Accelerando

by Charles Stross

  How to tell her how hard it is to admit that anything’s wrong? Ever? “You didn’t drag me here to tell me that,” he says, implicitly changing the subject.

  Amber lets go of him, backs away almost warily. “What is it?” she asks.

  “Something’s wrong?” he half asks, half asserts. “Have we made contact yet?”

  “Yeah,” she says, pulling a face. “There’s an alien trade delegation in the Louvre. That’s the problem.”

  “An alien trade delegation.” He rolls the words around the inside of his mouth, tasting them. They feel paradoxical, cold and slow after the hot words of passion he’s been trying to avoid uttering. It’s his fault for changing the subject.

  “A trade delegation,” says Amber. “I should have anticipated. I mean, we were going to go through the router ourselves, weren’t we?”

  He sighs. “We thought we were going to do that.” A quick prod at the universe’s controls determines that he has certain capabilities. He invokes an armchair, sprawls across it. “A network of point-to-point wormholes linking routers, self-replicating communication hubs, in orbit around most of the brown dwarfs of the galaxy. That’s what the brochure said, right? That’s what we expected. Limited bandwidth, not a lot of use to a mature superintelligence that has converted the free mass of its birth solar system into computronium, but sufficient to allow it to hold conversations with its neighbors. Conversations carried out via a packet-switched network in real time, not limited by the speed of light, but bound together by a common reference frame and the latency between network hops.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” she agrees from the carved-ruby throne beside him. “Except there’s a trade delegation waiting for us. In fact, they’re coming aboard already. And I don’t buy it—something about the whole setup stinks.”

  Pierre’s brow wrinkles. “You’re right, it doesn’t make sense,” he says, finally. “Doesn’t make sense at all.”

  Amber nods. “I carry a ghost of Dad around. He’s really upset about it.”

  “Listen to your old man.” Pierre’s lips quirk humorlessly. “We were going to jump through the looking glass, but it seems someone has beaten us to the punch. Question is why?”

  “I don’t like it.” Amber reaches out sideways, and he catches her hand. “And then there’s the lawsuit. We have to hold the trial sooner rather than later.”

  He lets go of her fingers. “I’d really be much happier if you hadn’t named me as your champion.”

  “Hush.” The scenery changes; her throne is gone, and instead she’s sitting on the arm of his chair, almost on top of him. “Listen. I had a good reason.”

  “Reason?”

  “You have choice of weapons. In fact, you have the choice of the field. This isn’t just ‘hit ’em with a sword until they die’ time.” She grins, impishly. “The whole point of a legal system that mandates trial by combat for commercial lawsuits, as opposed to an adjudication system, is to work out who’s a fitter servant of society and hence deserving of preferential treatment. It’s crazy to apply the same legal model to resolving corporate disputes that we use for arguments among people, especially as most companies are now software abstractions of business models; the interests of society are better served by a system that encourages efficient trade activity than by one that encourages litigation. It cuts down on corporate bullshit while encouraging the toughest ones to survive, which is why I was going to set up the trial as a contest to achieve maximum competitive advantage in a xenocommerce scenario. Assuming they really are traders, I figure we have more to trade with them than some damn lawyer from the depths of earth’s light cone.”

  Pierre blinks. “Um.” Blinks again. “I thought you wanted me to sideload some kind of fencing kinematics program and skewer the guy?”

  “Knowing how well I know you, why did you ever think that?” She slides down the arm of his chair and lands on his lap. She twists round to face him in point-blank close-up. “Shit, Pierre, I know you’re not some kind of macho psychopath!”

  “But your mother’s lawyers—”

  She shrugs dismissively. “They’re lawyers. Used to dealing with precedents. Best way to fuck with their heads is to change the way the universe works.” She leans against his chest. “You’ll make mincemeat of them. Profit-to-earnings ratio through the roof, blood on the stock exchange floor.” His hands meet around the small of her back. “My hero!”

  The Tuileries are full of confused lobsters.

