Accelerando e-3
Page 35
Sirhan isn’t the only inhabitant of the festival city, but the others keep themselves to themselves. Only bourgeois isolationists and reclusive weirdoes would want to live out here right now, with whole light-minutes between themselves and the rest of civilization. The network of lily-pad habitats isn’t yet ready for the Saturnalian immigration wave that will break upon this alien shore when it’s time for the Worlds’ Fair, a decade or more in the future. Amber’s flying circus has driven the native recluses underground, in some cases literally: Sirhan’s neighbor, Vinca Kovic, after complaining bitterly about the bustle and noise (“Forty immigrants! An outrage!”), has wrapped himself in an environment pod and is estivating at the end of a spidersilk cable a kilometer beneath the space-frame underpinnings of the city.
But that isn’t going to stop Sirhan from organizing a reception for the visitors. He’s moved his magnificent dining table outside, along with the Argentinosaurus skeleton. In fact, he’s built a dining room within the dinosaur’s rib cage. Not that he’s planning on showing his full hand, but it’ll be interesting to see how his guests respond. And maybe it’ll flush out the mystery benefactor who’s been paying for all these meatbodies.
Sirhan’s agents politely invite his visitors to the party as the second sunset in this day cycle gently darkens the sky to violet. He discusses his plans with Pamela via antique voice-only phone as his silent valet dresses him with inhuman grace and efficiency. “I’m sure they’ll listen when the situation is made clear to them,” he says. “If not, well, they’ll soon find out what it means to be paupers under Economics 2.0. No access to multiplicity, no willpower, to be limited to purely spacelike resources, at the mercy of predatory borganisms and metareligions -
it’s no picnic out there!”
“You don’t have the resources to set this up on your own,” his grandmother points out in dry, didactic tones.
“If this was the old economy, you could draw on the infrastructure of banks, insurers, and other risk management mechanisms -”
“There’s no risk to this venture, in purely human terms,” Sirhan insists. “The only risk is starting it up with such a limited reserve.”
“You win some, you lose some,” Pamela points out. “Let me see you.” With a sigh, Sirhan waves at a frozen camera; it blinks, surprised. “Hey, you look good! Every inch the traditional family entrepreneur. I’m proud of you, darling.”
Blinking back an unaccustomed tear of pride, Sirhan nods. “I’ll see you in a few minutes,” he says, and cuts the call. To the nearest valet: “Bring my carriage, now.”
A rippling cloud of utility foglets, constantly connecting and disconnecting in the hazy outline of a 1910-vintage Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, bears Sirhan silently away from his wing of the museum. It drives him out onto the sunset path around the building, over to the sunken amphitheatre, where the mounted skeleton of the Argentinosaurus stands like a half-melted columnar sculpture beneath the orange-and-silver ringlight. A small crowd of people are already present, some dressed casually and some attired in the formal garb of earlier decades.
Most of them are passengers or crew recently decanted from the starwhisp, but a handful are wary-eyed hermits, their body language defensive and their persons the focus of a constant orbital hum of security bees. Sirhan dismounts from his silvery car and magics it into dissolution, a haze of foglets dispersing on the breeze. “Welcome to my abode,” he says, bowing gravely to a ring of interested faces. “My name is Sirhan al-Khurasani, and I am the prime contractor in charge of this small corner of the temporary Saturn terraforming project. As some of you probably know, I am related by blood and design to your former captain, Amber Macx. I’d like to offer you the comforts of my home while you acclimatize yourselves to the changed circumstances prevailing in the system at large and work out where you want to go next.”
He walks toward the front of the U-shaped table of solidified air that floats beneath the dead dinosaur’s rib cage, slowly turns to take in faces, and blinks down captions to remind him who’s who in this gathering. He frowns slightly; there’s no sign of his mother. But that wiry fellow, with the beard – surely that can’t be – “Father?” he asks.
Sadeq blinks owlishly. “Have we met?”
“Possibly not.” Sirhan can feel his head spinning, because although Sadeq looks like a younger version of his father, there’s something wrong – some essential disconnect: the politely solicitous expression, the complete lack of engagement, the absence of paternal involvement. This Sadeq has never held the infant Sirhan in the control core of the Ring’s axial cylinder, never pointed out the spiral storm raking vast Jupiter’s face and told him stories of djinni and marvels to make a boy’s hair stand on end. “I won’t hold it against you, I promise,” he blurts.
Sadeq raises an eyebrow but passes no comment, leaving Sirhan at the center of an uncomfortable silence.
“Well then,” he says hastily. “If you would like to help yourselves to food and drink, there’ll be plenty of time to talk later.” Sirhan doesn’t believe in forking ghosts simply to interact with other people – the possibilities for confusion are embarrassing – but he’s going to be busy working the party.
He glances round. Here’s a bald, aggressive-looking fellow, beetle-browed, wearing what looks like a pair of cutoffs and a top made by deconstructing a space suit. Who’s he? (Sirhan’s agents hint: “Boris Denisovitch.” But what does that mean?) There’s an amused-looking older woman, a beady-eyed camera painted in the violent colors of a bird of paradise riding her shoulder. Behind her a younger woman, dressed head to toe in clinging black, her currently ash-blonde hair braided in cornrows, watches him – as does Pierre, a protective arm around her shoulders. They’re – Amber Macx? That’s his mother? She looks far too young, too much in love with Pierre.
