Amber sighs. “You guys really are media illiterates, aren’t you?” She stands up and stretches, feeling a facsimile of sleep’s enervation leaching from her muscles. “I’ll also need my -” it’s on the tip of her tongue: There’s something missing. “Hang on. There’s something I’ve forgotten.” Something important, she thinks, puzzled.
Something that used to be around all the time that would… know?… purr? … help? “Never mind,” she hears her lips say. “This other human. I really want her. Non-negotiable. All right?”
“That may be difficult,” repeats the ghost. “Entity is looping in a recursively confined universe.”
“Eh?” Amber blinks at it. “Would you mind rephrasing that? Or illustrating?”
“Illustration: ” The ghost folds the air in the room into a glowing ball of plasma, shaped like a Klein bottle.
Amber’s eyes cross as she looks at it. “Closest reference from human historical database is Descartes’s demon. This entity has retreated within a closed space, but is now unsure whether it is objectively real or not. In any event, it refuses to interact.”
“Well, can you get me into that space?” asks Amber. Pocket universes she can deal with; it’s part and parcel of her life. “Give me some leverage -”
“Risk may attach to this course of action,” warns the ghost.
“I don’t care,” she says irritably. “Just put me there. It’s someone I know, isn’t it? Send me into her dream, and I’ll wake her up, okay?”
“Understood,” says the ghost. “Prepare yourself.”
Without any warning, Amber is somewhere else. She glances around, taking in an ornate mosaic floor, whitewashed walls set with open windows through which stars twinkle faintly in the night sky. Her clothing has somehow been replaced by sexy lingerie under a nearly transparent robe, and her hair’s grown longer by about half a meter. It’s all very disorienting. The walls are stone, and she stands in a doorway to a room with nothing in it but a bed. Occupied by -
“Shit,” she exclaims. “Who are you?” The young and incredibly, classically beautiful woman in the bed looks at her vacantly, then rolls over on her side. She isn’t wearing a stitch, she’s completely hairless from the ears down, and her languid posture is one of invitation. “Yes?” Amber asks. “What is it?”
The woman on the bed beckons to her slowly. Amber shakes her head. “Sorry, that’s just not my scene.” She backs away into the corridor, unsteady in unaccustomedly high heels. “This is some sort of male fantasy, isn’t it?
And a dumb adolescent one at that.” She looks around again. In one direction, a corridor heads past more open doorways, and in the other, it ends with a spiral staircase. Amber concentrates, trying to tell the universe to take her to the logical destination, but nothing happens. “Looks like I’m going to have to do this the hard way. I wish -” she frowns. She was about to wish that someone else was here, but she can’t remember who. So she takes a deep breath and heads toward the staircase.
“Up or down?” she asks herself. Up – it seems logical, if you’re going to have a tower, to sleep up at the top of it. So she climbs the steps carefully, holding the spiraling rail. I wonder who designed this space? she wonders, and what role am I supposed to fit into in their scenario? On second thoughts, the latter question strikes her as laughable. Wait till I give him an earful …
There’s a plain wooden door at the top of the staircase, with a latch that isn’t fastened. Amber pauses for a few seconds, nerving herself to confront a sleeper so wrapped in solipsism that he’s built this sex-fantasy castle around himself. I hope it isn’t Pierre, she thinks grimly as she pushes the door inward.
The room is bare and floored in wood. There’s no furniture, just an open window set high in one wall. A man sits cross-legged and robed, with his back to her, mumbling quietly to himself and nodding slightly. Her breath catches as she realizes who it is. Oh shit! Her eyes widen. Is this what’s been inside his head all along?
“I did not summon you,” Sadeq says calmly, not turning round to look at her. “Go away, tempter. You aren’t real.”
Amber clears her throat. “Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re wrong,” she says. “We’ve got an alien monster to catch. Want to come hunting?”
Sadeq stops nodding. He sits up slowly, stretching his spine, then stands up and turns round. His eyes glint in the moonlight. “That’s odd.” He undresses her with his gaze. “You look like someone I used to know. You’ve never done that before.”