  Aineko has warped this virtual realm, implanting a symbolic gateway in the carefully manicured gardens outside. The gateway is about two meters in diameter, a verdigris-coated orouborous loop of bronze that sits like an incongruous archway astride a gravel path in the grounds. Giant black lobsters—each the size of a small pony—shuffle out of the loop’s baby blue buffer field, antennae twitching. They wouldn’t be able to exist in the real world, but the physics model here has been amended to permit them to breathe and move, by special dispensation.

  Amber sniffs derisively as she enters the great reception room of the Sully wing. “Can’t trust that cat with anything,” she mutters.

  “It was your idea, wasn’t it?” asks Su Ang, trying to duck past the zombie ladies-in-waiting who carry Amber’s train. Soldiers line the passage to either side, forming rows of steel to let the Queen pass unhindered.

  “To let the cat have its way, yes.” Amber is annoyed. “But I didn’t mean to let it wreck the continuity! I won’t have it!”

  “I never saw the point of all this medievalism, before,” Ang observes. “It’s not as if you can avoid the singularity by hiding in the past.” Pierre, following the Queen at a distance, shakes his head, knowing better than to pick a fight with Amber over her idea of stage scenery.

  “It looks good,” Amber says tightly, standing before her throne and waiting for the ladies-in-waiting to arrange themselves before her. She sits down carefully, her back straight as a ruler, voluminous skirts belling up. Her dress is an intricate piece of sculpture that uses the human body within as a support. “It impresses the yokels and looks convincing on narrowcast media. It provides a prefabricated sense of tradition. It hints at the political depths of fear and loathing intrinsic to my court’s activities and tells people not to fuck with me. It reminds us where we’ve come from . . . and it doesn’t give away anything about where we’re going.”

  “But that doesn’t make any difference to a bunch of alien lobsters,” points out Su Ang. “They lack the reference points to understand it.” She moves to stand behind the throne. Amber glances at Pierre, waves him over.

  Pierre glances around, seeking real people, not the vacant eigenfaces of the zombies that give this scenery added biological texture. There in the red gown, isn’t that Donna the Journalist? And over there, too, with shorter hair and wearing male drag; she gets everywhere. That’s Boris, sitting behind the bishop.

  “You tell her,” Ang implores him.

  “I can’t,” he admits. “We’re trying to establish communication, aren’t we? But we don’t want to give too much away about what we are, how we think. A historical distancing act will keep them from learning too much about us. The phase-space of technological cultures that could have descended from these roots is too wide to analyze easily. So we’re leaving them with the lobster translators and not giving anything away. Try to stay in character as a fifteenth-century duchess from Albì—it’s a matter of national security.”

  “Humph.” Ang frowns as a flunky hustles forward to place a folding chair behind her. She turns to face the expanse of red-and-gold carpet that stretches to the doorway as trumpets blat and the doors swing open to admit the deputation of lobsters.

  The lobsters are as large as wolves, black and spiny and ominous. Their monochrome carapaces are at odds with the brightly colored garb of the human crowd. Their antennae are large and sharp as swords. But for all that they advance hesitantly, eye turrets swiveling from side to side as they take the scene in. Their tails drag
ponderously on the carpet, but they have no trouble standing.

  The first of the lobsters halts short of the throne and angles itself to train an eye on Amber. “Am inconsistent,” it complains. “There is no liquid hydrogen monoxide here, and you-species am misrepresented by initial contact. Inconsistency, explain?”

  “Welcome to the human physical space-traveling interface unit Field Circus,” Amber replies calmly. “I am pleased to see your translator is working adequately. You are correct, there is no water here. The lobsters don’t normally need it when they visit us. And we humans are not water-dwellers. May I ask who you are when you’re not wearing borrowed lobster bodies?”

  Confusion. The second lobster rears up and clatters its long, armored antennae together. Soldiers to either side tighten their grips on their spears, but it drops back down again soon enough.

  “We are the Wunch,” announces the first lobster, speaking clearly. “This is a body-compliant translation layer. Based on map received from yourspace, units forty thousand trillion light-kilometers ago?”

