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

then, an interloper arrives

on the scene, pushing in between them. “Are you the curator who

reorganized the Precambrian gallery along teleology lines? I’ve got

some things to say about that!” The interloper is tall, assertive, and

blonde. Sirhan hates her from the first sight of her wagging finger.

 

“Oh shut up, Marissa, this is a party, you’ve been being a pain all

evening.” To his surprise, Rita the historian rounds on the interloper

angrily.

 

“It’s not a problem,” he manages to say. In the back of his mind,

something makes the Rogerian puppet-him that’s listening to the cat

sit up and dump-merge a whole lump of fresh memories into his mind -

something important, something about the Vile Offspring sending a

starship to bring something back from the router - but the people

around him are soaking up so much attention that he has to file it for

later.

 

“Yes it is a problem,” Rita declares. She points at the interloper,

who is saying something about the invalidity of teleological

interpretations, trying to justify herself, and says, “Plonk. Phew.

Where were we?”

 

Sirhan blinks. Suddenly everyone but him seems to be ignoring that

annoying Marissa person. “What just happened?” he asks cautiously.

 

“I killfiled her. Don’t tell me, you aren’t running Superplonk yet,

are you?” Rita flicks a location-cached idea at him and he takes it

cautiously, spawning a couple of specialized Turing Oracles to check

it for halting states. It seems to be some kind of optic lobe hack

that accesses a collaborative database of eigenfaces, with some sort

of side interface to Broca’s region. “Share and enjoy,

confrontation-free parties.”

 

“I’ve never seen -” Sirhan trails off as he loads the module

distractedly. (The cat is rambling on about god modules and metastatic

entanglement and the difficulty of arranging to have personalities

custom-grown to order somewhere in the back of his head, while his

fractional-self nods wisely whenever it pauses.) Something like an

inner eyelid descends. He looks round; there’s a vague blob at one

side of the room, making an annoying buzzing sound. His mother seems

to be having an animated conversation with it. “That’s rather

interesting.”

 

“Yes, it helps no end at this sort of event.” Rita startles him by

taking his left arm in hand - her cigarette holder shrivels and

condenses until it’s no more than a slight thickening around the wrist

of her opera glove - and steers him toward a waitron. “I’m sorry about

your foot, earlier, I was a bit overloaded. Is Amber Macx really your

mother?”

 

“Not exactly, she’s my eigenmother,” he mumbles. “The reincarnated

download of the version who went out to Hyundai +4904/[-56] aboard the

Field Circus. She married a French-Algerian confidence-trick analyst

instead of my father, but I think they divorced a couple of years ago.

My real mother married an imam, but they died in the aftermath of

Economics 2.0.” She seems to be steering him in the direction of the

window bay Amber dragged him away from earlier. “Why do you ask?”

 

“Because you’re not very good at making small talk,” Rita says

quietly, “and you don’t seem very good in crowds. Is that right? Was

it you who performed that amazing dissection of Wittgenstein’s

cognitive map? The one with the preverbal G�del string in it?”

 

“It was -” He clears his throat. “You thought it was amazing?”

Suddenly, on impulse, he detaches a ghost to identify this Rita person

and find out who she is, what she wants. It’s not normally worth the

effort to get to know someone more closely than casual small talk, but

she seems to have been digging into his background, and he wants to

know why. Along with the him that’s chatting to Aineko, that makes

about three instances pulling in near-realtime resources. He’ll be

running up an existential debt soon if he keeps forking ghosts like

this.

 

“I thought so,” she says. There’s a bench in front of the wall, and

somehow he finds himself sitting on it next to her. There’s no danger,

we’re not in private or anything, he tells himself stiffly. She’s

smiling at him, face tilted slightly to one side and lips parted, and

for a moment, a dizzy sense of possibility washes over him: What if

she’s about to throw all propriety aside? How undignified! Sirhan

believes in self-restraint and dignity. “I was really interested in

this -” She passes him another dynamically loadable blob, encompassing

a detailed critique of his analysis of Wittgenstein’s matriophobia in

the context of gendered language constructs and nineteenth century

Viennese society, along with a hypothesis that leaves Sirhan gasping

with mild indignation at the very idea that he of all people might

share Wittgenstein’s skewed outlook - “What do you think?” she asks,

grinning impishly at him.

 

“Nnngk.” Sirhan tries to unswallow his tongue. Rita crosses her legs,

her gown hissing. “I, ah, that is to say” - At which moment, his

partials reintegrate, dumping a slew of positively pornographic

images into his memories. It’s a trap! they shriek, her breasts and

hips and pubes - clean-shaven, he can’t help noticing - thrusting at

him in hotly passionate abandon, Mother’s trying to make you loose

like her! and he remembers what it would be like to wake up in bed

next to this woman whom he barely knows after being married to her for

a year, because one of his cognitive ghosts has just spent several

seconds of network time (or several subjective months) getting hot and

sweaty with a ghost of her own, and she does have interesting research

ideas, even if she’s a pushy over-westernized woman who thinks she can

run his life for him. “What is this?” he splutters, his ears growing

hot and his garments constricting.

