Accelerando e-3

by Charles Stross

  Sirhan’s lily-pad city floats inside a gigantic and nearly-invisible sphere in Saturn’s upper atmosphere; a balloon kilometers across with a shell of fullerene-reinforced diamond below and a hot hydrogen gas bag above. It’s one of several hundred multimegaton soap bubbles floating in the sea of turbulent hydrogen and helium that is the upper atmosphere of Saturn, seeded there by the Society for Creative Terraforming, subcontractors for the 2074

  Worlds’ Fair.

  The cities are elegant, grown from a conceptual seed a few megawords long. Their replication rate is slow (it takes months to build a bubble), but in only a couple of decades, exponential growth will have paved the stratosphere with human-friendly terrain. Of course, the growth rate will slow toward the end, as it takes longer to fractionate the metal isotopes out of the gas giant’s turbid depths, but before that happens, the first fruits of the robot factories on Ganymede will be pouring hydrocarbons down into the mix. Eventually Saturn – cloud-top gravity a human-friendly 11 meters per second squared – will have a planet wide biosphere with nearly a hundred times the surface area of Earth. And a bloody good thing indeed this will be, for otherwise, Saturn is no use to anyone except as a fusion fuel bunker for the deep future when the sun’s burned down.

  This particular lily-pad is carpeted in grass, the hub of the disk rising in a gentle hill surmounted by the glowering concrete hump of the Boston Museum of Science. It looks curiously naked, shorn of its backdrop of highways and the bridges of the Charles River – but even the generous kiloton dumb matter load-outs of the skyhooks that lifted it into orbit wouldn’t have stretched to bringing its framing context along with it. Probably someone will knock up a cheap diorama backdrop out of utility fog, Sirhan thinks, but for now, the museum stands proud and isolated, a solitary redoubt of classical learning in exile from the fast-thinking core of the solar system.

  “Waste of money,” grumbles the woman in black. “Whose stupid idea was this, anyway?” She jabs the diamond ferrule of her cane at the museum.

  “It’s a statement,” Sirhan says absently. “You know the kind, we’ve got so many newtons to burn we can send our cultural embassies wherever we like. The Louvre is on its way to Pluto, did you hear that?”

  “Waste of energy.” She lowers her cane reluctantly and leans on it. Pulls a face: “It’s not right.”

  “You grew up during the second oil crunch, didn’t you?” Sirhan prods. “What was it like then?”

  “What was it…? Oh, gas hit fifty bucks a gallon, but we still had plenty for bombers,” she says dismissively.

  “We knew it would be okay. If it hadn’t been for those damn’ meddlesome posthumanists -” Her wrinkled, unnaturally aged face scowls at him furiously from underneath hair that has faded to the color of rotten straw, but he senses a subtext of self-deprecating irony that he doesn’t understand. “Like your grandfather, damn him. If I was young again I’d go and piss on his grave to show him what I think of what he did. If he has a grave,” she adds, almost fondly.

  Memo checkpoint: log family history, Sirhan tells one of his ghosts. As a dedicated historian, he records every experience routinely, both before it enters his narrative of consciousness – efferent signals are the cleanest

  – and also his own stream of selfhood, against some future paucity of memory. But his grandmother has been remarkably consistent over the decades in her refusal to adapt to the new modalities.

  “You’re recording this, aren’t you?” she sniffs.

  “I’m not recording it, Grandmama,” he says gently, “I’m just preserving my memories for future generations.”

  “Hah! We’ll see,” she says suspiciously. Then she surprises him with a bark of laughter, cut off abruptly:

  “No, you’ll see, darling. I won’t be around to be disappointed.”

  “Are you going to tell me about my grandfather?” asks Sirhan.

  “Why should I bother? I know you posthumans, you’ll just go and ask his ghost yourself. Don’t try to deny it! There are two sides to every story, child, and he’s had more than his fair share of ears, the sleazebag. Leaving me to bring up your mother on my own, and nothing but a bunch of worthless intellectual property and a dozen lawsuits from the Mafiya to do it with. I don’t know what I ever saw in him.” Sirhan’s voice-stress monitor detects a distinct hint of untruth in this assertion. “He’s worthless trash, and don’t you forget it. Lazy idiot couldn’t even form just one startup on his own: He had to give it all away, all the fruits of his genius.”