  “He means twenty years,” Pierre whispers on a private channel Amber has multicast for the other real humans in the audience chamber reality. “They’ve confused space and time for measurement purposes. Does this tell us something?”

  “Relatively little,” comments someone else—Chandra? A round of polite laughter greets the joke, and the tension in the room eases slightly.

  “We are the Wunch,” the lobster repeats. “We come to exchange interest. What have you got that we want?”

  Faint frown lines appear on Amber’s forehead. Pierre can see her thinking very rapidly. “We consider it impolite to ask,” she says quietly.

  Clatter of claws on underlying stone floor. Chatter of clicking mandibles. “You accept our translation?” asks the leader.

  “Are you referring to the transmission you sent us, uh, thirty thousand trillion light-kilometers behind?” asks Amber.

  The lobster bobs up and down on its legs. “True. We send.”

  “We cannot integrate that network,” Amber replies blandly, and Pierre forces himself to keep a straight face. (Not that the lobsters can read human body language yet, but they’ll undoubtedly be recording everything that happens here for future analysis.) “They come from a radically different species. Our goal in coming here is to connect our species to the network. We wish to exchange advantageous information with many other species.”

  Concern, alarm, agitation. “You cannot do that! You are not untranslatable entity signifier.”

  Amber raises a hand. “You said untranslatable entity signifier. I did not understand that. Can you paraphrase?”

  “We, like you, are not untranslatable entity signifier. The network is for untranslatable entity signifier. We are to the untranslatable concept #1 as a single-celled organism is to ourselves. You and we cannot untranslatable concept #2. To attempt trade with untranslatable entity signifier is to invite death or transition to untranslatable concept #1.”

  Amber snaps her fingers: Time freezes. She glances round at Su Ang, Pierre, the other members of her primary team. “Opinions, anyone?”

  Aineko, hitherto invisible, sits up on the carpet at the foot of the dais. “I’m not sure. The reason those macros are tagged is that there’s something wrong with their semantics.”

  “Wrong with—how?” asks Su Ang.

  The cat grins, cavernously, and begins to fade. “Wait!” snaps Amber.

  Aineko continues her fade, but leaves a shimmering presence behind: not a grin, but a neural network weighting map, three-dimensional and incomprehensibly complicated. “The untranslatable entity concept #1 when mapped onto the lobster’s grammar network has elements of ‘god’ overloaded with attributes of mysticism and zenlike incomprehensibility. But I’m pretty sure that what it really means is ‘optimized conscious upload that runs much faster than real time.’ A type-one weakly superhuman entity, like, um, the folks back home. The implication is that this Wunch wants us to view them as gods.” The cat fades back in. “Any takers?”

  “Small-town hustlers,” mutters Amber. “Talking big—or using a dodgy metagrammar that makes them sound bigger than they are—to bilk the hayseeds new to the big city.”

  “Most likely.” Aineko turns and begins to wash her flank.

  “What are we going to do?” asks Su Ang.

  “Do?” Amber raises a pencil-lined eyebrow, then flashes a grin that chops a decade off her apparent age. “We’re going to mess with their heads!” She snaps her fingers again and time unfreezes. There’s no change in continuity except that Aineko is still present, at the foot of the throne. The cat looks up and gives the queen a dirty look. “We understand your concern,” Amber says smoothly, “but we have already given you the physiology models and neural architecture of the bodies that you are wearing. We want to communicate. Why won’t you show us your real selves or your real language?”

  “This is trade language!” protests Lobster Number One. “Wunch am/are metabolically variable coalition from number of worlds. No uniformity of interface. Easiest to conform to one plan and speak one tongue optimized for your comprehension.”

  “Hmm.” Amber leans forward. “Let me see if I understand you. You are a coalition of individuals from a number of species. You prefer to use the common user interface model we sent you, and offered us the language module you’re using for an exchange? And you want to trade with us.”

