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

is morally wrong,

Sirhan. I’m not passing judgment on you, just stating that I think

it’s wrong for me. It’s immoral because it blocks up the natural

order, keeps us old cobweb strands hanging around and getting in you

young things’ way. And then there are the theological questions. If

you try to live forever, you never get to meet your maker.”

 

“Your maker? Are you a theist, then?”

 

“I - think so.” Pamela is silent for a minute. “Although there are so

many different approaches to the subject that it’s hard to know which

version to believe. For a long time, I was secretly afraid your

grandfather might actually have had the answers. That I might have

been wrong all along. But now -” She leans on her cane. “When he

announced that he was uploading, I figured out that all he really had

was a life-hating antihuman ideology he’d mistaken for a religion. The

rapture of the nerds and the heaven of the AIs. Sorry, no thanks; I

don’t buy it.”

 

“Oh.” Sirhan squints out at the cloudscape. For a moment, he thinks he

can see something in the distant mist, an indeterminate distance away

- it’s hard to distinguish centimeters from megameters, with no scale

indicator and a horizon a continental distance away - but he’s not

sure what it is. Maybe another city, mollusk-curved and sprouting

antennae, a strange tail of fabricator nodes wavering below and

beneath it. Then a drift of cloud hides it for a moment, and, when it

clears the object is gone. “What’s left, then? If you don’t really

believe in some kind of benign creator, dying must be frightening.

Especially as you’re doing it so slowly.”

 

Pamela smiles skeletally, a particularly humorless expression. “It’s

perfectly natural, darling! You don’t need to believe in God to

believe in embedded realities. We use them every day, as mind tools.

Apply anthropic reasoning and isn’t it clear that our entire universe

is probably a simulation? We’re living in the early epoch of the

universe. Probably this” - she prods at the spun-diamond inner wall of

the bubble that holds in the precarious terrestrial atmosphere,

holding out the howling cryogenic hydrogen and methane gales of Saturn

- “is but a simulation in some ancient history engine’s panopticon,

rerunning the sum of all possible origins of sentience, a billion

trillion megayears down the line. Death will be like waking up as

someone bigger, that’s all.” Her grin slides away. “And if not, I’ll

just be a silly old fool who deserves the oblivion she yearns for.”

 

“Oh, but -” Sirhan stops, his skin crawling. She may be mad, he

realizes abruptly. Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire

universe. Locked into a pathological view of her own role in reality.

“I’d hoped for a reconciliation,” he says quietly. “Your extended

family has lived through some extraordinary times. Why spoil it with

acrimony?”

 

“Why spoil it?” She looks at him pityingly: “It was spoiled to begin

with, dear, too much selfless sacrifice and too little skepticism. If

Manfred hadn’t wanted so badly not to be human, and if I’d learned to

be a bit more flexible in time, we might still -” She trails off.

“That’s odd.”

 

“What is?”

 

Pamela raises her cane and points out into the billowing methane

thunderclouds, her expression puzzled. “I’ll swear I saw a lobster out

there …”

 

*

 

Amber awakens in the middle of the night in darkness and choking

pressure, and senses that she’s drowning. For a moment she’s back in

the ambiguous space on the far side of the router, a horror of

crawling instruments tracing her every experience back to the nooks

and crannies of her mind; then her lungs turn to glass and shatter,

and she’s coughing and wheezing in the cold air of the museum at

midnight.

 

The hard stone floor beneath her, and an odd pain in her knees, tells

her that she’s not aboard the Field Circus anymore. Rough hands hold

her shoulders up as she vomits a fine blue mist, racked by a coughing

fit. More bluish liquid is oozing from the pores of the skin on her

arms and breasts, evaporating in strangely purposeful streamers.

“Thank you,” she finally manages to gasp: “I can breathe now.”

 

She sits back on her heels, realizes she’s naked, and opens her eyes.

Everything’s confusingly strange, even though it shouldn’t be. There’s

a moment of resistance as if her eyelids are sealed - then they

respond. It all feels strangely familiar to her, like waking up again

inside a house she grew up in and moved away from years ago. But the

scene around her is hardly one to inspire confidence. Shadows lie

thick and deep across ovoid tanks filled with an anatomist’s dream,

bodies in various nightmarish stages of assembly. And sitting in the

middle of them, whence it has retreated after letting go of her

shoulders, is a strangely misshapen person - also nude, but for a

patchy coat of orange hair.

 

“Are you awake yet, ma ch�rie?” asks the orangutan.

 

“Um.” Amber shakes her head, cautiously, feeling the drag of damp

hair, the faint caress of a breeze - she reaches out with another

sense and tries to grab hold of reality, but it slithers away,

intransigent and unembedded. Everything around her is so solid and

immutable that, for a moment, she feels a stab of claustrophobic

panic: Help! I’m trapped in the real universe! Another quick check

reassures her that she’s got access to something outside her own head,

and the panic begins to subside: Her exocortex has migrated

successfully to this world. “I’m in a museum? On Saturn? Who are you -

have we met?”

 

“Not in person,” the ape says carefully. “We ‘ave corresponded.

Annette Dimarcos.”

