A more mature version of Amber lives down in the surging chaos of near-Jupiter space; there’s an instance of Pierre, too, although he has relocated light-hours away, near Neptune. Whether she still sometimes thinks of her relativistic twin, nobody can tell. In a way, it doesn’t matter, because by the time the Field Circus returns to Jupiter orbit, as much subjective time will have elapsed for the fast-thinkers back home as will flash by in the real universe between this moment and the end of the era of star formation, many billions of years hence.
“As your theologian, I am telling you that they are not gods.”
Amber nods patiently. She watches Sadeq closely.
Sadeq coughs grumpily. “Tell her, Boris.”
Boris tilts his chair back and turns it toward the Queen. “He is right, Amber. They are traders, and not clever ones, either. Is hard to get handle on their semiotics while they hide behind the lobster model we uploaded in their direction twenty years ago, but are certainly not crusties, and are definite not human either. Or transhuman. My guess, they are bunch of dumb hicks who get hands on toys left behind by much smarter guys. Like the rejectionist factions back home. Imagine they are waking up one morning and find everyone else is gone to the great upload environment in the sky. Leaving them with the planet to themselves. What you think they do with whole world, with any gadgets they trip over? Some will smash everything they come across, but others not so stupid. But they think small. Scavengers, deconstructionists. Their whole economic outlook are negative-sum game. Go visit aliens to rip them off, take ideas, not expand selves and transcend.”
Amber stands up, walks toward the windows at the front of the bridge. In black jeans and chunky sweater, she barely resembles the feudal queen whose role she plays for tourists. “Taking them on board was a big risk. I’m not happy about it.”
“How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Sadeq smiles crookedly. “We have an answer. But they may not even realize they are dancing with us. These are not the gods you were afraid of finding.”
“No.” Amber sighs. “Not too different from us, though. I mean, we aren’t exactly well adapted to this environment, are we? We tote these body-images along, rely on fake realities that we can map into our human-style senses. We’re emulations, not native AIs. Where’s Su Ang?”
“I can find her.” Boris frowns.
“I asked her to analyze the alien’s arrival times,” Amber adds as an afterthought. “They’re close—too close. And they showed up too damn fast when we first tickled the router. I think Aineko’s theories are flawed. The real owners of this network we’ve plugged into probably use much higher-level protocols to communicate; sapient packets to build effective communications gateways. This Wunch, they probably lurk in wait for newbies to exploit. Pedophiles hiding outside the school gate. I don’t want to give them that opportunity before we make contact with the real thing!”
“You may have little choice,” says Sadeq. “If they are without insight, as you suspect, they may become afraid if you edit their environment. They may lash out. I doubt they even understand how they created the contaminated metagrammar that they transmitted back to us. It will be to them just a tool that makes simpleminded aliens more gullible, easier to negotiate with. Who knows where they got it?”
“A grammatical weapon.” Boris spins himself round slowly. “Build propaganda into your translation software if you want to establish a favorable trading relationship. How cute. Haven’t these guys ever heard of Newspeak?”
“Probably not,” Amber says slowly, pausing for a moment to spawn spectator threads to run down the book and all three movie versions of 1984, followed by the sharecropped series of sequel novels. She shivers uncomfortably as she reintegrates the memories. “Ick. That’s not a very nice vision. Reminds me of”—she snaps her fingers, trying to remember Dad’s favorite—“Dilbert.”
“Friendly fascism,” says Sadeq. “It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us.”
“I think we ought to see how Pierre is doing,” Amber says aloud. “I certainly don’t want them poisoning him.” Grin. “That’s my job.”
Donna the Journalist is everywhere simultaneously. It’s a handy talent: Makes for even-handed news coverage when you can interview both sides at the same time.
Right now, one of her is in the bar with Alan Glashwiecz, who evidently hasn’t realized that he can modulate his ethanol dehydrogenase levels voluntarily and who is consequently well on the way to getting steaming drunk. Donna is assisting the process; she finds it fascinating to watch this bitter young man who has lost his youth to a runaway self-enhancement process.
