Accelerando

by Charles Stross

  “I know. You’ve come to see me about your conversion, haven’t you?”

  “Yes!”

  There’s a clanking noise from under the pressure sump. “Take this.” A plastic bag floats out, bulging with stray fasteners. “I got a bit of hoovering to do. Get yourself a mask if you don’t already have one.”

  A minute later, Amber is back beside Monica’s legs, her face veiled by a filter mask. “I don’t want this to go through,” she says. “I don’t care what Mom says, I’m not Moslem! This judge, he can’t touch me. He can’t,” she adds, vehemence warring with uncertainty.

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to?” Another bag. “Here, catch.”

  Amber grabs the bag, a fraction of a second too late. She discovers the hard way that it’s full of water and toadspawn. Stringy mucous ropes full of squiggling comma-shaped tadpoles explode all over the compartment and bounce off the walls in a shower of amphibian confetti. “Eew!”

  Monica squirms out from behind the pipe. “Oh, you didn’t.” She kicks off the consensus-defined floor and grabs a wad of absorbent paper from the spinner, whacks it across the ventilator shroud above the sump. Together they go after the toad spawn with rubbish bags and paper—by the time they’ve got the stringy mess mopped up, the spinner has begun to click and whir, processing cellulose from the algae tanks into fresh wipes. “That was not good,” Monica says emphatically, as the disposal bin sucks down her final bag. “You wouldn’t happen to know how the toad got in here?”

  “No, but I ran into one that was loose in the commons, one shift before last cycle-end. Gave it a ride back to Oscar.”

  “I’ll have a word with him, then.” Monica glares blackly at the pipe. “I’m going to have to go back and refit the filter in a minute. Do you want me to be Bob?”

  “Uh.” Amber thinks. “Not sure. Your call.”

  “All right, Bob coming online.” Monica’s face relaxes slightly, then her expression hardens. “Way I see it, you’ve got a choice. Your mother kinda boxed you in, hasn’t she?”

  “Yes.” Amber frowns.

  “So. Pretend I’m an idiot. Talk me through it, huh?”

  Amber drags herself alongside the hydro pipe and gets her head down, alongside Monica/Bob, who is floating with her feet near the floor. “I ran away from home. Mom owned me—that is, she had parental rights and Dad had none. So Dad, via a proxy, helped me sell myself into slavery to a company. The company was owned by a trust fund, and I’m the main beneficiary when I reach the age of majority. As a chattel, the company tells me what to do—legally—but the shell company is set to take my orders. So I’m autonomous. Right?”

  “That sounds like the sort of thing your father would do,” Monica/ Bob says neutrally. Overtaken by a sardonic middle-aged Silicon Valley drawl, her north-of-England accent sounds peculiarly mid-Atlantic.

  “Trouble is, most countries don’t acknowledge slavery, they just dress it up pretty and call it in loco parentis or something. Those that do mostly don’t have any equivalent of a limited liability company, much less one that can be directed by another company from abroad. Dad picked Yemen on the grounds that they’ve got this stupid brand of shari’a law—and a crap human rights record—but they’re just about conformant to the open legal standards protocol, able to interface to EU norms via a Turkish legislative cutout.”

  “So.”

  “Well, I guess I was technically a Janissary. Mom was doing her Christian phase, so that made me a Christian unbeliever slave of an Islamic company. Now the stupid bitch has gone and converted to shi’ism. Normally Islamic descent runs through the father, but she picked her sect carefully and chose one that’s got a progressive view of women’s rights. They’re sort of Islamic fundamentalist liberal constructionists, ‘what would the Prophet do if he was alive today and had to worry about self-replicating chewing gum factories’ and that sort of thing. They generally take a progressive view of things like legal equality of the sexes, because for his time and place the Prophet was way ahead of the ball and they figure they ought to follow his example. Anyway, that means Mom can assert that I am Moslem, and under Yemeni law I get to be treated as a Moslem chattel of a company. And their legal code is very dubious about permitting slavery of Moslems. It’s not that I have rights as such, but my pastoral well-being becomes the responsibility of the local imam, and—” She shrugs helplessly.

