Accelerando

by Charles Stross

  Some activities superficially familiar to you are merely stupid and should be avoided for your safety, although they are not illegal as such. These include: giving your bank account details to the son of the Nigerian Minister of Finance; buying title to bridges, skyscrapers, spacecraft, planets, or other real assets; murder; selling your identity; and entering into financial contracts with entities running Economics 2.0 or higher.

  THINGS YOU SHOULD DO AS SOON AS POSSIBLE:

  Many material artifacts you may consider essential to life are freely available—just ask the city, and it will grow you clothes, a house, food, or other basic essentials. Note, however, that the library of public domain structure templates is of necessity restrictive and does not contain items that are highly fashionable or that remain in copyright. Nor will the city provide you with replicators, weapons, sexual favors, slaves, or zombies.

  You are advised to register as a citizen as soon as possible. If the individual you are a resimulation of can be confirmed dead, you may adopt their name but not—in law—any lien or claim on their property, contracts, or descendants. You register as a citizen by asking the city to register you; the process is painless and typically complete within four hours. Unless you are registered, your legal status as a sapient organism may be challenged. The ability to request citizenship rights is one of the legal tests for sapience, and failure to comply may place you in legal jeopardy. You can renounce your citizenship whenever you wish: This may be desirable if you emigrate to another polity.

  While many things are free, it is highly likely that you possess no employable skills, and therefore, no way of earning money with which to purchase unfree items. The pace of change in the past century has rendered almost all skills you may have learned obsolete [see: singularity]. However, owing to the rapid pace of change, many cooperatives, trusts, and guilds offer on-the-job training or educational loans.

  Your ability to learn depends on your ability to take information in the format in which it is offered. Implants are frequently used to provide a direct link between your brain and the intelligent machines that surround it. A basic core implant set is available on request from the city. [See: implant security, firewall, wetware.]

  Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may be provided—for a fee. (In event of your murder, you will be furnished with a new body at the expense of your killer.) If you have any preexisting medical conditions or handicaps, consult the city.

  The city is an agoric-annealing participatory democracy with a limited liability constitution. Its current executive agency is a weakly godlike intelligence that chooses to associate with human-equivalent intelligences: This agency is colloquially known as “Hello Kitty,” “Beautiful Cat,” or “Aineko,” and may manifest itself in a variety of physical avatars if corporeal interaction is desired. (Prior to the arrival of “Hello Kitty,” the city used a variety of human-designed expert systems that provided suboptimal performance.)

  The city’s mission statement is to provide a mediatory environment for human-equivalent intelligences and to preserve same in the face of external aggression. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the ongoing political processes of determining such responses. Citizens also have a duty to serve on a jury if called (including senatorial service), and to defend the city.

  WHERE TO GO FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:

  Until you have registered as a citizen and obtained basic implants, all further questions should be directed to the city. Once you have learned to use your implants, you will not need to ask this question.

  Welcome to decade the ninth, singularity plus one gigasecond (or maybe more—nobody’s quite sure when, or indeed if, a singularity has been created). The human population of the solar system is either six billion, or sixty billion, depending on whether you class-forked state vectors of posthumans and the simulations of dead phenotypes running in the Vile Offspring’s Schrödinger boxes as people. Most of the physically incarnate still live on Earth, but the lily pads floating beneath continent-sized hot-hydrogen balloons in Saturn’s upper atmosphere already house a few million, and the writing is on the wall for the rocky inner planets. All the remaining human-equivalent intelligences with half a clue to rub together are trying to emigrate before the Vile Offspring decide to recycle Earth to fill in a gap in the concentric shells of nanocomputers they’re running on. The half-constructed Matrioshka brain already darkens the skies of Earth and has caused a massive crash in the planet’s photosynthetic biomass, as plants starve for short-wavelength light.

