Accelerando e-3

by Charles Stross

  Sadeq has always been inclined to philosophical inquiry, and his vision of the afterlife is more cerebral than most, involving ideas as questionable within the framework of Islam as those of Teilhard de Chardin were to the twentieth-century Catholic church. If there’s one key indicator of a false paradise in his eschatology, it’s two-and-seventy brainlessly beautiful houris waiting to do his bidding. So it follows that he can’t really be dead…

  The whole question of reality is so vexing that Sadeq does what he does every night. He strides heedlessly across priceless works of art, barging hastily through courtyards and passageways, ignoring niches in which nearly naked supermodels lie with their legs apart, climbing stairs – until he comes to a small unfurnished room with a single high window in one wall. There he sits on the floor, legs crossed, meditating; not in prayer, but in a more tightly focused ratiocination. Every false night (for there is no way to know how fast time is passing, outside this cyberspace pocket), Sadeq sits and thinks, grappling with Descartes’s demon in the solitude of his own mind. And the question he asks himself every night is the same: Can I tell if this is the true hell? And if it is not, how can I escape?

  *

  The ghost tells Amber that she has been dead for just under a third of a million years. She has been reinstantiated from storage – and has died again – many times in the intervening period, but she has no memory of this; she is a fork from the main bough, and the other branches expired in lonely isolation.

  The business of resurrection does not, in and of itself, distress Amber unduly. Born in the post-Moravec era, she merely finds some aspects of the ghost’s description dissatisfyingly incomplete. It’s like saying she was drugged and brought hither without stating whether by plane, train, or automobile.

  She doesn’t have a problem with the ghost’s assertion that she is nowhere near Earth – indeed, that she is approximately eighty thousand light-years away. When she and the others took the risk of uploading themselves through the router they found in orbit around Hyundai +4904/-56 they’d understood that they could end up anywhere or nowhere. But the idea that she’s still within the light cone of her departure strikes her as dubious. The original SETI broadcast strongly implied that the router is part of a network of self-replicating instantaneous communicators, spawning and spreading between the cold brown dwarf stars that litter the galaxy. She’d somehow expected to be much farther from home by now.

  Somewhat more disturbing is the ghost’s assertion that the human genotype has rendered itself extinct at least twice, that its home planet is unknown, and that Amber is nearly the only human left in the public archives. At this point, she interrupts. “I hardly see what this has to do with me!” Then she blows across her coffee glass, trying to cool the contents. “I’m dead,” she explains, with an undertone of knowing sarcasm in her voice. “Remember? I just got here. A thousand seconds ago, subjective time, I was in the control node of a starship, discussing what to do with the router we were in orbit around. We agreed to send ourselves through it, as a trade mission. Then I woke up in bed here in the umpty-zillionth century, wherever and whatever here is. Without access to any reality ackles or augmentation, I can’t even tell whether this is real or an embedded simulation. You’re going to have to explain why you need an old version of me before I can make sense of my situation – and I can tell you, I’m not going to help you until I know who you are. And speaking of that, what about the others? Where are they? I wasn’t the only one, you know?”

  The ghost freezes in place for a moment, and Amber feels a watery rush of terror: Have I gone too far? she wonders.

  “There has been an unfortunate accident,” the ghost announces portentously. It morphs from a translucent copy of Amber’s own body into the outline of a human skeleton, elaborate bony extensions simulating an osteosarcoma of more-than-lethal proportions. “Consensus-we believe that you are best positioned to remediate the situation. This applies within the demilitarized zone.”

  “Demilitarized?” Amber shakes her head, pauses to sip her coffee. “What do you mean? What is this place?”

  The ghost flickers again, adopting an abstract rotating hypercube as its avatar. “This space we occupy is a manifold adjacent to the demilitarized zone. The demilitarized zone is a space outside our core reality, itself exposed to entities that cross freely through our firewall, journeying to and from the network outside. We-us use the DMZ to establish the informational value of migrant entities, sapient currency units and the like. We-us banked you upon arrival against future options trades in human species futures.”

  “Currency!” Amber doesn’t know whether to be amused or horrified – both reactions seem appropriate. “Is that how you treat all your visitors?”

  The ghost ignores her question. “There is a runaway semiotic excursion under way in the zone. We-us believe only you can fix it. If you agree to do, so we will exchange value, pay, reward cooperation, expedite remuneration, manumit, repatriate.”

  Amber drains her coffee cup. “Have you ever entered into economic interactions with me, or humans like me, before?” she asks. “If not, why should I trust you? If so, why have you revived me? Are there any more experienced instances of myself running around here?” She raises a skeptical eyebrow at the ghost. “This looks like the start of an abusive relationship.”

  The ghost continues to sidestep her attempts to work out where she stands. It flickers into transparency, grows into a hazy window on a landscape of impossible shapes. Clouds sprouting trees drift above a landscape of green, egg-curved hills and cheesecake castles. “Nature of excursion: alien intelligence is loose in the DMZ,” it asserts. “Alien is applying invalid semiotics to complex structures designed to sustain trade. You know this alien, Amber. We require solution. Slay the monster, we will give you line of credit. Your own reality to control, insight into trade arrangements, augmented senses, ability to travel. Can even upgrade you to you-we consensus, if desired.”

