Accelerando

by Charles Stross

  “Hey!” she yells, stumbling. Her mind’s a blur, optics refusing to respond and grab a biometric model of her assailant. It’s the frozen moment, the dead zone when online coverage fails, and the thief is running away before she can catch her balance or try to give chase. Plus, with her extensions off-line she doesn’t know how to yell “Stop, thief!” in Cantonese.

  Seconds later, the fighter is out of visual range and the state censorship field lets up. “Get him, you bastards!” she screams, but the curious shoppers simply stare at the rude foreign child. An elderly woman brandishes a disposable phonecam at her and screeches something back. Amber picks up her feet and runs. Already she can feel the subsonics from her luggage growling at her guts—it’s going to make a scene if she doesn’t catch up in time. Shoppers scatter, a woman with a baby carriage almost running her down in her panic to get away from it.

  By the time Amber reaches her terrified shoulder bag, the thief has disappeared: She has to spend almost a minute petting the scared luggage before it stops screeching and retracts its spines enough for her to pick it up. And by that time there’s a robocop in attendance. “Identify yourself,” it rasps in synthetic English.

  Amber stares at her bag in horror. There’s a huge gash in the side, and it’s far too light. It’s gone, she thinks, despairingly. He stole it. “Help,” she says faintly, holding up her bag for the distant policeman looking through the robot’s eyes. “Been stolen.”

  “What item missing?” asks the robot.

  “My Hello Kitty,” she says, batting her eyelashes, mendacity full-on at maximum utilization, prodding her conscience into submission, warning of dire consequences should the police discover the true nature of her pet cat. “My kitten’s been stolen! Can you help me?”

  “Certainly,” says the cop, resting a reassuring hand on her shoulder—a hand that turns into a steel armband, as it pushes her into a van and notifies her in formally stilted language that she is under arrest on suspicion of shoplifting and will be required to produce certificates of authenticity and a fully compliant ownership audit for all items in her possession if she wants to prove her innocence.

  By the time Amber’s meatbrain realizes that she is being politely arrested, some of her external threads have already started yelling for help and her m-commerce trackers have identified the station she’s being taken to by way of click-thru trails and an obliging software license manager. They spawn agents to go notify the Franklin trustees, Amnesty International, the Space and Freedom Party, and her father’s lawyers. As she’s being booked into a cerise-and-turquoise juvenile offenders holding room by a middle-aged policewoman, the phones on the front desk are already ringing with inquiries from attorneys, fast-food vendors, and a particularly on-the-ball celebrity magazine that’s been tracking her father’s connections. “Can you help me get my cat back?” she asks the policewoman earnestly.

  “Name,” the officer reads, eyes flickering from the simultaneous translation. “To please wax your identity stiffly.”

  “My cat has been stolen,” Amber insists.

  “Your cat?” The cop looks perplexed, then exasperated. Dealing with foreign teenagers who answer questions with gibberish isn’t in her repertoire. “We are asking your name?”

  “No,” says Amber. “It’s my cat. It has been stolen. My cat has been stolen.”

  “Aha! Your papers, please?”

  “Papers?” Amber is growing increasingly worried. She can’t feel the outside world; there’s a Faraday cage wrapped around the holding cell, and it’s claustrophobically quiet inside. “I want my cat! Now!”

  The cop snaps her fingers, then reaches into her own pocket and produces an ID card, which she points to insistently. “Papers,” she repeats. “Or else.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Amber wails.

  The cop stares at her oddly. “Wait.” She rises and leaves, and a minute later returns with a thin-faced man in a business suit and wire-rimmed glasses that glow faintly.

  “You are making a scene,” he says, rudely and abruptly. “What is your name? Tell me truthfully, or you’ll spend the night here.”

  Amber bursts into tears. “My cat’s been stolen,” she chokes out.

  The detective and the cop obviously don’t know how to deal with this scene; it’s freaking them out, with its overtones of emotional messiness and sinister diplomatic entanglement. “You wait here,” they say, and back out of the cell, leaving her alone with a plastic animatronic koala and a cheap Lebanese coffee machine.

