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

dwarf stars and

sunless planets that wander the interstellar void. The looted

mechanisms underlying the alien routers have been cannibalized,

simplified to a level the merely superhuman can almost comprehend,

turned into generators for paired wormhole endpoints that allow

instantaneous switched transport across vast distances. Other

mechanisms, the descendants of the advanced nanotechnologies

developed by the flowering of human techgnosis in the twenty-first

century, have made the replication of dumb matter trivial; this is

not a society accustomed to scarcity.

 

But in some respects, New Japan and the Invisible Empire and the

other polities of human space are poverty-stricken backwaters. They

take no part in the higher-order economies of the posthuman. They

can barely comprehend the idle muttering of the Vile Offspring,

whose mass/energy budget (derived from their complete restructuring

of the free matter of humanity’s original solar system into

computronium) dwarfs that of half a hundred human-occupied brown

dwarf systems. And they still know worryingly little about the deep

history of intelligence in this universe, about the origins of the

router network that laces so many dead civilizations into an

embrace of death and decay, about the distant galaxy-scale bursts

of information processing that lie at measurable red-shift

distances, even about the free posthumans who live among them in

some senses, collocated in the same light cone as these living

fossil relics of old-fashioned humanity.

 

Sirhan and Rita settled in this charming human-friendly backwater

in order to raise a family, study xenoarchaeology, and avoid the

turmoil and turbulence that have characterized his family’s history

across the last couple of generations. Life has been comfortable

for the most part, and if the stipend of an academic nucleofamilial

is not large, it is sufficient in this place and age to provide all

the necessary comforts of civilization. And this suits Sirhan (and

Rita) fine; the turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors

led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of

observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to

someone else.

 

Only …

 

Aineko is back. Aineko, who after negotiating the establishment of

the earliest of the refugee habs in orbit around Hyundai

+4904/[-56], vanished into the router network with Manfred’s other

instance - and the partial copies of Sirhan and Rita who had

forked, seeking adventure rather than cozy domesticity. Sirhan made

a devil’s bargain with Aineko, all those gigaseconds ago, and now

he is deathly afraid that Aineko is going to call the payment due.

 

*

 

Manfred walks down a hall of mirrors. At the far end, he emerges in a

public space modeled on a Menger sponge - a cube diced subtractively

into ever-smaller cubic volumes until its surface area tends toward

infinity. This being meatspace, or a reasonable simulation thereof, it

isn’t a real Menger sponge; but it looks good at a distance, going

down at least four levels.

 

He pauses behind a waist-high diamond barrier and looks down into the

almost-tesseract-shaped depths of the cube’s interior, at a verdant

garden landscape with charming footbridges that cross streams laid out

with careful attention to the requirements of feng shui. He looks up:

Some of the cube-shaped subtractive openings within the pseudofractal

structure are occupied by windows belonging to dwellings or shared

buildings that overlook the public space. High above, butterfly-shaped

beings with exotic colored wings circle in the ventilation currents.

It’s hard to tell from down here, but the central cuboid opening looks

to be at least half a kilometer on a side, and they might very well be

posthumans with low-gee wings - angels.

 

Angels, or rats in the walls? he asks himself, and sighs. Half his

extensions are off-line, so hopelessly obsolete that the temple’s

assembler systems didn’t bother replicating them, or even creating

emulation environments for them to run in. The rest … well, at least

he’s still physically orthohuman, he realizes. Fully functional, fully

male. Not everything has changed - only the important stuff. It’s a

scary-funny thought, laden with irony. Here he is, naked as the day he

was born - newly re-created, in fact, released from the

wake-experience-reset cycle of the temple of history - standing on the

threshold of a posthuman civilization so outrageously rich and

powerful that they can build mammal-friendly habitats that resemble

works of art in the cryogenic depths of space. Only he’s poor, this

whole polity is poor, and it can’t ever be anything else, in fact,

because it’s a dumping ground for merely posthuman also-rans, the

singularitarian equivalent of australopithecines. In the brave new

world of the Vile Offspring, they can’t get ahead any more than a

protohominid could hack it as a rocket scientist in Werner von Braun’s

day. They’re born to be primitive, wallowing happily in the mud-bath

of their own limited cognitive bandwidth. So they fled into the

darkness and built a civilization so bright it can put anything

earthbound that came before the singularity into the shade … and

it’s still a shanty town inhabited by the mentally handicapped.

 

The incongruity of it amuses him, but only for a moment. He has, after

all, electively reincarnated for a reason: Sirhan’s throwaway comment

about the cat caught his attention. “City, where can I find some

clothes?” he asks. “Something socially appropriate, that is. And some,

uh, brains. I need to be able to off-load …”

 

Citymind chuckles inside the back of his head, and Manfred realizes

that there’s a public assembler on the other side of the ornamental

wall he’s leaning on. “Oh,” he mutters, as he finds himself imagining

something not unlike his clunky old direct neural interface,

candy-colored icons and overlays and all. It’s curiously mutable, and

with a weird sense of detachment, he realizes that it’s not his

imagination at all, but an infinitely customizable interface to the

pervasive information spaces of the polity, currently running in

dumbed-down stupid mode for his benefit. It’s true; he needs training

wheels. But it doesn’t take him long to figure out how to ask the

assembler to make him a pair of pants and a plain black vest, and to

discover that, as long as he keeps his requests simple, the results

are free - just like back home on Saturn. The spaceborn polities are

kind to indigents, for the basic requirements of life are cheap, and

to withhold them would be tantamount to homicide. (If the presence of

transhumans has upset a whole raft of prior assumptions, at least it

hasn’t done more than superficial damage to the Golden Rule.)

