“It asked for you,” says the ghost, narrowing from an ellipse to a line, then shrinking to a dimensionless point of brilliance. “And now it’s coming. We-I not willing to risk exposure. Call us-me when you have slain the dragon. Goodbye.”
“Oh shit -” Amber spins round. But she and Sadeq are alone beneath the hot sunlight from above. The piazza, like the one in the Nursery Republic, is charmingly rustic – but there’s nobody home, nothing but ornate cast-iron furniture basking beneath the noon-bright sun, a table with a parasol over it, and something furry lying sprawled in a patch of sunlight beside it.
“We appear to be alone for now,” says Sadeq. He smiles crookedly, then nods at the table. “Maybe we should wait for our host to arrive?”
“Our host.” Amber peers around. “The ghost is kind of frightened of this alien. I wonder why?”
“It asked for us.” Sadeq heads toward the table, pulls out a chair, and sits down carefully. “That could be very good news – or very bad.”
“Hmm.” Amber finishes her survey, sees no sign of life. For lack of any better ideas, she ambles over to the table and sits down on the other side of it from Sadeq. He looks slightly nervous beneath her inspection, but maybe it’s just embarrassment about having seen her in her underwear. If I had an afterlife like that, I’d be embarrassed about it, too, Amber thinks to herself.
“Hey, you nearly tripped over -” Sadeq freezes, peering at something close to Amber’s left foot. He looks puzzled for a moment, then smiles broadly. “What are you doing here?” he asks her blind spot.
“What are you talking to?” she asks, startled.
He’s talking to me, dummy, says something tantalizingly familiar from her blind spot. So the fuckwits are trying to use you to dislodge me, hmm? That’s not exactly clever.
“Who -” Amber squints at the flagstone, spawns a bunch of ghosts who tear hurriedly at her reality modification ackles. Nothing seems to shift the blindness. “Are you the alien?”
“What else could I be?” the blind spot asks with heavy irony. “No, I’m your father’s pet cat. Listen, do you want to get out of here?”
“Uh.” Amber rubs her eyes. “I can’t see you, whatever you are,” she says politely. “Do I know you?” She’s got a strange sense that she does know the blind spot, that it’s really important, and she’s missing something intimate to her own sense of identity, but what it might be she can’t tell.
“Yeah, kid.” There’s a note of world-weary amusement in the not-voice coming from the hazy patch on the ground. “They’ve hacked you but good, both of you. Let me in, and I’ll fix it.”
“No!” Exclaims Amber, a second ahead of Sadeq, who looks at her oddly. “Are you really an invader?”
The blind spot sighs. “I’m as much an invader as you are, remember? I came here with you. Difference is, I’m not going to let some stupid corporate ghost use me as fungible currency.”
“Fungible -” Sadeq stops. “I remember you,” he says slowly, with an expression of absolute, utter surprise on his face. “What do you mean?”
The blind spot yawns, baring sharp ivory fangs. Amber shakes her head, dismissing the momentary hallucination. “Lemme guess. You woke up in a room, and this alien ghost tells you the human species is extinct and asks you to do a number on me. Is that right?”
Amber nods, as an icy finger of fear trails up and down her spine. “Is it lying?” she asks.
“Damn right.” The blind spot is smiling, now, and the smile on the void won’t go away – she can see the smile, just not the body it’s attached to. “My reckoning is, we’re about sixteen light-years from Earth. The Wunch came through here, stripped the dump, then took off for parts unknown; it’s a trashhole, you wouldn’t believe it. The main life-form is an incredibly ornate corporate ecosphere, legal instruments breeding and replicating. They mug passing sapients and use them as currency.”
There’s a triangular, pointy head behind the smile, slit eyes and sharp ears, a predatory, intelligent-looking but infinitely alien face. Amber can see it out of the corners of her eyes when she looks around the piazza. “You mean we, uh, they grabbed us when we appeared, and they’ve mangled my memories -” Amber suddenly finds it incredibly difficult to concentrate, but if she focuses on the smile, she can almost see the body behind it, hunched like a furry chicken, tail wrapped neatly around its front paws.