  “Has he tried to make you run under any new rules, yet?” asks Monica/Bob. “Has he put blocks on your freedom of agency, tried to mess with your mind? Insisted on libido dampers or a strict dress code?”

  “Not yet.” Amber’s expression is grim. “But he’s no dummy. I figure he may be using Mom—and me—as a way of getting his fingers into this whole expedition. Staking a claim for jurisdiction, claim arbitration, that sort of thing. It could be worse; he might order me to comply fully with his specific implementation of shari’a. They permit implants, but require mandatory conceptual filtering: If I run that stuff, I’ll end up believing it.”

  “Okay.” Monica does a slow backward somersault in midair. “Now tell me why you can’t simply repudiate it.”

  “Because.” Deep breath. “I can do that in two ways. I can deny Islam, which makes me an apostate, and automatically terminates my indenture to the shell, so Mom owns me under US or EU law. Or I can say that the instrument has no legal standing because I was in the USA when I signed it, and slavery is illegal there, in which case Mom owns me. Or I can take the veil, live like a modest Moslem woman, do whatever the imam wants, and Mom doesn’t own me—but she gets to appoint my chaperone. Oh, Bob, she has planned this so well.”

  “Uh-huh.” Monica rotates back to the floor and looks at Amber, suddenly very Bob. “Now you’ve told me your troubles, start thinking like your dad. Your dad had a dozen creative ideas before breakfast every day—it’s how he made his name. Your mom has got you in a box. Think your way outside it: What can you do?”

  “Well.” Amber rolls over and hugs the fat hydroponic duct to her chest like a life raft. “It’s a legal paradox. I’m trapped because of the jurisdiction she’s cornered me in. I could talk to the judge, I suppose, but she’ll have picked him carefully.” Her eyes narrow. “The jurisdiction. Hey, Bob.” She lets go of the duct and floats free, hair streaming out behind her like a cometary halo. “How do I go about getting myself a new jurisdiction?”

  Monica grins. “I seem to recall the traditional way was to grab yourself some land and set yourself up as king, but there are other ways. I’ve got some friends I think you should meet. They’re not good conversationalists and there’s a two-hour lightspeed delay, but I think you’ll find they’ve answered that question already. But why don’t you talk to the imam first and find out what he’s like? He may surprise you. After all, he was already out here before your Mom decided to use him to make a point.”

  The Sanger hangs in orbit thirty kilometers up, circling the waist of potato-shaped Amalthea. Drones swarm across the slopes of Mons Lyctos, ten kilometers above the mean surface level. They kick up clouds of reddish sulphate dust as they spread transparent sheets across the barren moonscape. This close to Jupiter (a mere hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above the swirling madness of the cloudscape) the gas giant fills half the sky with a perpetually changing clock face, for Amalthea orbits the master in just under twelve hours. The Sanger’s radiation shields are running at full power, shrouding the ship in a corona of rippling plasma. Radio is useless, and the human miners control their drones via an intricate network of laser circuits. Other, larger drones are unwinding spools of heavy electrical cable north and south from the landing site. Once the circuits are connected, they will form a coil cutting through Jupiter’s magnetic field, generating electrical current (and imperceptibly sapping the moon’s orbital momentum).

  Amber sighs and looks, for the sixth time this hour, at the webcam plastered on the side of her cabin. She’s taken down the posters and told the toys to tidy themselves away. In another two thousand seconds,
the tiny Iranian spaceship will rise above the limb of Moshtari, and then it will be time to talk to the teacher. She isn’t looking forward to the experience. If he’s a grizzled old blockhead of the most obdurate fundamentalist streak, she’ll be in trouble. Disrespect for age has been part and parcel of the Western teenage experience for generations, and a cross-cultural thread that she’s detailed to clue up on Islam reminds her that not all cultures share this outlook. But if he turns out to be young, intelligent, and flexible, things could be even worse. When she was eight, Amber audited The Taming of the Shrew. She finds she has no appetite for a starring role in her own cross-cultural production.

  She sighs again. “Pierre?”

