“It was -” He clears his throat. “You thought it was amazing?” Suddenly, on impulse, he detaches a ghost to identify this Rita person and find out who she is, what she wants. It’s not normally worth the effort to get to know someone more closely than casual small talk, but she seems to have been digging into his background, and he wants to know why. Along with the him that’s chatting to Aineko, that makes about three instances pulling in near-realtime resources. He’ll be running up an existential debt soon if he keeps forking ghosts like this.
“I thought so,” she says. There’s a bench in front of the wall, and somehow he finds himself sitting on it next to her. There’s no danger, we’re not in private or anything, he tells himself stiffly. She’s smiling at him, face tilted slightly to one side and lips parted, and for a moment, a dizzy sense of possibility washes over him: What if she’s about to throw all propriety aside? How undignified! Sirhan believes in self-restraint and dignity. “I was really interested in this -” She passes him another dynamically loadable blob, encompassing a detailed critique of his analysis of Wittgenstein’s matriophobia in the context of gendered language constructs and nineteenth century Viennese society, along with a hypothesis that leaves Sirhan gasping with mild indignation at the very idea that he of all people might share Wittgenstein’s skewed outlook – “What do you think?” she asks, grinning impishly at him.
“Nnngk.” Sirhan tries to unswallow his tongue. Rita crosses her legs, her gown hissing. “I, ah, that is to say”
– At which moment, his partials reintegrate, dumping a slew of positively pornographic images into his memories. It’s a trap! they shriek, her breasts and hips and pubes – clean-shaven, he can’t help noticing -
thrusting at him in hotly passionate abandon, Mother’s trying to make you loose like her! and he remembers what it would be like to wake up in bed next to this woman whom he barely knows after being married to her for a year, because one of his cognitive ghosts has just spent several seconds of network time (or several subjective months) getting hot and sweaty with a ghost of her own, and she does have interesting research ideas, even if she’s a pushy over-westernized woman who thinks she can run his life for him. “What is this?” he splutters, his ears growing hot and his garments constricting.
“Just speculating about possibilities. We could get a lot done together.” She snakes an arm round his shoulders and pulls him toward her, gently. “Don’t you want to find out if we could work out?”
“But, but -” Sirhan is steaming. Is she offering casual sex? He wonders, profoundly embarrassed by his own inability to read her signals: “What do you want?” he asks.
“You do know that you can do more with Superplonk than just killfile annoying idiots?” she whispers in his ear. “We can be invisible right now, if you like. It’s great for confidential meetings – other things, too. We can work beautifully together, our ghosts annealed really well…”
Sirhan jumps up, his face stinging, and turns away: “No thank you!” he snaps, angry at himself. “Goodbye!”
His other instances, interrupted by his broadcast emotional overload, are distracted from their tasks and sputtering with indignation. Her hurt expression is too much for him: The killfile snaps down, blurring her into an indistinct black blob on the wall, veiled by his own brain as he turns and walks away, seething with anger at his mother for being so unfair as to make him behold his own face in the throes of fleshy passion.
*
Meanwhile, in one of the lower spheres, padded with silvery blue insulating pillows bound together with duct tape, the movers and shakers of the accelerationista faction are discussing their bid for world power at fractional-C velocities.
“We can’t outrun everything. For example, a collapse of the false vacuum,” Manfred insists, slightly uncoordinated and slurring his vowels under the influence of the first glass of fruit punch he’s experienced in nigh-on twenty realtime years. His body is young and still relatively featureless, hair still growing out, and he’s abandoned his old no-implants fetish at last to adopt an array of interfaces that let him internalize all the exocortex processes that he formerly ran on an array of dumb Turing machines outside his body. He’s standing on his own sense of style and is the only person in the room who isn’t wearing some variation of dinner jacket or classical evening dress. “Entangled exchange via routers is all very well, but it won’t let us escape the universe itself – any phase change will catch up eventually, the network must have an end. And then where will we be, Sameena?”
“I’m not disputing that.” The woman he’s talking to, wearing a green-and-gold sari and a medieval maharajah’s ransom in gold and natural diamonds, nods thoughtfully. “But it hasn’t happened yet, and we’ve got evidence that superhuman intelligences have been loose in this universe for gigayears, so there’s a fair bet that the worst catastrophe scenarios are unlikely. And looking closer to home, we don’t know what the routers are for, or who made them. Until then…” She shrugs. “Look what happened last time somebody tried to probe them. No offense intended.”
“It’s already happened. If what I hear is correct, the Vile Offspring aren’t nearly as negative about the idea of using the routers as we old-fashioned metahumans might like to believe.” Manfred frowns, trying to recall some hazy anecdote – he’s experimenting with a new memory compression algorithm, necessitated by his pack rat mnemonic habits when younger, and sometimes the whole universe feels as if it’s nearly on the tip of his tongue.
