“They’re not sending us power.” Aineko materializes fully now, a large orange-and-white cat with a swirl of brown fur in the shape on an @-symbol covering her ribs. For whatever reason, she plants herself on the table tauntingly close to Boris’s velociraptor body’s nose. “No propulsion laser means insufficient bandwidth. They’re talking in Latin- 1 text at 1200 baud, if you care to know.” (Which is an insult, given the ship’s multi-avabit storage capacity—one avabit is Avogadro’s number of bits; about 1023 bytes, several billion times the size of the Internet in 2001—and outrageous communications bandwidth.) “Amber says, come and see her now. Audience chamber. Informal, of course. I think she wants to discuss it.”
“Informal? Am all right without change bodies?”
The cat sniffs. “I’m wearing a real fur coat,” it declares haughtily, “but no knickers.” Then blinks out a fraction of a second ahead of the snicker-snack of Bandersnatch-like jaws.
“Come on,” says Pierre, standing up. “Time to see what Her Majesty wants with us today.”
Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally becoming visible on a cosmological scale.
There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various states of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of them cluster where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in the water zone around old Earth. Earth’s biosphere has been in the intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization can fix them—gray goo, thylacines, dragons. The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster so thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red ball of wool the size of a young red giant.
Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts. Now the brightly burning beacon of sapience isn’t held by humans anymore—their cross-infectious enthusiasms have spread to a myriad of other hosts, several types of which are qualitatively better at thinking. At last count, there were about a thousand nonhuman intelligent species in Sol space, split evenly between posthumans on one side, naturally self-organizing AIs in the middle, and mammalian nonhumans on the other. The common mammal neural chassis is easily upgraded to human-style intelligence in most species that can carry, feed and cool a half kilogram of gray matter, and the descendants of a hundred ethics-challenged doctoral theses are now demanding equal rights. So are the unquiet dead: the panopticon-logged net ghosts of people who lived recently enough to imprint their identities on the information age, and the ambitious theological engineering schemes of the Reformed Tiplerite Church of Latter-Day Saints (who want to emulate all possible human beings in real time, so that they can have the opportunity to be saved).
The human memesphere is coming alive, although how long it remains recognizably human is open to question. The informational density of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro’s number of bits per mole, one bit per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter of the inner planets (apart from Earth, preserved for now like a picturesque historic building stranded in an industrial park) is converted into computronium. And it’s not just the inner system. The same forces are at work on Jupiter’s moons, and those of Saturn, although it’ll take thousands of years rather than mere decades to dismantle the gas giants themselves. Even the entire solar energy budget isn’t enough to pump Jupiter’s enormous mass to orbital velocity in less than centuries. The fast-burning primitive thinkers descended from the African plains apes may have vanished completely or transcended their fleshy architecture before the solar Matrioshka brain is finished.
It won’t be long now . . .
Meanwhile, there’s a party brewing down in Saturn’s well.
Sirhan’s lily-pad city floats inside a gigantic and nearly invisible sphere in Saturn’s upper atmosphere; a balloon kilometers across with a shell of fullerene-reinforced diamond below and a hot hydrogen gasbag above. It’s one of several hundred multimegaton soap bubbles floating in the sea of turbulent hydrogen and helium that is the upper atmosphere of Saturn, seeded there by the Society for Creative Terraforming, subcontractors for the 2074 Worlds’ Fair.
The cities are elegant, grown from a conceptual seed a few mega-words long. Their replication rate is slow (it takes months to build a bubble), but in only a couple of decades exponential growth will have paved the stratosphere with human-friendly terrain. Of course, the growth rate will slow toward the end, as it takes longer to fractionate the metal isotopes out of the gas giant’s turbid depths, but before that happens the first fruits of the robot factories on Ganymede will be pouring hydrocarbons down into the mix. Eventually Saturn—cloud-top gravity a human-friendly eleven meters per second squared—will have a planetwide biosphere with nearly a hundred times the surface area of Earth. And a bloody good thing indeed this will be, for otherwise Saturn is no use to anyone except as a fusion fuel bunker for the deep future when the sun’s burned down.
This particular lily pad is carpeted in grass, the hub of the disk rising in a gentle hill surmounted by the glowering concrete hump of the Boston Museum of Science. It looks curiously naked, shorn of its backdrop of highways and the bridges of the Charles River—but even the generous kiloton dumb matter load-outs of the skyhooks that lifted it into orbit wouldn’t have stretched to bringing its framing context along with it. Probably someone will knock up a cheap diorama backdrop out of utility fog, Sirhan thinks, but for now the museum stands proud and isolated, a solitary redoubt of classical learning in exile from the fast-thinking core of the solar system.
“Waste of money,” grumbles the woman in black. “Whose stupid idea was this, anyway?” She jabs the diamond ferrule of her cane at the museum.
“It’s a statement,” Sirhan says absently. “You know the kind: We’ve got so many newtons to burn we can send our cultural embassies wherever we like. The Louvre is on its way to Pluto, did you hear that?”
“Waste of energy.” She lowers her cane reluctantly and leans on it. Pulls a face: “It’s not right.”