“I’m a full partner,” he says bitterly, “in Glashwiecz and Selves. I’m one of the Selves. We’re all partners, but it’s only Glashwiecz Prime who has any clout. The old bastard—if I’d known I’d grow up to become that, I’d have run away to join some hippie antiglobalist commune instead.” He drains his glass, demonstrating his oropharyngeal integrity, snaps his fingers for a refill. “I just woke up one morning to find I’d been resurrected by my older self. He said he valued my youthful energy and optimistic outlook, then offered me a minority stake with stock options that would take five years to vest. The bastard.”
“Tell me about it,” Donna coaxes sympathetically. “Here we are, stranded among idiopathic types, not among them a single multiplex—”
“Damn straight.” Another bottle of Bud appears in Glashwiecz’s hands. “One moment I’m standing in this apartment in Paris facing total humiliation by a cross-dressing commie asshole called Macx and his slimy French manager bitch, and the next I’m on the carpet in front of my alter ego’s desk and he’s offering me a job as junior partner. It’s seventeen years later, all the weird nonsense that guy Macx was getting up to is standard business practice, and there’s six of me in the outer office taking research notes because myself-as-senior-partner doesn’t trust anyone else to work with him. It’s humiliating, that’s what it is.”
“Which is why you’re here.” Donna waits while he takes a deep swig from the bottle.
“Yeah. Better than working for myself, I can tell you—it’s not like being self-employed. You know how you sometimes get distant from your work? It’s really bad when you see yourself from the outside with another half gigasecond of experience and the new-you isn’t just distant from the client base, he’s distant from the you-you. So I went back to college and crammed up on artificial intelligence law and ethics, the jurisprudence of uploading, and recursive tort. Then I volunteered to come out here. He’s still handling her account, and I figured—” Glashwiecz shrugged.
“Did any of the delta-yous contest the arrangement?” asks Donna, spawning ghosts to focus in on him from all angles. For a moment, she wonders if this is wise. Glashwiecz is dangerous—the power he wields over Amber’s mother, to twist her arm into extending his power of attorney, hints at dark secrets. Maybe there’s more to her persistent lawsuits than a simple family feud?
Glashwiecz’s face is a study in perspectives. “Oh, one did,” he says dismissively. One of Donna’s viewports captures the contemptuous twitch in his cheek. “I left her in my apartment freezer. Figured it’d be a while before anybody noticed. It’s not murder—I’m still here, right?—and I’m not about to claim tort against myself. I think. It’d be a left-recursive lawsuit, anyway, if I did it to myself.”
“The aliens,” prompts Donna, “and the trial by combat. What’s your take on that?”
Glashwiecz sneers. “Little bitch-queen takes after her father, doesn’t she? He’s a bastard, too. The competitive selection filter she’s imposed is evil—it’ll cripple her society if she leaves it in place for too long, but in the short run it’s a major advantage. So she wants me to trade for my life, and I don’t get to lay my formal claim against her unless I can outperform her pet day trader,
that punk from Marseilles. Yes? What he doesn’t know is, I’ve got an edge. Full disclosure.” He lifts his bottle drunkenly. “Y’see, I know that cat. One that’s gotta brown at-sign on its side, right? It used to belong to queenie-darling’s old man, Manfred, the bastard. You’ll see. Her mom, Pamela, Manfred’s ex, she’s my client in this case. And she gave me the cat’s ackle keys. Access control.” (Hic.) “Get ahold of its brains and grab that damn translation layer it stole from the CETI@home mob. Then I can talk to them straight.”
The drunken, future-shocked lawyer is on a roll. “I’ll get their shit, and I’ll disassemble it. Disassembly is the future of industry, y’know?”
“Disassembly?” asks the reporter, watching him in disgusted fascination from behind her mask of objectivity.
