Accelerando

by Charles Stross

  “Like your coronation robe?”

  Amber winces. “Touché.” The Ring Imperium is dead, along with whatever was left over from its early orbital legal framework, and Amber is lucky to be alive as a private citizen in this cold new age at the edge of the halo. “But that was just scenery setting. I didn’t fully understand what I was doing, back then.”

  “Welcome to maturity and experience.” Annette smiles distantly at some faint memory. “You don’t feel older, you just know what you’re doing this time. I wonder, sometimes, what Manny would make of it if he was here.”

  “That birdbrain,” Amber says dismissively, stung by the idea that her father might have something to contribute. She follows Annette past a gaggle of mendicant street evangelists preaching some new religion and in through the door of a real department store, one with actual human sales staff and fitting rooms to cut the clothing to shape. “If I’m sending out fractional me’s tailored for different demographics, isn’t it a bit self-defeating to go for a single image? I mean, we could drill down and tailor a partial for each individual elector—”

  “Perhaps.” The door re-forms behind them. “But you need a core identity.” Annette looks around, hunting for eye contact with the sales consultant. “To start with a core design, a style, then to work outward, tailoring you for your audience. And besides, there is tonight’s—ah, bonjour!”

  “Hello. How can we help you?” The two female and one male shop assistants who appear from around the displays—cycling through a history of the couture industry, catwalk models mixing and matching centuries of fashion—are clearly chips off a common primary personality, instances united by their enhanced sartorial obsession. If they’re not actually a fashion borganism, they’re not far from it, dressed head to foot in the highest quality Chanel and Armani replicas, making a classical twentieth-century statement. This isn’t simply a shop, it’s a temple to a very peculiar art form, its staff trained as guardians of the esoteric secrets of good taste.

  “Mais oui. We are looking for a wardrobe for my niece here.” Annette reaches through the manifold of fashion ideas mapped within the shop’s location cache and flips a requirement spec one of her ghosts has just completed at the lead assistant. “She is into politics going, and the question of her image is important.”

  “We would be delighted to help you,” purrs the proprietor, taking a delicate step forward. “Perhaps you could tell us what you’ve got in mind?”

  “Oh. Well.” Amber takes a deep breath, glances sidelong at Annette; Annette stares back, unblinking. It’s your head, she sends. “I’m involved in the accelerationista administrative program. Are you familiar with it?”

  The head coutureborg frowns slightly, twin furrows rippling her brow between perfectly symmetrical eyebrows, plucked to match her classic New Look suit. “I have heard reference to it, but a lady of fashion like myself does not concern herself with politics,” she says, a touch self-deprecatingly. “Especially the politics of her clients. Your, ah, aunt said it was a question of image?”

  “Yes.” Amber shrugs, momentarily self-conscious about her casual rags. “She’s my election agent. My problem, as she says, is there’s a certain voter demographic that mistakes image for substance and is afraid of the unknown, and I need to acquire a wardrobe that triggers associations of probity, of respect and deliberation. One suitable for a representative with a radical political agenda but a strong track record. I’m afraid I’m in a hurry to start with—I’ve got a big fund-raising party tonight. I know it’s short notice, but I need something off the shelf for it.”

  “What exactly is it you’re hoping to achieve?” asks the male couturier, his voice hoarse and his r’s rolling with some half-shed Mediterranean accent. He sounds fascinated. “If you think it might influence your choice of wardrobe . . .”

  “I’m running for the assembly,” Amber says bluntly. “On a platform calling for a state of emergency and an immediate total effort to assemble a starship. This solar system isn’t going to be habitable for much longer, and we need to emigrate. All of us, you included, before the Vile Offspring decide to reprocess us into computronium. I’m going to be doorstepping the entire electorate in parallel, and the experience needs to be personalized.” She manages to smile. “That means, I think, per-haps eight outfits and four different independent variables for each, accessories, and two or three hats—enough that each is seen by no more than a few thousand voters. Both physical fabric and virtual. In addition, I’ll want to see your range of historical formalwear, but that’s of secondary interest for now.” She grins. “Do you have any facilities for response-testing the combinations against different personality types from different periods? If we could run up some models, that would be useful.”