  Since decade the seventh, the computational density of the solar system has soared. Within the asteroid belt, more than half the available planetary mass has been turned into nanopro-cessors, tied together by quantum entanglement into a web so dense that each gram of matter can simulate all the possible life experiences of an individual human being in a scant handful of minutes. Economics 2.0 is itself obsolescent, forced to mutate in a furious survivalist arms race by the arrival of the Slug. Only the name remains as a vague shorthand for merely human-equivalent intelligences to use when describing interactions they don’t understand.

  The latest generation of posthuman entities is less overtly hostile to humans, but much more alien than the generations of the fifties and seventies. Among their less comprehensible activities, the Vile Offspring are engaged in exploring the phase-space of all possible human experiences from the inside out. Perhaps they caught a dose of the Tiplerite heresy along the way, for now a steady stream of resimulant uploads is pouring through the downsystem relays in Titan orbit. The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused, except that they’re not really resurrectees—they’re simulations based on their originals’ recorded histories, blocky and missing chunks of their memories, as bewildered as baby ducklings as they’re herded into the wood-chipper of the future.

  Sirhan al-Khurasani despises them with the abstract contempt of an antiquarian for a cunning but ultimately transparent forgery. But Sirhan is young, and he’s got more contempt than he knows what to do with. It’s a handy outlet for his frustration. He has a lot to be frustrated at, starting with his intermittently dysfunctional family, the elderly stars around whom his planet whizzes in chaotic trajectories of enthusiasm and distaste.

  Sirhan fancies himself a philosopher-historian of the singular age, a chronicler of the incomprehensible, which would be a fine thing to be except that his greatest insights are all derived from Aineko. He alternately fawns over and rages against his mother, who is currently a leading light in the refugee community, and honors (when not attempting to evade the will of ) his father, who is lately a rising philosophical patriarch within the Conservationist faction. He’s secretly in awe (not to mention slightly resentful) of his Manfred. In fact, the latter’s abrupt reincarnation in the flesh has quite disconcerted him. And he sometimes listens to his stepgrandmother Annette, who has reincarnated in more or less her original 2020s body after spending some years as a great ape, and who seems to view him as some sort of personal project.

  Only Annette isn’t being very helpful right now. His mother is campaigning on an electoral platform calling for a vote to blow up the world, Annette is helping run her campaign, his grandfather is trying to convince him to entrust everything he holds dear to a rogue lobster, and the cat is being typically feline and evasive.

  Talk about families with problems . . .

  They’ve transplanted imperial Brussels to Saturn in its entirety, mapped tens of megatons of buildings right down to nanoscale and beamed them into the outer darkness to be reinstantiated down-well on the lily-pad colonies that dot the stratosphere of the gas giant. (Eventually the entire surface of the Earth will follow—after which the Vile Offspring will core the planet like an apple, dismantle it into a cloud of newly formed quantum nanocomputers to add to their burgeoning Matrioshka bra
in.) Due to a resource contention problem in the festival committee’s planning algorithm—or maybe it’s simply an elaborate joke—Brussels now begins just on the other side of a diamond bubble wall from the Boston Museum of Science, less than a kilometer away as the passenger pigeon flies. Which is why, when it’s time to celebrate a birthday or name day (meaningless though those concepts are, out on Saturn’s synthetic surface), Amber tends to drag people over to the bright lights of the big city.

  This time she’s throwing a rather special party. At Annette’s canny prompting, she’s borrowed the Atomium and invited a horde of guests to a big event. It’s not a family bash—although Annette’s promised her a surprise—so much as a business meeting, testing the water as a preliminary to declaring her candidacy. It’s a media coup, an attempt to engineer Amber’s re-entry into the mainstream politics of the human system.

  Sirhan doesn’t really want to be here. He’s got far more important things to do, like continuing to catalogue Aineko’s memories of the voyage of the Field Circus. He’s also collating a series of interviews with resimulated logical positivists from Oxford, England (the ones who haven’t retreated into gibbering near catatonia upon realizing that their state vectors are all members of the set of all sets that do not contain themselves), when he isn’t attempting to establish a sound rational case for his belief that extraterrestrial superintelligence is an oxymoron and the router network is just an accident, one of evolution’s little pranks.