  The implications of her loss—of Aineko’s abduction—are sinking in, finally, and Amber is weeping loudly and hopelessly. It’s hard to deal with bereavement and betrayal at any age, and the cat has been her wisecracking companion and consolation for a year, the rock of certainty that gave her the strength to break free from her crazy mother. To lose her cat to a body shop in Hong Kong, where she will probably be cut up for spare circuitry or turned into soup is too horrible to contemplate. Filled with despair and hopeless anguish, Amber howls at the interrogation room walls while outside, trapped threads of her consciousness search for backups to synchronize with.

  But after an hour, just as she’s quieting down into a slough of raw despair, there’s a knock—a knock!—at the door. An inquisitive head pops in. “Please to come with us?” It’s the female cop with the bad translationware. She takes in Amber’s sobbing and tuts under her breath, but as Amber stands up and shambles toward her, she pulls back.

  At the front desk of a cubicle farm full of police bureaucrats in various states of telepresence, the detective is waiting with a damp cardboard box wrapped in twine. “Please identify,” he asks, snipping the string.

  Amber shakes her head, dizzy with the flow of threads homing in to synchronize their memories with her. “Is it—” she begins to ask as the lid comes apart, wet pulp disintegrating. A triangular head pops up, curiously, sniffing the air. Bubbles blow from brown-furred nostrils. “What took you so long?” asks the cat, as she reaches into the box and picks her up, fur wet and matted with seawater.

  “If you want me to go fix your alien, for starters I want you to give me reality alteration privileges,” says Amber. “Then I want you to find the latest instances of everyone who came here with me—round up the usual suspects—and give them root privileges, too. Then we’ll want access to the other embedded universes in the DMZ. Finally, I want guns. Lots of guns.”

  “That may be difficult,” says the ghost. “Many other humans reached halting state long since. Is at least one other still alive, but not accessible for duration of eschatological experiment in progress. Not all were recorded with version control engine; others were-is lost in DMZ. We-are can provide you with extreme access to the demilitarized zone, but query the need for kinetic energy weapons.”

  Amber sighs. “You guys really are media illiterates, aren’t you?” She stands up and stretches, feeling a facsimile of sleep’s enervation leaching from her muscles. “I’ll also need my—” It’s on the tip of her tongue: There’s something missing. “Hang on. There’s something I’ve forgotten.” Something important, she thinks, puzzled. Something that used to be around all the time that would . . . know? . . . purr? . . . help? “Never mind,” she hears her lips say. “This other human. I really want her. Nonnegotiable. All right?”

  “That may be difficult,” repeats the ghost. “Entity is looping in a recursively confined universe.”

  “Eh?” Amber blinks at it. “Would you mind rephrasing that? Or illustrating?”

  “Illustration.” The ghost folds the air in the room into a glowing ball of plasma, shaped like a Klein bottle. Amber’s eyes cross as she looks at it. “Closest reference from human historical database is Descartes’s demon. This entity has retreated within a closed space, but is now unsure whether it is objectively real or not. In any event, it refuses to interact.”

  “Well, can you get me into that space?” asks Amber. Pocket universes she can deal with; it’s part and pa
rcel of her life. “Give me some leverage—”

  “Risk may attach to this course of action,” warns the ghost.

  “I don’t care,” she says irritably. “Just put me there. It’s someone I know, isn’t it? Send me into her dream, and I’ll wake her up, okay?”

  “Understood,” says the ghost. “Prepare yourself.”

  Without any warning, Amber is somewhere else. She glances around, taking in an ornate mosaic floor, whitewashed walls set with open windows through which stars twinkle faintly in the night sky. Her clothing has somehow been replaced by sexy lingerie under a nearly transparent robe, and her hair’s grown longer by about half a meter. It’s all very disorienting. The walls are stone, and she stands in a doorway to a room with nothing in it but a bed. Occupied by—

  “Shit,” she exclaims. “Who are you?” The young and incredibly, classically beautiful woman in the bed looks at her vacantly, then rolls over on her side. She isn’t wearing a stitch, she’s completely hairless from the ears down, and her languid posture is one of invitation. “Yes?” Amber asks. “What is it?”