“You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn’t you?” Sirhan prods. “What was it like then?”
“What was it . . . ? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had plenty for bombers,” she says dismissively. “We knew it would be okay. If it hadn’t been for those damn meddlesome posthumanists—” Her wrinkled, unnaturally aged face scowls at him furiously from underneath hair that has faded to the color of rotten straw, but he senses a subtext of self-deprecating irony that he doesn’t understand. “Like your grandfather, damn him. If I was young again I’d go and piss on his grave to show him what I think of what he did. If he has a grave,” she adds, almost fondly.
Memo checkpoint: log family history, Sirhan tells one of his ghosts. As a dedicated historian, he records every experience routinely, both before it enters his narrative of consciousness—efferent signals are the cleanest—and also his own stream of selfhood, against some future paucity of memory. But his grandmother has been remarkably consistent over the decades in her refusal to adapt to the new modalities.
“You’re recording this, aren’t you?” she sniffs.
“I’m not recording it, Grandmama,” he says gently, “I’m just preserving my memories for future generations.”
“Hah! We’ll see,” she says suspiciously. Then she surprises him with a bark of laughter, cut off abruptly. “No, you’ll see, darling. I won’t be around to be disappointed.”
“Are you going to tell me about my grandfather?” asks Sirhan.
“Why should I bother? I know you posthumans, you’ll just go and ask his ghost yourself. Don’t try to deny it! There are two sides to every story, child, and he’s had more than his fair share of ears, the sleazebag. Leaving me to bring up your mother on my own, and nothing but a bunch of worthless intellectual property and a dozen lawsuits from the Mafiya to do it with. I don’t know what I ever saw in him.” Sirhan’s voice-stress monitor detects a distinct hint of untruth in this assertion. “He’s worthless trash, and don’t you forget it. Lazy idiot couldn’t even form just one start-up on his own; he had to give it all away, all the fruits of his genius.”
While she rambles on, occasionally punctuating her characterization with sharp jabs of the cane, Pamela leads Sirhan on a slow, wavering stroll that veers around one side of the museum, until they’re standing next to a starkly engineered antique loading bay. “He should have tried real communism instead,” she harrumphs. “Put some steel into him, shake those starry-eyed visionary positive-sum daydreams loose. You knew where you were in the old times, and no mistake. Humans were real humans, work was real work, and corporations were just things that did as we told them. And then, when she went to the bad, that was all his fault, too, you know.”
“She? You mean my, ah, mother?” Sirhan diverts his primary sensorium back to Pamela’s vengeful muttering. There are aspects to this story that he isn’t completely familiar with, angles he needs to sketch in so that he can satisfy himself that all is as it should be when the bailiffs go in to repossess Amber’s mind.
“He sent her our cat. Of all the mean-spirited, low, downright dishonest things he ever did, that was the worst part of it. That cat was mine, but he reprogrammed it to lead her astray. And it succeeded admirably. She was only twelve at the time, an impressionable age, I’m sure you’d agree. I was trying to raise her right. Children need moral absolutes, especially in a changing world, even if they don’t like it much at the time. Self-discipline and stability, you can’t function as an adult without them. I was afraid that with all her upgrades she’d never really get a handle on who she was, that she’d end up more machine than woman. But Manfred never really understood childhood, mostly on account of his never growing up. He always was inclined to meddle.”
“Tell me about the cat,” Sirhan says quietly. One glance at the loading bay door tells him that it’s been serviced recently. A thin patina of expended foglets have formed a snowy scab around its edges, flaking off like blue refractive candyfloss that leaves bright metal behind. “Didn’t it go missing or something?”
Pamela snorts. “When your mother ran away, it uploaded itself to her starwhisp and deleted its body. It was the only one of them that had the guts—or maybe it was afraid I’d have it subpoenaed as a hostile witness. Or, and I can’t rule this out, your grandfather gave it a suicide reflex. He was quite evil enough to do something like that, after he reprogrammed himself to think I was some kind of mortal enemy.”
“So when my mother died to avoid bankruptcy, the cat . . . didn’t stay around? Not at all? How remarkable.” Sirhan doesn’t bother adding how suicidal. Any artificial entity that’s willing to upload its neural state vector into a one-kilogram interstellar probe three-quarters of the way to Alpha Centauri without backup or some clear way of returning home has got to be more than a few methods short in the object factory.
“It’s a vengeful beast.” Pamela pokes her stick at the ground sharply, mutters a command word, and lets go of it. She stands before Sirhan, craning her neck back to look up at him. “My, what a tall boy you are.”
“Person,” he corrects, instinctively. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t presume.”
“Person, thing, boy, whatever—you’re engendered, aren’t you?” she asks, sharply, waiting until he nods reluctantly. “Never trust anyone who can’t make up their mind whether to be a man or a woman,” she says gloomily. “You can’t rely on them.” Sirhan, who has placed his reproductive system on hold until he needs it, bites his tongue. “That damn cat,” his grandmother complains. “It carried your grandfather’s business plan to my daughter and spirited her away into the big black. It poisoned her against me. It encouraged her to join in that frenzy of speculative bubble-building that caused the market reboot that brought down the Ring Imperium. And now it—”
“Is it on the ship?” Sirhan asks, almost too eagerly.
