Accelerando

by Charles Stross

  “I am very much afraid that she is,” says Annette. “Sirhan is a strange child: He takes after his grandmère. Who he, of course, invited to his party.”

  “His party?”

  “Why, yes! Hasn’t he told you what this is about? It’s his party. To mark the opening of his special institution. The family archive. He’s setting the lawsuit aside, at least for the duration. That’s why everybody is here—even me.” The ape-body smirks at her: “I’m afraid he’s rather disappointed by my dress.”

  “Tell me about this library,” Amber says, narrowing her eyes. “And about this son of mine whom I’ve never met, by a father I’ve never fucked.”

  “What, you would know everything?” asks Annette.

  “Yeah.” Amber pushes herself creakily upright. “I need some clothes. And soft furniture. And where do I get a drink around here?”

  “I’ll show you,” says the orangutan, unfolding herself in a vertical direction like a stack of orange furry inner tubes. “Drinks, first.”

  While the Boston Museum of Science is the main structure on the lily-pad habitat, it’s not the only one: just the stupidest, composed of dumb matter left over from the pre-enlightened age. The orangutan leads Amber through a service passage and out into the temperate night, naked by ringlight. The grass is cool beneath her feet, and a gentle breeze blows constantly out toward the recirculators at the edge of the worldlet. She follows the slouching orange ape up a grassy slope, under a weeping willow, round a three-hundred-and-ninety-degree bend that flashes the world behind them into invisibility, and into a house with walls of spun cloud stuff and a ceiling that rains moonlight.

  “What is this?” Amber asks, entranced. “Some kind of aerogel?”

  “No—” Annette belches, then digs a hand into the floor and pulls up a heap of mist. “Make a chair,” she says. It solidifies, gaining form and texture until a creditable Queen Anne reproduction stands in front of Amber on spindly legs. “And one for me. Skin up, pick one of my favorite themes.” The walls recede slightly and harden, extruding paint and wood and glass. “That’s it.” The ape grins at Amber. “You are comfortable?”

  “But I—” Amber stops. She glances at the familiar mantelpiece, the row of curios, the baby photographs forever glossy on their dye-sub media. It’s her childhood bedroom. “You brought the whole thing? Just for me?”

  “You can never tell with future shock.” Annette shrugs and reaches a limber arm around the back of her neck to scratch. “We are utility fog using, for most purposes out here, peer-to-peer meshes of multiarmed assemblers that change conformation and vapor/solid phase at command. Texture and color are all superfice, not reality. But yes, this came from one of your mother’s letters to your father. She brought it here, for you to surprise. If only it is ready in time.” Lips pull back from big, square, foliage-chewing teeth in something that might be a smile in a million years’ time.

  “You, I—I wasn’t expecting. This.” Amber realizes she’s breathing rapidly, a near-panic reflex. The mere proximity of her mother is enough to give her unpleasant reactions. Annette is all right, Annette is cool. And her father is the trickster-god, always hiding in your blind spot to leap out and shower you with ambiguous gifts. But Pamela tried to mold Amber in her own image as a child; and despite all the traveling she’s done since then, and all the growing up, Amber harbors an unreasonable claustrophobic fear of her mother.

  “Don’t be unhappy,” Annette says warmly. “I this you show to convince you, she will try to disturb you. It is a sign of weakness. She lacks the courage of her convictions.”

  “She does?” This is news to Amber, who leans forward to listen.

  “Yes. She is an old and bitter woman, now. The years have not been easy for her. She perhaps intends to use her unrepaired senescence as a passive suicide weapon by which to hold us blameworthy, inflicting guilt for her mistreatment, but she is afraid of dying all the same. Your reaction, should it be unhappy, will excuse and encourage her selfishness. Sirhan colludes, unknowing, the idiot child. He thinks the universe of her and thinks by helping her die he is helping her achieve her goals. He has never met an adult walking backward toward a cliff before.”

  “Backward.” Amber takes a deep breath. “You’re telling me Mom is so unhappy she’s trying to kill herself by growing old? Isn’t that a bit slow?”