  “I think we can do better than that.” The manager nods approvingly, perhaps contemplating her gold-backed deposit account. “Hansel, please divert any further visitors until we have dealt with Madam . . . ?”

  “Macx. Amber Macx.”

  “—Macx’s requirements.” She shows no sign of familiarity with the name. Amber winces slightly; it’s a sign of how hugely fractured the children of Saturn have become, and of how vast the population of the halo, that only a generation has passed and already barely anyone remembers the Queen of the Ring Imperium. “If you’d come this way, please, we can begin to research an eigenstyle combination that matches your requirements—”

  Sirhan walks, shrouded in isolation, through the crowds gathered for the festival. The only people who see him are the chattering ghosts of dead politicians and writers, deported from the inner system by order of the Vile Offspring. The green and pleasant plain stretches toward a horizon a thousand kilometers away, beneath a lemon yellow sky. The air smells faintly of ammonia, and the big spaces are full of small ideas; but Sirhan doesn’t care. Because for now, he’s alone.

  Except that he isn’t, really.

  “Excuse me, are you real?” someone asks him in American-accented English.

  It takes a moment or two for Sirhan to disengage from his introspection and realize that he’s being spoken to. “What?” he asks, slightly puzzled. Wiry and pale, Sirhan wears the robes of a Berber goatherd on his body and the numinous halo of a utility fogbank above his head: In his abstraction, he vaguely resembles a saintly shepherd in a postsingularity nativity play. “I say, what?” Outrage simmers at the back of his mind—Is nowhere private?—but as he turns, he sees that one of the ghost pods has split lengthwise across its white mushroomlike crown, spilling a trickle of leftover construction fluid and a completely hairless, slightly bemused-looking Anglo male who wears an expression of profound surprise.

  “I can’t find my implants,” the Anglo male says, shaking his head. “But I’m really here, aren’t I? Incarnate?” He glances round at the other pods. “This isn’t a sim.”

  Sirhan sighs—another exile—and sends forth a daemon to interrogate the ghost pod’s abstract interface. It doesn’t tell him much—unlike most of the resurrectees, this one seems to be undocumented. “You’ve been dead. Now you’re alive. I suppose that means you’re now almost as real as I am. What else do you need to know?”

  “When is—” The newcomer stops. “Can you direct me to the processing center?” he asks carefully. “I’m disoriented.”

  Sirhan is surprised—most immigrants take a lot longer to figure that out. “Did you die recently?” he asks.

  “I’m not sure I died at all.” The newcomer rubs his bald head, looking puzzled. “Hey, no jacks!” He shrugs, exasperated. “Look, the processing center . . . ?”

  “Over there.” Sirhan gestures at the monumental mass of the Boston Museum of Science (shipped all the way from Earth a couple of decades ago to save it from the demolition of the inner system). “My mother runs it.” He smiles thinly.

  “Your mother—” The newly resurrected immigrant stares at him intensely, then blinks. “Holy shit.” He takes a step toward Sirhan. “It is you—”

  Sirhan recoil
s and snaps his fingers. The thin trail of vaporous cloud that has been following him all this time, shielding his shaven pate from the diffuse red glow of the swarming shells of orbital nanocomputers that have replaced the inner planets, extrudes a staff of hazy blue mist that stretches down from the air and slams together in his hand like a quarterstaff spun from bubbles. “Are you threatening me, sir?” he asks, deceptively mildly.

  “I—” The newcomer stops dead. Then he throws back his head and laughs. “Don’t be silly, son. We’re related!”