  While she rambles on, occasionally punctuating her characterization with sharp jabs of the cane, Pamela leads Sirhan on a slow, wavering stroll that veers around one side of the museum, until they’re standing next to a starkly engineered antique loading bay. “He should have tried real communism instead,” she harrumphs: “Put some steel into him, shake those starry-eyed visionary positive-sum daydreams loose. You knew where you were in the old times, and no mistake. Humans were real humans, work was real work, and corporations were just things that did as we told them. And then, when she went to the bad, that was all his fault, too, you know.”

  “She? You mean my, ah, mother?” Sirhan diverts his primary sensorium back to Pamela’s vengeful muttering. There are aspects to this story that he isn’t completely familiar with, angles he needs to sketch in so that he can satisfy himself that all is as it should be when the bailiffs go in to repossess Amber’s mind.

  “He sent her our cat. Of all the mean-spirited, low, downright dishonest things he ever did, that was the worst part of it. That cat was mine, but he reprogrammed it to lead her astray. And it succeeded admirably. She was only twelve at the time, an impressionable age, I’m sure you’d agree. I was trying to raise her right. Children need moral absolutes, especially in a changing world, even if they don’t like it much at the time. Self-discipline and stability, you can’t function as an adult without them. I was afraid that, with all her upgrades, she’d never really get a handle on who she was, that she’d end up more machine than woman. But Manfred never really understood childhood, mostly on account of his never growing up. He always was inclined to meddle.”

  “Tell me about the cat,” Sirhan says quietly. One glance at the loading bay door tells him that it’s been serviced recently. A thin patina of expended foglets have formed a snowy scab around its edges, flaking off like blue refractive candyfloss that leaves bright metal behind. “Didn’t it go missing or something?”

  Pamela snorts. “When your mother ran away, it uploaded itself to her starwhisp and deleted its body. It was the only one of them that had the guts – or maybe it was afraid I’d have it subpoenaed as a hostile witness. Or, and I can’t rule this out, your grandfather gave it a suicide reflex. He was quite evil enough to do something like that, after he reprogrammed himself to think I was some kind of mortal enemy.”

  “So when my mother died to avoid bankruptcy, the cat… didn’t stay behind? Not at all? How remarkable.”

  Sirhan doesn’t bother adding how suicidal. Any artificial entity that’s willing to upload its neural state vector into a one-kilogram interstellar probe three-quarters of the way to Alpha Centauri without backup or some clear way of returning home has got to be more than a few methods short in the object factory.

  “It’s a vengeful beast.” Pamela pokes her stick at the ground sharply, mutters a command word, and lets go of it. She stands before Sirhan, craning her neck back to look up at him. “My, what a tall boy you are.”

  “Person,” he corrects, instinctively. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t presume.”

  “Person, thing, boy, whatever – you’re engendered, aren’t you?” she asks, sharply, waiting until he nods reluctantly. “Never trust anyone who can’t make up their mind whether to be a man or a woman,” she says gloomily.

  “You can’t rely on them.” Sirhan, who has placed his reproductive system on hold until he needs it, bites his tongue.

  “That damn cat,” his grandmother complains. ” It carried your grandfather�
��s business plan to my daughter and spirited her away into the big black. It poisoned her against me. It encouraged her to join in that frenzy of speculative bubble-building that caused the market reboot that brought down the Ring Imperium. And now it -”

  “Is it on the ship?” Sirhan asks, almost too eagerly.

  “It might be.” She stares at him through narrowed eyes. “You want to interview it, too, huh?”

  Sirhan doesn’t bother denying it. “I’m a historian, Grandmama. And that probe has been somewhere no other human sensorium has ever seen. It may be old news, and there may be old lawsuits waiting to feed on the occupants, but…” He shrugs. “Business is business, and my business lies in ruins.”

  “Hah!” She stares at him for a moment, then nods, very slowly. She leans forward to rest both wrinkled hands atop her cane, joints like bags of shriveled walnuts: Her suit’s endoskeleton creaks as it adjusts to accommodate her confidential posture. “You’ll get yours, kid.” The wrinkles twist into a frightening smile, sixty years of saved-up bitterness finally within spitting distance of a victim. “And I’ll get what I want, too. Between us, your mother won’t know what’s hit her.”