  “Yeah?” His voice comes from the foot of the emergency locker in her room. He’s curled up down there, limbs twitching languidly as he drives a mining drone around the surface of Object Barney, as the rock has named itself. The drone is a long-legged crane fly look-alike, bouncing very slowly from toe tip to toe tip in the microgravity. The rock is only half a kilometer along its longest axis, coated brown with weird hydrocarbon goop and sulphur compounds sprayed off the surface of Io by the Jovian winds. “I’m coming.”

  “You better.” She glances at the screen. “One twenty seconds to next burn.” The payload canister on the screen is, technically speaking, stolen. It’ll be okay as long as she gives it back, Bob said, although she won’t be able to do that until it’s reached Barney and they’ve found enough water ice to refuel it. “Found anything yet?”

  “Just the usual. Got a seam of ice near the semimajor pole—it’s dirty, but there’s at least a thousand tons there. And the surface is crunchy with tar. Amber, you know what? The orange shit, it’s solid with fullerenes.”

  Amber grins at her reflection in the screen. That’s good news. Once the payload she’s steering touches down, Pierre can help her lay superconducting wires along Barney’s long axis. It’s only a kilometer and a half, and that’ll only give them a few tens of kilowatts of juice, but the condensation fabricator that’s also in the payload can will be able to use it to convert Barney’s crust into processed goods at about two grams per second. Using designs copylefted by the free hardware foundation, inside two hundred thousand seconds they’ll have a grid of sixty-four 3D printers barfing up structured matter at a rate limited only by available power. Starting with a honking great dome tent and some free nitrogen/ oxygen for her to breathe, then adding a big web cache and direct high-bandwidth uplink to Earth, Amber could have her very own one-girl colony up and running within a million seconds.

  The screen blinks at her. “Oh shit! Make yourself scarce, Pierre.” The incoming call nags at her attention. “Yeah? Who are you?”

  The screen fills with a view of a cramped, very twen-cen-looking space capsule. The guy inside it is in his twenties, with a heavily tanned face, close-cropped hair and beard, wearing an olive drab space suit liner. He’s floating between a TORU manual docking controller and a gilt-framed photograph of the Ka’bah at Mecca. “Good evening to you,” he says solemnly. “Do I have the honor to be addressing Amber Macx?”

  “Uh, yeah? That’s me.” She stares at him. He looks nothing like her conception of an ayatollah—whatever an ayatollah is—elderly, black-robed, vindictively fundamentalist. “Who are you?”

  “I am Dr. Sadeq Khurasani. I hope that I am not interrupting you? Is it convenient for you that we talk now?”

  He looks so anxious that Amber nods automatically. “Sure. Did my mom put you up to this?” They’re still speaking English, and she notices that his diction is good, but slightly stilted. He isn’t using a grammar engine, he actually learned the language the hard way, she realizes, feeling a frisson of fear. “You want to be careful how you talk to her. She doesn’t lie, exactly, but she gets people to do what she wants.”

  “Yes, I spoke to—ah.” A pause. They’re still almost a light-second apart, time for painful collisions and accidental silences. “I see. Are you sure you should be speaking of your mother that way?”

  Amber breathes deeply. “Adults can get divorced. If I could get divorced from her, I would. She’s—” She flails around for the right word helplessly. “Look, she’s the sort of person who can’t lose a fight. If she’s going to lose, she’ll try to figure how to set the law on you. Like she’s done to me. Don’t you see?”

  Dr. Khurasani looks extremely dubious. “I am not sure I understand,” he says. “Perhaps, mmm, I should tell you why I am talking to you?”

  “Sure. Go ahead.” Amber is startled by his attitude: He actually seems to be taking her seriously, she realizes. Treating her like an adult. The sensation is so novel—coming from someone more than twenty years old—that she almost lets herself forget that he’s only talking to her because Mom set her up.

  “Well, I am an engineer, in addition I am a student of fiqh, jurisprudence. In fact, I am qualified to sit in judgment. I am a very junior judge, but even so, it is a heavy responsibility. Anyway, your mother, peace be unto her, lodged a petition with me. Are you aware of it?”

  “Yes.” Amber tenses up. “It’s a lie. Distortion of the facts.”