  “Son?” Sirhan bristles. “Who do you think you are—” A horrible thought occurs to him. “Oh. Oh dear.” A wash of adrenaline drenches him in warm sweat. “I do believe we’ve met, in a manner of speaking . . .” Oh boy, this is going to upset so many applecarts, he realizes, spinning off a ghost to think about the matter. The implications are enormous.

  The naked newcomer nods, grinning at some private joke. “You look different from ground level. And now I’m human again.” He runs his hands down his ribs, pauses, and glances at Sirhan owlishly. “Um. I didn’t mean to frighten you. But I don’t suppose you could find your aged grandfather something to wear?”

  Sirhan sighs and points his staff straight up at the sky. The rings are edge on, for the lily-pad continent floats above an ocean of cold gas along Saturn’s equator, and they glitter like a ruby laser beam slashed across the sky. “Let there be aerogel.”

  A cloud of wispy soap bubble congeals in a cone shape above the newly resurrected ancient and drops over him, forming a caftan. “Thanks,” he says. He looks round, twisting his neck, then winces. “Damn, that hurt. Ouch. I need to get myself a set of implants.”

  “They can sort you out in the processing center. It’s in the basement in the west wing. They’ll give you something more permanent to wear, too.” Sirhan peers at him. “Your face—” He pages through rarely used memories. Yes, it’s Manfred as he looked in the early years of the last century. As he looked around the time Mother-not was born. There’s something positively indecent about meeting your own grandfather in the full flush of his youth. “Are you sure you haven’t been messing with your phenotype?” he asks suspiciously.

  “No, this is what I used to look like. I think. Back in the naked ape again, after all these years as an emergent function of a flock of passenger pigeons.” His grandfather smirks. “What’s your mother going to say?”

  “I really don’t know—” Sirhan shakes his head. “Come on, let’s get you to immigrant processing. You’re sure you’re not just an historical simulation?”

  The place is already heaving with the resimulated. Just why the Vile Offspring seem to feel it’s necessary to apply valuable exaquops to the job of deriving accurate simulations of dead humans—outrageously accurate simulations of long-dead lives, annealed until their written corpus matches that inherited from the presingularity era in the form of chicken scratchings on mashed tree pulp—much less beaming them at the refugee camps on Saturn—is beyond Sirhan’s ken. But he wishes they’d stop.

  “Just a couple of days ago I crapped on your lawn. Hope you don’t mind.” Manfred cocks his head to one side and stares at Sirhan with beady eyes. “Actually, I’m here because of the upcoming election. It’s got the potential to turn into a major crisis point, and I figured Amber would need me around.”

  “Well you’d better come on in, then,” Sirhan says resignedly as he climbs the steps, enters the foyer, and leads his turbulent grandfather into the foggy haze of utility nanomachines that fill the building.

  He can’t wait to see what his mother will do when she meets her father in the flesh, after all this time.

  Welcome to Saturn, your new home world. This FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) memeplex is designed to orient you and explain the following:

  How you got here Where “here” is

  Things you should avoid doing

  Things you might want to do as soon as possible Where to go for more information.

  If you are remembering this presentation, you are probably resimulated. This is not the same as being resurrected. You may remember dying. Do not worry: Like all your other memories, it is a fabrication. In fact, this is the first time you have ever been alive. (Exception: If you died after the singularity, you may be a genuine resurrectee. In which case, why are you reading this FAQ?)

  HOW YOU GOT HERE:

  The center of the solar system—Mercury, Venus, Earth’s Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, and Jupiter—have been dismantled, or are being dismantled, by weakly godlike intelligences. [NB: Monotheistic clergy and Europeans who remember living prior to 1600, see alternative memeplex “in the beginning.”] A weakly godlike intelligence is not a supernatural agency but the product of a highly advanced society that learned how to artificially create souls [late twentieth century: software] and translate human minds into souls and vice versa. [Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

  Some of the weakly godlike intelligences appear to cultivate an interest in their human antecedents—for whatever reason is not known. (Possibilities include the study of history through horticulture, entertainment through live-action role-playing, revenge, and economic forgery.) While no definitive analysis is possible, all the resimulated persons to date exhibit certain common characteristics: They are all based on well-documented historical persons, their memories show suspicious gaps [see: smoke and mirrors], and they are ignorant of or predate the singularity [see: Turing Oracle, Vinge catastrophe].

