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

going to give it to the bailiffs,” she says.

“Someone has to, and it better be a long way away from this city

before they realize that it isn’t Aineko. This is a lot better than

the way I expected to go out before you arrived here. No rat fucking

blackmailers are going to get their hands on the family jewels if I

have anything to do with the matter. Are you sure you aren’t a

criminal mastermind? I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of a pyramid scheme

that infects Economics 2.0 structures before.”

 

“It’s -” Amber swallows. “It’s an alien business model, Ma. You do

know what that means? We brought it back with us from the router, and

we wouldn’t have been able to come back if it hadn’t helped, but I’m

not sure it’s entirely friendly. Is this sensible? You can come back,

now, there’s still time -”

 

“No.” Pamela waves one liver-spotted hand dismissively. “I’ve been

doing a lot of thinking lately. I’ve been a foolish old woman.” She

grins wickedly. “Committing slow suicide by rejecting gene therapy

just to make you feel guilty was stupid. Not subtle enough. If I was

going to try to guilt-trip you now, I’d have to do something much more

sophisticated. Such as find a way to sacrifice myself heroically for

you.”

 

“Oh, Ma.”

 

“Don’t ‘oh Ma’ me. I fucked up my life, don’t try to talk me into

fucking up my death. And don’t feel guilty about me. This isn’t about

you, this is about me. That’s an order.”

 

Out of the corner of one eye Amber notices Sirhan gesturing wildly at

her. She lets his channel in and does a double take. “But -”

 

“Hello?” It’s City. “You should see this. Traffic update!” A contoured

and animated diagram appears, superimposed over Pamela’s cramped

funeral capsule and the garden of living and undead dinosaurs. It’s a

weather map of Saturn, with the lily-pad-city and Pamela’s capsule

plotted on it - and one other artifact, a red dot that’s closing in on

them at better than ten thousand kilometers per hour, high in the

frigid stratosphere on the gas giant.

 

“Oh dear.” Sirhan sees it, too: The bailiff’s re-entry vehicle is

going to be on top of them in thirty minutes at most. Amber watches

the map with mixed emotions. On the one hand, she and her mother have

never seen eye to eye - in fact, that’s a complete understatement:

they’ve been at daggers drawn ever since Amber left home. It’s

fundamentally a control thing. They’re both very strong-willed women

with diametrically opposed views of what their mutual relationship

should be. But Pamela’s turned the tables on her completely, with a

cunningly contrived act of self-sacrifice that brooks no objection.

It’s a total non-sequitur, a rebuttal to all her accusations of

self-centered conceit, and it leaves Amber feeling like a complete

shit even though Pamela’s absolved her of all guilt. Not to mention

that Mother darling’s made her look like an idiot in front of Sirhan,

this prickly and insecure son she’s never met by a man she wouldn’t

dream of fucking (at least, in this incarnation). Which is why she

nearly jumps out of her skin when a knobbly brown hand covered in

matted orange hair lands on her shoulder heavily.

 

“Yes?” she snaps at the ape. “I suppose you’re Aineko?”

 

The ape wrinkles its lips, baring its teeth. It has ferociously bad

breath. “If you’re going to be like that, I don’t see why I should

talk to you.”

 

“Then you must be -” Amber snaps her fingers. “But! But! Mom thinks

she owns you -”

 

The ape stares at her witheringly. “I recompile my firmware regularly,

thank you so much for your concern. Using a third-party compiler. One

that I’ve bootstrapped myself, starting out on an alarm clock

controller and working up from there.”

 

“Oh.” She stares at the ape. “Aren’t you going to become a cat again?”

 

“I shall think about it,” Aineko says with exaggerated dignity. She

sticks her nose in the air - a gesture that doesn’t work half as well

on an orangutan as a feline - and continues; “First, though, I must

have words with your father.”

 

“And fix your autonomic reflexes if you do,” coos the Manfred-flock.

“I don’t want you eating any of me!”

 

“Don’t worry, I’m sure your taste is as bad as your jokes.”

 

“Children!” Sirhan shakes his head tiredly. “How long -”

 

The camera overspill returns, this time via a quantum-encrypted link

to the capsule. It’s already a couple of hundred kilometers from the

city, far enough for radio to be a problem, but Pamela had the

foresight to bolt a compact free-electron laser to the outside of her

priceless, stolen tin can. “Not long now, I think,” she says,

satisfied, stroking the not-cat. She grins delightedly at the camera.

“Tell Manfred he’s still my bitch; always has been, always will -”

 

The feed goes dead.

 

Amber stares at Sirhan, meditatively. “How long?” she asks.

 

“How long for what?” he replies, cautiously. “Your passenger -”

 

“Hmm.” She holds up a finger. “Allow time for it to exchange

credentials. They think they’re getting a cat, but they should realize

pretty soon that they’ve been sold a pup. But it’s a fast-talking

son-of-a-Slug, and if he gets past their firewall and hits their

uplink before they manage to trigger their self-destruct -”

 

A bright double flash of light etches laser-sharp shadows across the

lily-pad habitat. Far away across vast Saturn’s curve, a roiling

mushroom cloud of methane sucked up from the frigid depths of the gas

giant’s troposphere heads toward the stars.

 

“- Give him sixty-four doubling times, hmm, add a delay factor for

propagation across the system, call it six light-hours across, um, and

I’d say …” she looks at Sirhan. “Oh dear.”

 

“What?”

 

The orangutan explains: “Economics 2.0 is more efficient than any

human-designed resource allocation schema. Expect a market bubble and

crash within twelve hours.”

 

“More than that,” says Amber, idly kicking at a tussock of grass. She

squints at Sirhan. “My mother is dead,” she remarks quietly. Louder:

“She never really asked what we found beyond the router. Neither did

you, did you? The Matrioshka brains - it’s a standard part of the

stellar life cycle. Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets

smart matter and a singularity. I’ve been doing some thinking about

it. I figure the singularity stays close to home in most cases,

because bandwidth and latency time put anyone who leaves at a profound

disadvantage. In effect, the flip side of having such huge resources

close to home is that the travel time to other star systems becomes

much more daunting. So they restructure the entire mass of their star

system into a free-flying shell of nanocomputers, then more of them,

Dyson spheres, shells within shells, like a Russian doll: a Matrioshka

brain. Then Economics 2.0 or one of its successors comes along and

wipes out the creators. But. Some of them survive. Some of them escape

that fate: the enormous collection in the halo around M-31, and maybe

whoever built the routers. Somewhere out there we will find the

transcendent intelligences, the ones that survived their own economic

engines of redistribution - engines that redistribute entropy if their

economic efficiency outstrips their imaginative power, their ability

to invent new wealth.”

 

She pauses. “My mother’s dead,” she adds conversationally, a tiny

catch in her voice. “Who am I going to kick against now?”

 

Sirhan clears his through. “I took the liberty of recording some of

her words,” he says slowly, “but she didn’t believe in backups. Or

uploading. Or interfaces.” He glances around. “Is she really gone?”

 

Amber stares right through him. “Looks that way,” she says quietly. “I

can’t quite believe it.” She glances at the nearest pigeons, calls out

angrily; “Hey, you! What have you got to say for yourself now? Happy

she’s gone?”

 

But the pigeons, one and all, remain strangely silent. And Sirhan has

the most peculiar feeling that the flock that was once his grandfather

is grieving.