Accelerando

by Charles Stross

  The computing power of the solar system is now around one thousand MIPS per gram, and is unlikely to increase in the near term—all but a fraction of one percent of the dumb matter is still locked up below the accessible planetary crusts, and the sapience/mass ratio has hit a glass ceiling that will only be broken when people, corporations, or other posthumans get around to dismantling the larger planets. A start has already been made in Jupiter orbit and the asteroid belt. Greenpeace has sent squatters to occupy Eros and Juno, but the average asteroid is now surrounded by a reef of specialized nanomachinery and debris, victims of a cosmic land grab unmatched since the days of the wild west. The best brains flourish in free fall, minds surrounded by a sapient aether of extensions that out-think their meaty cortices by many orders of magnitude—minds like Amber, Queen of the Inner Ring Imperium, the first self-extending power center in Jupiter orbit.

  Down at the bottom of the terrestrial gravity well, there has been a major economic catastrophe. Cheap immortagens, out-of-control personality adjuvants, and a new formal theory of uncertainty have knocked the bottom out of the insurance and underwriting industries. Gambling on a continuation of the worst aspects of the human condition—disease, senescence, and death—looks like a good way to lose money, and a deflationary spiral lasting almost fifty hours has taken down huge swaths of the global stock market. Genius, good looks, and long life are now considered basic human rights in the developed world: Even the poorest backwaters are feeling extended effects from the commoditization of intelligence.

  Not everything is sweetness and light in the era of mature nanotechnology. Widespread intelligence amplification doesn’t lead to widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults explode across the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened by successive semiotic jihads. India and Pakistan have held their long-awaited nuclear war: External intervention by US and EU nanosats prevented most of the IRBMs from getting through, but the subsequent spate of network raids and Basilisk attacks cause havoc. Luckily, infowar turns out to be more survivable than nuclear war—especially once it is discovered that a simple anti-aliasing filter stops nine out of ten neural-wetware-crashing Langford fractals from causing anything worse than a mild headache.

  New discoveries this decade include the origins of the weakly repulsive force responsible for changes in the rate of expansion of the universe after the big bang, and on a less abstract level, experimental implementations of a Turing Oracle using quantum entanglement circuits: a device that can determine whether a given functional expression can be evaluated in finite time. It’s boom time in the field of Extreme Cosmology, where some of the more recherché researchers are bickering over the possibility that the entire universe was created as a computing device, with a program encoded in the small print of the Planck constant. And theorists are talking again about the possibility of using artificial wormholes to provide instantaneous connections between distant corners of space-time.

  Most people have forgotten about the well-known extraterrestrial transmission received fifteen years earlier. Very few people know anything about the second, more complex transmission received a little later. Many of those are now passengers or spectators of the Field Circus: a light-sail craft that is speeding out of Sol system on a laser beam generated by Amber’s installations in low-Jupiter orbit. (Superconducting tethers anchored to Amalthea drag through Jupiter’s magnetosphere, providing gigawatts of electricity for the hungry lasers: energy that comes in turn from the small moon’s orbital momentum.)

  Manufactured by Airbus-Cisco years earlier, the Field Circus is a hick backwater, isolated from the mainstream of human culture, its systems complexity limited by mass. The destination lies nearly three light years from Earth, and even with high acceleration and relativistic cruise speeds the one-kilogram starwhisp and its hundred-kilogram light sail will take the best part of seven years to get there. Sending a human-sized probe is beyond even the vast energy budget of the new orbital states in Jupiter system—near-lightspeed travel is horrifically expensive. Rather than a big, self-propelled ship with canned primates for passengers, as previous generations had envisaged, the starship is a Coke-can-sized slab of nanocomputers, running a neural simulation of the uploaded brain states of some tens of humans at merely normal speed. By the time its occupants beam themselves home again for download into freshly cloned bodies, a linear extrapolation shows that as much change will have overtaken human civilization as in the preceding fifty millennia—the sum total of H. sapiens sapiens’ time on Earth.

  But that’s okay by Amber, because what she expects to find in orbit around the brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/-56 will be worth the wait.