  *

  “Relax, between us your mother won’t know what’s hit her,” says the cat, baring needle teeth at the Queen in the big chair – carved out of a single lump of computational diamond, her fingers clenched whitely on the sapphire-plated arms – her minions, lovers, friends, crew, shareholders, bloggers, and general factional auxiliaries spaced out around her. And the Slug. “It’s just another lawsuit. You can deal with it.”

  “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke,” Amber says, a trifle moodily. Although she’s ruler of this embedded space, with total control over the reality model underlying it, she’s allowed herself to age to a dignified twentysomething: Dressed casually in gray sweats, she doesn’t look like the once-mighty ruler of a Jovian moon, or for that matter the renegade commander of a bankrupt interstellar expedition. “Okay, I think you’d better run that past me again. Unless anyone’s got any suggestions?”

  “If you will excuse me?” asks Sadeq. “We have a shortage of insight here. I believe two laws were cited as absolute systemwide conventions – and how they convinced the ulama to go along with that I would very much like to know – concerning the rights and responsibilities of the undead. Which, apparently, we are. Did they by any chance attach the code to their claim?”

  “Do bears shit in woods?” asks Boris, raptor-irascible, with an angry clatter of teeth. “Is full dependency graph and parse tree of criminal code crawling way up carrier’s ass as we speak. Am drowning in lawyer gibberish!

  If you -”

  “Boris, can it!” Amber snaps. Tempers are high in the throne room. She didn’t know what to expect when she arrived home from the expedition to the router, but bankruptcy proceedings weren’t part of it. She doubts any of them expected anything like this. Especially not the bit about being declared liable for debts run up by a renegade splinter of herself, her own un-uploaded identity that had stayed home to face the music, aged in the flesh, married, gone bankrupt, died – incurred child support payments? “I don’t hold you responsible for this,” she added through gritted teeth, with a significant glance toward Sadeq.

  “This is truly a mess fit for the Prophet himself, peace be unto him, to serve judgment upon.” Sadeq looks as shaken as she is by the implications the lawsuit raises. His gaze skitters around the room, looking anywhere but at Amber – and Pierre, her lanky toy-boy astrogator and bed warmer – as he laces his fingers.

  “Drop it. I said I don’t blame you.” Amber forces a smile. “We’re all tense from being locked in here with no bandwidth. Anyway, I smell Mother-dearest’s hand underneath all this litigation. Sniff the glove. We’ll sort a way out.”

  “We could keep going.” This from Ang, at the back of the room. Diffident and shy, she doesn’t generally open her mouth without a good reason. “The Field Circus is in good condition, isn’t it? We could divert back to the beam from the router, accelerate up to cruise speed, and look for somewhere to live. There must be a few suitable brown dwarfs within a hundred light-years…”

  “We’ve lost too much sail mass,” says Pierre. He’s not meeting Amber’s gaze either. There are lots of subtexts loose in this room, broken narratives from stories of misguided affections. Amber pretends not to notice his embarrassment. “We ejected half our original launch sail to provide the braking mirror at Hyundai +4904/-56, and almost eight megaseconds ago, we halved our area again to give us a final deceleration beam for Saturn orbit. If we did it again, we wouldn’t have enough area left to repeat the trick and still decelerate at our final target.” Laser-boosted light sails do it with mirrors; after boost, they can drop half the sail and use it to reverse the launch beam and direct it back at the ship, to provide deceleration. But you can only do it a few times before you run out of sail.

  “There’s nowhere to run.”

  “Nowhere to -” Amber stares at him through narrowed eyes. “Sometimes I really wonder about you, you know?”

  “I know you do.” And Pierre really does know, because he carries a little homunculoid around in his society of mind, a model of Amber far more accurate and detailed than any pre-upload human could possibly have managed to construct of a lover. (For her part, Amber keeps a little Pierre doll tucked away inside the creepy cobwebs of her head, part of an exchange of insights they took part in years ago. But she doesn’t try to fit inside his head too often anymore – it’s not good to be able to second-guess your lover every time.) “I also know that you’re going to rush in and grab the bull by the, ah, no. Wrong metaphor. This is your mother we are discussing?”

