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

weird sensation, seeing all this stuff for the first time

- the trappings of a technosphere centuries ahead of the one he’s last

been awake in - but with the memories to explain it all. He finds his

feet are still carrying him forward, toward a grassy square lined with

doors opening onto private dwellings. Behind one of them, he’s going

to meet his descendants, and Pamela in all probability. The thought

makes his stomach give a little queasy backflip. I’m not ready for

this -

 

It’s an acute moment of d�ja vu. He’s standing on a familiar doorstep

he’s never seen before. The door opens and a serious-faced child with

three arms - he can’t help staring, the extra one is a viciously

barbed scythe of bone from the elbow down - looks up at him. “Hello,

me,” says the kid.

 

“Hello, you.” Manfred stares. “You don’t look the way I remember.” But

Manni’s appearance is familiar from big-Manni’s memories, captured by

the unblinking Argus awareness of the panopticon dust floating in the

air. “Are your parents home? Your” - his voice cracks -

“great-grandmother?”

 

The door opens wider. “You can come in,” the kid says gravely. Then he

hops backward and ducks shyly into a side room - or as if expecting to

be gunned down by a hostile sniper, Manfred realizes. It’s tough being

a kid when there are no rules against lethal force because you can be

restored from a backup when playtime ends.

 

Inside the dwelling - calling it a house seems wrong to Manfred, not

when bits of it are separated by trillions of kilometers of empty

vacuum - things feel a bit crowded. He can hear voices from the

dayroom, so he goes there, brushing through the archway of thornless

roses that Rita has trained around the T-gate frame. His body feels

lighter, but his heart is heavy as he looks around. “Rita?” he asks.

“And -”

 

“Hello, Manfred.” Pamela nods at him guardedly.

 

Rita raises an eyebrow at him. “The cat asked if he could borrow the

household assembler. I wasn’t expecting a family reunion.”

 

“Neither was I.” Manfred rubs his forehead ruefully. “Pamela, this is

Rita. She’s married to Sirhan. They’re my - I guess eigenparents is as

good as term as any? I mean, they’re bringing up my reincarnation.”

 

“Please, have a seat,” Rita offers, waving at the empty floor between

the patio and the stone fountain in the shape of a section through a

glass hypersphere. A futon of spun diamondoid congeals out of the

utility fog floating in the air, glittering in the artificial

sunlight. “Sirhan’s just taking care of Manni - our son. He’ll be with

us in just a minute.”

 

Manfred sits gingerly at one side of the futon. Pamela sits stiffly at

the opposite edge, not meeting his eye. Last time they met in the

flesh - an awesome gulf of years previously - they’d parted cursing

each other, on opposite sides of a fractious divorce as well as an

ideological barrier as high as a continental divide. But many

subjective decades have passed, and both ideology and divorce have

dwindled in significance - if indeed they ever happened. Now that

there’s common cause to draw them together, Manfred can barely look at

her. “How is Manni?” he asks his hostess, desperate for small talk.

 

“He’s fine,” Rita says, in a brittle voice. “Just the usual

preadolescent turbulence, if it wasn’t for …” She trails off. A door

appears in mid air and Sirhan steps through it, followed by a small

deity wearing a fur coat.

 

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Aineko remarks.

 

“You’re a fine one to talk,” Pamela says icily. “Don’t you think you’d

-”

 

“I tried to keep him away from you,” Sirhan tells Manfred, “but he

wouldn’t -”

 

“That’s okay.” Manfred waves it off. “Pamela, would you mind

starting?”

 

“Yes, I would.” She glances at him sidelong. “You go first.”

 

“Right. You wanted me here.” Manfred hunkers down to stare at the cat.

“What do you want?”

 

“If I was your traditional middle-European devil, I’d say I’d come to

steal your soul,” says Aineko, looking up at Manfred and twitching his

tail. “Luckily I’m not a dualist, I just want to borrow it for a

while. Won’t even get it dirty.”

 

“Uh-huh.” Manfred raises an eyebrow. “Why?”

 

“I’m not omniscient.” Aineko sits down, one leg sticking out sideways,

but continues to stare at Manfred. “I had a … a telegram, I guess,

claiming to be from you. From the other copy of you, that is, the one

that went off through the router network with another copy of me, and

with Amber, and everyone else who isn’t here. It says it found the

answer and it wants to give me a shortcut route out to the deep

thinkers at the edge of the observable universe. It knows who made the

wormhole network and why, and -” Aineko pauses. If he was human, he’d

shrug, but being a cat, he absent mindedly scritches behind his left

ear with a hind leg. “Trouble is, I’m not sure I can trust it. So I

need you to authenticate the message. I don’t dare use my own memory

of you because it knows too much about me; if the package is a Trojan,

it might find out things I don’t want it to learn. I can’t even redact

its memories of me - that, too, would convey useful information to the

packet if it is hostile. So I want a copy of you from the museum,

fresh and uncontaminated.”

 

“Is that all?” Sirhan asks incredulously.