  The woman on the bed beckons to her slowly. Amber shakes her head. “Sorry, that’s just not my scene.” She backs away into the corridor, unsteady in unaccustomedly high heels. “This is some sort of male fantasy, isn’t it? And a dumb adolescent one at that.” She looks around again. In one direction, a corridor heads past more open doorways, and in the other, it ends with a spiral staircase. Amber concentrates, trying to tell the universe to take her to the logical destination, but nothing happens. “Looks like I’m going to have to do this the hard way. I wish—” She frowns. She was about to wish that someone else was there, but she can’t remember who. So she takes a deep breath and heads toward the staircase.

  “Up or down?” she asks herself. Up—it seems logical, if you’re going to have a tower, to sleep up at the top of it. So she climbs the steps carefully, holding the spiraling rail. I wonder who designed this space? And what role am I supposed to fit into in their scenario? On second thought, the latter question strikes her as laughable. Wait till I give him an earful . . .

  There’s a plain wooden door at the top of the staircase, with a latch that isn’t fastened. Amber pauses for a few seconds, nerving herself to confront a sleeper so wrapped in solipsism that he’s built this sex-fantasy castle around himself. I hope it isn’t Pierre, she thinks grimly as she pushes the door inward.

  The room is bare and floored in wood. There’s no furniture, just an open window set high in one wall. A man sits cross-legged and robed, with his back to her, mumbling quietly to himself and nodding slightly. Her breath catches as she realizes who it is. Oh shit! Her eyes widen. Is this what’s been inside his head all along?

  “I did not summon you,” Sadeq says calmly, not turning round to look at her. “Go away, tempter. You aren’t real.”

  Amber clears her throat. “Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re wrong,” she says. “We’ve got an alien monster to catch. Want to come hunting?”

  Sadeq stops nodding. He sits up slowly, stretching his spine, then stands up and turns round. His eyes glint in the moonlight. “That’s odd.” He undresses her with his gaze. “You look like someone I used to know. You’ve never done that before.”

  “For fuck’s sake!” Amber nearly explodes, but catches herself after a moment. “What is this, a Solipsists United chapterhouse meeting?”

  “I—” Sadeq looks puzzled. “I’m sorry, are you claiming to be real?”

  “As real as you are.” Amber reaches out and grabs a hand. He doesn’t resist as she pulls him toward the doorway.

  “You’re the first visitor I’ve ever had.” He sounds shocked.

  “Listen, come on.” She tugs him after her, down the spiral staircase to the floor below. “Do you want to stay here? Really?” She glances back at him. “What is this place?”

  “Hell is a perversion of heaven,” he says slowly, running the fingers of his free hand through his beard. Abruptly, he reaches out and grabs her around the waist, then yanks her toward him. “We’ll have to see how real you are—” Amber, who is not used to this kind of treatment, responds by stomping on his instep and backhanding him hard.

  “You’re real!” he cries, as he falls back against the staircase. “Forgive me, please! I had to know—”

  “Know what?” she snarls. “Lay one finger on me again, and I’ll leave you here to rot!” She’s already spawning the ghost that will signal the alien outside to pull her out of this pocket universe: It’s a serious threat.

  “But I had to—wait. You have free will. You just demonstrated that.” He’s breathing heavily and looking up at her imploringly. “I’m sorry, I apologize! But I had to know whether you were another zombie. Or not.”

  “A zombie?” She looks round. Another living doll has appeared behind her, standing in an open doorway wearing a skintight leather suit with a cutaway crotch. She beckons to Sadeq invitingly. Another body wearing strategically placed strips of rubber mewls at her feet, writhing for attention. Amber raises an eyebrow in disgust. “You thought I was one of those?”

  Sadeq nods. “They’ve got cleverer lately. Some of them can talk. I nearly mistook one for—” He shudders convulsively. “Unclean!”

  “Unclean.” Amber looks down at him thoughtfully. “This isn’t really your personal paradise after all, is it?” After a moment she holds out a hand to him. “Come on.”

  “I’m sorry I thought you were a zombie,” he repeats.