  Pierre is at work in another virtual environment, the one currently running the master control system of the Field Circus. He’s supervising the sail-maintenance bots when the message comes in. Two visitors are on their way up the beam from Jupiter orbit. The only other person around is Su Ang, who showed up sometime after he arrived, and she’s busy with some work of her own. The master control VM—like all the other human-accessible environments at this level of the ship’s virtualization stack—is a construct modeled on a famous movie; this one resembles the bridge of a long-since-sunk ocean liner, albeit with discreetly informative user interfaces hovering in front of the ocean views outside the windows. Polished brass gleams softly everywhere. “What was that?” he calls out, responding to the soft chime of a bell.

  “We have visitors,” Ang repeats, interrupting her rhythmic chewing. (She’s trying out a betel-nut kick, but she’s magicked the tooth-staining dye away and will probably detox herself in a few hours.) “They’re buffering up the line already; just acknowledging receipt is sucking most of our downstream bandwidth.”

  “Any idea who they are?” asks Pierre; he puts his boots up on the back of the vacant helmsman’s chair and stares moodily at the endless expanse of green-gray ocean ahead.

  Ang chews a bit more, watching him with an expression he can’t interpret. “They’re still locked,” she says. A pause. “But there was a flash from the Franklins, back home. One of them’s some kind of lawyer, while the other’s a film producer.”

  “A film producer?”

  “The Franklin Trust says it’s to help defray our lawsuit expenses. Myanmar is gaining. They’ve already subpoenaed Amber’s downline instance, and they’re trying to bring this up in some kind of kangaroo jurisdiction—Oregon Christian Reconstructionist Empire, I think.”

  “Ouch.” Pierre winces. The daily news from Earth, modulated onto a lower-powered communication laser, is increasingly bad. On the plus side, Amber is incredibly rich: The goodwill futures leveraged off her dad’s trust metric means people will bend over backward to do things for her. And she owns a lot of real estate, too, a hundred gigatons of rock in low-Jupiter orbit with enough KE to power Northern Europe for a century. But her interstellar venture burns through money—both the traditional barter-indirection type and the more creative modern varieties—about the way you would if you heaped up the green pieces of paper and shoveled them onto a conveyor belt leading to the business end of a running rocket motor. Just holding off the environmental protests over deorbiting a small Jovian moon is a grinding job. Moreover, a whole bunch of national governments have woken up and are trying to legislate themselves a slice of the cake. Nobody’s tried to forcibly take over yet (there are two hundred gigawatts of lasers anchored to the Ring Imperium, and Amber takes her sovereign status seriously, has even applied for a seat at the UN and membership in the EC), but the nuisance lawsuits are mounting up into a comprehensive denial of service attack, or maybe economic sanctions. And Uncle Gianni’s retirement hasn’t helped any, either. “Anything to say about it?”

  “Mmph.” Ang looks irritated for some reason. “Wait your turn. They’ll be out of the buffer in another couple of days. Maybe a bit longer in the case of the lawyer. He’s got a huge infodump packaged on his person. Probably another semisapient class-action lawsuit.”

  �
�I’ll bet. They never learn, do they?”

  “What, about the legal system here?”

  “Yup.” Pierre nods. “One of Amber’s smarter ideas, reviving eleventh-century Scots law and updating it with new options on barratry, trial by combat, and compurgation.” He pulls a face and detaches a couple of ghosts to go look out for the new arrivals; then he goes back to repairing sails. The interstellar medium is abrasive, full of dust—each grain of which carries the energy of an artillery shell at this speed—and the laser sail is in a constant state of disintegration. A large chunk of the drive system’s mass is silvery utility flakes for patching and replacing the soap-bubble-thin membrane as it ablates away. The skill is in knowing how best to funnel repair resources to where they’re needed, while minimizing tension in the suspension lines and avoiding resonance and thrust imbalance. As he trains the patch bots, he broods about the hate mail from his elder brother (who still blames him for their father’s accident), and about Sadeq’s religious injunctions—Superstitious nonsense, he thinks—and the fickleness of powerful women, and the endless depths of his own nineteen-year-old soul.

