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

adds, “as soon as I can catch up with

Sam.” She glances over her shoulder at Rita apologetically, then dives

into the exercise room.

 

Sirhan takes a step toward the hallway. “Let’s talk,” he says tightly.

“In my study.” He glares at the cat. “I want an explanation. I want to

know the truth.”

 

*

 

Meanwhile, in a cognitive wonderland his parents know about but deeply

underestimate, parts of Manni are engaging in activities far less

innocent than they imagine.

 

Back in the twenty-first century, Sirhan lived through loads of

alternate childhoods in simulation, his parents’ fingers pressing

firmly on the fast-forward button until they came up with someone who

seemed to match their preconceptions. The experience scarred him as

badly as any nineteenth-century boarding school experience, until he

promised himself no child he raised would be subjected to such; but

there’s a difference between being shoved through a multiplicity of

avatars, and voluntarily diving into an exciting universe of myth and

magic where your childhood fantasies take fleshy form, stalking those

of your friends and enemies through the forests of the night.

 

Manni has grown up with neural interfaces to City’s mindspace an order

of magnitude more complex than those of Sirhan’s youth, and parts of

him - ghosts derived from a starting image of his neural state vector,

fertilized with a scattering borrowed from the original Manfred,

simulated on a meat machine far faster than real time - are fully

adult. Of course, they can’t fit inside his seven-year-old skull, but

they still watch over him. And when he’s in danger, they try to take

care of their once and future body.

 

Manni’s primary adult ghost lives in some of New Japan’s virtual

mindspaces (which are a few billion times more extensive than the

physical spaces available to stubborn biologicals, for the

computational density of human habitats have long since ceased to make

much sense when measured in MIPS per kilogram). They’re modeled on

presingularity Earth. Time is forever frozen on the eve of the real

twenty-first century, zero eight-forty-six hours on September 11: An

onrushing wide-body airliner hangs motionless in the air forty meters

below the picture window of Manni’s penthouse apartment on the one

hundred and eighth floor of the North Tower. In historical reality,

the one hundred and eighth floor was occupied by corporate offices;

but the mindspace is a consensual fiction, and it is Manni’s conceit

to live at this pivotal point. (Not that it means much to him - he was

born well over a century after the War on Terror - but it’s part of

his childhood folklore, the fall of the Two Towers that shattered the

myth of Western exceptionalism and paved the way for the world he was

born into.)

 

Adult-Manni wears an avatar roughly modeled on his clone-father

Manfred - skinnier, pegged at a youthful twentysomething, black-clad,

and gothic. He’s taking time out from a game of Matrix to listen to

music, Type O Negative blaring over the sound system as he twitches in

the grip of an ice-cold coke high. He’s expecting a visit from a

couple of call girls - themselves the gamespace avatars of force-grown

adult ghosts whose primaries may not be adult, or female, or even

human - which is why he’s flopped bonelessly back in his Arne Jacobsen

recliner, waiting for something to happen.

 

The door opens behind him. He doesn’t show any sign of noticing the

intrusion, although his pupils dilate slightly at the faint reflection

of a woman, stalking toward him, glimpsed dimly in the window glass.

“You’re late,” he says tonelessly. “You were supposed to be here ten

minutes ago -” He begins to look round, and now his eyes widen.

 

“Who were you expecting?” asks the ice blond in the black business

suit, long-skirted and uptight. There’s something predatory about her

expression: “No, don’t tell me. So you’re Manni, eh? Manni’s partial?”

She sniffs, disapproval. “Fin de si�cle decadence. I’m sure Sirhan

wouldn’t approve.”

 

“My father can go fuck himself,” Manni says truculently. “Who the hell

are you?”

 

The blond snaps her fingers: An office chair appears on the carpet

between Manni and the window, and she sits on the edge of it,

smoothing her skirt obsessively. “I’m Pamela,” she says tightly. “Has

your father told you about me?”

 

Manni looks puzzled. In the back of his mind, raw instincts alien to

anyone instantiated before the midpoint of the twenty-first century

tug on the fabric of pseudoreality. “You’re dead, aren’t you?” he

asks. “One of my ancestors.”

 

“I’m as dead as you are.” She gives him a wintry smile. “Nobody stays

dead these days, least of all people who know Aineko.”

 

Manni blinks. Now he’s beginning to feel a surge of mild irritation.

“This is all very well, but I was expecting company,” he says with

heavy emphasis. “Not a family reunion, or a tiresome attempt to preach

your puritanism -”

 

Pamela snorts. “Wallow in your pigsty for all I care, kid, I’ve got

more important things to worry about. Have you looked at your primary

recently?”

 

“My primary?” Manni tenses. “He’s doing okay.” For a moment his eyes

focus on infinity, a thousand-yard stare as he loads and replays the

latest brain dump from his infant self. “Who’s the cat he’s playing

with? That’s no companion!”

 

“Aineko. I told you.” Pamela taps the arm of her chair impatiently.

“The family curse has come for another generation. And if you don’t do

something about it -”

 

“About what?” Manni sits up. “What are you talking about?” He comes to

his feet and turns toward her. Outside the window, the sky is growing

dark with an echo of his own foreboding. Pamela is on her feet before

him, the chair evaporated in a puff of continuity clipping, her

expression a cold-eyed challenge.