“For fuck’s sake!” Amber nearly explodes, but catches herself after a moment. “What is this, a Solipsists United chapterhouse meeting?”
“I -” Sadeq looks puzzled. “I’m sorry, are you claiming to be real?”
“As real as you are.” Amber reaches out and grabs a hand: He doesn’t resist as she pulls him toward the doorway.
“You’re the first visitor I’ve ever had.” He sounds shocked.
“Listen, come on.” She tugs him after her, down the spiral staircase to the floor below. “Do you want to stay here? Really?” She glances back at him. “What is this place?”
“Hell is a perversion of heaven,” he says slowly, running the fingers of his free hand through his beard.
Abruptly, he reaches out and grabs her around the waist, then yanks her toward him. “We’ll have to see how real you are -” Amber, who is not used to this kind of treatment, responds by stomping on his instep and backhanding him hard.
“You’re real!” he cries, as he falls back against the staircase. “Forgive me, please! I had to know -”
“Know what?” she snarls. “Lay one finger on me again, and I’ll leave you here to rot!” She’s already spawning the ghost that will signal the alien outside to pull her out of this pocket universe: It’s a serious threat.
“But I had to – wait. You have free will. You just demonstrated that.” He’s breathing heavily and looking up at her imploringly. “I’m sorry, I apologize! But I had to know whether you were another zombie. Or not.”
“A zombie?” She looks round. Another living doll has appeared behind her, standing in an open doorway wearing a skintight leather suit with a cutaway crotch. She beckons to Sadeq invitingly. Another body wearing strategically placed strips of rubber mewls at her feet, writhing for attention. Amber raises an eyebrow in disgust.
“You thought I was one of those?”
Sadeq nods. “They’ve got cleverer lately. Some of them can talk. I nearly mistook one for -” He shudders convulsively. “Unclean!”
“Unclean.” Amber looks down at him thoughtfully. “This isn’t really your personal paradise after all, is it?”
After a moment she holds out a hand to him. “Come on.”
“I’m sorry I thought you were a zombie,” he repeats.
“Under the circumstances, I think I forgive you,” she says. Then the ghost yanks them both back to the universe outside.
*
More memories converge on the present moment:
The Ring Imperium is a huge cluster of self-replicating robots that Amber
has assembled in low Jupiter orbit, fueled by the mass and momentum of
the small moon J-47 Barney, to provide a launching platform for the
interstellar probe her father’s business partners are helping her to build.
It’s also the seat of her court, the leading jurisprudential nexus in the
outer solar system. Amber is the Queen, here, arbitrator and ruler. And
Sadeq is her judge and counsel.
A plaintiff Amber only knows as a radar blip thirty light-minutes away has
filed a lawsuit in her court, alleging malfeasance, heresy, and barratry
against a semisentient corporate pyramid scheme that arrived in Jovian
space twelve million seconds ago and currently seems set on converting
every other intelligence in the region to its peculiar memeset. A whole
bundle of multithreaded countersuits are dragging at her a
ttention, in a
counterattack alleging that the light blip is in violation of copyright, patent,
and trade secrecy laws by discussing the interloper’s intentions.
Right now, Amber isn’t home on the Ring to hear the case in person.
She’s left Sadeq behind to grapple with the balky mechanics of her legal
system – tailor-designed to make corporate litigation a pain in the ass -
while she drags Pierre off on a diplomatic visit to another Jovian colony,
the Nursery Republic. Planted by the Franklin Trust’s orphanage ship
Ernst Sanger, the Nursery has grown over the past four years into a
spindly snowflake three kilometers across. A slow-growing O’Neil cylinder
sprouts from its hub: Most of the inhabitants of the space station are less
than two years old, precocious additions to the Trust’s borganism.
There’s a piazza, paved with something not unlike rough marble, on the
side of a hill that clings insecurely to the inner edge of a spinning cup.
