Accelerando

by Charles Stross

  A bunch of passengers and crew have gathered on the bridge (now running at one-tenth of real-time) to watch the arrival. Amber sits curled up in the captain’s chair, moodily watching the gathered avatars. Pierre is still avoiding her at every opportunity, formal audiences excepted, and the damned shark and his pet hydra aren’t invited, but apart from that most of the gang is here. There are sixty-three uploads running on the Field Circus’s virtualization stack, software copied out of meatbodies who are mostly still walking around back home. It’s a crowd, but it’s possible to feel lonely in a crowd, even when it’s your party. And especially when you’re worried about debt, even though you’re a billionairess, beneficiary of the human species’ biggest reputations-rating trust fund. Amber’s clothing—black leggings, black sweater—is as dark as her mood.

  “Something troubles you.” A hand descends on the back of the chair next to her.

  She glances round momentarily, nods in recognition. “Yeah. Have a seat. You missed the audience?”

  The thin, brown-skinned man with a neatly cropped beard and deeply lined forehead slips into the seat next to her. “It was not part of my heritage,” he explains carefully, “although the situation is not unfamiliar.” A momentary smile threatens to crack his stony face. “I found the casting a trifle disturbing.”

  “I’m no Marguerite de Valois, but the vacant role . . . let’s just say, the cap fits.” Amber leans back in her chair. “Mind you, Marguerite had an interesting life,” she muses.

  “Don’t you mean depraved and debauched?” her neighbor counters.

  “Sadeq.” She closes her eyes. “Let’s not pick a fight over absolute morality just right now, please? We have an orbital insertion to carry out, then an artifact to locate, and a dialogue to open, and I’m feeling very tired. Drained.”

  “Ah—I apologize.” He inclines his head carefully. “Is it your young man’s fault? Has he slighted you?”

  “Not exactly—” Amber pauses. Sadeq, whom she basically invited along as ship’s theologian in case they ran into any gods, has taken up her pastoral well-being as some kind of hobby. She finds it mildly oppressive at times, flattering at others, surreal always. Using the quantum search resources available to a citizen of the Ring Imperium, he’s outpublished his peers, been elected a hojetolislam at an unprecedentedly young age: His original will probably be an ayatollah by the time they get home. He’s circumspect in dealing with cultural differences, reasons with impeccable logic, carefully avoids antagonizing her—and constantly seeks to guide her moral development. “It’s a personal misunderstanding,” she says. “I’d rather not talk about it until we’ve sorted it out.”

  “Very well.” He looks unsatisfied, but that’s normal. Sadeq still has the dusty soil of a childhood in the industrial city of Yazd stuck to his boots. Sometimes she wonders if their disagreements don’t mirror in miniature the gap between the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. “But back to the here and now. Do you know where this router is?”

  “I will, in a few minutes or hours.” Amber raises her voice, simultaneously spawning a number of search-ghosts. “Boris! You got any idea where we’re going?”

  Boris lumbers round in place to face her; today he’s wearing a velociraptor, and they don’t turn easily in confined spaces. He snarls irritably. “Give me some space!” He coughs, a threatening noise from the back of his wattled throat. “Searching the sail’s memory now.” The back of the soap-bubble-thin laser sail is saturated with tiny nanocomputers spaced micrometers apart. Equipped with light receptors and configured as cellular automata, they form a gigantic phased-array detector, a retina more than a hundred meters in diameter. Boris is feeding them patterns describing anything that differs from the unchanging starscape. Soon the memories will condense and return as visions of darkness in motion—the cold, dead attendants of an aborted sun.

  “But where is it going to be?” asks Sadeq. “Do you know what you are looking for?”

  “Yes. We should have no trouble finding it,” says Amber. “It looks like this.” She flicks an index finger at the row of glass windows that front the bridge. Her signet ring flashes ruby light, and something indescribably weird shimmers into view in place of the seascape. Clusters of pearly beads that form helical chains, disks and whorls of color that interlace and knot through one another, hang in space above a darkling planet. “Looks like a William Latham sculpture made out of strange matter, doesn’t it?”

