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

toe in clinging black, her currently ash-blonde

hair braided in cornrows, watches him - as does Pierre, a protective

arm around her shoulders. They’re - Amber Macx? That’s his mother? She

looks far too young, too much in love with Pierre. “Amber!” he says,

approaching the couple.

 

“Yeah? You’re, uh, my mystery child-support litigant?” Her smile is

distinctly unfriendly as she continues: “Can’t say I’m entirely

pleased to meet you, under the circumstances, although I should thank

you for the spread.”

 

“I -” His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. “It’s not like

that.”

 

“What’s it supposed to be like?” she asks sharply. jabbing a finger at

him: “You know damn well I’m not your mother. So what’s it all about,

huh? You know damn well I’m nearly bankrupt, too, so it’s not as if

you’re after my pocket lint. What do you want from me?”

 

Her vehemence takes him aback. This sharp-edged aggressive woman isn’t

his mother, and the introverted cleric - believer - on the other side

isn’t his father, either. “I ha-ha-had to stop you heading for the

inner system,” he says, speech center hitting deadlock before his

antistutter mod can cut in. “They’ll eat you alive down there. Your

other half left behind substantial debts, and they’ve been bought up

by the most predatory - “

 

“Runaway corporate instruments,” she states, calmly enough. “Fully

sentient and self-directed.”

 

“How did you know?” he asks, worried.

 

She looks grim. “I’ve met them before.” It’s a very familiar grim

expression, one he knows intimately, and that feels wrong coming from

this near stranger. “We visited some weird places, while we were

away.” She glances past him, focuses on someone else, and breathes in

sharply as her face goes blank. “Quickly, tell me what your scheme is.

Before Mom gets here.”

 

“Mind archiving and history mergers. Back yourself up, pick different

life courses, see which ones work and which don’t - no need to be a

failure, just hit the ‘reload game’ icon and resume. That and a

long-term angle on the history futures market. I need your help,” he

babbles. “It won’t work without family, and I’m trying to stop her

killing herself -”

 

“Family.” She nods, guardedly, and Sirhan notices her companion, this

Pierre - not the weak link that broke back before he was born, but a

tough-eyed explorer newly returned from the wilderness - sizing him

up. Sirhan’s got one or two tricks up his exocortex, and he can see

the haze of ghost-shapes around Pierre; his data-mining technique is

crude and out-of-date, but enthusiastic and not without a certain

flair. “Family,” Amber repeats, and it’s like a curse. Louder: “Hello,

Mom. Should have guessed he’d have invited you here, too.”

 

“Guess again.” Sirhan glances round at Pamela, then back at Amber,

suddenly feeling very much like a rat trapped between a pair of angry

cobras. Leaning on her cane, wearing discreet cosmetics and with her

medical supports concealed beneath an old-fashioned dress, Pamela

could be a badly preserved sixtysomething from the old days instead of

the ghastly slow suicide case that her condition amounts to today. She

smiles politely at Amber. “You may remember me telling you that a lady

never unintentionally causes offense. I didn’t want to offend Sirhan

by turning up in spite of his wishes, so I didn’t give him a chance to

say no.”

 

“And this is supposed to earn you a sympathy fuck?” Amber drawls. “I’d

expected better of you.”

 

“Why, you -” The fire in her eyes dies suddenly, subjected to the

freezing pressure of a control that only comes with age. “I’d hoped

getting away from it all would have improved your disposition, if not

your manners, but evidently not.” Pamela jabs her cane at the table:

“Let me repeat, this is your son’s idea. Why don’t you eat something?”

 

“Poison tester goes first.” Amber smiles slyly.

 

“For fuck’s sake!” It’s the first thing Pierre has said so far, and

crude or not, it comes as a profound relief when he steps forward,

picks up a plate of water biscuits loaded with salmon caviar, and puts

one in his mouth. “Can’t you guys leave the back stabbing until the

rest of us have filled our stomachs? ‘S not as if I can turn down the

biophysics model in here.” He shoves the plate at Sirhan. “Go on, it’s

yours.”

 

The spell is broken. “Thank you,” Sirhan says gravely, taking a

cracker and feeling the tension fall as Amber and her mother stop

preparing to nuke each other and focus on the issue at hand - which is

that food comes before fighting at any social event, not vice versa.

 

“You might enjoy the egg mayonnaise, too,” Sirhan hears himself

saying: “It goes a long way to explaining why the dodo became extinct

first time around.”

 

“Dodoes.” Amber keeps one eye warily on her mother as she accepts a

plate from a silently gliding silver bush-shaped waitron. “What was

that about the family investment project?” she asks.

 

“Just that without your cooperation your family will likely go the way

of the bird,” her mother cuts in before Sirhan can muster a reply.

“Not that I expect you to care.”

 

Boris butts in. “Core worlds are teeming with corporates. Is bad

business for us, good business for them. If you are seeing what we are

seen -”

 

“Don’t remember you being there,” Pierre says grumpily.