“Yeah. Except they didn’t bargain on meeting something like me.” The smile is infinitely wide, a Cheshire-cat grin on front of an orange-and-brown stripy body that shimmers in front of Amber’s gaze like a hallucination.
“Your mother’s cracking tools are self-extending, Amber. Do you remember Hong Kong?”
“Hong -”
There is a moment of painless pressure, then Amber feels huge invisible barriers sliding away on all sides.
She looks around, for the first time seeing the piazza as it really is, half the crew of the Field Circus waiting nervously around her, the grinning cat crouched on the floor at her feet, the enormous walls of recomplicating data that fence their little town off from the gaping holes – interfaces to the other routers in the network.
“Welcome back,” Pierre says gravely, as Amber gives a squeak of surprise and leans forward to pick up her cat. “Now you’re out from under, how about we start trying to figure out how to get home?”
*
Welcome to decade the sixth, millennium three. These old datelines don’t
mean so much anymore, for while some billions of fleshbody humans are
still infected with viral memes, the significance of theocentric dating has
been dealt a body blow. This may be the fifties, but what that means to
you depends on how fast your reality rate runs. The various upload
clades exploding across the reaches of the solar system vary by several
orders of magnitude – some are barely out of 2049, while others are
exploring the subjective thousandth millennium.
While the Field Circus floats in orbit around an alien router (itself orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/-56), while Amber and her crew are trapped
on the far side of a wormhole linking the router to a network of
incomprehensibly vast alien mindscapes – while all this is going on, the
damnfool human species has finally succeeded in making itself obsolete.
The proximate cause of its displacement from the pinnacle of creation (or
the pinnacle of teleological self-congratulation, depending on your stance
on evolutionary biology) is an attack of self-aware corporations. The
phrase “smart money” has taken on a whole new meaning, for the
collision between international business law and neurocomputing
technology has given rise to a whole new family of species – fast-moving
corporate carnivores in the Net. The planet Mercury has been broken up
by a consortium of energy brokers, and Venus is an expanding debris
cloud, energized to a violent glare by the trapped and channeled solar
output. A million billion fist-sized computing caltrops, backsides glowing
dull red with the efflux from their thinking, orbit the sun at various
inclinations no farther out than Mercury used to be.
Billions of fleshbody humans refuse to have anything to do with the
blasphemous new realities. Many of their leaders denounce the uploads
and AIs as soulless machines. Many more are timid, harboring self—
preservation memes that amplify a previously healthy aversion to having
one’s brain peeled like an onion by mind-mapping robots into an all—
pervading neurosis. Sales of electrified tinfoil-lined hats are at an all-time
high. Still, hundreds of millions have already traded their meat puppets for
mind machines, and they breed fast. In another few years, the fleshbody
po
pulace will be an absolute minority of the posthuman clade. Sometime
later, there will probably be a war. The dwellers in the thoughtcloud are
hungry for dumb matter to convert, and the fleshbodies make notoriously
poor use of the collection of silicon and rare elements that pool at the
bottom of the gravity well that is Earth.
Energy and thought are driving a phase-change in the condensed matter
substance of the solar system. The MIPS per kilogram metric is on the
steep upward leg of a sigmoid curve – dumb matter is coming to life as
the mind children restructure everything with voracious nanomechanical
servants. The thoughtcloud forming in orbit around the sun will ultimately
be the graveyard of a biological ecology, another marker in space visible
to the telescopes of any new iron-age species with the insight to
understand what they’re seeing: the death throes of dumb matter, the
birth of a habitable reality vaster than a galaxy and far speedier. Death
throes that, within a few centuries, will mean the extinction of biological
life within a light-year or so of that star – for the majestic Matrioshka
brains, though they are the pinnacles of sentient civilization, are
intrinsically hostile environments for fleshy life.
