“Hmm.” She taps her fingers on the arm of her throne, and Sadeq’s heart freezes. He’s heard the stories from the claim jumpers and boardroom bandits, from the greenmail experts with their roots in the earthbound jurisdictions that have made such a hash of arbitration here. How she can experience a year in a minute, rip your memories out through your cortical implants, and make you relive your worst mistakes in her nightmarishly powerful simulation space. She is the queen—the first individual to get her hands on so much mass and energy that she could pull ahead of the curve of binding technology, and the first to set up her own jurisdiction and rule certain experiments to be legal so that she could make use of the mass/energy intersection. She has force majeure—even the Pentagon’s infowarriors respect the Ring Imperium’s autonomy for now. In fact, the body sitting in the throne opposite him probably contains only a fraction of her identity. She’s by no means the first upload or partial, but she’s the first gust front of the storm of power that will arrive when the arrogant ones achieve their goal of dismantling the planets and turning dumb and uninhabited mass into brainpower throughout the observable reaches of the universe. And he’s just questioned the rectitude of her vision, in her presence.
The queen’s lips twitch. Then they curl into a wide, carnivorous grin. Behind her, the cat sits up and stretches, then stares at Sadeq through narrowed eyes.
“You know, that’s the first time in weeks that anyone has told me I’m full of shit. You haven’t been talking to my mother again, have you?”
It’s Sadeq’s turn to shrug, uncomfortably. “I have prepared a judgment,” he says slowly.
“Ah.” Amber rotates the huge diamond ring around her finger. Then she looks him in the eye, a trifle nervously. Although what he could possibly do to make her comply with any decree—
“To summarize: Her motive is polluted,” Sadeq says shortly.
“Does that mean what I think it does?” she asks.
Sadeq breathes deeply again. “Yes, I think so.”
Her smile returns. “And is that the end of it?” she asks.
He raises a dark eyebrow. “Only if you can prove to me that you can have a conscience in the absence of divine revelation.”
Her reaction catches him by surprise. “Oh, sure. That’s the next part of the program. Obtaining divine revelations.”
“What! From the alien?”
The cat, claws extended, delicately picks its way down to her lap and waits to be held and stroked. It never once takes its eyes off him. “Where else?” she asks. “Doctor, I didn’t get the Franklin Trust to loan me the wherewithal to build this castle just in return for some legal paperwork, and some, ah, interesting legal waivers from Brussels. We’ve known for years there’s a whole alien packet-switching network out there, and we’re just getting spillover from some of their routers. It turns out there’s a node not far away from here, in real space. Helium-three, separate jurisdictions, heavy industrialization on Io—there is a purpose to all this activity.”
Sadeq licks his suddenly dry lips. “You’re going to narrowcast a reply?”
“No, much better than that: We’re going to visit them. Cut the delay cycle down to real time. We came here to build a ship and recruit a crew, even if we have to cannibalize the whole of Jupiter system to pay for the exercise.”
The cat yawns then fixes him with a thousand-yard stare. “This stupid girl wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting with something so smart it might as well be a god,” it says. “And she needs to convince the peanut gallery back home that she’s got one, being a born-again atheist and all. Which means, you’re it, monkey boy. There’s a slot open for the post of ship’s theologian on the first starship out of Jupiter system. I don’t suppose I can convince you to turn the offer down?”
5: ROUTER
SOME YEARS LATER, TWO MEN AND A CAT ARE TYING one on in a bar that doesn’t exist.
The air in the bar is filled with a billowing relativistic smoke cloud—it’s a stellarium, accurately depicting the view beyond the imaginary walls. Aberration of starlight skews the color toward violet around the doorway, brightening in a rainbow mist over the tables, then dimming to a hazy red glow in front of the raised platform at the back. The Doppler effect has slowly emerged over the past few months as the ship gathers momentum. In the absence of visible stellar motion—or a hard link to the ship’s control module—it’s the easiest way for a drunken passenger to get a feeling for how frighteningly fast the Field Circus is moving. Some time ago, the ship’s momentum exceeded half its rest mass, at which point a single kilogram packs the punch of a multimegaton hydrogen bomb.