  Annette shakes her head lugubriously. “She’s had fifty years to practice. You have been away twenty-eight years! She was thirty when she bore you. Now she is more than eighty, and a telomere refusenik, a charter member of the genome conservation front. To accept a slow virus purge and aging reset would be to lay down a banner she has carried for half a century. To accept uploading, that, too, is wrong in her mind. She will not admit her identity is a variable, not a constant. She came out here in a can, frozen, with more radiation damage. She is not going back home. This is where she plans to end her days. Do you see? That is why you were brought here. That, and because of the bailiffs who have bought title to your other self’s business debts. They are waiting for you in Jupiter system with warrants and headsuckers to extract your private keys.”

  “She’s cornered me!”

  “Oh, I would not say that. We all change our convictions sometime or other, perhaps. She is inflexible, she will not bend, but she is not stupid. Nor is she as vindictive as perhaps she herself believes. She thinks she must a scorned woman be, even though there is more to her than that. Your father and I, we—”

  “Is he still alive?” Amber demands eagerly, half-anxious to know, half-wishing she could be sure the news won’t be bad.

  “Yes.” Annette grins again, but it’s not a happy expression, more a baring of teeth at the world. “As I was saying, your father and I, we have tried to help her. Pamela denies him. He is, she says, not a man. No more so am I myself a woman? No, but she’ll still talk to me. You will do better. But his assets, they are spent. He is not a rich man this epoch, your father.”

  “Yeah, but.” Amber nods to herself. “He may be able to help me.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  “You remember the original goal of the Field Circus? The sapient alien transmission?”

  “Yes, of course.” Annette snorts. “Junk bond pyramid schemes from credulous saucer wisdom airheads.”

  Amber licks her lips. “How susceptible to interception are we here?”

  “Here?” Annette glances round. “Very. You can’t maintain a habitat in a nonbiosphere environment without ubiquitous surveillance.”

  “Well, then . . .”

  Amber dives inward, forks her identity, collects a complex bundle of her thoughts and memories, marshals them, offers Annette one end of an encryption tunnel, then stuffs the frozen mindstorm into her head. Annette sits still for approximately ten seconds, then shudders and whimpers quietly. “You must ask your father,” she says, growing visibly agitated. “I must leave, now. I should not have known that! It is dynamite, you see. Political dynamite. I must return to my primary sister-identity and warn her.”

  “Your—wait!” Amber stands up as fast as her ill-coordinated body will let her, but Annette is moving fast, swarming up a translucent ladder in the air.

  “Tell Manfred!” calls her aunt through the body of an ape. “Trust no one else!” She throws another packet of compressed, encrypted memories down the tunnel to Amber; then a moment later the orange skull touches the ceiling and dissolves, a liquid flow of dissociating utility foglets letting go of one another and dispersing into the greater mass of the building that spawned the fake ape.

  Snapshots from the family album: While you were gone . . .

  Amber, wearing a brocade gown and a crown encrusted with diamond processors and external neural taps, her royal party gathered around her, attends the pan-Jovian constitutional conference with the majesty of a confirmed head of state and ruler of a small inner moon. She smiles knowingly at the camera viewpoint, with the professional shine that comes from a good public relations video filter. “We are
very happy to be here,” she says, “and we are pleased that the commission has agreed to lend its weight to the continued progress of the Ring Imperium’s deep-space program.”

  A piece of dumb paper, crudely stained with letters written in a faded brown substance—possibly blood—says “I’m checking out, don’t delta me.” This version of Pierre didn’t go to the router: He stayed at home, deleted all his backups, and slit his wrists, his epitaph sharp and self-inflicted. It comes as a cold shock, the first chill gust of winter’s gale blowing through the outer system’s political elite. And it’s the start of a regime of censorship directed toward the already-speeding starwhisp. Amber, in her grief, makes an executive decision not to tell her embassy to the stars that one of them is dead and, therefore, unique.