“Hell, yeah. There’s a singularity going on, that implies disequilibrium. An’ wherever there’s a disequilibrium, someone is going to get rich disassembling the leftovers. Listen, I once knew this econo—economist, that’s what he was. Worked for the eurofeds, rubber fetishist. He tole me about this fact’ry near Barcelona. It had a disassembly line running in it. ’Spensive servers in boxes’d roll in at one end. Be unpacked. Then workers’d take the cases off, strip the disk drives, memory, processors, bits’n’guts out. Bag and tag job. Throw the box, what’s left, ’cause it wasn’t worth dick. Thing is, the manufact’rer charged so much for parts it was worth their while to buy whole machines’n’strip them. To bits. And sell the bits. Hell, they got an enterprise award for ingenuity! All ’cause they knew that disassembly was the wave of the future.”
“What happened to the factory?” asks Donna, unable to tear her eyes away.
Glashwiecz waves an empty bottle at the starbow that stretches across the ceiling. “Ah, who gives a fuck? They closedown round about” (hic) “ten years ’go. Moore’s Law topped out, killed the market. But disassembly—production line cannibalism—it’sa way to go. Take old assets an’ bring new life to them. A fully ’preciated fortune.” He grins, eyes unfocused with greed. “ ’S what I’m gonna do to those space lobsters. Learn to talk their language an’ll never know what hit ’em.”
The tiny starship drifts in high orbit above a turbid brown soup of atmosphere. Deep in the gravity well of Hyundai +4904/-56, it’s a speck of dust trapped between two light sources: the brilliant sapphire stare of Amber’s propulsion lasers in Jovian orbit, and the emerald insanity of the router itself, a hypertoroid spun from strange matter.
The bridge of the Field Circus is in constant use at this time, a meeting ground for minds with access to the restricted areas. Pierre is spending more and more time here, finding it a convenient place to focus his trading campaign and arbitrage macros. At the same time that Donna is picking the multiplexed lawyer’s strategy apart, Pierre is present in neomorphic form—a quicksilver outline of humanity, six-armed and two-headed, scanning with inhuman speed through tensor maps of the information traffic density surrounding the router’s clump of naked singularities.
There’s a flicker in the emptiness at the rear of the bridge, then Su Ang has always been there. She watches Pierre in contemplative silence for a minute. “Do you have a moment?”
Pierre superimposes himself: One shadowy ghost keeps focused on the front panel, but another instance turns round, crosses his arms, waits for her to speak.
“I know you’re busy—” she begins, then stops. “Is it that important?” she asks.
“It is.” Pierre blurs, resynchronizing his instances. “The router—there are four wormholes leading off from it, did you know that? Each of them is radiating at about 1011 Kelvins, and every wavelength is carrying data connections, multiplexed, with a protocol stack that’s at least eleven layers deep but maybe more—they show signs of self-similarity in the framing headers. You know how much data that is? It’s about 1012 times as much as our high-bandwidth uplink from home. But compared to what’s on the other side of the ’holes—” He shakes his head.
“It’s big?”
“It’s unimaginably big! These wormholes, they’re a low-bandwidth link compared to the minds they’re hooking up to.” He blurs in front of her, unable to stay still and unable to look away from the front panel. Excitement or agitation? Su Ang can’t tell. With Pierre, sometimes the two states are indistinguishable. He gets emotional easily. “I think we have the outline of the answer to the Fermi paradox. Transcendents don’t go traveling because they can’t get enough bandwidth—trying to migrate through one of these wormholes would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly, if they are what I think they are—and the slower-than-light route is out, too, because they couldn’t take enough computronium along. Unless—”
He’s off again. But before he can blur out, Su Ang steps across and lays hands on him. “Pierre. Calm down. Disengage. Empty yourself.”
“I can’t!” He really is agitated, she sees. “I’ve got to figure out the best trading strategy to get Amber off the hook with that lawsuit, then tell her to get us out of here; being this close to the router is seriously dangerous! The Wunch are the least of it.”
“Stop.”
He pauses his multiplicity of presences, converges on a single identity focused on the here and now. “Yes?”
“That’s better.” She walks round him, slowly. “You’ve got to learn to deal with stress more appropriately.”