 

“In any event,” Sirhan says smoothly, “the core isn’t healthy for us

one-time fleshbodies anymore. There are still lots of people there,

but the ones who uploaded expecting a boom economy were sadly

disappointed. Originality is at a premium, and the human neural

architecture isn’t optimized for it - we are, by disposition, a

conservative species, because in a static ecosystem, that provides the

best return on sunk reproductive investment costs. Yes, we change over

time - we’re more flexible than almost any other animal species to

arise on Earth - but we’re like granite statues compared to organisms

adapted to life under Economics 2.0.”

 

“You tell ‘em, boy,” Pamela chirps, almost mockingly. “It wasn’t that

bloodless when I lived through it.” Amber casts her a cool stare.

 

“Where was I?” Sirhan snaps his fingers, and a glass of fizzy grape

juice appears between them. “Early upload entrepreneurs forked

repeatedly, discovered they could scale linearly to occupy processor

capacity proportional to the mass of computronium available, and that

computationally trivial tasks became tractable. They could also run

faster, or slower, than real time. But they were still human, and

unable to operate effectively outside human constraints. Take a human

being and bolt on extensions that let them take full advantage of

Economics 2.0, and you essentially break their narrative chain of

consciousness, replacing it with a journal file of bid/request

transactions between various agents; it’s incredibly efficient and

flexible, but it isn’t a conscious human being in any recognizable

sense of the word.”

 

“All right,” Pierre says slowly. “I think we’ve seen something like

that ourselves. At the router.”

 

Sirhan nods, not sure whether he’s referring to anything important.

“So you see, there are limits to human progress - but not to progress

itself! The uploads found their labor to be a permanently deflating

commodity once they hit their point of diminishing utility. Capitalism

doesn’t have a lot to say about workers whose skills are obsolete,

other than that they should invest wisely while they’re earning and

maybe retrain: but just knowing how to invest in Economics 2.0 is

beyond an unaugmented human. You can’t retrain as a seagull, can you,

and it’s quite as hard to retool for Economics 2.0. Earth is -” He

shudders.

 

“There’s a phrase I used to hear in the old days,” Pamela says calmly,

“ethnic cleansing. Do you know what that means, darling idiot

daughter? You take people who you define as being of little worth, and

first you herd them into a crowded ghetto with limited resources, then

you decide those resources aren’t worth spending on them, and bullets

are cheaper than bread. ‘Mind children’ the extropians called the

posthumans, but they were more like Vile Offspring. There was a lot of

that, during the fast sigmoid phase. Starving among plenty, compulsory

conversions, the very antithesis of everything your father said he

wanted …”

 

“I don’t believe it,” Amber says hotly. “That’s crazy! We can’t go the

way of -”

 

“Since when has human history been anything else?” asks the woman with

the camera on her shoulder - Donna, being some sort of public

archivist, is in Sirhan’s estimate likely to be of use to him.

“Remember what we found in the DMZ?”

 

“The DMZ?” Sirhan asks, momentarily confused.

 

“After we went through the router,” Pierre says grimly. “You tell him,

love.” He looks at Amber.

 

Sirhan, watching him, feels it fall into place at that moment, a sense

that he’s stepped into an alternate universe, one where the woman who

might have been his mother isn’t, where black is white, his kindly

grandmother is the wicked witch of the west, and his feckless

grandfather is a farsighted visionary.

 

“We uploaded via the router,” Amber says, and looks confused for a

moment. “There’s a network on the other side of it. We were told it

was FTL, instantaneous, but I’m not so sure now. I think it’s

something more complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which

are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from our

perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a

technological singularity - they’re bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later

the posthuman descendants evolve Economics 2.0, or 3.0, or something

else and it, uh, eats the original conscious instigators. Or uses them

as currency or something. The end result we found is a howling

wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious

processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for

processing power. We were” - she licks her lips - “lucky to escape

with our minds. We only did it because of a friend. It’s like the main

sequence in stellar evolution; once a G-type star starts burning

helium and expands into a red giant, it’s ‘game over’ for life in what

used to be its liquid-water zone. Conscious civilizations sooner or

later convert all their available mass into computronium, powered by

solar output. They don’t go interstellar because they want to stay

near the core where the bandwidth is high and latency is low, and

sooner or later, competition for resources hatches a new level of

metacompetition that obsoletes them.”

 

“That sounds plausible,” Sirhan says slowly. He puts his glass down

and chews distractedly on one knuckle. “I thought it was a

low-probability outcome, but …”

 

“I’ve been saying all along, your grandfather’s ideas would backfire

in the end,” Pamela says pointedly.

 

“But -” Amber shakes her head. “There’s more to it than that, isn’t

there?”

 

“Probably,” Sirhan says, then shuts up.

 

“So are you going to tell us?” asks Pierre, looking annoyed. “What’s

the big idea, here?”

 

“An archive store,” Sirhan says, deciding that this is the right time

for his pitch. “At the lowest level, you can store backups of

yourself here. So far so good, eh? But there’s a bit more to it than

that. I’m planning to offer a bunch of embedded universes - big,

running faster than realtime - sized and scoped to let

human-equivalent intelligences do what-if modeling on themselves. Like

forking off ghosts of yourself, but much more so - give them whole

years to diverge, learn new skills, and evaluate them against market

requirements, before deciding which version of you is most suited to

run in the real world. I mentioned the retraining paradox. Think of

this as a solution for level