A ginger-and-brown cat—who has chosen to be female, just to mess with the heads of those people who think all ginger cats are male—sprawls indolently across the wooden floorboards in front of the bar, directly beneath the bridge of the starbow. Predictably, it has captured the only ray of sunlight to be had within the starship. In the shadows at the back of the bar, two men slump at a table, lost in their respective morose thoughts: One nurses a bottle of Czech beer, the other a half-empty cocktail glass.
“It wouldn’t be so bad if she is giving me some sign,” says one of them, tilting his beer bottle to inspect the bottom for sediment. “No, that not right. It’s the correct kind of attention. Am not knowing where I stand with her.”
The other one leans back in his chair, squints at the faded brown paint of the ceiling. “Take it from one who knows,” he says. “If you knew, you’d have nothing to dream about. Anyway, what she wants and what you want may not be the same thing.”
The first man runs a hand through his hair. Tight-curled black ringlets briefly turn silver beneath his aging touch. “Pierre, if talent for making patronizing statements is what you get from tuping Amber—”
Pierre glares at him with all the venom an augmented nineteen-year-old can muster. “Be glad she has no ears in here,” he hisses. His hand tightens around his glass reflexively, but the physics model in force in the bar refuses to let him break it. “You’ve had too fucking much to drink, Boris.”
A tinkle of icy laughter comes from the direction of the cat. “Shut up, you,” says Boris, glancing at the animal. He tips the bottle back, lets the dregs trickle down his throat. “Maybe you’re right. Am sorry. Do not mean to be rude about the queen.” He shrugs, puts the bottle down. Shrugs again, heavily. “Am just getting depressed.”
“You’re good at that,” Pierre observes.
Boris sighs again. “Evidently. If our positions are reversed—”
“I know, I know, you’d be telling me the fun is in the chase and it’s not the same when she kicks you out after a fight, and I wouldn’t believe a word of it, being sad and single and all that.” Pierre snorts. “Life isn’t fair, Boris: Live with it.”
“I’d better go—” Boris stands.
“Stay away from Ang,” says Pierre, still annoyed with him. “At least until you’re sober.”
“Okay already, stay cool. Am consciously running watchdog thread.” Boris blinks irritably. “Enforcing social behavior. It doesn’t normally allow this drunk. Not where reputation damage are possible in public.”
He does a slow dissolve into thin air, leaving Pierre alone in the bar with the cat.
“How much longer do we have to put up with this shit?” he asks aloud. Tempers are frayed, and arguments proliferate indefinitely in the pocket universe of the ship.
The cat doesn’t look round. “In our current reference frame, we drop the primary reflector and start decelerating in another two million seconds,” she says. “Back home, five or six megaseconds.”
“That’s a big gap. What’s the cultural delta up to now?” Pierre asks idly. He snaps his fingers. “Waiter, another cocktail. The same, if you please.”
“Oh, probably about ten to twenty times our departure reference,” says the cat. “If you’d been following the news from back home, you’d have noted a significant speed-up in the deployment of switched entanglement router
s. They’re having another networking revolution, only this one will run to completion inside a month because they’re using dark fiber that’s already in the ground.”
“Switched . . . entanglement?” Pierre shakes his head, bemused. The waiter, a faceless body in black tie and a long, starched apron, walks around the bar and offers him a glass. “That almost sounds as if it makes sense. What else?”
The cat rolls over on her flank, stretches, claws extended. “Stroke me, and I might tell you,” she suggests.
“Fuck you, and the dog you rode in on,” Pierre replies. He lifts his glass, removes a glacé cherry on a cocktail stick, throws it toward the spiral staircase that leads down to the toilets, and chugs back half of the drink in one go—freezing pink slush with an afterbite of caramelized hexose sugars and ethanol. The near spillage as he thumps the glass down serves to demonstrate that he’s teetering on the edge of drunkenness. “Mercenary!”