  “Very abstract,” Sadeq says approvingly.

  “It’s alive,” she adds. “And when it gets close enough to see us, it’ll try to eat us.”

  “What?” Sadeq sits up uneasily.

  “You mean nobody told you?” asks Amber. “I thought we’d briefed everybody.” She throws a glistening golden pomegranate at him, and he catches it. The apple of knowledge dissolves in his hand, and he sits in a haze of ghosts absorbing information on his behalf. “Damn,” she adds mildly.

  Sadeq freezes in place. Glyphs of crumbling stonework overgrown with ivy texture his skin and his dark suit, warning that he’s busy in another private universe.

  “Hrrrr! Boss! Found something,” calls Boris, drooling on the bridge floor.

  Amber glances up. Please, let it be the router, she thinks. “Put it on the main screen.”

  “Are you sure this is safe?” Su Ang asks nervously.

  “Nothing is safe,” Boris snaps, clattering his huge claws on the deck. “Here. Look.”

  The view beyond the windows flips to a perspective on a dusty bluish horizon: swirls of hydrogen brushed with a high cirrus of white methane crystals, stirred above the freezing point of oxygen by Hyundai +4904/-56’s residual rotation. The image-intensification level is huge—a naked human eyeball would see nothing but blackness. Rising above the limb of the gigantic planet is a small pale disk: Callidice, largest moon of the brown dwarf—or second-innermost planet—a barren rock slightly larger than Mercury. The screen zooms in on the moon, surging across a landscape battered by craters and dusted with the spume of ice volcanoes. Finally, just above the far horizon, something turquoise shimmers and spins against a backdrop of frigid darkness.

  “That’s it,” Amber whispers, her stomach turning to jelly as all the terrible might-have-beens dissolve like phantoms of the night around her. “That’s it!” Elated, she stands up, wanting to share the moment with everybody she values. “Wake up, Sadeq! Someone get that damned cat in here! Where’s Pierre? He’s got to see this!”

  Night and revelry rule outside the castle. The crowds are drunken and rowdy on the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. Fireworks burst overhead, and the open windows admit a warm breeze redolent of cooked meats, woodsmoke, open sewers. Meanwhile a lover steals up a tightly spiraling stone staircase in the near dark; his goal, a prearranged rendezvous. He’s been drinking, and his best linen shirt shows the stains of sweat and food. He pauses at the third window to breathe in the outside air and run both hands through his mane of hair, which is long, unkempt, and grimy. Why am I doing this? he wonders. This is so unlike him, this messing around—

  He carries on up the spiral. At the top, an oak door gapes on a vestibule lit by a lantern hanging from a hook. He ventures inside into a reception room paneled in oak blackened by age. Crossing the threshold makes another crossover kick in by prior arrangement. Something other than his own volition steers his feet, and he feels an unfamiliar throb in his chest, anticipation and a warmth and looseness lower down that makes him cry out. “Where are you?”

  “Over here.” He sees her waiting for him in the doorway. She’s partially undressed, wearing layered underskirts and a flat-chested corset that makes the tops of her breasts swell like lustrous domes. Her tight sleeves are half-unraveled, her hair disheveled. He’s full of her brilliant eyes, the constriction holding her spine straight, the taste in her mouth. She’s the magnet for his reality, impossibly alluring, so tense she could burst. “Is it working for you?” she asks.

  “Yes.” He fe
els tight, breathless, squeezed between impossibility and desire as he walks toward her. They’ve experimented with gender play, trying on the extreme dimorphism of this period as a game, but this is the first time they’ve done it this way. She opens her mouth. He kisses her, feels the warmth of his tongue thrust between her lips, the strength of his arms enclosing her waist.

