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

youth. “Are you sure you haven’t

been messing with your phenotype?” he asks suspiciously.

 

“No, this is what I used to look like. I think. Back in the naked ape

again, after all these years as an emergent function of a flock of

passenger pigeons.” His grandfather smirks. “What’s your mother going

to say?”

 

“I really don’t know -” Sirhan shakes his head. “Come on, let’s get

you to immigrant processing. You’re sure you’re not just an historical

simulation?”

 

The place is already heaving with the resimulated. Just why the Vile

Offspring seem to feel it’s necessary to apply valuable exaquops to

the job of deriving accurate simulations of dead humans - outrageously

accurate simulations of long-dead lives, annealed until their written

corpus matches that inherited from the presingularity era in the form

of chicken scratchings on mashed tree pulp - much less beaming them at

the refugee camps on Saturn - is beyond Sirhan’s ken: But he wishes

they’d stop.

 

“Just a couple of days ago I crapped on your lawn. Hope you don’t

mind.” Manfred cocks his head to one side and stares at Sirhan with

beady eyes. “Actually, I’m here because of the upcoming election. It’s

got the potential to turn into a major crisis point, and I figured

Amber would need me around.”

 

“Well you’d better come on in, then,” Sirhan says resignedly as he

climbs the steps, enters the foyer, and leads his turbulent

grandfather into the foggy haze of utility nanomachines that fill the

building.

 

He can’t wait to see what his mother will do when she meets her father

in the flesh, after all this time.

 

*

 

Welcome to Saturn, your new home world. This FAQ (Frequently Asked

Questions) memeplex is designed to orient you and explain the

following:

* How you got here

* Where “here” is

* Things you should avoid doing

* Things you might want to do as soon as possible

* Where to go for more information

 

If you are remembering this presentation, you are probably

resimulated. This is not the same as being resurrected. You may

remember dying. Do not worry: Like all your other memories, it is a

fabrication. In fact, this is the first time you have ever been alive.

(Exception: If you died after the singularity, you may be a genuine

resurrectee. In which case, why are you reading this FAQ?)

 

How you got here:

 

The center of the solar system - Mercury, Venus, Earth’s Moon, Mars,

the asteroid belt, and Jupiter - have been dismantled, or are being

dismantled, by weakly godlike intelligences. [NB: Monotheistic clergy

and Europeans who remember living prior to 1600, see alternative

memeplex “in the beginning.”] A weakly godlike intelligence is not a

supernatural agency, but the product of a highly advanced society that

learned how to artificially create souls [late 20th century: software]

and translate human minds into souls and vice versa. [Core concepts:

Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is

not immortal.]

 

Some of the weakly godlike intelligences appear to cultivate an

interest in their human antecedents - for whatever reason is not

known. (Possibilities include the study of history through

horticulture, entertainment through live-action role-playing, revenge,

and economic forgery.) While no definitive analysis is possible, all

the resimulated persons to date exhibit certain common

characteristics: They are all based on well-documented historical

persons, their memories show suspicious gaps [see: smoke and mirrors],

and they are ignorant of or predate the singularity [see: Turing

Oracle, Vinge catastrophe].

 

It is believed that the weakly godlike agencies have created you as a

vehicle for the introspective study of your historical antecedent by

backward-chaining from your corpus of documented works, and the

back-projected genome derived from your collateral descendants, to

generate an abstract description of your computational state vector.

This technique is extremely intensive [see: expTime-complete

algorithms, Turing Oracle, time travel, industrial magic] but

marginally plausible in the absence of supernatural explanations.

 

After experiencing your life, the weakly godlike agencies have

expelled you. For reasons unknown, they chose to do this by

transmitting your upload state and genome/proteome complex to

receivers owned and operated by a consortium of charities based on

Saturn. These charities have provided for your basic needs, including

the body you now occupy.

 

In summary: You are a reconstruction of someone who lived and died a

long time ago, not a reincarnation. You have no intrinsic moral right

to the identity you believe to be your own, and an extensive body of

case law states that you do not inherit your antecedent’s possessions.

Other than that, you are a free individual.

 

Note that fictional resimulation is strictly forbidden. If you have

reason to believe that you may be a fictional character, you must

contact the city immediately. [ See: James Bond, Spider Jerusalem.]

Failure to comply is a felony.

 

Where you are:

 

You are on Saturn. Saturn is a gas giant planet 120,500 kilometers in

diameter, located 1.5 billion kilometers from Earth’s sun. [NB:

Europeans who remember living prior to 1580, see alternative memeplex

“the flat Earth - not”.] Saturn has been partially terraformed by

posthuman emigrants from Earth and Jupiter orbit: The ground beneath

your feet is, in reality, the floor of a hydrogen balloon the size of

a continent, floating in Saturn’s upper atmosphere. [NB: Europeans who

remember living prior to 1790, internalize the supplementary memeplex:

“the Brothers Montgolfier.”] The balloon is very safe, but mining

activities and the use of ballistic weapons are strongly deprecated

because the air outside is unbreathable and extremely cold.