 

“Just speculating about possibilities. We could get a lot done

together.” She snakes an arm round his shoulders and pulls him toward

her, gently. “Don’t you want to find out if we could work out?”

 

“But, but -” Sirhan is steaming. Is she offering casual sex? He

wonders, profoundly embarrassed by his own inability to read her

signals: “What do you want?” he asks.

 

“You do know that you can do more with Superplonk than just killfile

annoying idiots?” she whispers in his ear. “We can be invisible right

now, if you like. It’s great for confidential meetings - other things,

too. We can work beautifully together, our ghosts annealed really well

…”

 

Sirhan jumps up, his face stinging, and turns away: “No thank you!” he

snaps, angry at himself. “Goodbye!” His other instances, interrupted

by his broadcast emotional overload, are distracted from their tasks

and sputtering with indignation. Her hurt expression is too much for

him: The killfile snaps down, blurring her into an indistinct black

blob on the wall, veiled by his own brain as he turns and walks away,

seething with anger at his mother for being so unfair as to make him

behold his own face in the throes of fleshy passion.

 

*

 

Meanwhile, in one of the lower spheres, padded with silvery blue

insulating pillows bound together with duct tape, the movers and

shakers of the accelerationista faction are discussing their bid for

world power at fractional-C velocities.

 

“We can’t outrun everything. For example, a collapse of the false

vacuum,” Manfred insists, slightly uncoordinated and slurring his

vowels under the influence of the first glass of fruit punch he’s

experienced in nigh-on twenty realtime years. His body is young and

still relatively featureless, hair still growing out, and he’s

abandoned his old no-implants fetish at last to adopt an array of

interfaces that let him internalize all the exocortex processes that

he formerly ran on an array of dumb Turing machines outside his body.

He’s standing on his own sense of style and is the only person in the

room who isn’t wearing some variation of dinner jacket or classical

evening dress. “Entangled exchange via routers is all very well, but

it won’t let us escape the universe itself - any phase change will

catch up eventually, the network must have an end. And then where will

we be, Sameena?”

 

“I’m not disputing that.” The woman he’s talking to, wearing a

green-and-gold sari and a medieval maharajah’s ransom in gold and

natural diamonds, nods thoughtfully. “But it hasn’t happened yet, and

we’ve got evidence that superhuman intelligences have been loose in

this universe for gigayears, so there’s a fair bet that the worst

catastrophe scenarios are unlikely. And looking closer to home, we

don’t know what the routers are for, or who made them. Until then …”

She shrugs. “Look what happened last time somebody tried to probe

them. No offense intended.”

 

“It’s already happened. If what I hear is correct, the Vile Offspring

aren’t nearly as negative about the idea of using the routers as we

old-fashioned metahumans might like to believe.” Manfred frowns,

trying to recall some hazy anecdote - he’s experimenting with a new

memory compression algorithm, necessitated by his pack rat mnemonic

habits when younger, and sometimes the whole universe feels as if it’s

nearly on the tip of his tongue. “So, we seem to be in violent

agreement about the need to know more about what’s going on, and to

find out what they’re doing out there. We’ve got cosmic background

anisotropies caused by the waste heat from computing processes

millions of light-years across - it takes a big interstellar

civilization to do that, and they don’t seem to have fallen into the

same rat trap as the local Matrioshka brain civilizations. And we’ve

got worrying rumors about the VO messing around with the structure of

space-time in order to find a way around the Beckenstein bound. If the

VO are trying that, then the folks out near the supercluster already

know the answers. The best way to find out what’s happening is to go

and talk to whoever’s responsible. Can we at least agree on that?”

 

“Probably not.” Her eyes glitter with amusement. “It all depends on

whether one believes in these civilizations in the first place. I know

your people point to deep-field camera images going all the way back

to some wonky hubble-bubble scrying mirror from the late twentieth,

but we’ve got no evidence except some theories about the Casimir

effect and pair production and spinning beakers of helium-3 - much

less proof that whole bunch of alien galactic civilizations are trying

to collapse the false vacuum and destroy the universe!” Her voice

dropped a notch: “At least, not enough proof to convince most people,

Manny dear. I know this comes as a shock to you, but not everyone is a

neophiliac posthuman bodysurfer whose idea of a sabbatical is to spend

twenty years as a flock of tightly networked seagulls in order to try

and to prove the Turing Oracle thesis -”

 

“Not everyone is concerned with the deep future,” Manfred interrupts.

“It’s important! If we live or die, that doesn’t matter - that’s not

the big picture. The big question is whether information originating

in our light cone is preserved, or whether we’re stuck in a lossy

medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It’s downright

embarrassing to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of

curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all

personally! I mean, if there’s going to come a time when there’s

nobody or nothing to remember us then what does -”

 

“Manfred?”

 

He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly.

 

It’s Amber, poised in black cat suit with cocktail glass. Her

expression is open and confused, appallingly vulnerable. Blue liquid

slops, almost spilling out of her glass - the rim barely extends

itself in time to catch the drops. Behind her stands Annette, a deeply

self-satisfied smile on her