  She leans against him, feeling his erection. “So this is how it feels to be you,” she says wonderingly. The door to her chamber is ajar, but she doesn’t have the self-restraint to wait: The flood of new sensations—rerouted from her physiology model to his proprioceptive sensorium—has taken hold. She grinds her hips against him, pushing deeper into his arms, whining softly at the back of her throat as she feels the fullness in his balls, the tension of his penis. He nearly faints with the rich sensations of her body—it’s as if he’s dissolving, feeling the throbbing hardness against his groin, turning to water and running away. Somehow he gets his arms around her waist—so tight, so breathless—and stumbles forward into the bedroom. She’s whimpering as he drops her on the overstuffed mattress. “Do it to me!” she demands. “Do it now!”

  Somehow he ends up on top of her, hose down around his ankles, skirts bundled up around her waist; she kisses him, grinding her hips against him and murmuring urgent nothings. Then his heart is in his mouth, and there’s a sensation like the universe pushing into his private parts, so inside out it takes his breath away. It’s hot and as hard as rock, and he wants it inside so badly, but at the same time it’s an intrusion, frightening and unexpected. He feels the lightning touch of his tongue on her nipples as he leans closer, feels exposed and terrified and ecstatic as her private places take in his member. As he begins to dissolve into the universe he screams in the privacy of his own head, I didn’t know it felt like this—

  Afterward, she turns to him with a lazy smile, and asks, “How was it for you?” Obviously assuming that, if she enjoyed it, he must have, too.

  But all he can think of is the sensation of the universe thrusting into him, and of how good it felt. All he can hear is his father yelling—(“What are you, some kind of queer?”)—and he feels dirty.

  Greetings from the last megasecond before the discontinuity.

  The solar system is thinking furiously at 1033 MIPS—thoughts bubble and swirl in the equivalent of a million billion unaugmented human minds. Saturn’s rings glow with waste heat. The remaining faithful of the Latter-Day Saints are correlating the phase-space of their genome and the records of their descent in an attempt to resurrect their ancestors. Several skyhooks have unfurled in equatorial orbit around the earth like the graceful fernlike leaves of sundews, ferrying cargo and passengers to and from orbit. Small, crablike robots swarm the surface of Mercury, exuding a black slime of photovoltaic converters and the silvery threads of mass drivers. A glowing cloud of industrial nanomes forms a haze around the innermost planet as it slowly shrinks under the onslaught of copious solar power and determined mining robots.

  The original incarnations of Amber and her court float in high orbit above Jupiter, presiding over the huge nexus of dumb matter trade that is rapidly biting into the available mass of the inner Jovian system. The trade in reaction mass is brisk, and there are shipments of diamond/vacuum biphase structures to assemble and crank down into the lower reaches of the solar system. Far below, skimming the edges of Jupiter’s turbulent cloudscape, a gigantic glowing figure-of-eight—a five-hundred-kilometer-long loop of superconducting cable—traces incandescent trails through the gas giant’s magnetosphere. It’s trading momentum for electrical current, diverting it into a fly’s eye grid of lasers that beam it toward Hyundai +4904/-56. As long as the original Amber and her incarnate team can keep it running, the Field Circus can continue its mission of discovery, but they’re part of the posthuman civilization evolving down in the turbulent depths of Sol system. Part of the runaway train being dragged behind the out-of-control engine of history.

  Weird new biologies based on complex adaptive matter take shape in the sterile oceans of Titan. In the frigid depths beyond Pluto, supercooled boson gases condense into impossible dreaming structures, packaged for shipping inward to the fast-thinking core.

  There are still humans dwelling down in the hot depths, but it’s getting hard to recognize them. The lot of humanity before the twenty-first century was nasty, brutish, and short. Chronic malnutrition, lack of education, and endemic diseases led to crippled minds and broken bodies. Now, most people multitask: Their meatbrains sit at the core of a haze of personality, much of it virtualized on stacked layers of structured reality far from their physical bodies. Wars and revolutions, or their subtle latter-day cognates, sweep the globe as constants become variables; many people find the death of stupidity even harder to accept than the end of mortality. Some have vitrified themselves to await an uncertain posthuman future. Others have modified their core identities to better cope with the changed demands of reality. Among these are beings whom nobody from a previous century would recognize as human—human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels and devils of software, slyly self-aware financial instruments. Even their popular fictions are self-deconstructing these days.