  “Under the circumstances, I think I forgive you,” she says. Then the ghost yanks them both back to the universe outside.

  More memories converge on the present moment:

  The Ring Imperium is a huge cluster of self-replicating robots that Amber has assembled in low-Jupiter orbit, fueled by the mass and momentum of the small moon J-47 Barney, to provide a launching platform for the interstellar probe her father’s business partners are helping her to build. It’s also the seat of her court, the leading jurisprudential nexus in the outer solar system. Amber is the Queen, here, arbitrator and ruler. And Sadeq is her judge and counsel.

  A plaintiff Amber only knows as a radar blip thirty light-minutes away has filed a lawsuit in her court, alleging malfeasance, heresy, and barratry against a semisentient corporate pyramid scheme that arrived in Jovian space twelve million seconds ago and currently seems set on converting every other intelligence in the region to its peculiar meme-set. A whole bundle of multithreaded countersuits are dragging at her attention, in a counterattack alleging that the light blip is in violation of copyright, patent, and trade secrecy laws by discussing the interloper’s intentions.

  Right now, Amber isn’t home on the Ring to hear the case in person. She’s left Sadeq behind to grapple with the balky mechanics of her legal system—tailor-designed to make corporate litigation a pain in the ass—while she drags Pierre off on a diplomatic visit to another Jovian colony, the Nursery Republic. Planted by the Franklin Trust’s orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, the Nursery has grown over the past four years into a spindly snowflake three kilometers across. A slow-growing O’Neil cylinder sprouts from its hub. Most of the inhabitants of the space station are less than two years old, precocious additions to the Trust’s borganism.

  There’s a piazza, paved with something not unlike rough marble, on the side of a hill that clings insecurely to the inner edge of a spinning cup. The sky is a black vastness overhead, wheeling slowly around a central axis lined up on Jupiter. Amber sprawls in a wicker chair, her legs stretched out before her and one arm flung across her forehead. The wreckage of an incredible meal is scattered across the tables around her. Torpid and full, she strokes the cat that lies curled in her lap. Pierre is off somewhere, touring one or another of the prototype ecosystems that one or another of the borg’s special interest minds is testing. Amber, for her part, can’t be bothered. She’s just had a great meal, she doesn’t have any lawsuits to worry about, everything back home is on the critpath, and quality time like th
is is so hard to come by—

  “Do you keep in touch with your father?” asks Monica.

  “Mmm.” The cat purrs quietly, and Amber strokes its flank. “We e-mail. Sometimes.”

  “I just wondered.” Monica is the local borg den mother, willowy and brown-eyed and with a deceptively lazy drawl—Yorkshire English overlaid with Silicon Valley speak. “I hear from him, y’know. From time to time. Now that Gianni’s retired, he doesn’t have much to do down-well anymore. So he was talking about coming out here.”

  “What? To Perijove?” Amber’s eyes open in alarm. Aineko stops purring and looks round at Monica accusingly.

  “Don’t worry.” Monica sounds vaguely amused. “He wouldn’t cramp your style, I think.”

  “But, out here—” Amber sits up. “Damn,” she says, quietly. “What got into him?”

  “Middle-aged restlessness, my down-well sibs say.” Monica shrugs. “This time Annette didn’t stop him. But he hasn’t made up his mind to travel yet.”

  “Good. Then he might not—” Amber stops. “The phrase ‘made up his mind.’ What exactly do you mean?”

  Monica’s smile mocks her for a few seconds before the older woman surrenders. “He’s talking about uploading.”

  “Is that embarrassing or what?” asks Ang. Amber glances at her, mildly annoyed, but Ang isn’t looking her way. So much for friends, Amber thinks. Being queen of all you survey is a great way of breaking up peer relationships—

  “He won’t do it,” Amber predicts. “Dad’s burned out.”

  “He thinks he’ll get it back if he optimizes himself for re-entrancy.” Monica continues to smile. “I’ve been telling him it’s just what he needs.”

  “I do not want my father bugging me. Or my mother. Or Auntie ’Nette and Uncle Gianni. Memo to immigration control: No entry rights for Manfred Macx or the other named individuals without clearance through the Queen’s secretary.”