“So, we seem to be in violent agreement about the need to know more about what’s going on, and to find out what they’re doing out there. We’ve got cosmic background anisotropies caused by the waste heat from computing processes millions of light-years across – it takes a big interstellar civilization to do that, and they don’t seem to have fallen into the same rat trap as the local Matrioshka brain civilizations. And we’ve got worrying rumors about the VO messing around with the structure of space-time in order to find a way around the Beckenstein bound. If the VO are trying that, then the folks out near the supercluster already know the answers. The best way to find out what’s happening is to go and talk to whoever’s responsible. Can we at least agree on that?”
“Probably not.” Her eyes glitter with amusement. “It all depends on whether one believes in these civilizations in the first place. I know your people point to deep-field camera images going all the way back to some wonky hubble-bubble scrying mirror from the late twentieth, but we’ve got no evidence except some theories about the Casimir effect and pair production and spinning beakers of helium-3 – much less proof that whole bunch of alien galactic civilizations are trying to collapse the false vacuum and destroy the universe!” Her voice dropped a notch: “At least, not enough proof to convince most people, Manny dear. I know this comes as a shock to you, but not everyone is a neophiliac posthuman bodysurfer whose idea of a sabbatical is to spend twenty years as a flock of tightly networked seagulls in order to try and to prove the Turing Oracle thesis -”
“Not everyone is concerned with the deep future,” Manfred interrupts. “It’s important! If we live or die, that doesn’t matter – that’s not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether we’re stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It’s downright embarrassing to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally! I mean, if there’s going to come a time when there’s nobody or nothing to remember us then what does -”
“Manfred?”
He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly.
It’s Amber, poised in black cat suit with cocktail glass. Her expression is open and confused, appallingly vulnerable. Blue liquid slops, almost spilling out of her glass – the rim barely extends itself in time to catch the drops. Behind her stands Annette, a deeply self-satisfied smile on her face.
“You.” Amber pause
s, her cheek twitching as bits of her mind page in and out of her skull, polling external information sources. “You really are -”
A hasty cloud materializes under her hand as her fingers relax, dropping the glass.
“Uh.” Manfred stares, at a complete loss for words. “I’d, uh.” After a moment he looks down. “I’m sorry. I’ll get you another drink..?”
“Why didn’t someone warn me?” Amber complains.
“We thought you could use the good advice,” Annette stated into the awkward silence. “And a family reunion. It was meant to be a surprise.”
“A surprise.” Amber looks perplexed. “You could say that.”
“You’re taller than I was expecting,” Manfred says unexpectedly. “People look different when you’re not using human eyes.”
“Yeah?” She looks at him, and he turns his head slightly, facing her. It’s a historic moment, and Annette is getting it all on memory diamond, from every angle. The family’s dirty little secret is that Amber and her father have never met, not face-to-face in physical meat-machine proximity. She was born years after Manfred and Pamela separated, after all, decanted prefertilized from a tank of liquid nitrogen. This is the first time either of them have actually seen the other’s face without electronic intermediation. And while they’ve said everything that needed to be said on a businesslike level, anthropoid family politics is still very much a matter of body language and pheromones. “How long have you been out and about?” she asks, trying to disguise her confusion.
“About six hours.” Manfred manages a rueful chuckle, trying to take the sight of her in all at once. “Let’s get you another drink and put our heads together?”
“Okay.” Amber takes a deep breath and glares at Annette. “You set this up, you clean up the mess.”
Annette just stands there smiling at the confusion of her accomplishment.
*
The cold light of dawn finds Sirhan angry, sober, and ready to pick a fight with the first person who comes through the door of his office. The room is about ten meters across, with a floor of polished marble and skylights in the intricately plastered ceiling. The walkthrough of his current project sprouts in the middle of the floor like a ghostly abstract cauliflower, fractal branches dwindling down to infolded nodes tagged with compressed identifiers.
The branches expand and shrink as Sirhan paces around it, zooming to readability in response to his eyeball dynamics. But he isn’t paying it much attention. He’s too disturbed, uncertain, trying to work out whom to blame.
Which is why, when the door bangs open, his first response is to whirl angrily and open his mouth – then stop.
“What do you want?” he demands.
“A word, if you please?” Annette looks around distractedly. “This is your project?”
“Yes,” he says icily, and banishes the walkthrough with a wave of one hand. “What do you want?”
“I’m not sure.” Annette pauses. For a moment she looks weary, tired beyond mortal words, and Sirhan momentarily wonders if perhaps he’s spreading the blame too far. This ninetysomething Frenchwoman who is no blood relative, who was in years past the love of his scatterbrained grandfather’s life, seems the least likely person to be trying to manipulate him, at least in such an unwelcome and intimate manner. But there’s no telling. Families are strange things, and even though the current instantiations of his father and mother aren’t the ones who ran his preadolescent brain through a couple of dozen alternative lifelines before he was ten, he can’t be sure – or that they wouldn’t enlist Tante Annette’s assistance in fucking with his mind. “We need to talk about your mother,” she continues.
“We do, do we?” Sirhan turns around and sees the vacancy of the room for what it is, a socket, like a pulled tooth, informed as much by what is absent as by what is present. He snaps his fingers, and an intricate bench of translucent bluish utility fog congeals out of the air behind him. He sits: Annette can do what she wants.
