Accelerando

by Charles Stross

  Angels, or rats in the walls? he asks himself, and sighs. Half his extensions are off-line, so hopelessly obsolete that the temple’s assembler systems didn’t bother replicating them, or even creating emulation environments for them to run in. The rest . . . well, at least he’s still physically orthohuman, he realizes. Fully functional, fully male. Not everything has changed—only the important stuff. It’s a scary-funny thought, laden with irony. Here he is, naked as the day he was born—newly re-created, in fact, released from the wake-experience-reset cycle of the temple of history—standing on the threshold of a posthuman civilization so outrageously rich and powerful that they can build mammal-friendly habitats that resemble works of art in the cryogenic depths of space. Only he’s poor, this whole polity is poor, and it can’t ever be anything else, in fact, because it’s a dumping ground for merely posthuman also-rans, the singularitarian equivalent of australopithecines. In the brave new world of the Vile Offspring, they can’t get ahead any more than a protohominid could hack it as a rocket scientist in Werner von Braun’s day. They’re born to be primitive, wallowing happily in the mud bath of their own limited cognitive bandwidth. So they fled into the darkness and built a civilization so bright it can put anything earthbound that came before the singularity into the shade . . . and it’s still a shantytown inhabited by the mentally handicapped.

  The incongruity of it amuses him, but only for a moment. He has, after all, electively reincarnated for a reason: Sirhan’s throwaway comment about the cat caught his attention. “City, where can I find some clothes?” he asks. “Something socially appropriate, that is. And some, uh, brains. I need to be able to off-load . . .”

  Citymind chuckles inside the back of his head, and Manfred realizes that there’s a public assembler on the other side of the ornamental wall he’s leaning on. “Oh,” he mutters, as he finds himself imagining something not unlike his clunky old direct neural interface, candy-colored icons and overlays and all. It’s curiously mutable, and with a weird sense of detachment he realizes that it’s not his imagination at all, but an infinitely customizable interface to the pervasive information spaces of the polity, currently running in dumbed-down stupid mode for his benefit. It’s true; he needs training wheels. But it doesn’t take him long to figure out how to ask the assembler to make him a pair of pants and a plain black vest, and to discover that as long as he keeps his requests simple the results are free—just like back home on Saturn. The spaceborn polities are kind to indigents, for the basic requirements of life are cheap, and to withhold them would be tantamount to homicide. (If the presence of transhumans has upset a whole raft of prior assumptions, at least it hasn’t done more than superficial damage to the Golden Rule.)

  Clothed and more or less conscious—at least at a human level—Manfred takes stock. “Where do Sirhan and Rita live?” he asks. A dotted route makes itself apparent to him, snaking improbably through a solid wall that he understands to be an instantaneous wormhole gate connecting points light years apart. He shakes his head, bemused. I suppose I’d better go and see them, he decides. It’s not as if there’s anyone else for him to look up, is it? The Franklins vanished into the solar Matrioshka brain, Pamela died ages ago (and there’s a shame, he’d never expected to miss her), and Annette hooked up with Gianni while he was being a flock of pigeons. (Draw a line under that one and say it’s all over.) His daughter vanished into the long-range exploration program. He’s been dead for so long that his friends and acquaintances are scattered across a light cone centuries across. He can’t think of anyone else here who he might run into, except for the loyal grandson, keeping the candle of filial piety burning with unasked-for zeal. “Maybe he needs help,” Manfred thinks aloud as he steps into the gate, rationalizing. “And then again, maybe he can help me figure out what to do?”

  Sirhan gets home anticipating trouble. He finds it, but not in any way he’d expected. Home is a split-level manifold, rooms connected by T-gates scattered across a variety of habitats: low-gee sleeping den, high-gee exercise room, and everything in between. It’s furnished simply, tatami mats and programmable matter walls able to extrude any desired furniture in short order. The walls are configured to look and feel like paper, but can damp out even infant tantrums. But right now the antisound isn’t working, and the house he comes home to is overrun by shrieking yard apes, a blur of ginger-and-white fur, and a distraught Rita trying to explain to her neighbor Eloise why her orthodaughter Sam is bouncing around the place like a crazy ball.