 

“Sounds like enough to me,” Manfred responds. Pamela opens her mouth,

ready to speak, but Manfred makes eye contact and shakes his head

infinitesimally. She looks right back and - a shock goes through him -

nods and closes her mouth. The moment of complicity is dizzying. “I

want something in return.”

 

“Sure,” says the cat. He pauses. “You realize it’s a destructive

process.”

 

“It’s a - what?”

 

“I need to make a running copy of you. Then I introduce it to the, uh,

alien information, in a sandbox. The sandbox gets destroyed afterward

- it emits just one bit of information, a yes or no to the question,

can I trust the alien information?”

 

“Uh.” Manfred begins to sweat. “Uh. I’m not so sure I like the sound

of that.”

 

“It’s a copy.” Another cat-shrug moment. “You’re a copy. Manni is a

copy. You’ve been copied so many times it’s silly - you realize every

few years every atom in your body changes? Of course, it means a copy

of you gets to die after a lifetime or two of unique, unrepeatable

experiences that you’ll never know about, but that won’t matter to

you.”

 

“Yes it does! You’re talking about condemning a version of me to

death! It may not affect me, here, in this body, but it certainly

affects that other me. Can’t you -”

 

“No, I can’t. If I agreed to rescue the copy if it reached a positive

verdict, that would give it an incentive to lie if the truth was that

the alien message is untrustworthy, wouldn’t it? Also, if I intended

to rescue the copy, that would give the message a back channel through

which to encode an attack. One bit, Manfred, no more.”

 

“Agh.” Manfred stops talking. He knows he should be trying to come up

with some kind of objection, but Aineko must have already considered

all his possible responses and planned strategies around them. “Where

does she fit into this?” he asks, nodding at Pamela.

 

“Oh, she’s your payment,” Aineko says with studied insouciance. “I

have a very good memory for people, especially people I’ve known for

decades. You’ve outlasted that crude emotional conditioning I used on

you around the time of the divorce, and as for her, she’s a good

reinstantiation of -”

 

“Do you know what it’s like to die?” Pamela asks, finally losing her

self-control. “Or would you like to find out the hard way? Because if

you keep talking about me as if I’m a slave -”

 

“What makes you think you aren’t?” The cat is grinning hideously,

needle like teeth bared. Why doesn’t she hit him? Manfred asks himself

fuzzily, wondering also why he feels no urge to move against the

monster. “Hybridizing you with Manfred was, admittedly, a fine piece

of work on my part, but you would have been bad for him during his

peak creative years. A contented Manfred is an idle Manfred. I got

several extra good bits of work out of him by splitting you up, and by

the time he burned out, Amber was ready. But I digress; if you give me

what I want, I shall leave you alone. It’s as simple as that. Raising

new generations of Macxs has been a good hobby, you make interesting

pets, but ultimately it’s limited by your stubborn refusal to

transcend your humanity. So that’s what I’m offering, basically. Let

me destructively run a copy of you to completion in a black box along

with a purported Turing Oracle based on yourself, and I’ll let you go.

And you too, Pamela. You’ll be happy together this time, without me

pushing you apart. And I promise I won’t return to haunt your

descendants, either.” The cat glances over his shoulder at Sirhan and

Rita, who clutch at each other in abject horror; and Manfred finds he

can sense a shadow of Aineko’s huge algorithmic complexity hanging

over the household, like a lurching nightmare out of number theory.

 

“Is that all we are to you? A pet-breeding program?” Pamela asks

coldly. She’s run up against Aineko’s implanted limits, too, Manfred

realizes with a growing sense of horror. Did we really split up

because Aineko made us? It’s hard to believe: Manfred is too much of a

realist to trust the cat to tell the truth except when it serves to

further his interests. But this -

 

“Not entirely.” Aineko is complacent. “Not at first, before I was

aware of my own existence. Besides, you humans keep pets, too. But you

were fun to play with.”

 

Pamela stands up, angry to the point of storming out. Before he quite

realizes what he’s doing, Manfred is on his feet, too, one arm

protectively around her. “Tell me first, are our memories our own?” he

demands.

 

“Don’t trust it,” Pamela says sharply. “It’s not human, and it lies.”

Her shoulders are tense.

 

“Yes, they are,” says Aineko. He yawns. “Tell me I’m lying, bitch,” he

adds mockingly: “I carried you around in my head for long enough to

know you’ve no evidence.”

 

“But I -” Her arm slips around Manfred’s waist. “I don’t hate him.” A

rueful laugh: “I remember hating him, but -”

 

“Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness,” Aineko

says with a theatrical sigh. “You’re as stupid as it’s possible for an

intelligent species to be - there being no evolutionary pressure to be

any smarter - but you still don’t internalize that and act accordingly

around your superiors. Listen, girl, everything you remember is true.

That doesn’t mean you remember it because it actually happened, just

that you remember it because you experienced it internally. Your

memories of experiences are accurate, but your emotional responses to

those experiences were manipulated. Get it? One ape’s hallucination is

another ape’s religious experience, it just depends on which one’s god

module is overactive at the time. That goes for all of you.” Aineko

looks around at them in mild contempt. “But I don’t need you anymore,

and if you do this one thing for me, you’re going to be free.

Understand? Say yes, Manfred; if