  It is believed that the weakly godlike agencies have created you as a vehicle for the introspective study of your historical antecedent by backward-chaining from your corpus of documented works, and the back-projected genome derived from your collateral descendants, to generate an abstract description of your computational state vector. This technique is extremely intensive [see: expTime-complete algorithms, Turing Oracle, time travel, industrial magic] but marginally plausible in the absence of supernatural explanations.

  After experiencing your life, the weakly godlike agencies have expelled you. For reasons unknown, they chose to do this by transmitting your upload state and genome/proteome complex to receivers owned and operated by a consortium of charities based on Saturn. These charities have provided for your basic needs, including the body you now occupy.

  In summary: You are a reconstruction of someone who lived and died a long time ago, not a reincarnation. You have no intrinsic moral right to the identity you believe to be your own, and an extensive body of case law states that you do not inherit your antecedent’s possessions. Other than that, you are a free individual.

  Note that fictional resimulation is strictly forbidden. If you have reason to believe that you may be a fictional character, you must contact the city immediately. [ See: James Bond, Spider Jerusalem.] Failure to comply is a felony.

  WHERE YOU ARE:

  You are on Saturn. Saturn is a gas giant planet 120,500 kilometers in diameter, located 1.5 billion kilometers from Earth’s sun. [NB: Europeans who remember living prior to 1580, see alternative memeplex “the flat Earth—not”.] Saturn has been partially terraformed by posthuman emigrants from Earth and Jupiter orbit: The ground beneath your feet is, in reality, the floor of a hydrogen balloon the size of a continent, floating in Saturn’s upper atmosphere. [NB: Europeans who remember living prior to 1790, internalize the supplementary memeplex: “the Brothers Montgolfier.”] The balloon is very safe, but mining activities and the use of ballistic weapons are strongly deprecated because the air outside is unbreathable and extremely cold.

  The society you have been instantiated in is extremely wealthy within the scope of Economics 1.0, the value transfer system developed by human beings during and after your own time. Money exists, and is used for the usual range of goods and services, but the basics—food, water, air, power, off-the-shelf clothing, housing, historical entertainment, and monster trucks—are free. An implicit social contract dictates that, in return for access to these f
acilities, you obey certain laws.

  If you wish to opt out of this social contract, be advised that other worlds may run Economics 2.0 or subsequent releases. These value-transfer systems are more efficient—hence wealthier—than Economics 1.0, but true participation in Economics 2.0 is not possible without dehumanizing cognitive surgery. Thus, in absolute terms, although this society is richer than any you have ever heard of, it is also a poverty-stricken backwater compared to its neighbors.

  THINGS YOU SHOULD AVOID DOING:

  Many activities that have been classified as crimes in other societies are legal here. These include but are not limited to: acts of worship, art, sex, violence, communication, or commerce between consenting competent sapients of any species, except where such acts transgress the list of prohibitions below. [See additional memeplex: competence defined.]

  Some activities are prohibited here and may have been legal in your previous experience. These include willful deprivation of ability to consent [see: slavery], interference in the absence of consent [see: minors, legal status of], formation of limited liability companies [see: singularity], and invasion of defended privacy [see: the Slug, Cognitive Pyramid Schemes, Brain Hacking, Thompson Trust Exploit].

  Some activities unfamiliar to you are highly illegal and should be scrupulously avoided. These include: possession of nuclear weapons, possession of unlimited autonomous replicators [see: gray goo], coercive assimilationism [see: borganism, aggressive], coercive halting of Turing-equivalent personalities [see: Basilisks], and applied theological engineering [see: God bothering].