  “—The cat, he gets them worked up.” She wrings her hands and begins to turn as Sirhan comes into view. “At last!”

  “I came fast.” He nods respectfully at Eloise, then frowns. “The children—” Something small and fast runs headfirst into him, grabs his legs, and tries to head-butt him in the crotch. “Oof!” He bends down and lifts Manni up. “Hey, son, haven’t I told you not to—”

  “Not his fault,” Rita says hurriedly. “He’s excited because—”

  “I really don’t think—” Eloise begins to gather steam, looking around uncertainly.

  “Mrreeow?” something asks in a conversational tone of voice from down around Sirhan’s ankles.

  “Eek!” Sirhan jumps backward, flailing for balance under the weight of an excited toddler. There’s a gigantic disturbance in the polity thoughtspace—like a stellar-mass black hole—and it appears to be stropping itself furrily against his left leg. “What are you doing here?” he demands.

  “Oh, this and that,” says the cat, his innerspeech accent a sardonic drawl. “I thought it was about time I visited again. Where’s your household assembler? Mind if I use it? Got a little something I need to make up for a friend . . .”

  “What?” Rita demands, instantly suspicious. “Haven’t you caused enough trouble already?” Sirhan looks at her approvingly; obviously Amber’s long-ago warnings about the cat sank in deeply, because she’s certainly not treating it as the small bundle of child-friendly fun it would like to be perceived as.

  “Trouble?” The cat looks up at her sardonically, lashing his tail from side to side. “I won’t make any trouble, I promise you. It’s just—”

  The door chime clears its throat, to announce a visitor: “Ren Fuller would like to visit, m’lord and lady.”

  “What’s she doing here?” Rita asks irritably. Sirhan can feel her unease, the tenuous grasping of her ghosts as she searches for reason in an unreasonable world, simulating outcomes, living through bad dreams, and backtracking to adjust her responses accordingly. “Show her in, by all means.” Ren is one of their neighbor-cognates (most of her dwelling is several light years away, but in terms of transit time it’s a hop, skip, and a jump); she and her extruded family are raising a small herd of ill-behaved kids who occasionally hang out with Manni.

  A small blue eeyore whinnies mournfully and dashes past the adults, pursued by a couple of children waving spears and shrieking. Eloise makes a grab for her own and misses, just as the door to the exercise room disappears and Manni’s little friend Lis darts inside like a pint-sized guided missile. “Sam, come here right now—” Eloise calls, heading toward the door.

  “Look, what do you want?” Sirhan demands, hugging his son and looking down at the cat.

  “Oh, not much,” Aineko says, turning to lick a mussed patch of fur on his flank. “I just want to play with him.”

  “You want to—” Rita stops.

  “Daddy!” Manni wants down.

  Sirhan lowers him carefully, as if his bones are glass. “Run along and play,” he suggests. Turning to Rita: “Why don’t you go and find out what Ren wants, dear?” he asks. “She’s probably here to collect Lis, but you can never be sure.”

  “I was just leaving,” Eloise adds, “as soon as I can catch up with Sam.” She glances over her shoulder at Rita apologetically, then dives into the exercise room.

  Sirhan takes a step toward the hallway. “Let’s talk,” he says tightly. “In my study.” He glares at the cat. “I want an explana
tion. I want to know the truth.”

  Meanwhile, in a cognitive wonderland his parents know about but deeply underestimate, parts of Manni are engaging in activities far less innocent than they imagine.

  Back in the twenty-first century, Sirhan lived through loads of alternate childhoods in simulation, his parents’ fingers pressing firmly on the fast-forward button until they came up with someone who seemed to match their preconceptions. The experience scarred him as badly as any nineteenth-century boarding school experience, until he promised himself no child he raised would be subjected to such; but there’s a difference between being shoved through a multiplicity of avatars and voluntarily diving into an exciting universe of myth and magic where your childhood fantasies take fleshy form, stalking those of your friends and enemies through the forests of the night.