  “This monster.” Amber leans forward, staring into the window eagerly. She’s half-minded to ignore what she feels is a spurious offer; it doesn’t sound too appetizing. Upgrade me to a ghost fragment of an alien group mind?

  she wonders dismissively. “What is this alien?” She feels blind and unsure, stripped of her ability to spawn threads of herself to pursue complex inferences. “Is it part of the Wunch?”

  “Datum unknown. It-them came with you,” says the ghost. “Accidentally reactivated some seconds since now. It runs amok in the demilitarized zone. Help us, Amber. Save our hub, or we will be cut off from the network.

  If that happens, you will die with we-us. Save us…”

  *

  A single memory belonging to someone else unwinds, faster than a

  guided missile and far more deadly.

  Amber, aged eleven, is a gawky, long-limbed child loose on the streets of

  Hong Kong, a yokel tourist viewing the hot core of the Middle Kingdom.

  This is her first and final vacation before the Franklin Trust straps her

  inside the payload pod of a Shenzhou spaceplane and blasts her into

  orbit from Xinkiang. She’s free for the time being, albeit mortgaged to the

  tune of several million euros; she’s a little taikonaut to be, ready to work

  for the long years in Jupiter orbit it will take her to pay off the self-propelled options web that owns her. It’s not exactly slavery: Thanks to

  Dad’s corporate shell game she doesn’t have to worry about Mom

  chasing her, trying to return her to the posthuman prison of growing up

  just like an old-fashioned little girl. And now she’s got a bit of pocket

  money, and a room in the Hilton, and her own personal Franklin remote to

  keep her company, she’s decided she’s gonna do that eighteenth-century-enlightenment tourist shit and do it right.

  Because this is her last day at liberty in the randomly evolved biosphere.

  China is where things are
at in this decade, hot and dense and full of

  draconian punishments for the obsolescent. Nationalist fervor to catch up

  with the west has been replaced by consumerist fervor to own the latest

  fad gadgets; the most picturesque tourist souvenirs from the quaintly old-fashioned streets of America; the fastest, hottest, smartest, upgrades for

  body and soul. Hong Kong is hotter and faster than just about anywhere

  else in China, or in the whole damn world for that matter. This is a place

  where tourists from Tokyo gawp, cowed and future-shocked by the

  glamour of high-technology living.

  Walking along Jardine’s Bazaar – More like Jardine’s bizarre, she thinks

  – exposes Amber to a blast of humid noise. Geodesic domes sprout like

  skeletal mushrooms from the glass-and-chrome roofs of the expensive

  shopping malls and luxury hotels, threatening to float away on the hot sea

  breeze. There are no airliners roaring in and out of Kai Tak anymore, no

  burnished aluminum storm clouds to rain round-eyed passengers on the

  shopping malls and fish markets of Kowloon and the New Territories. In

  these tense later days of the War Against Unreason, impossible new

  shapes move in the sky; Amber gapes upward as a Shenyang F-30

  climbs at a near-vertical angle, a mess of incomprehensibly curved flight

  surfaces vanishing to a perspective point that defies radar as well as

  eyeballs. The Chinese – fighter? missile platform? supercomputer? – is

  heading out over the South China Sea to join the endless patrol that

  reassures the capitalist world that it is being guarded from the Hosts of

  Denial, the Trouble out of Wa’hab.

  For the moment, she’s merely a precocious human child. Amber’s

  subconscious is off-lined by the presence of forceful infowar daemons,

  the Chinese government censorbots suppressing her cognition of their

  deadliest weapons. And in the seconds while her mind is as empty as a

  sucked egg, a thin-faced man with blue hair shoves her in the small of her

  back and snatches at her shoulder bag.

  “Hey!” she yells, stumbling. Her mind’s a blur, optics refusing to respond

  and grab a biometric model of her assailant. It’s the frozen moment, the

  dead zone when on-line coverage fails, and the thief is running away

  before she can catch her balance or try to give chase. Plus, with her

  extensions off-line she doesn’t know how to yell “stop, thief!” in

  Cantonese.

  Seconds later, the fighter is out of visual range and the state censorship

  field lets up. “Get him, you bastards!” she screams, but the curious

  shoppers simply stare at the rude foreign child: An elderly woman

  brandishes a disposable phonecam at her and screeches something

  back. Amber picks up her feet and runs. Already she can feel the

  subsonics from her luggage growling at her guts – it’s going to make a

  scene if she doesn’t catch up in time. Shoppers scatter, a woman with a

  baby carriage almost running her down in her panic to get away from it.

  By the time Amber reaches her terrified shoulder bag, the thief has

  disappeared: She has to spend almost a minute petting the scared

  luggage before it stops screeching and retracts its spines enough for her

  to pick it up. And by that time there’s a robocop in attendance. “Identify

  yourself,” it rasps in synthetic English.

  Amber stares at her bag in horror: There’s a huge gash in the side, and

  it’s far too light. It’s gone, she thinks, despairingly. He stole it. “Help,” she says faintly, holding up her bag for the distant policeman looking through

  the robot’s eyes. “Been stolen.”