“It might be.” She stares at him through narrowed eyes. “You want to interview it, too, huh?”
Sirhan doesn’t bother denying it. “I’m an historian, Grandmama. And that probe has been somewhere no other human sensorium has ever seen. It may be old news, and there may be old lawsuits waiting to feed on the occupants, but . . .” He shrugs. “Business is business, and my business lies in ruins.”
“Hah!” She stares at him for a moment, then nods, very slowly. She leans forward to rest both wrinkled hands atop her cane, joints like bags of shriveled walnuts. Her suit’s endoskeleton creaks as it adjusts to accommodate her confidential posture. “You’ll get yours, kid.” The wrinkles twist into a frightening smile, sixty years of saved-up bitterness finally within spitting distance of a victim. “And I’ll get what I want, too. Between us, your mother won’t know what’s hit her.”
“Relax, between us your mother won’t know what’s hit her,” says the cat, baring needle teeth at the Queen in the big chair—carved out of a single lump of computational diamond, her fingers clenched whitely on the sapphire-plated arms—her minions, lovers, friends, crew, shareholders, bloggers, and general factional auxiliaries spaced out around her. And the Slug. “It’s just another lawsuit. You can deal with it.”
“Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke,” Amber says, a trifle moodily. Although she’s ruler of this embedded space, with total control over the reality model underlying it, she’s allowed herself to age to a dignified twentysomething: Dressed casually in gray sweats, she doesn’t look like the once-mighty ruler of a Jovian moon, or for that matter the renegade commander of a bankrupt interstellar expedition. “Okay, I think you’d better run that past me again. Unless anyone’s got any suggestions?”
“If you will excuse me?” asks Sadeq. “We have a shortage of insight here. I believe two laws were cited as absolute systemwide conventions—and how they convinced the ulama to go along with that I would very much like to know—concerning the rights and responsibilities of the undead. Which, apparently, we are. Did they by any chance attach the code to their claim?”
“Do bears shit in woods?” asks Boris, raptor-irascible, with an angry clatter of teeth. “Is full dependency graph and parse tree of criminal code crawling way up carrier’s ass as we speak. Am drowning in lawyer gibberish! If you—”
“Boris, can it!” Amber snaps. Tempers are high in the throne room. She didn’t know what to expect when she arrived home from the expedition to the router, but bankruptcy proceedings weren’t part of it. She doubts any of them expected anything like this. Especially not the bit about being declared liable for debts run up by a renegade splinter of herself, her own un-uploaded identity that had stayed home to face the music, aged in the flesh, married, gone bankrupt, died—incurred child support payments? “I don’t hold you responsible for this,” she added through gritted teeth, with a significant glance toward Sadeq.
“This is truly a mess fit for the Prophet himself, peace be unto him, to serve judgment upon.” Sadeq looks as shaken as she is by the implications the lawsuit raises. His gaze skitters around the room, looking anywhere but at Amber—and Pierre, her lanky toy-boy astrogator and bed warmer—as he laces his fingers.
“Drop it. I said I don’t blame you.” Amber forces a smile. “We’re all tense from being locked in here with no bandwidth. Anyway, I smell Mother-dearest’s hand underneath all this litigation. Sniff the glove. We’ll sort a way out.”
“We could keep going.” This from Ang, at the back of the room. Diffident and shy, she doesn’t generally open her mouth without a good reason. “The Field Circus is in good condition
, isn’t it? We could divert back to the beam from the router, accelerate up to cruise speed, and look for somewhere to live. There must be a few suitable brown dwarfs within a hundred light years . . .”
“We’ve lost too much sail mass,” says Pierre. He’s not meeting Amber’s gaze either. There are lots of subtexts loose in this room, broken narratives from stories of misguided affections. Amber pretends not to notice his embarrassment. “We ejected half our original launch sail to provide the braking mirror at Hyundai +4904/-56, and almost eight megaseconds ago we halved our area again to give us a final deceleration beam for Saturn orbit. If we did it again, we wouldn’t have enough area left to repeat the trick and still decelerate at our final target.” Laser-boosted light sails do it with mirrors; after boost they can drop half the sail and use it to reverse the launch beam and direct it back at the ship, to provide deceleration. But you can only do it a few times before you run out of sail. “There’s nowhere to run.”
“Nowhere to—” Amber stares at him through narrowed eyes. “Sometimes I really wonder about you, you know?”
“I know you do.” And Pierre really does know, because he carries a little homunculoid around in his society of mind, a model of Amber far more accurate and detailed than any pre-upload human could possibly have managed to construct of a lover. (For her part, Amber keeps a little Pierre doll tucked away inside the creepy cobwebs of her head, part of an exchange of insights they took part in years ago. But she doesn’t try to fit inside his head too often anymore—it’s not good to be able to second-guess your lover every time.) “I also know that you’re going to rush in and grab the bull by the, ah, no. Wrong metaphor. This is your mother we are discussing?”
“My mother.” Amber nods thoughtfully. “Where’s Donna?”
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