The sky is a black vastness overhead, wheeling slowly around a central
axis lined up on Jupiter. Amber sprawls in a wicker chair, her legs
stretched out before her and one arm flung across her forehead. The
wreckage of an incredible meal is scattered across the tables around her.
Torpid and full, she strokes the cat that lies curled in her lap. Pierre is off
somewhere, touring one or another of the prototype ecosystems that one
or another of the borg’s special interest minds is testing. Amber, for her
part, can’t be bothered. She’s just had a great meal, she doesn’t have any
lawsuits to worry about, everything back home is on the critpath, and
quality time like this is so hard to come by -
“Do you keep in touch with your father?” asks Monica.
“Mmm.” The cat purrs quietly, and Amber strokes its flank. “We e-mail.
Sometimes.”
“I just wondered.” Monica is the local borg den mother, willowy and
brown-eyed and with a deceptively lazy drawl – Yorkshire English
overlaid with Silicon Valley speak. “I hear from him, y’know. From time to
time. Now that Gianni’s retired, he doesn’t have much to do downwell
anymore. So he was talking about coming out here.”
“What? To Perijove?” Amber’s eyes open in alarm: Aineko stops purring
and looks round at Monica accusingly.
“Don’t worry.” Monica sounds vaguely amused: “He wouldn’t cramp your
style, I think.”
“But, out here -” Amber sits up. “Damn,” she says, quietly. “What got into him?”
“Middle-aged restlessness, my downwell sibs say.” Monica shrugs. “This
time Annette didn’t stop him. But he hasn’t made up his mind to travel
yet.”
“Good. Then he might not -” Amber stops. “The phrase, ‘made up his
mind’, what exactly do you mean?”
Monica’s smile mocks her for a few seconds before the older woman
surrenders. “He’s talking about uploading.”
“Is that embarrassing or what?” asks Ang. Amber glances at her, mildly
annoyed, but Ang isn’t looking her way. So much for friends, Amber thinks. Being queen of all you survey is a great way of breaking up peer
relationships -
“He won’t do it,” Amber predicts. “Dad’s burned out.”
“He thinks he’ll get it back if he optimizes himself for re-entrancy.” Monica continues to smile. “I’ve been telling him it’s just what he needs.”
“I do not want my father bugging me. Or my mother. Or Auntie ‘Nette and
Uncle Gianni. Memo to immigration control: No entry rights for Manfred
Macx or the other named individuals without clearance through the
Queen’s secretary.”
“What did he do to get you so uptight?” asks Monica idly.
Amber sighs, and subsides. “Nothing. It’s not that I’m ungrateful or
anything, but he’s just so extropian, it’s embarrassing. Like, that was the
last century’s apocalypse. Y’know?”
“I think he was a really very forward-looking organic,” Monica, speaking
for the Franklin borg, asserts. Amber looks away. Pierre would get it, she thinks. Pierre would understand her aversion to Manfred’s showing up.
Pierre, too, wants to carve out his own niche without parents looking over
his shoulders, although for very different reasons. She focuses on
someone male and more or less mature – Nicky, she thinks, though she
hasn’t seen him for a long time – walking toward the piazza, bare-ass
naked and beautifully tanned.
“Parents. What are they good for?” asks Amber, with all the truculence of
her seventeen years. “Even if they stay neotenous, they lose flexibility.
And there’s that long Paleolithic tradition of juvenile slavery. Inhuman, I
call it.”
“How old were you when it was safe to leave you around the house on
your own?” challenges Monica.
“Three. That’s when I had my first implants.” Amber smiles at the
approaching young Adonis, who smiles back: Yes, it’s Nicky, and he
seems pleased to see her. Life is good, she thinks, idly considering whether or not to tell Pierre.
“Times change,” remarks Monica. “Don’t write your family off too soon;
there might come a time when you want their company.”
“Huh.” Amber pulls a face at the old borg component. “That’s what you all say!”