  “What item missing?” asks the robot.

  “My Hello Kitty,” she says, batting her eyelashes, mendacity full-on at

  maximum utilization, prodding her conscience into submission, warning of

  dire consequences should the police discover the true nature of her pet

  cat. “My kitten’s been stolen! Can you help me?”

  “Certainly,” says the cop, resting a reassuring hand on her shoulder – a

  hand that turns into a steel armband, as it pushes her into a van and

  notifies her in formally stilted language that she is under arrest on

  suspicion of shoplifting and will be required to produce certificates of

  authenticity and a fully compliant ownership audit for all items in her

  possession if she wants to prove her innocence.

  By the time Amber’s meatbrain realizes that she is being politely arrested,

  some of her external threads have already started yelling for help and her

  m-commerce trackers have identified the station she’s being taken to by

  way of click-thru trails and an obliging software license manager. They

  spawn agents to go notify the Franklin trustees, Amnesty International,

  the Space and Freedom Party, and her father’s lawyers. As she’s being

  booked into a cerise-and-turquoise juvenile offenders holding room by a

  middle-aged policewoman, the phones on the front desk are already

  ringing with inquiries from attorneys, fast-food vendors, and a particularly

  on-the-ball celebrity magazine that’s been tracking her father’s

  connections. “Can you help me get my cat back?” she asks the

  policewoman earnestly.

  “Name,” the officer reads, eyes flickering from the simultaneous

  translation. “To please wax your identity stiffly.”

  “My cat has been stolen,” Amber insists.

  “Your cat?” The cop looks perplexed, then exasperated. Dealing with

  foreign teenagers who answer questions with gibberish isn’t in her

  repertoire. “We are asking your name?”

  “No,” says Amber. “It’s my cat. It has been stolen. My cat has been stolen.”

  “Aha! Your papers, please?”

  “Papers?” Amber is growing increasingly worried. She can’t feel the

  outside world; there’s a Faraday cage wrapped around the holding cell,

  and it’s claustrophobically quiet inside. “I want my cat! Now!”

  The cop snaps her fingers, then reaches into her own pocket and

  produces an ID card, which she points to insistently. “Papers,” she

  repeats. “Or else.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Amber wails.

  The cop stares at her oddly. “Wait.” She rises and leaves, and a minute

  later, returns with a thin-faced man in a business suit and wire-rimmed

  glasses that glow faintly.

  “You are making a scene,” he says, rudely and abruptly. “What is your

  name? Tell me truthfully, or you’ll spend the night here.”

  Amber bursts into tears. “My cat’s been stolen,” she chokes out.

  The detective and the cop obviously don’t know how to deal with this

  scene; it’s freaking them out, with its overtones of emotional messiness

  and sinister diplomatic entanglement. “You wait here,” they say, and back

  out of the cell, leaving her alone with a plastic animatronic koala and a

  cheap Lebanese coffee machine.

  The implications of her loss – of Aineko’s abduction – are sinking in,

  finally, and Amber is weeping loudly and hopelessly. It’s hard to deal with

  bereavement and betrayal at any age, and the cat has been her

  wisecracking companion and consolation for a year, the rock of certainty

 
; that gave her the strength to break free from her crazy mother. To lose

  her cat to a body shop in Hong Kong, where she will probably be cut up

  for spare circuitry or turned into soup is too horrible to contemplate. Filled

  with despair and hopeless anguish, Amber howls at the interrogation

  room walls while outside, trapped threads of her consciousness search

  for backups to synchronize with.

  But after an hour, just as she’s quieting down into a slough of raw

  despair, there’s a knock – a knock! – at the door. An inquisitive head

  pops in. “Please to come with us?” It’s the female cop with the bad

  translationware. She takes in Amber’s sobbing and tuts under her breath,

  but as Amber stands up and shambles toward her, she pulls back.

  At the front desk of a cubicle farm full of police bureaucrats in various

  states of telepresence, the detective is waiting with a damp cardboard

  box wrapped in twine. “Please identify,” he asks, snipping the string.

  Amber shakes her head, dizzy with the flow of threads homing in to

  synchronize their memories with her. “Is it -” she begins to ask as the lid

  comes apart, wet pulp disintegrating. A triangular head pops up,

  curiously, sniffing the air. Bubbles blow from brown-furred nostrils. “What

  took you so long?” asks the cat, as she reaches into the box and picks

  her up, fur wet and matted with seawater.

  *

  “If you want me to go fix your alien, for starters I want you to give me reality alteration privileges,” says Amber. “Then I want you to find the latest instances of everyone who came here with me – round up the usual suspects – and give them root privileges, too. Then we’ll want access to the other embedded universes in the DMZ.

  Finally, I want guns. Lots of guns.”

  “That may be difficult,” says the ghost. “Many other humans reached halting state long since. Is at least one other still alive, but not accessible for duration of eschatological experiment in progress. Not all were recorded with version control engine; others were-is lost in DMZ. We-are can provide you with extreme access to the demilitarized zone, but query the need for kinetic energy weapons.”