*
Pierre, Donna-the-all-seeing-eye, and Su Ang fill Amber in on what they’ve discovered about the bazaar -
as they call the space the ghost referred to as the demilitarized zone – over ice-cold margaritas and a very good simulation of a sociable joint. Some of them have been on the loose in here for subjective years. There’s a lot of information to absorb.
“The physical layer is half a light-hour in diameter, four hundred times as massive as Earth,” Pierre explains.
“Not solid, of course – the largest component is about the size my fist used to be.” Amber squints, trying to remember how big that was – scale factors are hard to remember accurately. “I met this old chatbot that said it’s outlived its original star, but I’m not sure it’s running with a full deck. Anyway, if it’s telling the truth, we’re a third of a light year out from a closely coupled binary system – they use orbital lasers the size of Jupiter to power it without getting too close to all those icky gravity wells.”
Amber is intimidated, despite her better judgment, because this bizarre bazaar is several hundred billion times as big as the totality of human presingularity civilization. She tries not to show it in front of the others, but she’s worried that getting home may be impossible – requiring enterprise beyond the economic event horizon, as realistic a proposition as a dime debuting as a dollar bill. Still, she’s got to at least try. Just knowing about the existence of the bazaar will change so many things…
“How much money can we lay our hands on?” She asks. “What is money hereabouts, anyway? Assuming they’ve got a scarcity-mediated economy. Bandwidth, maybe?”
“Ah, well.” Pierre looks at her oddly. “That’s the problem. Didn’t the ghost tell you?”
“Tell me?” Amber raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, but it hasn’t exactly proven to be a reliable guide to anything, has it?”
“Tell her,” Su Ang says quietly. She looks away, embarrassed by something.
“They’ve got a scarcity economy all right,” says Pierre. “Bandwidth is the limited resource, that and matter.
This whole civilization is tied together locally because if you move too far away, well, it takes ages to catch up on the gossip. Matrioshka brain intelligences are much more likely to stay at home than anybody realized, even though they chat on the phone a lot. And they use things that come from other cognitive universes as, well, currency. We came in through the coin slot, is it any wonder we ended up in the bank?”
“That’s so deeply wrong that I don’t know where to begin,” Amber grumbles. “How did they get into this mess?”
“Don’t ask me.” Pierre shrugs. “I have the distinct feeling that anyone or anything we meet in this place won’t have any more of a clue than we do – whoever or whatever built this brain, there ain’t nobody home anymore except the self-propelled corporations and hitchhikers like the Wunch. We’re in the dark, just like they were.”
“Huh. You mean they built something like this, then they went extinct? That sounds so dumb…”
Su Ang sighs. “They got too big and complex to go traveling once they built themselves a bigger house to live in. Extinction tends to be what happens to overspecialized organisms that are stuck in one environmental niche for too long. If you posit a singularity, then maximization of local computing resources – like this – as the usual end state for tool users, is it any wonder none of them ever came calling on us?”
Amber focuses on the table in front of her, rests the heel of her palm on the cool metal, and tries to remember how to fork a second copy of her state vector. A moment later, her ghost obligingly fucks with the physics model of the table. Iron gives way like rubber beneath her fingertips, a pleasant elasticity. “Okay, we have some control over the universe, at least that’s something to work with. Have any of you tried any self-modification?”
“That’s dangerous,” Pierre says emphatically. “The more of us the better before we start doing that stuff.
And we need some firewalling of our own.”
“How deep does reality go, here?” asks Sadeq. It’s almost the first question he’s asked of his own volition, and Amber takes it as a positive sign that he’s finally coming out of his shell.
“Oh, the Planck length is about a hundredth of a millimeter in this world. Too small to see, comfortably large for the simulation engines to handle. Not like real space-time.”