“Stress!” Pierre snorts. He shrugs, an impressive gesture with three sets of shoulder blades. “That’s something I can turn off whenever I need to. Side effect of this existence; we’re pigs in cyberspace, wallowing in fleshy simulations but unable to experience the new environment in the raw. What did you want from me, Ang? Honestly? I’m a busy man, I’ve got a trading network to set up.”
“We’ve got a problem with the Wunch right now, even if you think something worse is out there,” Ang says patiently. “Boris thinks they’re parasites, negative-sum gamers who stalk newbies like us. Glashwiecz is apparently talking about cutting a deal with them. Amber’s suggestion is that you ignore them completely, cut them out, and talk to anyone else who’ll listen.”
“Anyone else who’ll listen, right,” Pierre says heavily. “Any other gems of wisdom to pass on from the throne?”
Ang takes a deep breath. He’s infuriating, she realizes. And worst of all, he doesn’t realize. Infuriating but cute. “You’re setting up a trading network, yes?” she asks.
“Yes. A standard network of independent companies, instantiated as cellular automata within the Ring Imperium switched legal service environment.” He relaxes slightly. “Each one has access to a compartmentalized chunk of intellectual property and can call on the corrected parser we got from that cat. They’re set up to communicate with a blackboard system—a souk—and I’m bringing up a link to the router, a multicast link that’ll broadcast the souk’s existence to anyone who’s listening. Trade . . .” His eyebrows furrow. “There are at least two different currency standards in this network, used to buy quality-of-service precedence and bandwidth. They depreciate with distance, as if the whole concept of money was invented to promote the development of long-range network links. If I can get in first, when Glashwiecz tries to cut in on the dealing by offering IP at discounted rates—”
“He’s not going to, Pierre,” she says as gently as possible. “Listen to what I said. Glashwiecz is going to focus on the Wunch. He’s going to offer them a deal. Amber wants you to ignore them. Got that?”
“Got it.” There’s a hollow bong! from one of the communication bells. “Hey, that’s interesting.”
“What is?” She stretches, neck extending snakelike so that she can see the window on underlying reality that’s flickered into existence in the air before him.
“An ack from”—he pauses, then plucks a neatly reified concept from the screen in front of him and presents it to her in a silvery caul of light—“about two hundred light years away! Someone wants to talk.” He smiles. Then the front panel workstation bongs again. “Hey again. I wonder w
hat that says.”
It’s the work of a moment to pipe the second message through the translator. Oddly, it doesn’t translate at first. Pierre has to correct for some weird destructive interference in the fake lobster network before it’ll spill its guts. “That’s interesting,” he says.
“I’ll say.” Ang lets her neck collapse back to normal. “I’d better go tell Amber.”
“You do that,” Pierre says worriedly. He makes eye contact with her, but what she’s hoping to see in his face just isn’t there. He’s wearing his emotions entirely on the surface. “I’m not surprised their translator didn’t want to pass that message along.”
“It’s a deliberately corrupted grammar,” Ang murmurs, and bangs out in the direction of Amber’s audience chamber, “and they’re actually making threats.” The Wunch, it seems, have acquired a very bad reputation somewhere along the line—and Amber needs to know.
Glashwiecz leans toward Lobster Number One, stomach churning. It’s only a real-time kilosecond since his barroom interview, but in the intervening subjective time he’s abolished a hangover, honed his brief, and decided to act. In the Tuileries. “You’ve been lied to,” he confides quietly, trusting the privacy ackles that he browbeat Amber’s mother into giving him—access lists that give him a degree of control over the regime within this virtual universe that the cat dragged in.
“Lied? Context rendered horizontal in past, or subjected to grammatical corruption? Linguistic evil?”
“The latter.” Glashwiecz enjoys this, even though it forces him to get rather closer to the two-meter-long virtual crustacean than he’d like. Showing a mark how they’ve been scammed is always good, especially when you hold the keys to the door of the cage they’re locked inside. “They are not telling you the truth about this system.”
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