  Manni has grown up with neural interfaces to City’s mindspace an order of magnitude more complex than those of Sirhan’s youth, and parts of him—ghosts derived from a starting image of his neural state vector, fertilized with a scattering borrowed from the original Manfred, simulated on a meat machine far faster than real time—are fully adult. Of course, they can’t fit inside his seven-year-old skull, but they still watch over him. And when he’s in danger, they try to take care of their once-and-future body.

  Manni’s primary adult ghost lives in some of New Japan’s virtual mindspaces (which are a few billion times more extensive than the physical spaces available to stubborn biologicals, for the computational density of human habitats have long since ceased to make much sense when measured in MIPS per kilogram). They’re modeled on presingularity Earth. Time is forever frozen on the eve of the real twenty-first century, zero eight-forty-six hours on September 11: An onrushing wide-body airliner hangs motionless in the air forty meters below the picture window of Manni’s penthouse apartment on the one hundred and eighth floor of the North Tower. In historical reality, the one hundred and eighth floor was occupied by corporate offices; but the mindspace is a consensual fiction, and it is Manni’s conceit to live at this pivotal point. (Not that it means much to him—he was born well over a century after the War on Terror—but it’s part of his childhood folklore, the fall of the Two Towers that shattered the myth of Western exceptionalism and paved the way for the world he was born into.)

  Adult-Manni wears an avatar roughly modeled on his clone-father Manfred—skinnier, pegged at a youthful twentysomething, black-clad, and gothic. He’s taking time out from a game of Matrix to listen to music, Type O Negative blaring over the sound system as he twitches in the grip of an ice-cold coke high. He’s expecting a visit from a couple of call girls—themselves the gamespace avatars of force-grown adult ghosts whose primaries may not be adult, or female, or even human—which is why he’s flopped bonelessly back in his Arne Jacobsen recliner, waiting for something to happen.

  The door opens behind him. He doesn’t show any sign of noticing the intrusion, although his pupils dilate slightly at the faint reflection of a woman, stalking toward him, glimpsed dimly in the window glass. “You’re late,” he says tonelessly. “You were supposed to be here ten minutes ago—” He begins to look round, and now his eyes widen.

  “Who were you expecting?” asks the ice blond in the black business suit, long-skirted and uptight. There’s something predatory about her expression. “No, don’t tell me. So you’re Manni, eh? Manni’s partial?” She sniffs, disapproval. “Fin de siècle decadence. I’m sure Sirhan wouldn’t approve.”

  “My father can go fuck himself,” Manni says truculently. “Who the hell are you?”

  The blond snaps her fingers: An office chair appears on the carpet between Manni and the window, and she sits on the edge of it, smoothing her skirt obsessively. “I’m Pamela,” she says tightly. “Has your father told you about me?”

  Manni looks puzzled. In the back of his mind, raw instincts alien to anyone instantiated before the midpoint of the twenty-first century tug on the fabric of pseudoreality. “You’re dead, aren’t you?” he asks. “One of my ancestors.”

  “I’m as dead as you are.” She gives him a wintry smile. “Nobody stays dead these days, least of all people who know Aineko.”

  Manni blinks. Now he’s beginning to feel a surge of mild irritation. “This is all very well, but I was expecting company,” he says with heavy emphasis. “Not a family reunion, or a tiresome attempt to preach your puritanism—”

  Pamela snorts. “Wallow in your pigsty for all I care, kid. I’ve got more important things to worry about. Have you looked at your primary recently?”

  “My primary?” Manni tenses. “He’s doing okay.” For a moment his eyes focus on infinity, a thousand-yard stare as he loads and replays the latest brain dump from his infant self. “Who’s the cat he’s playing with? That’s no companion!”

  “Aineko. I told you.” Pamela taps the arm of her chair impatiently. “The family curse has come for another generation. And if you don’t do something about it—”

  “About what?” Manni sits up. “What are you talking about?” He comes to his feet and turns toward her. Outside the window, the sky is growing dark with an echo of his own foreboding. Pamela is on her feet before him, the chair evaporated in a puff of continuity clipping, her expression a cold-eyed challenge.