*
As soon as Amber steps onto the grass, she can feel possibilities open up around her. She has management authority here, and this universe is big, wide open, not like Sadeq’s existential trap. A twitch of a sub-process reasserts her self-image, back to short hair and comfortable clothing. Another twitch brings up a whole load of useful diagnostics. Amber has a nasty feeling that she’s running in a compatibility sandbox here – there are signs that her access to the simulation system’s control interface is very much via proxy – but at least she’s got it.
“Wow! Back in the real world at last!” She can hardly contain her excitement, even forgetting to be pissed at Sadeq for thinking she was just an actor in his Cartesian theatre’s performance of Puritan Hell. “Look! It’s the DMZ!”
They’re standing on a grassy knoll overlooking a gleaming Mediterranean city. It snoozes beneath a Mandelbrot-fuzzy not-sun that hangs at the center of a hyperbolic landscape, which dwindles into a blue yonder that seems incomprehensibly distant. Circular baby-blue wells open in the walls of the world at regular intervals, connecting to other parts of the manifold. “How big is it, ghost? In planetary simulation-equivalents.”
“This demilitarized zone is an embedded reality, funneling all transfers between the local star system’s router and the civilization that built it. It uses on the order of a thousandth of the capacity of the Matrioshka brain it is part of, although the runaway excursion currently in force has absorbed most of that. Matrioshka brain, you are familiar with the concept?” The ghost sounds fussily pedantic.
Sadeq shakes his head. Amber glances at him, askance. “Take all the planets in a star system and dismantle them,” she explains. “Turn them into dust – structured nanocomp, powered by heat exchangers, spread in concentric orbits around the central star. The inner orbitals run close to the melting point of iron, the outer ones are cold as liquid nitrogen, and each layer runs off the waste heat of the next shell in. It’s like a Russian doll made out of Dyson spheres, shell enclosing shell enclosing shell, but it’s not designed to support human life. It’s computronium, matter optimized at the atomic level to s
upport computing, and they’re all running uploads – Dad figured our own solar system could support, uh, about a hundred billion times as many inhabitants as Earth. At a conservative estimate. As uploads, living in simulation space. If you first dismantle all the planets and use the resulting materials to build a Matrioshka brain.”
“Ah.” Sadeq nods thoughtfully. “Is that your definition, too?” he asks, glancing up at the glowing point the ghost uses to localize its presence.
“Substantially,” it says, almost grudgingly.
“Substantially?” Amber glances around. A billion worlds to explore, she thinks dizzily. And that’s just the firewall? She feels obscurely cheated: You need to be vaster than human just to count the digits in the big numbers at play here, but there’s nothing fundamentally incomprehensible about it. This is the sort of civilization Dad said she could expect to live in, within her meatbody life expectancy. Dad and his drinking buddies, singing, “Dismantle the Moon! Melt down Mars!” in a castle outside Prague as they waited for the results of a shamelessly gerrymandered election to arrive in the third decade of the third millennium. The Space and Freedom Party taking over the EU, and cranking up to escape velocity. But this is supposed to be kiloparsecs from home, ancient alien civilizations and all that! Where’s the exotic superscience? What about the neuron stars, strange matter suns structured for computing at nucleonic, rather than electronic, speeds? I have a bad feeling about this, she thinks, spawning a copy of herself to set up a private channel to Sadeq. It’s not advanced enough. Do you suppose these guys could be like the Wunch? Parasites or barbarians hitching a ride in the machine?
You believe it’s lying to us? Sadeq sends back.
“Hmm.” Amber sets off downslope toward the piazza below, at the heart of the fake town. “It looks a bit too human to me.”
“Human,” echoes Sadeq, a curious wistfulness in his voice. “Did you not say humans are extinct?”
“Your species is obsolete,” the ghost comments smugly. “Inappropriately adapted to artificial realities.
Poorly optimized circuitry, excessively complex low-bandwidth sensors, messily global variables -”
“Yeah, yeah, I get the picture,” says Amber, turning her attention to the town. “So why do you think we can deal with this alien god you’ve got a problem with?”
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