  “My mother.” Amber nods thoughtfully. “Where’s Donna?”

  “I don’t -”

  There’s a throaty roar from the back, and Boris lurches forward with something in his mouth, an angry Bolex that flails his snout with its tripod legs. “Hiding in corners again?” Amber says disdainfully.

  “I am a camera!” protests the camera, aggrieved and self-conscious as it picks itself up off the floor. “I am

  – “

  Pierre leans close, sticks his face up against the fish-eye lens: “You’re fucking well going to be a human being just this once. Merde!”

  The camera is replaced by a very annoyed blond woman wearing a safari suit and more light meters, lenses, camera bags, and microphones than a CNN outside broadcast unit. “Go fuck yourself!”

  “I don’t like being spied on,” Amber says sharply. “Especially as you weren’t invited to this meeting. Right?”

  “I’m the archivist.” Donna looks away, stubbornly refusing to admit anything. ” You said I should -”

  “Yes, well.” Amber is embarrassed. But it’s a bad idea to embarrass the Queen in her audience chamber.

  “You heard what we were discussing. What do you know about my mother’s state of mind?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” Donna says promptly. She’s clearly in a sulk and prepared to do no more than the minimum to help resolve the situation. “I only met her once. You look like her when you are angry, do you know that?”

  “I -” For once, Amber’s speechless.

  “I’ll schedule you for facial surgery,” offers the cat. Sotto voce: “It’s the only way to be sure.”

  Normally, accusing Amber of any resemblance to her mother, however slight and passing, would be enough to trigger a reality quake within the upload environment that passes for the bridge of the Field Circus. It’s a sign of how disturbed Amber is by the lawsuit that she lets the cat’s impertinence slide. “What is the lawsuit, anyway?”

  Donna asks, nosy as ever and twice as annoying: “I did not that bit see.”

  “It’s horrible,” Amber says vehemently.

  “Truly evil,” echoes Pierre.

  “Fascinating but wrong,” Sadeq muses thoughtfully.

  “But it’s still horrible!”

  “Yes, but what is it?” Don
na the all-seeing-eye archivist and camera manqué asks.

  “It’s a demand for settlement.” Amber takes a deep breath. “Dammit, you might as well tell everyone – it won’t stay secret for long.” She sighs. “After we left, it seems my other half – my original incarnation, that is -

  got married. To Sadeq, here.” She nods at the Iranian theologian, who looks just as bemused as she did the first time she heard this part of the story. “And they had a child. Then the Ring Imperium went bankrupt. The child is demanding maintenance payments from me, backdated nearly twenty years, on the grounds that the undead are jointly and severally liable for debts run up by their incarnations. It’s a legal precedent established to prevent people from committing suicide temporarily as a way to avoid bankruptcy. Worse, the lien on my assets is measured in subjective time from a point at the Ring Imperium about nineteen months after our launch time – we’ve been in relativistic flight, so while my other half would be out from under it by now if she’d survived, I’m still subject to the payment order. But compound interest applies back home – that is to stop people trying to use the twin’s paradox as a way to escape liability. So, by being away for about twenty-eight years of wall-clock time, I’ve run up a debt I didn’t know about to enormous levels.

  “This man, this son I’ve never met, theoretically owns the Field Circus several times over. And my accounts are wiped out – I don’t even have enough money to download us into fleshbodies. Unless one of you guys has got a secret stash that survived the market crash after we left, we’re all in deep trouble.”

  *

  A mahogany dining table eight meters long graces the flagstoned floor of the huge museum gallery, beneath the skeleton of an enormous Argentinosaurus and a suspended antique Mercury capsule more than a century old.

  The dining table is illuminated by candlelight, silver cutlery and fine porcelain plates setting out two places at opposite ends. Sirhan sits in a high-backed chair beneath the shadow of a triceratops’s rib cage. Opposite him, Pamela has dressed for dinner in the fashion of her youth. She raises her wineglass toward him. “Tell me about your childhood, why don’t you?” she asks. High above them, Saturn’s rings shimmer through the skylights, like a luminous paint splash thrown across the midnight sky.