  While he’s brooding, Ang evidently finishes whatever she was doing and bangs out—not even bothering to use the polished mahogany door at the rear of the bridge, just discorporating and rematerializing somewhere else. Wondering if she’s annoyed, he glances up just as the first of his ghosts patches into his memory map, and he remembers what happened when it met the new arrival. His eyes widen. “Oh shit!”

  It’s not the film producer but the lawyer who’s just uploaded into the Field Circus’s virtual universe. Someone’s going to have to tell Amber. And although the last thing he wants to do is talk to her, it looks like he’s going to have to call her, because this isn’t just a routine visit. The lawyer means trouble.

  Take a brain and put it in a bottle. Better: Take a map of the brain and put it in a map of a bottle—or of a body—and feed signals to it that mimic its neurological inputs. Read its outputs and route them to a model body in a model universe with a model of physical laws, closing the loop. René Descartes would understand. That’s the state of the passengers of the Field Circus in a nutshell. Formerly physical humans, their neural software (and a map of the intracranial wetware it runs on) has been transferred into a virtual machine environment executing on a honking great computer, where the universe they experience is merely a dream within a dream.

  Brains in bottles—empowered ones, with total, dictatorial control over the reality they are exposed to—sometimes stop engaging in activities that brains in bodies can’t avoid. Menstruation isn’t mandatory. Vomiting, angina, exhaustion, and cramp are all optional. So is meatdeath, the decomposition of the corpus. But some activities don’t cease, because people (even people who have been converted into a software description, squirted through a high-bandwidth laser link, and ported into a virtualization stack) don’t want them to stop. Breathing is wholly unnecessary, but suppression of the breathing reflex is disturbing unless you hack your hypothalamic map, and most homomorphic uploads don’t want to do that. Then there’s eating—not to avoid starvation, but for pleasure: Feasts on sautéed dodo seasoned with silphium are readily available here, and indeed, why not? It seems the human addiction to sensory input won’t go away. And that’s without considering sex, and the technical innovations that become possible when the universe—and the bodies within it—are mutable.

  The public audience with the new arrivals is held in yet another movie: the Parisian palace of Charles IX, the throne room lifted wholesale from La Reine Margot by Patrice Chéreau. Amber insisted on period authenticity, with the realism dialed right up to eleven. It’s 1572 to the hilt this time, physical to the max. Pierre grunts in irritation, unaccustomed to his beard. His codpiece chafes, and sidelong glances tell him he isn’t the only member of the royal court who’s uncomfortable. Still, Amber is resplendent in a gown worn by Isabelle Adjani as Marguerite de Valois, and the luminous sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows high above the crowd of actor zimboes lends a certain barbaric majesty to the occasion. The place is heaving with bodies in clerical robes, doublets, and low-cut gowns—some of them occupied by real people. Pierre sniffs again: Someone (Gavin, with his history bug, perhaps?) has been working on getting the smells right. He hopes like hell that nobody throws up. At least nobody seems to have come as Catherine de Médicis . . .

  A bunch of actors portraying Huguenot soldiers approach the throne on which Amber is seated. They pace slowly forward, escorting a rather bemused-looking fellow with long, lank hair and a brocade jacket that appears to be made of cloth-of-gold. “His lordship, Attorney at Arms Alan Glashwiecz!” announces a flunky, reading from a parchment. “Here at the behest of the most excellent guild and corporation of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates, with matters of legal import to discuss with Her Royal Highness!”

  A flourish of trumpets. Pierre glances at Her Royal Highness, who nods gracefully, but is slightly peaky—it’s a humid summer day and her many-layered robes look very hot. “Welcome to the furthermost soil of the Ring Imperium,” she announces in a clear, ringing voice. “I bid you welcome and invite you to place your petition before me in full public session of court.”

  Pierre directs his attention to Glashwiecz, who appears to be worried. Doubtless he’d absorbed the basics of court protocol in the Ring (population all of eighteen thousand back home, a growing little principality); but the reality of it, a genuine old-fashioned monarchy rooted in Amber’s three-way nexus of power, data, and time, always takes a while to sink in. “I would be pleased to do so,” he says, a little stiffly, “but in front of all those—”

  Pierre misses the next bit, because someone has just goosed him on the left buttock. He starts and half turns to see Su Ang looking past him at the throne, a lady-in-waiting for the Queen. She wears an apricot dress with tight sleeves and a bodice that bares everything above her nipples. There’s a fortune in pearls roped into her hair. As he notices her, she winks at him.