“Amber!” he says, approaching the couple.
“Yeah? You’re, uh, my mystery child-support litigant?” Her smile is distinctly unfriendly as she continues:
“Can’t say I’m entirely pleased to meet you, under the circumstances, although I should thank you for the spread.”
“I -” His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. “It’s not like that.”
“What’s it supposed to be like?” she asks sharply. jabbing a finger at him: “You know damn well I’m not your mother. So what’s it all about, huh? You know damn well I’m nearly bankrupt, too, so it’s not as if you’re after my pocket lint. What do you want from me?”
Her vehemence takes him aback. This sharp-edged aggressive woman isn’t his mother, and the introverted cleric – believer – on the other side isn’t his father, either. “I ha-ha-had to stop you heading for the inner system,”
he says, speech center hitting deadlock before his antistutter mod can cut in. “They’ll eat you alive down there. Your other half left behind substantial debts, and they’ve been bought up by the most predatory – “
“Runaway corporate instruments,” she states, calmly enough. “Fully sentient and self-directed.”
“How did you know?” he asks, worried.
She looks grim. “I’ve met them before.” It’s a very familiar grim expression, one he knows intimately, and that feels wrong coming from this near stranger. “We visited some weird places, while we were away.” She glances past him, focuses on someone else, and breathes in sharply as her face goes blank. “Quickly, tell me what your scheme is. Before Mom gets here.”
“Mind archiving and history mergers. Back yourself up, pick different life courses, see which ones work and which don’t – no need to be a failure, just hit the ‘reload game’ icon and resume. That and a long-term angle on the history futures market. I need your help,” he babbles. “It won’t work without family, and I’m trying to stop her killing herself -”
“Family.” She nods, guardedly, and Sirhan notices her companion, this Pierre – not the weak link that broke back before he was born, but a tough-eyed explorer newly returned from the wilderness – sizing him up.
“Guess again.” Sirhan glances round at Pamela, then back at Amber, suddenly feeling very much like a rat trapped between a pair of angry cobras. Leaning on her cane, wearing discreet cosmetics and with her medical supports concealed beneath an old-fashioned dress, Pamela could be a badly preserved sixtysomething from the old days instead of the ghastly slow suicide case that her condition amounts to today. She smiles politely at Amber.
“You may remember me telling you that a lady never unintentionally causes offense. I didn’t want to offend Sirhan by turning up in spite of his wishes, so I didn’t give him a chance to say no.”
“And this is supposed to earn you a sympathy fuck?” Amber drawls. “I’d expected better of you.”
“Why, you -” The fire in her eyes dies suddenly, subjected to the freezing pressure of a control that only comes with age. “I’d hoped getting away from it all would have improved your disposition, if not your manners, but evidently not.” Pamela jabs her cane at the table: “Let me repeat, this is your son’s idea. Why don’t you eat something?”
“Poison tester goes first.” Amber smiles slyly.
“For fuck’s sake!” It’s the first thing Pierre has said so far, and crude or not, it comes as a profound relief when he steps forward, picks up a plate of water biscuits loaded with salmon caviar, and puts one in his mouth.
“Can’t you guys leave the back stabbing until the rest of us have filled our stomachs? ‘S not as if I can turn down the biophysics model in here.” He shoves the plate at Sirhan. “Go on, it’s yours.”
The spell is broken. “Thank you,” Sirhan says gravely, taking a cracker and feeling the tension fall as Amber and her mother stop preparing to nuke each other and focus on the issue at hand – which is that food comes before fighting at any social event, not vice versa.
“You might enjoy the egg mayonnaise, too,” Sirhan hears himself saying: “It goes a long way to explaining why the dodo became extinct first time around.”
“Dodoes.” Amber keeps one eye warily on her mother as she accepts a plate from a silently gliding silver bush-shaped waitron. “What was that about the family investment project?” she asks.
“Just that without your cooperation your family will likely go the way of the bird,” her mother cuts in before Sirhan can muster a reply. “Not that I expect you to care.”
Boris butts in. “Core worlds are teeming with corporates. Is bad business for us, good business for them. If you are seeing what we are seen -”
“Don’t remember you being there,” Pierre says grumpily.
“In any event,” Sirhan says smoothly, “the core isn’t healthy for us one-time fleshbodies anymore. There are still lots of people there, but the ones who uploaded expecting a boom economy were sadly disappointed.
Originality is at a premium, and the human neural architecture isn’t optimized for it – we are, by disposition, a conservative species, because in a static ecosystem, that provides the best return on sunk reproductive investment costs. Yes, we change over time – we’re more flexible than almost any other animal species to arise on Earth -
but we’re like granite statues compared to organisms adapted to life under Economics 2.0.”
“You tell ‘em, boy,” Pamela chirps, almost mockingly. “It wasn’t that bloodless when I lived through it.”