“Lovesick drug-using human,” the cat replies without rancor, and rolls to her feet. She arches her back and yawns, baring ivory fangs at the world. “You apes—if I cared about you, I’d have to kick sand over you.” For a moment she looks faintly confused. “I mean, I would bury you.” She stretches again and glances round the otherwise-empty bar. “By the way, when are you going to apologize to Amber?”
“I’m not going to fucking apologize to her!” Pierre shouts. In the ensuing silence and confusion, he raises his glass and tries to drain it, but the ice has all sunk to the bottom, and the resulting coughing fit makes him spray half of the cocktail across the table. “No way,” he rasps quietly.
“Too much pride, huh?” The cat stalks toward the edge of the bar, tail held high with tip bent over in a feline question mark. “Like Boris with his adolescent woman trouble, too? You primates are so predictable. Whoever thought of sending a starship crewed by posthuman adolescents—”
“Go ’way,” says Pierre. “I’ve got serious drinking to do.”
“To the Macx, I suppose,” puns the cat, turning away. But the moody youth has no answer for her, other than to conjure a refill from the vasty deeps.
Meanwhile, in another partition of the Field Circus’s reticulated reality, a different instance of the selfsame cat—Aineko by name, sarcastic by disposition—is talking to its former owner’s daughter, the Queen of the Ring Imperium. Amber’s avatar looks about sixteen, with disheveled blond hair and enhanced cheekbones. It’s a lie, of course, because in subjective life experience, she’s in her midtwenties, but apparent age signifies little in a simulation space populated by upload minds, or in real space, where posthumans age at different rates.
Amber wears a tattered black dress over iridescent purple leggings, and sprawls lazily across the arms of her informal throne—an ostentatious lump of nonsense manufactured from a single carbon crystal doped with semiconductors. (Unlike the real thing back home in Jupiter orbit, this one is merely a piece of furniture for a virtual environment.) The scene is very much the morning after the evening before, like a goth nightclub gone to seed: all stale smoke and crumpled velvet, wooden church pews, burned-out candles, and gloomy Polish avant-garde paintings. Any hint of a regal statement the queen might be making is spoiled by the way she’s hooked one knee over the left arm of the throne and is fiddling with a six-axis pointing device. But these are her private quarters, and she’s off duty. The regal person of the Queen is strictly for formal, corporate occasions.
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” she suggests.
“Nope,” replies the cat. “It was more like: ‘Greetings, earthlings, compile me on your leader.’ ”
“Well, you got me there,” Amber admits. She taps her heel on the throne and fidgets with her signet ring. “No damn way I’m loading some buggy alien wetware on my sweet gray stuff. Weird semiotics, too. What does Dr. Khurasani say?”
Aineko sits down in the middle of the crimson carpet at the foot of the dais and idly twists round to sniff her crotch. “Sadeq is immersed in scriptural interpretations. He refused to be drawn.”
“Huh.” Amber stares at the cat. “So. You’ve been carrying this lump of source code since when . . . ?”
“At the signal, for precisely two hundred and sixteen million, four hundred and twenty-nine thousand, and fifty-two seconds,” Aineko supplies, then beeps smugly. “Call it just under six years.”
“Right.” Amber squeezes her eyes shut. Uneasy possibilities whisper in her mind’s ears. “And it began talking to you—”
“—About three million seconds after I picked it up and ran it on a basic environment hosted on a neural network emulator modeled on the components found in the stomatogastric ganglion of a spiny lobster. Clear?”
Amber sighs. “I wish you’d told Dad about it. Or Annette. Things could have been so different!”
“How?” The cat stops licking her arse and looks up at the queen with a peculiarly opaque stare. “It took the specialists a decade to figure out the first message was a map of the pulsar neighborhood with directions to the nearest router on the interstellar network. Knowing how to plug into the router wouldn’t help while it was three light years away, would it? Besides, it was fun watching the idiots trying to ‘crack the alien code’ without ever wondering if it might be a reply in a language we already know to a message we sent out years ago. Fuckwits. And, too, Manfred pissed me off once too often. He kept treating me like a goddamn house pet.”