 

“I think you know exactly what I’m talking about, Manni. It’s time to

stop playing this fucking game. Grow up, while you’ve still got the

chance!”

 

“I’m -” He stops. “Who am I?” he asks, a chill wind of uncertainty

drying the sweat that has sprung up and down his spine. “And what are

you doing here?”

 

“Do you really want to know the answer? I’m dead, remember. The dead

know everything. And that isn’t necessarily good for the living …”

 

He takes a deep breath. “Am I dead too?” He looks puzzled. “There’s an

adult-me in Seventh Cube Heaven, what’s he doing here?”

 

“It’s the kind of coincidence that isn’t.” She reaches out and takes

his hand, dumping encrypted tokens deep into his sensorium, a trail of

bread crumbs leading into a dark and trackless part of mindspace.

“Want to find out? Follow me.” Then she vanishes.

 

Manni leans forward, baffled and frightened, staring down at the

frozen majesty of the onrushing airliner below his window. “Shit,” he

whispers. She came right through my defenses without leaving a trace.

Who is she? The ghost of his dead great-grandmother, or something

else?

 

I’ll have to follow her if I want to find out, he realizes. He holds

up his left hand, stares at the invisible token glowing brightly

inside his husk of flesh. “Resynchronize me with my primary,” he says.

 

A fraction of a second later, the floor of the penthouse bucks and

quakes wildly and fire alarms begin to shriek as time comes to an end

and the frozen airliner completes its journey. But Manni isn’t there

anymore. And if a skyscraper falls in a simulation with nobody to see

it, has anything actually happened?

 

*

 

“I’ve come for the boy,” says the cat. It sits on the hand woven rug

in the middle of the hardwood floor with one hind leg sticking out at

an odd angle, as if it’s forgotten about it. Sirhan teeters on the

edge of hysteria for a moment as he apprehends the sheer size of the

entity before him, the whimsical posthuman creation of his ancestors.

Originally a robotic toy companion, Aineko was progressively upgraded

and patched. By the eighties, when Sirhan first met the cat in the

flesh, he was already a terrifyingly alien intelligence, subtle and

ironic. And now …

 

Sirhan knows Aineko manipulated his eigenmother, bending her natural

affections away from his real father and toward another man. In

moments of black introspection, he sometimes wonders if the cat wasn’t

also responsible in some way for his own broken upbringing, the

failure to relate to his real parents. After all, it was a pawn in the

vicious divorce battle between Manfred and Pamela - decades before his

birth - and there might be long-term instructions buried in its

preconscious drives. What if the pawn is actually a hidden king,

scheming in the darkness?

 

“I’ve come for Manny.”

 

“You’re not having him.” Sirhan maintains an outer facade of calm,

even though his first inclination is to snap at Aineko. “Haven’t you

done enough damage already?”

 

“You’re not going to make this easy, are you?” The cat stretches his

head forward and begins to lick obsessively between the splayed toes

of his raised foot. “I’m not making a demand, kid, I said I’ve come

for him, and you’re not really in the frame at all. In fact, I’m going

out of my way to warn you.”

 

“And I say -” Sirhan stops. “Shit!” Sirhan doesn’t approve of

swearing: The curse is an outward demonstration of his inner turmoil.

“Forget what I was about to say, I’m sure you already know it. Let me

begin again, please.”

 

“Sure. Let’s play this your way.” The cat chews on a loose nail sheath

but his innerspeech is perfectly clear, a casual intimacy that keeps

Sirhan on edge. “You’ve got some idea of what I am, clearly. You know

- I ascribe intentionality to you - that my theory of mind is

intrinsically stronger than yours, that my cognitive model of human

consciousness is complete. You might well suspect that I use a Turing

Oracle to think my way around your halting states.” The cat isn’t

worrying at a loose claw now, he’s grinning, pointy teeth gleaming in

the light from Sirhan’s study window. The window looks out onto the

inner space of the habitat cylinder, up at a sky with hillsides and

lakes and forests plastered across it: It’s like an Escher landscape,

modeled with complete perfection. “You’ve realized that I can think my

way around the outside of your box while you’re flailing away inside

it, and I’m always one jump ahead of you. What else do you know I

know?”

 

Sirhan shivers. Aineko is staring up at him, unblinking. For a moment,

he feels at gut level that he is in the presence of an alien god: It’s

the simple truth, isn’t it? But - “Okay, I concede the point,” Sirhan

says after a moment in which he spawns a blizzard of panicky cognitive

ghosts, fractional personalities each tasked with the examination of a

different facet of the same problem. “You’re smarter than I am. I’m

just a boringly augmented human being, but you’ve got a flashy new

theory of mind that lets you work around creatures like me the way I

can think my way around a real cat.” He crosses his arms defensively.

“You do not normally rub this in. It’s not in your interests to do so,

is it? You prefer to hide your manipulative capabilities under an

affable exterior, to play with us. So you’re revealing all this for a

reason.” There’s a note of bitterness in his voice now. Glancing

round, Sirhan summons up a chair - and, as an afterthought, a cat

basket. “Have a seat. Why now, Aineko? What makes you think you can

take my eigenson?”

 

“I didn’t say I was going