Amber casts her a cool stare.
“Where was I?” Sirhan snaps his fingers, and a glass of fizzy grape juice appears between them. “Early upload entrepreneurs forked repeatedly, discovered they could scale linearly to occupy processor capacity proportional to the mass of computronium available, and that computationally trivial tasks became tractable. They could also run faster, or slower, than real time. But they were still human, and unable to operate effectively outside human constraints. Take a human being and bolt on extensions that let them take full advantage of Economics 2.0, and you essentially break their narrative chain of consciousness, replacing it with a journal file of bid/request transactions between various agents; it’s incredibly efficient and flexible, but it isn’t a conscious human being in any recognizable sense of the word.”
“All right,” Pierre says slowly. “I think we’ve seen something like that ourselves. At the router.”
Sirhan nods, not sure whether he’s referring to anything important. “So you see, there are limits to human progress – but not to progress itself! The uploads found their labor to be a permanently deflating commodity once they hit their point of diminishing utility. Capitalism doesn’t have a lot to say about workers whose skills are obsolete, other than that they should invest wisely while they’re earning and maybe retrain: but just knowing how to invest in Economics 2.0 is beyond an unaugmented human. You can’t retrain as a seagull, can you, and it’s quite as hard to retool for Economics 2.0. Earth is -” He shudders.
“There’s a phrase I used to hear in the old days,” Pamela says calmly, “ethnic cleansing. Do you know what that means, darling idiot daughter? You take people who you define as being of little worth, and first you herd them into a crowded ghetto with limited resources, then you decide those resources aren’t worth spending on them, and bullets are cheaper than bread. ‘Mind children’ the extropians called the posthumans, but they were more like Vile Offspring. There was a lot of that, during the fast sigmoid phase. Starving among plenty, compulsory conversions, the very antithesis of everything your father said he wanted…”
“I don’t believe it,” Amber says hotly. “That’s crazy! We can’t go the way of -”
“Since when has human history been anything else?” asks the woman with the camera on her shoulder -
Donna, being some sort of public archivist, is in Sirhan’s estimate likely to be of use to him. “Remember what we found in the DMZ?”
“The DMZ?” Sirhan asks, momentarily confused.
“After we went through the router,” Pierre says grimly. “You tell him, love.” He looks at Amber.
Sirhan, watching him, feels it fall into place at that moment, a sense that he’s stepped into an alternate universe, one where the woman who might have been his mother isn’t, where black is white, his kindly grandmother is the wicked witch of the west, and his feckless grandfather is a farsighted visionary.
“We uploaded via the router,” Amber says, and looks confused for a moment. “There’s a network on the other side of it. We were told it was FTL, instantaneous, but I’m not so sure now. I think it’s something more complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from our perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a technological singularity – they’re bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman descendants evolve Economics 2.0, or 3.0, or something else and it, uh, eats the original conscious instigators. Or uses them as currency or something. The end result we found is a howling wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for processing power. We were” – she licks her lips – “lucky to escape with our minds. We only did it because of a friend. It’s like the main sequence in stellar evolution; once a G-type star starts burning helium and expands into a red giant, it’s ‘game over’ for life in what used to be its liquid-water zone. Conscious civilizations sooner or later convert all their available mass into computronium, powered by solar output. They don’t go interstellar because they want to stay near the core where the bandwidth is high and latency is low, and sooner or later, competition for resources hatches a new level of metacompetition that obsoletes them.”
“That sounds plausible,” Sirhan says slowly. He puts his glass down and chews distractedly on one knuc
kle.
“I thought it was a low-probability outcome, but…”
“I’ve been saying all along, your grandfather’s ideas would backfire in the end,” Pamela says pointedly.
“But -” Amber shakes her head. “There’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”
“Probably,” Sirhan says, then shuts up.
“So are you going to tell us?” asks Pierre, looking annoyed. “What’s the big idea, here?”
“An archive store,” Sirhan says, deciding that this is the right time for his pitch. “At the lowest level, you can store backups of yourself here. So far so good, eh? But there’s a bit more to it than that. I’m planning to offer a bunch of embedded universes – big, running faster than realtime – sized and scoped to let human-equivalent intelligences do what-if modeling on themselves. Like forking off ghosts of yourself, but much more so – give them whole years to diverge, learn new skills, and evaluate them against market requirements, before deciding which version of you is most suited to run in the real world. I mentioned the retraining paradox. Think of this as a solution for level one, human-equivalent, intelligences. But that’s just the short-term business model. Long-term, I want to acquire a total lock on the history futures market by having a complete archive of human experiences, from the dawn of the fifth singularity on up. No more unknown extinct species. That should give us something to trade with the next-generation intelligences – the ones who aren’t our mind children and barely remember us. At the very least, it gives us a chance to live again, a long way out in deep time. Alternatively, it can be turned into a lifeboat. If we can’t compete with our creations, at least we’ve got somewhere to flee, those of us who want to. I’ve got agents working on a comet, out in the Oort cloud – we could move the archive to it, turn it into a generation ship with room for billions of evacuees running much slower than realtime in archive space until we find a new world to settle.”