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

mind-boggling: notwithstanding that canned apes are

simply not suited to life in the interstellar void, especially in

orbit around a brown dwarf whose planets make Pluto seem like a

tropical paradise, they’ve taken over the whole damn system.

 

New Japan is one of the newer human polities in this system, a

bunch of nodes physically collocated in the humaniformed spaces of

the colony cylinders. Its designers evidently only knew about old

Nippon from recordings made back before Earth was dismantled, and

worked from a combination of nostalgia-trip videos, Miyazaki

movies, and anime culture. Nevertheless, it’s the home of numerous

human beings - even if they are about as similar to their

historical antecedents as New Japan is to its long-gone namesake.

 

Humanity?

 

Their grandparents would recognize them, mostly. The ones who are

truly beyond the ken of twentieth-century survivors stayed back

home in the red-hot clouds of nanocomputers that have replaced the

planets that once orbited Earth’s sun in stately Copernican

harmony. The fast-thinking Matrioshka brains are as

incomprehensible to their merely posthuman ancestors as an ICBM to

an amoeba - and about as inhabitable. Space is dusted with the

corpses of Matrioshka brains that have long since burned out,

informational collapse taking down entire civilizations that stayed

in close orbit around their home stars. Farther away, galaxy-sized

intelligences beat incomprehensible rhythms against the darkness of

the vacuum, trying to hack the Planck substrate into doing their

bidding. Posthumans, and the few other semitranscended species to

have discovered the router network, live furtively in the darkness

between these islands of brilliance. There are, it would seem,

advantages to not being too intelligent.

 

Humanity. Monadic intelligences, mostly trapped within their own

skulls, living in small family groups within larger tribal

networks, adaptable to territorial or migratory lifestyles. Those

were the options on offer before the great acceleration. Now that

dumb matter thinks, with every kilogram of wallpaper potentially

hosting hundreds of uploaded ancestors, now that every door is

potentially a wormhole to a hab half a parsec away, the humans can

stay in the same place while the landscape migrates and mutates

past them, streaming into the luxurious void of their personal

history. Life is rich here, endlessly varied and sometimes

confusing. So it is that tribal groups remain, their associations

mediated across teraklicks and gigaseconds by exotic agencies. And

sometimes the agencies will vanish for a while, reappearing later

like an unexpected jape upon the infinite.

 

*

 

Ancestor worship takes on a whole new meaning when the state vectors

of all the filial entities’ precursors are archived and indexed for

recall. At just the moment that the tiny capillaries in Rita’s face

are constricting in response to a surge of adrenaline, causing her to

turn pale and her pupils to dilate as she focuses on the

pussycat-thing, Sirhan is kneeling before a small shrine, lighting a

stick of incense, and preparing to respectfully address his

grandfather’s ghost.

 

The ritual is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. Sirhan can speak to his

grandfather’s ghost wherever and whenever he wants, without any

formality, and the ghost will reply at interminable length, cracking

puns in dead languages and asking about people who died before the

temple of history was established. But Sirhan is a sucker for rituals,

and anyway, it helps him structure an otherwise-stressful encounter.

 

If it were up to Sirhan, he’d probably skip chatting to grandfather

every ten megaseconds. Sirhan’s mother and her partner aren’t

available, having opted to join one of the long-distance exploration

missions through the router network that were launched by the

accelerationistas long ago; and Rita’s antecedents are either fully

virtualized or dead. They are a family with a tenuous grip on history.

But both of them spent a long time in the same state of half-life in

which Manfred currently exists, and he knows his wife will take him to

task if he doesn’t bring the revered ancestor up to date on what’s

been happening in the real world while he’s been dead. In Manfred’s

case, death is not only potentially reversible, but almost inevitably

so. After all, they’re raising his clone. Sooner or later, the kid is

going to want to visit the original, or vice versa.

 

What a state we have come to, when the restless dead refuse to stay a

part of history? He wonders ironically as he scratches the

self-igniter strip on the red incense stick and bows to the mirror at

the back of the shrine. “Your respectful grandson awaits and expects

your guidance,” he intones formally - for in addition to being

conservative by nature, Sirhan is acutely aware of his family’s

relative poverty and the need to augment their social credit, and in

this reincarnation-intermediated traditionalist polity for the

hopelessly orthohuman, you can score credit for formality. He sits

back on his heels to await the response.

 

Manfred doesn’t take long to appear in the depths of the mirror. He

takes the shape of an albino orangutan, as usual: He was messing

around with Great Aunt Annette’s ontological wardrobe right before

this copy of him was recorded and placed in the temple - they might

have separated, but they remained close. “Hi, lad. What year is it?”

 

Sirhan suppresses a sigh. “We don’t do years anymore,” he explains,

not for the first time. Every time he consults his grandfather, the

new instance asks this question sooner or later. “Years are an

archaism. It’s been ten megs since we last spoke - about four months,

if you’re going to be pedantic about it, and a hundred and eighty

years since we emigrated. Although correcting for general relativity

adds another decade or so.”

 

“Oh. Is that all?” Manfred manages to look disappointed. This is a new

one on Sirhan: Usually the diverging state vector of Gramps’s ghost

asks after Amber or cracks a feeble joke at this point. “No changes in

the Hubble constant, or the rate of stellar formation? Have we heard

from any of the exploration eigenselves yet?”