“But you—” Amber bites her lip. But you were, when he bought you, she had been about to say. Engineered consciousness is still relatively new: It didn’t exist when Manfred and Pamela first hacked on Aineko’s cognitive network, and according to the flat-earth wing of the AI community, it still doesn’t. Even she hadn’t really believed Aineko’s claims to self-awareness until a couple of years ago, finding it easier to think of the cat as a zimboe—a zombie with no self-awareness, but programmed to claim to be aware in an attempt to deceive the truly conscious beings around it. “I know you’re conscious now, but Manfred didn’t know back then. Did he?”
Aineko glares at her, then slowly narrows her eyes to slits—either feline affection, or a more subtle gesture. Sometimes Amber finds it hard to believe that, twenty-five years ago, Aineko started out as a crude neural-network-driven toy from a Far Eastern amusement factory—upgradeable, but still basically a mechanical animal emulator.
“I’m sorry. Let me start again. You actually figured out what the second alien packet was, you, yourself, and nobody else. Despite the combined efforts of the entire CETI analysis team who spent Gaia knows how many human-equivalent years of processing power trying to crack its semantics. I hope you’ll pardon me for saying I find that hard to believe?”
The cat yawns. “I could have told Pierre instead.” Aineko glances at Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily changes the subject. “The solution was intuitively obvious, just not to humans. You’re so verbal.” Lifting a hind paw, she scratches behind her left ear for a moment then pauses, foot waving absentmindedly. “Besides, the CETI team was searching under the streetlights while I was sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find primes; when that didn’t work, they started trying to breed a Turing machine that would run it without immediately halting.” Aineko lowers her paw daintily. “None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had ever beamed out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother had a hand in my wetware, too.”
“Treating it as a map—” Amber stops. “You were meant to penetrate Dad’s corporate network?”
“That’s right,” says the cat. “I was supposed to fork repeatedly and gang-rape his web of trust. But I didn’t.” Aineko yawns. “Pam pissed me off, too. I don’t like people who try to use me.”
“I don’t care. Taking that thing on board was still a really stupid risk you took,” Amber accuses.
“So?” The cat looks at her insolently. “I kept it in my sandbox. And I got it working, on the seven
hundred and forty-first attempt. It’d have worked for Pamela’s bounty-hunter friends, too, if I’d tried it. But it’s here, now, when you need it. Would you like to swallow the packet?”
Amber straightens out, sits up in her throne. “I just told you, if you think I’m going to link some flaky chunk of alien neural programming into my core dialogue, or even my exocortex, you’re crazy!” Her eyes narrow. “Can it use your grammar model?”
“Sure.” If the cat was human, it would be shrugging nonchalantly at this point. “It’s safe, Amber, really and truly. I found out what it is.”
“I want to talk to it,” she says impetuously—and before the cat can reply, adds, “So what is it?”
“It’s a protocol stack. Basically it allows new nodes to connect to a network, by providing high-level protocol conversion services. It needs to learn how to think like a human so it can translate for us when we arrive at the router, which is why they bolted a lobster’s neural network on top of it—they wanted to make it architecturally compatible with us. But there are no buried time bombs, I assure you. I’ve had plenty of time to check. Now, are you sure you don’t want to let it into your head?”
Greetings from the fifth decade of the century of wonders.
The solar system that lies roughly twenty-eight trillion kilometers—just short of three light years—behind the speeding starwhisp Field Circus is seething with change. There have been more technological advances in the past ten years than in the entire previous expanse of human history—and more unforeseen accidents.
Lots of hard problems have proven to be tractable. The planetary genome and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the biosciences are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome—plotting the phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and biochemical structures, understanding how extended phenotypic traits are generated and contribute to evolutionary fitness. The biosphere has become surreal: Small dragons have been sighted nesting in the Scottish highlands, and in the American Midwest, raccoons have been caught programming microwave ovens.
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