  “Hmm.” Sadeq rubs his beard thoughtfully. “Well, I have to find out, yes? Your mother has submitted herself to the will of God. This makes you the child of a Moslem, and she claims—”

  “She’s trying to use you as a weapon!” Amber interrupts. “I sold myself into slavery to get away from her, do you understand? I enslaved myself to a company that is held in trust for my ownership. She’s trying to change the rules to get me back. You know what? I don’t believe she gives a shit about your religion, all she wants is me!”

  “A mother’s love—”

  “Fuck love,” Amber snarls, “she wants power.”

  Sadeq’s expression hardens. “You have a foul mouth in your head, child. All I am trying to do is to find out the facts of this situation. You should ask yourself if such disrespect furthers your interests?” He pauses for a moment, then continues, less abruptly. “Did you really have such a bad childhood with her? Do you think she did everything merely for power, or could she love you?” Pause. “You must understand, I need to learn these things. Before I can know what is the right thing to do.”

  “My mother—” Amber stops dead and spawns a vaporous cloud of memory retrievals. They fan out through the space around her mind like the tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network parsers and class filters, she turns the memories into reified images and blats them at the webcam’s tiny brain so he can see them. Some of the memories are so painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in full office war paint, leaning over Amber, promising to disable her lexical enhancements forcibly if she doesn’t work on her grammar without them. Mom telling Amber that they’re moving again, abruptly, dragging her away from school and the friends she’d tentatively started to like. The church-of-the-month business. Mom catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table, forcing her to eat—“My mother likes control.”

  “Ah.” Sadeq’s expression turns glassy. “And this is how you feel about her? How long have you had that level of—no, please forgive me for asking. You obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know? Did you talk to them?”

  “My grandparents?” Amber stifles a snort. “Mom’s parents are dead. Dad’s are still alive, but they won’t talk to him—they like Mom. They think I’m creepy. I know little things, their tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data with my head when I was four. I’m not built like little girls were in their day, and they don’t understand. You know the old ones don’t like us at all? Some of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who think their kids are possessed.”

  “Well.” Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. “I must say, this is a lot to learn. But you know your mother has accepted Islam, don’t you? This means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally speaks for you. An
d she says this makes you my problem. Hmm.”

  “I’m not a Muslim.” Amber stares at the screen. “I’m not a child, either.” Her threads are coming together, whispering scarily behind her eyes: Her head is suddenly dense and turgid with ideas, heavy as a stone and twice as old as time. “I am nobody’s chattel. What does your law say about people who are born with implants? What does it say about people who want to live forever? I don’t believe in any god, Mr. Judge. I don’t believe in limits. Mom can’t, physically, make me do anything, and she sure can’t speak for me. All she can do is challenge my legal status, and if I choose to stay where she can’t touch me, what does that matter?”

  “Well, if that is what you have to say, I must think on the matter.” He catches her eye; his expression is thoughtful, like a doctor considering a diagnosis. “I will call you again in due course. In the meantime, if you need to talk to anyone, remember that I am always available. If there is anything I can do to help ease your pain, I would be pleased to be of service. Peace be unto you, and those you care for.”

  “Same to you, too,” she mutters darkly, as the connection goes dead. “Now what?” she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across the wall, begging for attention.

  “I think it’s the lander,” Pierre says helpfully. “Is it down yet?”

  She rounds on him. “Hey, I thought I told you to get lost!”

  “What, and miss all the fun?” He grins at her impishly. “Amber’s got a new boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody . . .”

  Sleep cycles pass; the borrowed 3D printer on Object Barney’s surface spews bitmaps of atoms in quantum lockstep at its rendering platform, building up the control circuitry and skeletons of new printers. (There are no clunky nanoassemblers here, no robots the size of viruses busily sorting molecules into piles—just the bizarre quantized magic of atomic holography, modulated Bose-Einstein condensates collapsing into strange, lacy, super-cold machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable loops as they slice through Jupiter’s magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock’s momentum into power. Small robots grovel in the orange dirt, scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber’s garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according to a schema designed by preteens at an industrial school in Poland, with barely any need for human guidance.