  None of this, other than the barest news summary, reaches the Field Circus. The starwhisp is a fossil, left behind by the broad sweep of accelerating progress. But it is aboard the Field Circus that some of the most important events remaining in humanity’s future light cone take place.

  “Say hello to the jellyfish, Boris.”

  Boris, in human drag, for once, glares at Pierre and grips the pitcher with both hands. The contents of the jug swirl their tentacles lazily: One of them flips almost out of solution, dislodging an impaled cocktail cherry. “Will get you for this,” Boris threatens. The smoky air around his head is a-swirl with daemonic visions of vengeance.

  Su Ang stares intently at Pierre, who is watching Boris as he raises the jug to his lips and begins to drink. The baby jellyfish—small, pale blue, with cuboid bells and four clusters of tentacles trailing from each corner—slips down easily. Boris winces momentarily as the nematocysts let rip inside his mouth, but in a moment or so the cubozoan slips down, and in the meantime his biophysics model clips the extent of the damage to his stinger-ruptured oropharynx.

  “Wow,” he says, taking another slurp of sea wasp margaritas. “Don’t try this at home, fleshboy.”

  “Here.” Pierre reaches out. “Can I?”

  “Invent your own damn poison,” Boris sneers—but he releases the jug and passes it to Pierre, who raises it and drinks. The cubozoan cocktail reminds him of fruit jelly drinks in a hot Hong Kong summer. The stinging in his palate is sharp but fades rapidly, producing an intimate burn when the alcohol hits the mild welts that are all this universe will permit the lethal medusa to inflict on him.

  “Not bad,” says Pierre, wiping a stray loop of tentacle off his chin. He pushes the pitcher across the table toward Su Ang. “What’s with the wicker man?” He points a thumb over his back at the table jammed in the corner opposite the copper-topped bar.

  “Who cares?” asks Boris. “ ’S part of the scenery, isn’t it?”

  The bar is a three-hundred-year-old brown café with a beer menu that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale ale. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer’s yeast, and melatonin spray: And none of it exists. Amber dragged it out of the Franklin borg’s collective memories, by way of her father’s scattershot e-mails annotating her corporeal origins—the original is in Amsterdam, if that city still exists.

  “I care who it is,” says Pierre.

  “Save it,” Ang says quietly. “I think it’s a lawyer with a privacy screen.”

  Pierre glances over his shoulder and glares. “Really?”

  Ang puts a restraining hand on his wrist. “Really. Don’t pay it any attention. You don’t have to, until the trial, you know.”

  The wicker man sits uneasily in the cor
ner. It resembles a basket-weave silhouette made from dried reeds, dressed in a red kerchief. A glass of doppelbock fills the mess of tied-off ends where its right hand ought to be. From time to time, it raises the glass as if to take a mouthful, and the beer vanishes into the singular interior.

  “Fuck the trial,” Pierre says shortly. And fuck Amber, too, for naming me her public defender—

  “Since when do lawsuits come with an invisible man?” asks Donna the Journalist, blitting into the bar along with a patchy historical trail hinting that she’s just come from the back room.

  “Since—” Pierre blinks. “Hell.” When Donna entered, so did Aineko, or maybe the cat’s been there all the time, curled up loaf-of-bread fashion on the table in front of the wicker man. “You’re damaging the continuity,” Pierre complains. “This universe is broken.”

  “Fix it yourself,” Boris tells him. “Everybody else is coping.” He snaps his fingers. “Waiter!”

  “Excuse me.” Donna shakes her head. “I didn’t mean to harm anything.”

  Ang, as always, is more accommodating. “How are you?” she asks politely. “Would you like to try this most excellent poison cocktail?”

  “I am well,” says Donna. A heavily built German woman—blond and solidly muscular, according to the avatar she’s presenting to the public—she’s surrounded by a haze of viewpoints. They’re camera angles on her society of mind, busily integrating and splicing her viewpoint threads together in an endless journal of the journey. A stringer for the CIA media consortium, she uploaded to the ship in the same packet stream as the lawsuit. “Danke, Ang.”