 

“Nope.” Sirhan relaxes slightly. So Manfred is going to ask about the

fool’s errand to the edge of the Beckenstein limit again, is he?

That’s canned conversation number twenty-nine. (Amber and the other

explorers who set out for the really long exploration mission shortly

after the first colony was settled aren’t due back for, oh, about 1019

seconds. It’s a long way to the edge of the observable universe, even

when you can go the first several hundred million light-years - to the

B�otes supercluster and beyond - via a small-world network of

wormholes. And this time, she didn’t leave any copies of herself

behind.)

 

Sirhan - either in this or some other incarnation - has had this talk

with Manfred many times before, because that’s the essence of the

dead. They don’t remember from one recall session to the next, unless

and until they ask to be resurrected because their restoration

criteria have been matched. Manfred has been dead a long time, long

enough for Sirhan and Rita to be resurrected and live a long family

life three or four times over after they had spent a century or so in

nonexistence. “We’ve received no notices from the lobsters, nothing

from Aineko either.” He takes a deep breath. “You always ask me where

we are next, so I’ve got a canned response for you -” and one of his

agents throws the package, tagged as a scroll sealed with red wax and

a silk ribbon, through the surface of the mirror. (After the tenth

repetition Rita and Sirhan agreed to write a basic briefing that the

Manfred-ghosts could use to orient themselves.)

 

Manfred is silent for a moment - probably hours in ghost-space - as he

assimilates the changes. Then: “This is true? I’ve slept through a

whole civilization?”

 

“Not slept, you’ve been dead,” Sirhan says pedantically. He realizes

he’s being a bit harsh: “Actually, so did we,” he adds. “We surfed the

first three gigasecs or so because we wanted to start a family

somewhere where our children could grow up the traditional way. Habs

with an oxidation-intensive triple-point water environment didn’t get

built until sometime after the beginning of the exile. That’s when the

fad for neomorphism got entrenched,” he adds with distaste. For quite

a while the neos resisted the idea of wasting resources building

colony cylinders spinning to provide vertebrate-friendly gee forces

and breathable oxygen-rich atmospheres - it had been quite a political

football. But the increasing curve of wealth production had allowed

the orthodox to reincarnate from death-sleep after a few decades, once

the fundamental headaches of building settlements in chilly orbits

around metal-deficient brown dwarfs were overcome.

 

“Uh.” Manfred takes a deep breath, then scratches himself under one

armpit, rubbery lips puckering. “So, let me get this straight: We -

you, they, whoever - hit the router at Hyundai +4904/[-56], replicated

a load of them, and now use the wormhole mechanism the routers rely on

as point-to-point gates for physical transport? And have spread

throughout a bunch of brown dwarf systems, and built a pure deep-space

polity based on big cylinder habitats connected by teleport gates

hacked out of routers?”

 

“Would you trust one of the original routers for switched data

communications?” Sirhan asks rhetorically. “Even with the source code?

They’ve been corrupted by all the dead alien Matrioshka civilizations

they’ve come into contact with, but they’re reasonably safe if all you

want to use them for is to cannibalize them for wormholes and tunnel

dumb mass from point to point.” He searches for a metaphor: “Like

using your, uh, internet, to emulate a nineteenth-century postal

service.”

 

“O-kay.” Manfred looks thoughtful, as he usually does at this point in

the conversation - which means Sirhan is going to have to break it to

him that his first thoughts for how to utilize the gates have already

been done. They’re hopelessly old hat. In fact, the main reason why

Manfred is still dead is that things have moved on so far that, sooner

or later, whenever he surfaces for a chat, he gets frustrated and

elects not to be reincarnated. Not that Sirhan is about to tell him

that he’s obsolete - that would be rude, not to say subtly inaccurate.

“That raises some interesting possibilities. I wonder, has anyone -”

 

“Sirhan, I need you!”

 

The crystal chill of Rita’s alarm and fear cuts through Sirhan’s

awareness like a scalpel, distracting him from the ghost of his

ancestor. He blinks, instantly transferring the full focus of his

attention to Rita without sparing Manfred even a ghost.

 

“What’s happening -”

 

He sees through Rita’s eyes: a cat with an orange-and-brown swirl on

its flank sits purring beside Manni in the family room of their

dwelling. Its eyes are narrowed as it watches her with unnatural

wisdom. Manni is running fingers through its fur and seems none the

worse for wear, but Sirhan still feels his fists clench.

 

“What -”

 

“Excuse me,” he says, standing up: “Got to go. Your bloody cat’s

turned up.” He adds “coming home now” for Rita’s benefit, then turns

and hurries out of the temple concourse. When he reaches the main

hall, he pauses, then Rita’s sense of urgency returns to him, and he

throws parsimony to the wind, stepping into a priority gate in order

to get home as fast as possible.

 

Behind him, Manfred’s melancholy ghost snorts, mildly offended, and

considers the existential choice: to be, or not to be. Then he makes a

decision.

 

*

 

Welcome to the twenty-third century, or the twenty-fourth. Or maybe

it’s the twenty-second, jet-lagged and dazed by spurious suspended

animation and relativistic travel; it hardly matters these days.

What’s left of recognizable humanity has scattered across a hundred

light-years, living in hollowed-out asteroids and cylindrical

spinning habitats strung in orbit around cold brown