  But tante Annette twisted his arm and promised he was in on the surprise if he came to the party. And despite everything, he wouldn’t miss being a fly on the wall during the coming meeting between Manfred and Amber for all the tea in China.

  Sirhan walks up to the gleaming stainless-steel dome that contains the entrance to the Atomium, and waits for the lift. He’s in line behind a gaggle of young-looking women, skinny and soignée in cocktail gowns and tiaras lifted from 1920s silent movies. (Annette declared an age of elegance theme for the party, knowing full well that it would force Amber to focus on her public appearance.) Sirhan’s attention is, however, elsewhere. The various fragments of his mind are conducting three simultaneous interviews with philosophers (“whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent” in spades), controlling two bots that are overhauling the museum plumbing and air-recycling system, and he’s busy discussing observations of the alien artifact orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/-56 with Aineko. What’s left of him exhibits about as much social presence as a pickled cabbage.

  The lift arrives and accepts a load of passengers. Sirhan is crowded into one corner by a bubble of high-society laughter and an aromatic puff of smoke from an improbable ivory cigarette holder as the lift surges, racing up the sixty-meter shaft toward the observation deck at the top of the Atomium. It’s a ten-meter-diameter metal globe, spiral staircases and escalators connecting it to the seven spheres at the corners of an octahedron that make up the former centerpiece of the 1950 World’s Fair. Unlike most of the rest of Brussels, it’s the original bits and atoms, bent alloy structures from before the space age shipped out to Saturn at enormous expense. The lift arrives with a slight jerk. “Excuse me,” squeaks one of the good-time girls as she lurches backward, elbowing Sirhan.

  He blinks, barely noticing her black bob of hair, chromatophore-tinted shadows artfully tuned around her eyes: “Nothing to excuse.” In the background, Aineko is droning on sarcastically about the lack of interest the crew of the Field Circus exhibited in the cat’s effort to decompile their hitchhiker, the Slug. It’s distracting as hell, but Sirhan feels a desperate urge to understand what happened out there. It’s the key to understanding his not-mother’s obsessions and weaknesses—which, he senses, will be important in the times to come.

  He evades the gaggle of overdressed good-time girls and steps out onto the lower of the two stainless-steel decks that bisect the sphere. Accepting a fruit cocktail from a discreetly humaniform waitron, he strolls toward a row of triangular windows that gaze out across the arena toward the American Pavilion and the World Village. The metal walls are braced with turquoise-painted girders, and the perspex transparencies are fogged with age. He can barely see the one-tenth-scale model of an atomic-powered ocean liner leaving the pier below, or the eight-engined giant seaplane beside it. “They never once asked me if the Slug had attempted to map itself into the human-compatible spaces aboard the ship,” Aineko bitches at him. “I wasn’t expecting them to, but really! Your mother’s too trusting, boy.”

  “I suppose you took precautions?” Sirhan’s ghost murmurs to the cat. That sets the irascible metafeline off again on a long discursive tail-washing rant about the unreliability of Economics-2.0-compliant financial instruments. Economics 2.0 apparently replaces the single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the parameterized desires and subjective experiential values of the players, and as far as the cat is concerned, this makes all such transactions intrinsically untrustworthy.

  Which is why you’re stuck here with us apes, Sirhan-prime cynically notes as he spawns an Eliza ghost to carry on nodding at the cat while he experiences the party.

  It’s uncomfortably warm in the Atomium sphere—not surprising, there must be thirty people milling around up here, not counting the waitrons—and several local multicast channels are playing a variety of styles of music to synchronize the mood swings of the revelers to hardcore techno, waltz, raga . . .