  Manfred—fifty, with the fashionably pale complexion of the digerati, healthy-looking for his age, standing beside a transmigration bush with a stupid grin on his face. He’s decided to take the final step, not simply to spawn external mental processes running in an exocortex of distributed processors, but to move his entire persona right out of meatspace, into wherever it is that the uploads aboard the Field Circus have gone. Annette, skinny, elegant, and very Parisian, stands beside him, looking as uncertain as the wife of a condemned man.

  A wedding, shi’ite, Mut’ah—of limited duration. It’s scandalous to many, but the mamtu’ah isn’t Moslem, she wears a crown instead of a veil, and her groom is already spoken of in outraged terms by most other members of the trans-Martian Islamic clergy. Besides which, in addition to being in love, the happy couple have more strategic firepower than a late-twentieth-century superpower. Their cat, curled at their feet, looks smug. She’s the custodian of the permissive action locks on the big lasers.

  A speck of ruby light against the darkness—red-shifted almost into the infrared, it’s the return signal from the Field Circus’s light sail as the starwhisp passes the one-light-year mark, almost twelve trillion kilometers out beyond Pluto. (Although how can you call it a starwhisp when it masses almost a hundred kilograms, including propulsion module? Starwhisps are meant to be tiny!)

  Collapse of the trans-Lunar economy: Deep in the hot thinking depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new theory of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than the previously pervasive Free Market 1.0. With no local minima to hamper them, and no need to spawn and reap start-ups Darwin-style, the companies, group minds, and organizations that adopt the so-called Accelerated Salesman Infrastructure of Economics 2.0 trade optimally with each other. The phase-change accelerates as more and more entities join in, leveraging network externalities to overtake the traditional ecosystem. Amber and Sadeq are late on the train, Sadeq obsessing about how to reconcile ASI with murabaha and mudaraba while the postmodern economy of the midtwenty-first century disintegrates around them. Being late has punitive consequences—the Ring Imperium has always been a net importer of brainpower and a net exporter of gravitational potential energy. Now it’s a tired backwater, the bit rate from the red-shifted relativisitic probe insufficiently delightful to obsess the daemons of industrial routing.

  In other words, they’re poor.

  A message from beyond the grave: The travelers aboard the starship have reached their destination, an alien artifact drifting in chilly orbit around a frozen brown dwarf. Recklessly they upload themselves into it, locking the starwhisp down for years of sleep. Amber and her husband have few funds with which to pay for the propulsion lasers. What they have left of the kinetic energy of the Ring Imperium—based on the orbital momentum of a small Jovian inner moon—is being sapped, fast, at a near loss, by the crude requirements of the exobionts and metanthropes who fork and spawn in the datasphere of the outer Jovians. The cost of importing brains to the Ring Imperium is steep: In near despair, Amber and Sadeq produce a child, Generation 3.0, to populate their dwindling kingdom. Picture the cat, offended, lashing its tail beside the zero-gee crib.

  Surprise and postcards from the inner orbitals—Amber’s mother offers to help. For the sake of the child, Sadeq offers bandwidth and user interface enrichment. The child forks, numerous times, as Amber despairingly plays with probabilities, simulating upbringing outcomes. Neither she nor Sadeq are good parents—the father absentminded and prone to lose himself in the intertextual deconstruction of surahs, the mother ragged-edged from running the economy of a small and failing kingdom. In the space of a decade, Sirhan lives a dozen lives, discarding identities like old clothes. The uncertainty of life in the decaying Ring Imperium does not entrance him, his parents’ obsessions annoy him, and when his grandmother offers to fund his delta vee and subsequent education in one of the orbitals around Titan, his parents give their reluctant assent.

  Amber and Sadeq separate acrimoniously. Sadeq, studies abandoned in the face of increasing intrusions from the world of what is into the universe of what should be, joins a spacelike sect of sufis, encysted in a matrix of vitrification nanomechs out in the Oort cloud to await a better epoch. His instrument of will—the legal mechanism of his resurrection—specifies that he is waiting for the return of the hidden, twelfth imam.