  Pierre freezes the scene, decoupling them from reality, and she faces him. “Are we alone now?” she asks.

  “Guess so. You want to talk about something?” he asks, heat rising in his cheeks. The noise around them is a random susurrus of machine-generated crowd scenery, the people motionless as their shared reality thread proceeds independently of the rest of the universe.

  “Of course!” She smiles at him and shrugs. The effect on her chest is remarkable—those period bodices could give a skeleton a cleavage—and she winks at him again. “Oh, Pierre.” She smiles. “So easily distracted!” She snaps her fingers, and her clothing cycles through Afghani burqua, nudity, trouser suit, then back to court finery. Her grin is the only constant. “Now that I’ve got your attention, stop looking at me and start looking at him.”

  Even more embarrassed, Pierre follows her outstretched arm all the way to the momentarily frozen Moorish emissary. “Sadeq?”

  “Sadeq knows him, Pierre. This guy, there’s something wrong.”

  “Shit. You think I don’t know that?” Pierre looks at her with annoyance, embarrassment forgotten. “I’ve seen him before. Been tracking his involvement for years. Guy’s a front for the Queen Mother. He acted as her divorce lawyer when she went after Amber’s dad.”

  “I’m sorry.” Ang glances away. “You haven’t been yourself lately, Pierre. I know it’s something wrong between you and the Queen. I was worried. You’re not paying attention to the little details.”

  “Who do you think warned Amber?” he asks.

  “Oh. Okay, so you’re in the loop,” she says. “I’m not sure. Anyway, you’ve been distracted. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  “Listen.” Pierre puts his hands on her shoulders. She doesn’t move, but looks up into his eyes—Su Ang is only one-sixty tall—and he feels a pang of something odd: teenage male uncertainty about the friendship of women. What does she want? “I know, and I’m sorry, and I’ll try to keep my eyes on the ball some more, b
ut I’ve been in my own headspace a lot lately. We ought to go back into the audience before anybody notices.”

  “Do you want to talk about the problem first?” she asks, inviting his confidence.

  “I—” Pierre shakes his head. I could tell her everything, he realizes shakily as his metaconscience prods him urgently. He’s got a couple of agony-aunt agents, but Ang is a real person and a friend. She won’t pass judgment, and her model of human social behavior is a hell of a lot better than any expert system’s. But time is in danger of slipping, and besides, Pierre feels dirty. “Not now,” he says. “Let’s go back.”

  “Okay.” She nods, then turns away, steps behind him with a swish of skirts, and he unfreezes time again as they snap back into place within the larger universe, just in time to see the respected visitor serve the queen with a class-action lawsuit, and the Queen respond by referring adjudication to trial by combat.

  Hyundai +4904/-56 is a brown dwarf, a lump of dirty hydrogen condensed from a stellar nursery, eight times as massive as Jupiter but not massive enough to ignite a stable fusion reaction at its core. The relentless crush of gravity has overcome the mutual repulsion of electrons trapped at its core, shrinking it into a shell of slush around a sphere of degenerate matter. It’s barely larger than the gas giant the human ship uses as an energy source, but it’s much denser. Gigayears ago, a chance stellar near miss sent it careening off into the galaxy on its own, condemned to drift in eternal darkness along with a cluster of frozen moons that dance attendance upon it.

  By the time the Field Circus is decelerating toward it at short range—having shed the primary sail, which drifts farther out into interstellar space while reflecting light back onto the remaining secondary sail surface to slow the starwhisp—Hyundai +4904/-56 is just under one parsec distant from Earth, closer even than Proxima Centauri. Utterly dark at visible wavelengths, the brown dwarf could have drifted through the outer reaches of the solar system before conventional telescopes would have found it by direct observation. Only an infrared survey in the early years of the current century gave it a name.