surprised by this new angle in her

lengthy, self-justifying confession: “but what if you’re just saying

this because you feel old? If it’s just a physiological malfunction,

we could fix it and you’d -”

 

“No! I’ve got a feeling that life prolongation