  For her part, Amber searches the inner system briefly for word of her father—but there’s nothing. Isolated and alone, pursued by accusing debts, she flings herself into a reborganization, stripping away those aspects of her personality that have brought her low; in law, her liability is tied to her identity. Eventually she donates herself to a commune of also-rans, accepting their personality in return for a total break with the past.

  Without Queen and consort, the Ring Imperium—now unmanned, leaking breathing gases, running on autonomic control—slowly deorbits into the Jovian murk, beaming power to the outer moons until it punches a hole in the cloud deck in a final incandescent smear of light, the like of which has not been seen since the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact.

  Sirhan, engrossed in Saturnalia, is offended by his parents’ failure to make more of themselves. And he resolves to do it for them, if not necessarily in a manner of their liking.

  “You see, I am hoping you will help me with my history project,” says the serious-faced young man.

  “History project.” Pierre follows him along the curving gallery, hands clasped behind his back self-consciously to keep from showing his agitation. “What history is this?”

  “The history of the twenty-first century,” says Sirhan. “You remember it, don’t you?”

  “Remember it—” Pierre pauses. “You’re serious?”

  “Yes.” Sirhan opens a side door. “This way, please. I’ll explain.”

  The door opens onto what used to be one of the side galleries of the museum building, full of interactive exhibits designed to explain elementary optics to hyperactive children and their indulgent parental units. Traditional optics are long since obsolete—tunable matter can slow photons to a stop, teleport them here to there, play Ping-Pong with spin and polarization—and besides, the dumb matter in the walls and floor has been replaced by low-power computronium, heat sinks dangling far below the floor of the lily-pad habitat to dispose of the scanty waste photons from reversible computation. Now the room is empty.

  “Since I became curator here, I’ve turned the museum’s structural supports into a dedicated high-density memory store. One of the fringe benefits of a supervisory post, of course. I have about a billion avabits of capacity, enough to archive the combined sensory bandwidth and memories of the entire population of twentieth-century Earth—if that was what interested me.”

  Slowly the walls and ceiling are coming to life, brightening, providing a dizzyingly vibrant view of dawn over the rim wall of Meteor Crater, Arizona—or maybe it’s downtown Baghdad.

  “Once I realized how my mother had squandered the family fortune, I spent some time looking for a solution to the problem,” Sirhan continues. “And it struck me, then, that there’s only one commodity that is going to appreciate in value as time continues: reversibility.”

  “Reversibility
? That doesn’t make much sense.” Pierre shakes his head. He still feels slightly dizzy from his decanting. He’s only been awake an hour or so and is still getting used to the vagaries of a universe that doesn’t bend its rules to fit his whim of iron—that, and worrying about Amber, of whom there is no sign in the hall of growing bodies. “Excuse me, please, but do you know where Amber is?”

  “Hiding, probably,” Sirhan says, without rancor. “Her mother’s about,” he adds. “Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know what you know about us.” Pierre looks at him askance. “We were aboard the Field Circus for a long time.”

  “Oh, don’t worry on my behalf. I know you’re not the same people who stayed behind to contribute to the Ring Imperium’s collapse,” Sirhan says dismissively, while Pierre hastily spawns a couple of ghosts to search for the history he’s alluding to. What they discover shocks him to the core as they integrate with his conscious narrative.

  “We didn’t know about any of that!” Pierre crosses his arms defensively. “Not about you, or your father either,” he adds quietly. “Or my other . . . life.” Shocked: Did I kill myself? Why would I do a thing like that? Nor can he imagine what Amber might see in an introverted cleric like Sadeq, not that he wants to.

  “I’m sure this must come as a big shock to you,” Sirhan says condescendingly, “but it’s all to do with what I was talking about. Reversibility. What does it mean to you, in your precious context? You are, if you like, an opportunity to reverse whatever ill fortune made your primary instance autodarwinate himself. He destroyed all the backups he could get his ghosts to ferret out, you know. Only a light-year delay line and the fact that as a running instance you’re technically a different person saved you. And now, you’re alive, and he’s dead—and whatever made him kill himself doesn’t apply to you. Think of it as natural selection among different versions of yourself. The fittest version of you survives.”