“Oui.” She thrusts her hands deep into the pocket of the peasant smock she’s wearing – a major departure from her normal style – and leans against the wall. Physically, she looks young enough to have spent her entire life blitzing around the galaxy at three nines of lightspeed, but her posture is world-weary and ancient. History is a foreign country, and the old are unwilling emigrants, tired out by the constant travel. “Your mother, she has taken on a huge job, but it’s one that needs doing. You agreed it needed doing, years ago, with the archive store. She is now trying to get it moving, that is what the campaign is about, to place before the electors a choice of how best to move an entire civilization. So I ask, why do you obstruct her?”
Sirhan works his jaw; he feels like spitting. ” Why?” he snaps.
“Yes. Why?” Annette gives in and magics up a chair from the swirling fogbank beneath the ceiling. She crouches in it, staring at him. “It is a question.”
“I have nothing against her political machinations,” Sirhan says tensely. “But her uninvited interference in my personal life -”
“What interference?”
He stares. “Is that a question?” He’s silent for a moment. Then: “Throwing that wanton at me last night -”
Annette stares at him. “Who? What are you talking about?”
“That, that loose woman!” Sirhan is reduced to spluttering. “False pretenses! If this is one of Father’s matchmaking ideas, it is so very wrong that -”
Annette is shaking her head. “Are you crazy? Your mother simply wanted you to meet her campaign team, to join in planning the policy. Your father is not on this planet! But you stormed out, you really upset Rita, did you know that? Rita, she is the best belief maintenance and story construction operative I have! Yet you to tears reduce her. What is wrong with you?”
“I -” Sirhan swallows. “She’s what?” he asks again, his mouth dry. “I thought…” He trails off. He doesn’t want to say what he thought. The hussy, that brazen trollop, is part of his mother’s campaign party? Not some plot to lure him into corruption? What if it was all a horrible misunderstanding?
“I think you need to apologize to someone,” Annette says coolly, standing up. Sirhan’s head is spinning between a dozen dialogues of actors and ghosts, a journal of the party replaying before his ghast-stricken inner gaze. Even the walls have begun to flicker, responding to his intense unease. Annette skewers him with a disgusted look: “When you can a woman behave toward as a person, not a threat, we can again talk. Until then.” And she stands up and walks out of the room, leaving him to contemplate the shattered stump of his anger, so startled he can barely concentrate on his project, thinking, Is that really me? Is that what I look like to her? as the cladistic graph slowly rotates before him, denuded branches spread wide, waiting to be filled with the nodes of the alien interstellar network just as soon as he can convince Aineko to stake him the price of the depth-first tour of darkness.
*
Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons – literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd, even without the added distractions of his sex drive, which he has switched off until he gets used to being unitary again. Not only does he get shooting pains in his neck whenever he tries to look over his left shoulder with his right eye, but he’s lost the habit of spawning exocortical agents to go interrogate a database or bush robot or something, then report back to him. Instead he keeps trying to fly off in all directions at once, which usually ends with him falling over.
But at present, that’s not a problem. He’s sitting comfortably at a weathered wooden table in a beer garden behind a hall lifted from somewhere like Frankfurt, a liter glass of straw-colored liquid at his elbow and a comforting multiple whispering of knowledge streams tickling the back of his head. Most of his attention is focused on Annette, who frowns at him with mingled concern and affection. They may have lived separate lives for almost a third o
f a century, since she declined to upload with him, but he’s still deeply attuned to her.
“You are going to have to do something about that boy,” she says sympathetically. “He is close enough to upset Amber. And without Amber, there will be a problem.”
“I’m going to have to do something about Amber, too,” Manfred retorts. “What was the idea, not warning her I was coming?”
“It was meant to be a surprise.” Annette comes as close to pouting as Manfred’s seen her recently. It brings back warm memories; he reaches out to hold her hand across the table.
“You know I can’t handle the human niceties properly when I’m a flock.” He strokes the back of her wrist.
She pulls back after a while, but slowly. “I expected you to manage all that stuff.”
“That stuff.” Annette shakes her head. “She’s your daughter, you know? Did you have no curiosity left?”
“As a bird?” Manfred cocks his head to one side so abruptly that he hurts his neck and winces. “Nope. Now I do, but I think I pissed her off -”
“Which brings us back to point one.”
“I’d send her an apology, but she’d think I was trying to manipulate her” – Manfred takes a mouthful of beer
– “and she’d be right.” He sounds slightly depressed. “All my relationships are screwy this decade. And it’s lonely.”
“So? Don’t brood.” Annette pulls her hand back. “Something will sort itself out eventually. And in the short term, there is the work, the electoral problem becomes acute.” When she’s around him the remains of her once-strong French accent almost vanish in a transatlantic drawl, he realizes with a pang. He’s been abhuman for too long
– people who meant a lot to him have changed while he’s been away.
“I’ll brood if I want to,” he says. “I didn’t ever really get a chance to say goodbye to Pam, did I? Not after that time in Paris when the gangsters…” He shrugs. “I’m getting nostalgic in my old age.” He snorts.
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