 

The society you have been instantiated in is extremely wealthy within

the scope of Economics 1.0, the value transfer system developed by

human beings during and after your own time. Money exists, and is used

for the usual range of goods and services, but the basics - food,

water, air, power, off-the-shelf clothing, housing, historical

entertainment, and monster trucks - are free. An implicit social

contract dictates that, in return for access to these facilities, you

obey certain laws.

 

If you wish to opt out of this social contract, be advised that other

worlds may run Economics 2.0 or subsequent releases. These

value-transfer systems are more efficient - hence wealthier - than

Economics 1.0, but true participation in Economics 2.0 is not possible

without dehumanizing cognitive surgery. Thus, in absolute terms,

although this society is richer than any you have ever heard of, it is

also a poverty-stricken backwater compared to its neighbors.

 

Things you should avoid doing:

 

Many activities that have been classified as crimes in other societies

are legal here. These include but are not limited to: acts of worship,

art, sex, violence, communication, or commerce between consenting

competent sapients of any species, except where such acts transgress

the list of prohibitions below. [See additional memeplex: competence

defined.]

 

Some activities are prohibited here and may have been legal in your

previous experience. These include willful deprivation of ability to

consent [see: slavery], interference in the absence of consent [see:

minors, legal status of], formation of limited liability companies

[see: singularity], and invasion of defended privacy [see: the Slug,

Cognitive Pyramid Schemes, Brain Hacking, Thompson Trust Exploit].

 

Some activities unfamiliar to you are highly illegal and should be

scrupulously avoided. These include: possession of nuclear weapons,

possession of unlimited autonomous replicators [see: gray goo],

coercive assimilationism [see: borganism, aggressive], coercive

halting of Turing-equivalent personalities [see: basilisks], and

applied theological engineering [see: God bothering].

 

Some activities superficially familiar to you are merely stupid and

should be avoided for your safety, although they are not illegal as

such. These include: giving your bank account details to the son of

the Nigerian Minister of Finance; buying title to bridges,

skyscrapers, spacecraft, planets, or other real assets; murder;

selling your identity; and entering into financial contracts with

entities running Economics 2.0 or higher.

 

Things you should do as soon as possible:

 

Many material artifacts you may consider essential to life are freely

available - just ask the city, and it will grow you clothes, a house,

food, or other basic essentials. Note, however, that the library of

public domain structure templates is of necessity restrictive, and

does not contain items that are highly fashionable or that remain in

copyright. Nor will the city provide you with replicators, weapons,

sexual favors, slaves, or zombies.

 

You are advised to register as a citizen as soon as possible. If the

individual you are a resimulation of can be confirmed dead, you may

adopt their name but not - in law - any lien or claim on their

property, contracts, or descendants. You register as a citizen by

asking the city to register you; the process is painless and typically

complete within four hours. Unless you are registered, your legal

status as a sapient organism may be challenged. The ability to request

citizenship rights is one of the legal tests for sapience, and failure

to comply may place you in legal jeopardy. You can renounce your

citizenship whenever you wish: This may be desirable if you emigrate

to another polity.

 

While many things are free, it is highly likely that you posses no

employable skills, and therefore, no way of earning money with which

to purchase unfree items. The pace of change in the past century has

rendered almost all skills you may have learned obsolete [see:

singularity]. However, owing to the rapid pace of change, many

cooperatives, trusts, and guilds offer on-the-job training or

educational loans.

 

Your ability to learn depends on your ability to take information in

the format in which it is offered. Implants are frequently used to

provide a direct link between your brain and the intelligent machines

that surround it. A basic core implant set is available on request

from the city. [See: implant security, firewall, wetware.]

 

Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and

is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and

in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may be provided

- for a fee. (In event of your murder, you will be furnished with a

new body at the expense of your killer.) If you have any preexisting

medical conditions or handicaps, consult the city.

 

The city is an agoric-annealing participatory democracy with a limited

liability constitution. Its current executive agency is a weakly

godlike intelligence that chooses to associate with human-equivalent

intelligences: This agency is colloquially known as “Hello Kitty,”

“Beautiful Cat,” or “Aineko,” and may manifest itself in a variety of

physical avatars if corporeal interaction is desired. (Prior to the

arrival of “Hello Kitty,” the city used a variety of human-designed

expert systems that provided suboptimal performance.)

 

The city’s mission statement is to provide a mediatory environment for

human-equivalent intelligences and to preserve same in the face of

external aggression. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the

ongoing political processes of determining such responses. Citizens

also have a duty to serve on a jury if called (including senatorial

service), and to defend the city.

 

Where to go for further information:

 

Until you have registered as a citizen and obtained basic implants,

all further questions should be directed to the city. Once you have

learned to use your implants, you will not need to ask this question.

 

*

 

Welcome to decade the ninth, singularity plus one gigasecond (or

maybe more - nobody’s quite sure when, or indeed if, a singularity

has been created). The human population of the solar system is

either six billion, or sixty billion, depending on whether you

class the forked state vectors of posthumans and the simulations of

dead phenotypes running in the Vile Offspring’s Schr�dinger boxes

as people. Most of the physically incarnate still live on Earth,

but the lily-pads floating beneath