 

Clothed and more or less conscious - at least at a human level -

Manfred takes stock. “Where do Sirhan and Rita live?” he asks. A

dotted route makes itself apparent to him, snaking improbably through

a solid wall that he understands to be an instantaneous wormhole gate

connecting points light-years apart. He shakes his head, bemused. I

suppose I’d better go and see them, he decides. It’s not as if there’s

anyone else for him to look up, is it? The Franklins vanished into the

solar Matrioshka brain, Pamela died ages ago (and there’s a shame,

he’d never expected to miss her) and Annette hooked up with Gianni

while he was being a flock of pigeons. (Draw a line under that one and

say it’s all over.) His daughter vanished into the long-range

exploration program. He’s been dead for so long that his friends and

acquaintances are scattered across a light cone centuries across. He

can’t think of anyone else here who he might run into, except for the

loyal grandson, keeping the candle of filial piety burning with

unasked-for zeal. “Maybe he needs help,” Manfred thinks aloud as he

steps into the gate, rationalizing. “And then again, maybe he can help

me figure out what to do?”

 

*

 

Sirhan gets home, anticipating trouble. He finds it, but not in any

way he’d expected. Home is a split-level manifold, rooms connected by

T-gates scattered across a variety of habitats: low-gee sleeping den,

high-gee exercise room, and everything in between. It’s furnished

simply, tatami mats and programmable matter walls able to extrude any

desired furniture in short order. The walls are configured to look and

feel like paper, but can damp out even infant tantrums. But right now,

the antisound isn’t working, and the house he comes home to is overrun

by shrieking yard apes, a blur of ginger-and-white fur, and a

distraught Rita trying to explain to her neighbor Eloise why her

orthodaughter Sam is bouncing around the place like a crazy ball.

 

” - The cat, he gets them worked up.” She wrings her hands and begins

to turn as Sirhan comes into view. “At last!”

 

“I came fast.” He nods respectfully at Eloise, then frowns. “The

children -” Something small and fast runs headfirst into him, grabs

his legs, and tries to head-butt him in the crotch. “Oof!” He bends

down and lifts Manni up. “Hey, son, haven’t I told you not to -”

 

“Not his fault,” Rita says hurriedly. “He’s excited because -”

 

“I really don’t think -” Eloise begins to gather steam, looking around

uncertainly.

 

“Mrreeow?” something asks in a conversational tone of voice from down

around Sirhan’s ankles.

 

“Eek!” Sirhan jumps backward, flailing for balance under the weight of

an excited toddler. There’s a gigantic disturbance in the polity

thoughtspace - like a stellar-mass black hole - and it appears to be

stropping itself furrily against his left leg. “What are you doing

here?” He demands.

 

“Oh, this and that,” says the cat, his innerspeech accent a sardonic

drawl. “I thought it was about time I visited again. Where’s your

household assembler? Mind if I use it? Got a little something I need

to make up for a friend …”

 

“What?” Rita demands, instantly suspicious. “Haven’t you caused enough

trouble already?” Sirhan looks at her approvingly; obviously Amber’s

long-ago warnings about the cat sank in deeply, because she’s

certainly not treating it as the small bundle of child-friendly fun it

would like to be perceived as.

 

“Trouble?” The cat looks up at her sardonically, lashing his tail from

side to side. “I won’t make any trouble, I promise you. It’s just -”

 

The door chime clears its throat, to announce a visitor: “Ren Fuller

would like to visit, m’lord and lady.”

 

“What’s she doing here?” Rita asks irritably. Sirhan can feel her

unease, the tenuous grasping of her ghosts as she searches for reason

in an unreasonable world, simulating outcomes, living through bad

dreams, and backtracking to adjust her responses accordingly. “Show

her in, by all means.” Ren is one of their neighbor-cognates (most of

her dwelling is several light-years away, but in terms of transit

time, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump); she and her extruded family are

raising a small herd of ill-behaved kids who occasionally hang out

with Manni.

 

A small blue eeyore whinnies mournfully and dashes past the adults,

pursued by a couple of children waving spears and shrieking. Eloise

makes a grab for her own and misses, just as the door to the exercise

room disappears and Manni’s little friend Lis darts inside like a

pint-sized guided missile. “Sam, come here right now -” Eloise calls,

heading toward the door.

 

“Look, what do you want?” Sirhan demands, hugging his son and looking

down at the cat.

 

“Oh, not much,” Aineko says, turning to lick a mussed patch of fur on

his flank. “I just want to play with him.”

 

“You want to -” Rita stops.

 

“Daddy!” Manni wants down.

 

Sirhan lowers him carefully, as if his bones are glass. “Run along and

play,” he suggests. Turning to Rita: “Why don’t you go and find out

what Ren wants, dear?” he asks. “She’s probably here to collect Lis,

but you can never be sure.”

 

“I was just leaving,” Eloise