“Well, then.” Sadeq pauses. “They can zoom their reality if they need to?”
“Yeah, fractals work in here.” Pierre nods. “I didn’t -”
“This place is a trap,” Su Ang says emphatically.
“No it isn’t,” Pierre replies, nettled.
“What do you mean, a trap?” asks Amber.
“We’ve been here a while,” says Ang. She glances at Aineko, who sprawls on the flagstones, snoozing or whatever it is that weakly superhuman AIs do when they’re emulating a sleeping cat. “After your cat broke us out of bondage, we had a look around. There are things out there that -” She shivers. “Humans can’t survive in most of the simulation spaces here. Universes with physics models that don’t support our kind of neural computing. You could migrate there, but you’d need to be ported to a whole new type of logic – by the time you did that, would you still be you? Still, there are enough entities roughly as complex as we are to prove that the builders aren’t here anymore. Just lesser sapients, rooting through the wreckage. Worms and parasites squirming through the body after nightfall on the battlefield.”
“I ran into the Wunch,” Donna volunteers helpfully. “The first couple of times they ate my ghost, but eventually I figured out how to talk to them.”
“And there’s other aliens, too,” Su Ang adds gloomily. “Just nobody you’d want to meet on a dark night.”
“So there’s no hope of making contact,” Amber summarizes. “At least, not with anything transcendent and well-intentioned toward visiting humans.”
“That’s probably right,” Pierre concedes. He doesn’t sound happy about it.
“So we’re stuck in a pocket universe with limited bandwidth to home and a bunch of crazy slum dwellers who’ve moved into the abandoned and decaying mansion and want to use us for currency. ‘Jesus saves, and redeems souls for valuable gifts.’ Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Su Ang looks depressed.
“Well.” Amber glances at Sadeq speculatively. Sadeq is staring into the distance, at the crazy infinite sunspot that limns the square with shadows. “Hey, god-man. Got a question for you.”
“Yes?” Sadeq looks at her, a slightly dazed expression on his face. “I�
��m sorry, I am just feeling the jaws of a larger trap around my throat -”
“Don’t be.” Amber grins, and it is not a pleasant expression. “Have you ever been to Brooklyn?”
“No, why -”
“Because you’re going to help me sell these lying bastards a bridge. Okay? And when we’ve sold it we’re going to use the money to pay the purchasing fools to drive us across, so we can go home. Listen, this is what I’m planning…”
*
“I can do this, I think,” Sadeq says, moodily examining the Klein bottle on the table. The bottle is half-empty, its fluid contents invisible around the corner of the fourth-dimensional store. “I spent long enough alone in there to -” He shivers.
“I don’t want you damaging yourself,” Amber says, calmly enough, because she has an ominous feeling that their survival in this place has an expiry date attached.
“Oh, never fear.” Sadeq grins lopsidedly. “One pocket hell is much like another.”
“Do you understand why -”
“Yes, yes,” he says dismissively. “We can’t send copies of ourselves into it, that would be an abomination. It needs to be unpopulated, yes?”
“Well, the idea is to get us home, not leave thousands of copies of ourselves trapped in a pocket universe here. Isn’t that it?” Su Ang asks hesitantly. She’s looking distracted, most of her attention focused on absorbing the experiences of a dozen ghosts she’s spun off to attend to perimeter security.
“Who are we selling this to?” asks Sadeq. “If you want me to make it attractive -”
“It doesn’t need to be a complete replica of the Earth. It just has to be a convincing advertisement for a presingularity civilization full of humans. You’ve got two-and-seventy zombies to dissect for their brains; bolt together a bunch of variables you can apply to them, and you can permutate them to look a bit more varied.”
Amber turns her attention to the snoozing cat. “Hey, furball. How long have we been here really, in real time? Can you grab Sadeq some more resources for his personal paradise garden?”
Aineko stretches and yawns, totally feline, then looks up at Amber with narrowed eyes and raised tail.
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