  “Exchange interest,” the Wunch emphasizes, bouncing up and down on its legs. “Can offer much! Sense of identity of a thousand civilizations. Safe tunnels to a hundred archives on the net suitable for beings who are not untranslatable entity signifier. Able to control risks of communication. Have technique of manipulating matter at molecular level. Solution to algorithmic iterated systems based on quantum entanglement.”

  “Old-fashioned nanotechnology and shiny beads to dazzle the primitives,” Pierre mutters on Amber’s multicast channel. “How backward do they think we are?”

  “The physics model in here is really overdone,” comments Boris. “They may even think this is real, that we’re primitives coat-tailing it on the back of the lobsters’ efforts.”

  Amber forces a smile. “That is most interesting!” she trills at the Wunch’s representatives. “I have appointed two representatives who will negotiate with you; this is an internal contest within my own court. I commend to you Pierre Naqet, my own commercial representative. In addition, you may want to deal with Alan Glashwiecz, an independent factor who is not currently present. Others may come forward in due course if that is acceptable.”

  “It pleases us,” says Lobster Number One. “We are tired and disoriented by the long journey through gateways to this place. Request resumption of negotiations later?”

  “By all means.” Amber nods. A sergeant-at-arms, a mindless but impressive zimboe controlled by her spider’s nest of personality threads, blows a sharp note on his trumpet. The first audience is at an end.

  Outside the light cone of the Field Circus, on the other side of the spacelike separation between Amber’s little kingdom in motion and the depths of empire time that grip the solar system’s entangled quantum networks, a singular new reality is taking shape.

  Welcome to the moment of maximum change.

  About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind surrounded by an exocortex of distributed agents, threads of personality spun right out of their heads to run on the clouds of utility fog—infinitely flexible computing resources as thin as aerogel—in which they live. The foggy depths are alive with high-bandwidth sparkles; most of Earth’s biosphere has been wrapped in cotton wool and preserved for future examination. For every living human, a thousand million software agents carry information into the farthest corners of the consciousness address space.

  The sun, for so long an unremarkable mildly variable G2 dwarf, has vanished within a gray cloud that englobes it except for a narrow belt around the plane of the ecliptic. Sunlight falls, uncha
nged, on the inner planets: except for Mercury, which is no longer present, having been dismantled completely and turned into solar-powered high-temperature nanocomputers. A much fiercer light falls on Venus, now surrounded by glittering ferns of carbon crystals that pump angular momentum into the barely spinning planet via huge superconducting loops wound around its equator. This planet, too, is due to be dismantled. Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus—all sprout rings as impressive as Saturn’s. But the task of cannibalizing the gas giants will take many times longer than the small rocky bodies of the inner system.

  The ten billion inhabitants of this radically changed star system remember being human; almost half of them predate the millennium. Some of them still are human, untouched by the drive of metaevolution that has replaced blind Darwinian change with a goal-directed teleological progress. They cower in gated communities and hill forts, mumbling prayers and cursing the ungodly meddlers with the natural order of things. But eight out of every ten living humans are included in the phase-change. It’s the most inclusive revolution in the human condition since the discovery of speech.

  A million outbreaks of gray goo—runaway nanoreplicator excursions—threaten to raise the temperature of the biosphere dramatically. They’re all contained by the planetary-scale immune system fashioned from what was once the World Health Organization. Weirder catastrophes threaten the boson factories in the Oort cloud. Antimatter factories hover over the solar poles. Sol system shows all the symptoms of a runaway intelligence excursion, exuberant blemishes as normal for a technological civilization as skin problems on a human adolescent.

  The economic map of the planet has changed beyond recognition. Both capitalism and communism, bickering ideological children of a protoindustrial outlook, are as obsolete as the divine right of kings. Companies are alive, and dead people may live again, too. Globalism and tribalism have run to completion, diverging respectively into homogeneous interoperability and the Schwarzschild radius of insularity. Beings that remember being human plan the deconstruction of Jupiter, the creation of a great simulation space that will expand the habitat available within the solar system. By converting all the nonstellar mass of the solar system into processors, they can accommodate as many human-equivalent minds as a civilization with a planet hosting ten billion humans in orbit around every star in the galaxy.