  “Having a good time, are we?” Sirhan breaks away from integrating one of his timid philosophers and realizes that his glass is empty, and his mother is grinning alarmingly at him over the rim of a cocktail glass containing something that glows in the dark. She’s wearing spike-heeled boots and a black velvet cat suit that hugs her contours like a second skin, and she’s already getting drunk. In wall-clock years she is younger than Sirhan; it’s like having a bizarrely knowing younger sister mysteriously injected into his life to replace the eigenmother who stayed home and died with the Ring Imperium decades ago. “Look at you, hiding in a corner at your grandfather’s party! Hey, your glass is empty. Want to try this caipirinha? There’s someone you’ve got to meet over here—”

  It’s at moments like this that Sirhan really wonders what in Jupiter’s orbit his father ever saw in this woman. (But then again, in the world line this instance of her has returned from, he didn’t. So what does that signify?) “As long as there’s no fermented grape juice in it,” he says resignedly, allowing himself to be led past a gaggle of conversations and a mournful-looking gorilla slurping a long drink through a straw. “More of your accelerationista allies?”

  “Maybe not.” It’s the girl gang he avoided noticing in the lift, their eyes sparkling, really getting into this early twen-cen drag party thing, waving their cigarette holders and cocktail glasses around with wild abandon. “Rita, I’d like you to meet Sirhan, my other fork’s son. Sirhan, this is Rita? She’s an historian, too. Why don’t you—”

  Dark eyes, emphasized not by powder or paint but by chromatophores inside her skin cells: black hair, chain of enormous pearls, slim black dress sweeping the floor, a look of mild embarrassment on her heart-shaped face. She could be a clone of Audrey Hepburn. “Didn’t I just meet you in the elevator?” The embarrassment shifts to her cheeks, becoming visible.

  Sirhan flushes, unsure how to reply. Just then an interloper arrives on the scene, pushing in between them. “Are you the curator who reorganized the Precambrian gallery along teleology lines? I’ve got some things to say about that!” The interloper is tall, assertive, and blond. Sirhan hates her from the first sight of her wagging finger.

  “Oh shut up, Marissa, this is a party. You’ve been being a pain all evening.” To his surprise, Rita the historian rounds on the interloper angrily.

  “It’s not a problem,” he manages to say. In the back of his mind, something makes the Rogerian puppet-him that’s listening to the
cat sit up and dump-merge a whole lump of fresh memories into his mind—something important, something about the Vile Offspring sending a starship to bring something back from the router—but the people around him are soaking up so much attention that he has to file it for later.

  “Yes it is a problem,” Rita declares. She points at the interloper, who is saying something about the invalidity of teleological interpretations, trying to justify herself, and says, “Plonk. Phew. Where were we?”

  Sirhan blinks. Suddenly everyone but him seems to be ignoring that annoying Marissa person. “What just happened?” he asks cautiously.

  “I killfiled her. Don’t tell me, you aren’t running Superplonk yet, are you?” Rita flicks a location-cached idea at him and he takes it cautiously, spawning a couple of specialized Turing Oracles to check it for halting states. It seems to be some kind of optic lobe hack that accesses a collaborative database of eigenfaces, with some sort of side interface to Broca’s region. “Share and enjoy, confrontation-free parties.”

  “I’ve never seen—” Sirhan trails off as he loads the module distractedly. (The cat is rambling on about god modules and metastatic entanglement and the difficulty of arranging to have personalities custom-grown to order somewhere in the back of his head, while his fractional-self nods wisely whenever it pauses.) Something like an inner eyelid descends. He looks round; there’s a vague blob at one side of the room, making an annoying buzzing sound. His mother seems to be having an animated conversation with it. “That’s rather interesting.”

  “Yes, it helps no end at this sort of event.” Rita startles him by taking his left arm in hand—her cigarette holder shrivels and condenses until it’s no more than a slight thickening around the wrist of her opera glove—and steers him toward a waitron. “I’m sorry about your foot, earlier. I was a bit overloaded. Is Amber Macx really your mother?”