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

continent-sized hot-hydrogen

balloons in Saturn’s upper atmosphere already house a few million,

and the writing is on the wall for the rocky inner planets. All the

remaining human-equivalent intelligences with half a clue to rub

together are trying to emigrate before the Vile Offspring decide to

recycle Earth to fill in a gap in the concentric shells of

nanocomputers they’re running on. The half-constructed Matrioshka

brain already darkens the skies of Earth and has caused a massive

crash in the planet’s photosynthetic biomass, as plants starve for

short-wavelength light.

 

Since decade the seventh, the computational density of the solar

system has soared. Within the asteroid belt, more than half the

available planetary mass has been turned into nanoprocessors, tied

together by quantum entanglement into a web so dense that each gram

of matter can simulate all the possible life experiences of an

individual human being in a scant handful of minutes. Economics 2.0

is itself obsolescent, forced to mutate in a furious survivalist

arms race by the arrival of the Slug. Only the name remains as a

vague shorthand for merely human-equivalent intelligences to use

when describing interactions they don’t understand.

 

The latest generation of posthuman entities is less overtly hostile

to humans, but much more alien than the generations of the fifties

and seventies. Among their less comprehensible activities, the Vile

Offspring are engaged in exploring the phase-space of all possible

human experiences from the inside out. Perhaps they caught a dose

of the Tiplerite heresy along the way, for now a steady stream of

resimulant uploads is pouring through the downsystem relays in

Titan orbit. The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the

Resurrection of the Extremely Confused, except that they’re not

really resurrectees - they’re simulations based on their originals’

recorded histories, blocky and missing chunks of their memories, as

bewildered as baby ducklings as they’re herded into the

wood-chipper of the future.

 

Sirhan al-Khurasani despises them with the abstract contempt of an

antiquarian for a cunning but ultimately transparent forgery. But

Sirhan is young, and he’s got more contempt than he knows what to

do with. It’s a handy outlet for his frustration. He has a lot to

be frustrated at, starting with his intermittently dysfunctional

family, the elderly stars around whom his planet whizzes in chaotic

trajectories of enthusiasm and distaste.

 

Sirhan fancies himself a philosopher-historian of the singular age,

a chronicler of the incomprehensible, which would be a fine thing

to be except that his greatest insights are all derived from

Aineko. He alternately fawns over and rages against his mother, who

is currently a leading light in the refugee community, and honors

(when not attempting to evade the will of) his father, who is

lately a rising philosophical patriarch within the Conservationist

faction. He’s secretly in awe (not to mention slightly resentful)

of his grandfather Manfred. In fact, the latter’s abrupt

reincarnation in the flesh has quite disconcerted him. And he

sometimes listens to his stepgrandmother Annette, who has

reincarnated in more or less her original 2020s body after spending

some years as a great ape, and who seems to view him as some sort

of personal project.

 

OnlyAnnette isn’t being very helpful right now. His mother is

campaigning on an electoral platform calling for a vote to blow up

the world, Annette is helping run her campaign, his grandfather is

trying to convince him to entrust everything he holds dear to a

rogue lobster, and the cat is being typically feline and evasive.

 

Talk about families with problems …

 

*

 

They’ve transplanted imperial Brussels to Saturn in its entirety,

mapped tens of megatonnes of buildings right down to nanoscale and

beamed them into the outer darkness to be reinstantiated downwell on

the lily-pad colonies that dot the stratosphere of the gas giant.

(Eventually the entire surface of the Earth will follow - after which

the Vile Offspring will core the planet like an apple, dismantle it

into a cloud of newly formed quantum nanocomputers to add to their

burgeoning Matrioshka brain.) Due to a resource contention problem in

the festival committee’s planning algorithm - or maybe it’s simply an

elaborate joke - Brussels now begins just on the other side of a

diamond bubble wall from the Boston Museum of Science, less than a

kilometer away as the passenger pigeon flies. Which is why, when it’s

time to celebrate a birthday or name day (meaningless though those

concepts are, out on Saturn’s synthetic surface), Amber tends to drag

people over to the bright lights of the big city.

 

This time she’s throwing a rather special party. At Annette’s canny

prompting, she’s borrowed the Atomium and invited a horde of guests to

a big event. It’s not a family bash - although Annette’s promised her

a surprise - so much as a business meeting, testing the water as a

preliminary to declaring her candidacy. It’s a media coup, an attempt

to engineer Amber’s re-entry into the mainstream politics of the human

system.

 

Sirhan doesn’t really want to be here. He’s got far more important

things to do, like continuing to catalogue Aineko’s memories of the

voyage of the Field Circus. He’s also collating a series of interviews

with resimulated logical positivists from Oxford, England (the ones

who haven’t retreated into gibbering near catatonia upon realizing

that their state vectors are all members of the set of all sets that

do not contain themselves), when he isn’t attempting to establish a

sound rational case for his belief that extraterrestrial

superintelligence is an oxymoron and the router network is just an

accident, one of evolution’s little pranks.

 

But Tante Annette twisted his arm and promised he was in on the

surprise if he came to the party. And despite everything, he wouldn’t

miss being a fly on the wall during the coming meeting between Manfred

and Amber for all the tea in China.