 

“Auntie -” A flood of memories rattle Amber’s fragile stream of

consciousness apart, forcing her to fork repeatedly until she can drag

them together. Annette, in a recorded message: Your father sends you

this escape package. The legal key to her mother’s gilded custodial

cage. Freedom a necessity. “Is Dad here?” she asks hopefully, even

though she knows full well that here in the real world at least

thirty-five years have passed in linear time: In a century where ten

years of linear time is enough for several industrial revolutions,

that’s a lot of water under the bridge.

 

“I am not sure.” The orangutan blinks lazily, scratches at her left

forearm, and glances round the chamber. “He might be in one of these

tanks, playing a shell game. Or he might be leaving well enough alone

until the dust settles.” She turns back to stare at Amber with big,

brown, soulful eyes. “This is not to be the reunion you were hoping

for.”

 

“Not -” Amber takes a deep breath, the tenth or twelfth that these new

lungs have inspired: “What’s with the body? You used to be human. And

what’s going on?”

 

“I still am human, where it counts,” says Annette. “I use these bodies

because they are good in low gravity, and they remind me that

meatspace is no longer where I live. And for another reason.” She

gestures fluidly at the open door. “You will find big changes. Your

son has organized -”

 

“My son.” Amber blinks. “Is this the one who’s suing me? Which version

of me? How long ago?” A torrent of questions stream through her mind,

exploding out into structured queries throughout the public sections

of mindspace that she has access to. Her eyes widen as she absorbs the

implications. “Oh shit! Tell me she isn’t here already!”

 

“I am very much afraid that she is,” says Annette. “Sirhan is a

strange child: He takes after his grandm�re. Who he, of course,

invited to his party.”

 

“His party?”

 

“Why, yes! Hasn’t he told you what this is about? It’s his party. To

mark the opening of his special institution. The family archive. He’s

setting the lawsuit aside, at least for the duration. That’s why

everybody is here - even me.” The ape-body smirks at her: “I’m afraid

he’s rather disappointed by my dress.”

 

“Tell me about this library,” Amber says, narrowing her eyes. “And

about this son of mine whom I’ve never met, by a father I’ve never

fucked.”

 

“What, you would know everything?” asks Annette.

 

“Yeah.” Amber pushes herself creakily upright. “I need some clothes.

And soft furniture. And where do I get a drink around here?”

 

“I’ll show you,” says the orangutan, unfolding herself in a vertical

direction like a stack of orange furry inner tubes. “Drinks, first.”

 

*

 

While the Boston Museum of Science is the main structure on the

lily-pad habitat, it’s not the only one: just the stupidest, composed

of dumb matter left over from the pre-enlightened age. The orangutan

leads Amber through a service passage and out into the temperate

night, naked by ringlight. The grass is cool beneath her feet, and a

gentle breeze blows constantly out toward the recirculators at the

edge of the worldlet. She follows the slouching orange ape up a grassy

slope, under a weeping willow, round a three-hundred-and-ninety-degree

bend that flashes the world behind them into invisibility, and into a

house with walls of spun cloud stuff and a ceiling that rains

moonlight.

 

“What is this?” Amber asks, entranced. “Some kind of aerogel?”

 

“No -” Annette belches, then digs a hand into the floor and pulls up a

heap of mist. “Make a chair,” she says. It solidifies, gaining form

and texture until a creditable Queen Anne reproduction stands in front

of Amber on spindly legs. “And one for me. Skin up, pick one of my

favorite themes.” The walls recede slightly and harden, extruding

paint and wood and glass. “That’s it.” The ape grins at Amber. “You

are comfortable?”

 

“But I -” Amber stops. She glances at the familiar mantelpiece, the

row of curios, the baby photographs forever glossy on their dye-sub

media. It’s her childhood bedroom. “You brought the whole thing? Just

for me?”

 

“You can never tell with future shock.” Annette shrugs and reaches a

limber arm around the back of her neck to scratch. “We are utility fog

using, for most purposes out here, peer-to-peer meshes of multiarmed

assemblers that change conformation and vapor/solid phase at command.

Texture and color are all superfice, not reality. But yes, this came

from one of your mother’s letters to your father. She brought it here,

for you to surprise. If only it is ready in time.” Lips pull back from

big, square, foliage-chewing teeth in something that might be a smile

in a million years’ time.

 

“You, I - I wasn’t expecting. This.” Amber realizes she’s breathing

rapidly, a near-panic reflex. The mere proximity of her mother is

enough to give her unpleasant reactions. Annette is all right, Annette

is cool. And her father is the trickster-god, always hiding in your

blind spot to leap out and shower you with ambiguous gifts. But Pamela

tried to mold Amber in her own image as a child; and despite all the

traveling she’s done since then, and all the growing up, Amber harbors

an unreasonable claustrophobic fear of her mother.

 

“Don’t be unhappy,” Annette says warmly. “I this you show to convince

you, she will try to disturb you. It is a sign of weakness, she lacks

the courage of her convictions.”

 

“She does?” This is news to Amber, who leans forward to listen.

 

“Yes. She is an old and bitter woman, now. The years have not been

easy for her. She perhaps intends to use her unrepaired senescence as

a passive suicide weapon by which to hold us blameworthy, inflicting

guilt for her mistreatment, but she is afraid of dying all