  “I think you know exactly what I’m talking about, Manni. It’s time to stop playing this fucking game. Grow up, while you’ve still got the chance!”

  “I’m—” He stops. “Who am I?” he asks, a chill wind of uncertainty drying the sweat that has sprung up and down his spine. “And what are you doing here?”

  “Do you really want to know the answer? I’m dead, remember. The dead know everything. And that isn’t necessarily good for the living . . .”

  He takes a deep breath. “Am I dead, too?” He looks puzzled. “There’s an adult-me in Seventh Cube Heaven. What’s he doing here?”

  “It’s the kind of coincidence that isn’t.” She reaches out and takes his hand, dumping encrypted tokens deep into his sensorium, a trail of bread crumbs leading into a dark and trackless part of mindspace. “Want to find out? Follow me.” Then she vanishes.

  Manni leans forward, baffled and frightened, staring down at the frozen majesty of the onrushing airliner below his window. “Shit,” he whispers. She came right through my defenses without leaving a trace. Who is she? The ghost of his dead great-grandmother, or something else?

  I’ll have to follow her if I want to find out, he realizes. He holds up his left hand, stares at the invisible token glowing brightly inside his husk of flesh. “Resynchronize me with my primary,” he says.

  A fraction of a second later, the floor of the penthouse bucks and quakes wildly and fire alarms begin to shriek as time comes to an end and the frozen airliner completes its journey. But Manni isn’t there anymore. And if a skyscraper falls in a simulation with nobody to see it, has anything actually happened?

  “I’ve come for the boy,” says the cat. It sits on the handwoven rug in the middle of the hardwood floor with one hind leg sticking out at an odd angle, as if it’s forgotten about it. Sirhan teeters on the edge of hysteria for a moment as he apprehends the sheer size of the entity before him, the whimsical posthuman creation of his ancestors. Originally a robotic toy companion, Aineko was progressively upgraded and patched. By the eighties, when Sirhan first met the cat in the flesh, he was already a terrifyingly alien intelligence, subtle and ironic. And now . . .

  Sirhan knows Aineko manipulated his eigenmother, bending her natural affections away from his real father and toward another man. In moments of black introspection, he sometimes wonders if the cat wasn’t also responsible in some way for his own broken upbringing, the failure to relate to his real parents. After all, it was a pawn in the vicious divorce battle between Manfred and Pamela—decades before his birth—and there might be long-term instructions buried in its preconscious drives. What if the pawn is actually a hidden king, scheming in the darkness?

  “I’ve come for Manny.”


  “You’re not having him.” Sirhan maintains an outer facade of calm, even though his first inclination is to snap at Aineko. “Haven’t you done enough damage already?”

  “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?” The cat stretches his head forward and begins to lick obsessively between the splayed toes of his raised foot. “I’m not making a demand, kid. I said I’ve come for him, and you’re not really in the frame at all. In fact, I’m going out of my way to warn you.”

  “And I say—” Sirhan stops. “Shit.” Sirhan doesn’t approve of swearing: The curse is an outward demonstration of his inner turmoil. “Forget what I was about to say, I’m sure you already know it. Let me begin again, please.”

  “Sure. Let’s play this your way.” The cat chews on a loose nail sheath but his innerspeech is perfectly clear, a casual intimacy that keeps Sirhan on edge. “You’ve got some idea of what I am, clearly. You know—I ascribe intentionality to you—that my theory of mind is intrinsically stronger than yours, that my cognitive model of human consciousness is complete. You might well suspect that I use a Turing Oracle to think my way around your halting states.” The cat isn’t worrying at a loose claw now, his grinning, pointy teeth gleaming in the light from Sirhan’s study window. The window looks out onto the inner space of the habitat cylinder, up at a sky with hillsides and lakes and forests plastered across it: It’s like an Escher landscape, modeled with complete perfection. “You’ve realized that I can think my way around the outside of your box while you’re flailing away inside it, and I’m always one jump ahead of you. What else do you know I know?”