 

Sirhan walks up to the gleaming stainless-steel dome that contains the

entrance to the Atomium, and waits for the lift. He’s in line behind a

gaggle of young-looking women, skinny and soign� in cocktail gowns and

tiaras lifted from 1920s silent movies. (Annette declared an age of

elegance theme for the party, knowing full well that it would force

Amber to focus on her public appearance.) Sirhan’s attention is,

however, elsewhere. The various fragments of his mind are conducting

three simultaneous interviews with philosophers (“whereof we cannot

speak, thereof we must be silent” in spades), controlling two ‘bots

that are overhauling the museum plumbing and air-recycling system, and

he’s busy discussing observations of the alien artifact orbiting the

brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/[-56] with Aineko. What’s left of him

exhibits about as much social presence as a pickled cabbage.

 

The lift arrives and accepts a load of passengers. Sirhan is crowded

into one corner by a bubble of high-society laughter and an aromatic

puff of smoke from an improbable ivory cigarette holder as the lift

surges, racing up the sixty-meter shaft toward the observation deck at

the top of the Atomium. It’s a ten-meter-diameter metal globe, spiral

staircases and escalators connecting it to the seven spheres at the

corners of an octahedron that make up the former centerpiece of the

1950 World’s Fair. Unlike most of the rest of Brussels, it’s the

original bits and atoms, bent alloy structures from before the space

age shipped out to Saturn at enormous expense. The lift arrives with a

slight jerk. “Excuse me,” squeaks one of the good-time girls as she

lurches backward, elbowing Sirhan.

 

He blinks, barely noticing her black bob of hair, chromatophore-tinted

shadows artfully tuned around her eyes: “Nothing to excuse.” In the

background, Aineko is droning on sarcastically about the lack of

interest the crew of the Field Circus exhibited in the cat’s effort to

decompile their hitchhiker, the Slug. It’s distracting as hell, but

Sirhan feels a desperate urge to understand what happened out there.

It’s the key to understanding his not-mother’s obsessions and

weaknesses - which, he senses, will be important in the times to come.

 

He evades the gaggle of overdressed good-time girls and steps out onto

the lower of the two stainless-steel decks that bisect the sphere.

Accepting a fruit cocktail from a discreetly humaniform waitron, he

strolls toward a row of triangular windows that gaze out across the

arena toward the American Pavilion and the World Village. The metal

walls are braced with turquoise-painted girders, and the perspex

transparencies are fogged with age. He can barely see the

one-tenth-scale model of an atomic-powered ocean liner leaving the

pier below, or the eight-engined giant seaplane beside it. “They never

once asked me if the Slug had attempted to map itself into the

human-compatible spaces aboard the ship,” Aineko bitches at him. “I

wasn’t expecting them to, but really! Your mother’s too trusting,

boy.”

 

“I suppose you took precautions?” Sirhan’s ghost murmurs to the cat.

That sets the irascible metafeline off again on a long discursive

tail-washing rant about the unreliability of Economics-2.0-compliant

financial instruments. Economics 2.0 apparently replaces the

single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the

multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of

insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the

parameterized desires and subjective experiential values of the

players, and as far as the cat is concerned, this makes all such

transactions intrinsically untrustworthy.

 

Which is why you’re stuck here with us apes, Sirhan-prime cynically

notes as he spawns an Eliza ghost to carry on nodding at the cat while

he experiences the party.

 

It’s uncomfortably warm in the Atomium sphere - not surprising, there

must be thirty people milling around up here, not counting the

waitrons - and several local multicast channels are playing a variety

of styles of music to synchronize the mood swings of the revelers to

hardcore techno, waltz, raga …

 

“Having a good time, are we?” Sirhan breaks away from integrating one

of his timid philosophers and realizes that his glass is empty, and

his mother is grinning alarmingly at him over the rim of a cocktail

glass containing something that glows in the dark. She’s wearing

spike-heeled boots and a black velvet cat suit that hugs her contours

like a second skin, and she’s already getting drunk. In wall-clock

years she is younger than Sirhan; it’s like having a bizarrely knowing

younger sister mysteriously injected into his life to replace the

eigenmother who stayed home and died with the Ring Imperium decades

ago. “Look at you, hiding in a corner at your grandfather’s party!

Hey, your glass is empty. Want to try this caipirinha? There’s someone

you’ve got to meet over here -”

 

It’s at moments like this that Sirhan really wonders what in Jupiter’s

orbit his father ever saw in this woman. (But then again, in the world

line this instance of her has returned from, he didn’t. So what does

that signify?) “As long as there’s no fermented grape juice in it,” he

says resignedly, allowing himself to be led past a gaggle of

conversations and a mournful-looking gorilla slurping a long drink

through a straw. “More of your accelerationista allies?”

 

“Maybe not.” It’s the girl gang he avoided noticing in the lift, their

eyes sparkling, really getting into this early twen-cen drag party

thing, waving their cigarette holders and cocktail glasses around with

wild abandon. “Rita, I’d like you to meet Sirhan, my other fork’s son.

Sirhan, this is Rita? She’s an historian, too. Why don’t you -”

 

Dark eyes, emphasized not by powder or paint, but by chromatophores

inside her skin cells: black hair, chain of enormous pearls, slim

black dress sweeping the floor, a look of mild embarrassment on her

heart-shaped face: She could be a clone of Audrey Hepburn in any other

century, “Didn’t I just meet you in the elevator?” The embarrassment

shifts to her cheeks, becoming visible.

 

Sirhan flushes, unsure how to reply. Just