Amber smiles. “We want an open channel back to the router we arrived through.”
“Impossible,” says the ghost.
“We want an open channel, and for it to stay open for six hundred million seconds after we clear it.”
“Impossible,” the ghost repeats.
“We can trade you a whole civilization,” Amber says blandly. “A whole human nation, millions of individuals. Just let us go, and we’ll see to it.”
“You—please wait.” The ghost shimmers slightly, fuzzing at the edges.
Amber opens a private channel to Pierre while the ghost confers with its other nodes. Are the Wunch in place yet? she sends.
They’re moving in. This bunch don’t remember what happened on the Field Circus. Memories of those events never made it back to them. So the Slug’s got them to cooperate. It’s kinda scary to watch—like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you know?
I don’t care if it’s scary to watch, Amber replies. I need to know if we’re ready yet.
Sadeq says yes, the universe is ready.
Right, pack yourself down. We’ll be moving soon.
The ghost is firming up in front of her. “A whole civilization?” it asks. “That is not possible. Your arrival—” It pauses, fuzzing a little. Hah, Gotcha! thinks Amber. Liar, liar, pants on fire! “You cannot possibly have found a human civilization in the archives?”
“The monster you complain about that came through with us is a predator,” she asserts blandly. “It swallowed an entire nation before we heroically attracted its attention and induced it to follow us into the router. It’s an archivore—everything was inside it, still frozen until we expanded it again. This civilization will already have been restored from hot shadows in our own solar system: There is nothing to gain by taking it home with us. But we need to return to ensure that no more predators of this type discover the router—or the high-bandwidth hub we linked to it.”
“You are sure you have killed this monster?” asks the ghost. “It would be inconvenient if it were to emerge from hiding in its digest archives.”
“I can guarantee it won’t trouble you again if you let us go,” says Amber, mentally crossing her fingers. The ghost doesn’t seem to have noticed the huge wedge of fractally compressed data that bloats her personal scope by an order of magnitude. She can still feel Aineko’s goodbye smile inside her head, an echo of ivory teeth trusting her to revive it if the escape plan succeeds.
“We-us agree.” The ghost twists weirdly, morphs into a five-dimensional hypersphere. It bubbles violently for a moment, then spits out a smaller token—a warped distortion in the air, like a gravityless black hole. “Here is your passage. Show us the civilization.”
“Okay”—Now!—“catch.” Amber twitches an imaginary muscle, and one wall of the room dissolves, forming a doorway into Sadeq’s existential hell, now redecorated as a fair facsimile of a twenty-first-century industrial city in Iran, and populated by a Wunch of parasites who can’t believe what they’ve lucked into—an entire continent of zombies waiting to host their flesh-hungry consciousness.
The ghost drifts toward the open window. Amber grabs the hole and yanks it open, gets a grip on her own thoughts, and sends Open wide! on the channel everybody is listening in on. For a moment time stands still, and then—
A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through the cold vacuum, in high orbit around a brown dwarf. But the vacuum is anything but dark. A sapphire glare as bright as the noonday sun on Mars shines on the crazy diamond, billowing and cascading off sails as fine as soap bubbles that slowly drift and tense away from the can. The runaway Slug-corporation’s proxy has hacked the router’s firmware, and the open wormhole gate that feeds power to it is shining with the brilliance of a nuclear fireball, laser light channeled from a star many light years away to power the Field Circus on its return trip to the once-human solar system.
Amber has retreated, with Pierre, into a simulation of her home aboard the Ring Imperium. One wall of her bedroom is a solid slab of diamond, looking out across the boiling Jovian ionosphere from an orbit low enough to make the horizon appear flat. They’re curled together in her bed, a slightly more comfortable copy of the royal bed of King Henry VIII of England. It appears to be carved from thousand-year-old oak beams. As with so much else about the Ring Imperium, appearances are deceptive, and this is even more true of the cramped simulation spaces aboard the Field Circus, as it limps toward a tenth the speed of light, the highest velocity it’s likely to achieve on a fraction of its original sail area.
“Let me get this straight. You convinced. The locals. That a simulation of Iran, with zombie bodies that had been taken over by members of the Wunch. Was a human civilization?”
“Yeah.” Amber stretches lazily and smirks at him. “It’s their damn fault; if the corporate collective entities didn’t use conscious viewpoints as money, they wouldn’t have fallen for a trick like that, would they?”
“People. Money.”
“Well.” She yawns, then sits up and snaps her finger imperiously. Down-stuffed pillows appear behind her back, and a silver salver bearing two full glasses of wine materializes between them. “Corporations are life-forms back home, too, aren’t they? And we trade them. We give our AIs corporations to make them legal entities, but the analogy goes deeper. Look at any company headquarters, fitted out with works of art and expensive furniture and staff bowing and scraping everywhere—”
“—They’re the new aristocracy. Right?”
“Wrong. When they take over, what you get is more like the new biosphere. Hell, the new primordial soup: prokaryotes, bacteria, and algae, mindlessly swarming, trading money for plasmids.” The Queen passes her consort a wineglass. When he drinks from it, it refills miraculously. “Basically, sufficiently complex resource-allocation algorithms reallocate scarce resources . . . and if you don’t jump to get out of their way, they’ll reallocate you. I think that’s what happened inside the Matrioshka brain we ended up in. Judging by the Slug, it happens elsewhere, too. You’ve got to wonder where the builders of that structure came from. And where they went. And whether they realized that the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments.”
“Maybe they tried to dismantle the companies before the companies spent them.” Pierre looks worried. “Running up a national debt, importing luxurious viewpoint extensions, munching exotic dreams. Once they plugged into the net, a primitive Matrioshka civilization would be like, um.” He pauses. “Tribal. A primitive postsingularity civilization meeting the galactic net for the first time. Overawed. Wanting all the luxuries. Spending their capital, their human—or alien—capital, the meme machines that built them. Until there’s nothing left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking for someone to own.”
“Speculation.”
“Idle speculation,” he agrees.
“But we can’t ignore it.” She nods. “Maybe some early corporate predator built the machines that spread the wormholes around brown dwarfs and ran the router network on top of them in an attempt to make money fast. By not putting them in the actual planetary systems likely to host tool-using life, they’d ensure that only near-singularity civilizations would stumble over them. Civilizations that had gone too far to be easy prey probably wouldn’t send a ship out to look . . . so the network would ensure a steady stream of yokels new to the big city to fleece. Only they set the mechanism in motion billions of years ago and went extinct, leaving the network to propagate, and now there’s nothing out there but burned-out Matrioshka civilizations and howling parasites like the angry ghosts and the Wunch. And victims like us.” She shudders and changes the subject. “Speaking of aliens, is the Slug happy?”
“Last time I checked on him, yeah.” Pierre blows on his wineglass and it dissolves into a million splinters of light. He looks dubious at the mention of the rogue corporate instrument they’re taking with them. “I don’t trust him out
in the unrestricted sim-spaces yet, but he delivered on the fine control for the router’s laser. I just hope you don’t ever have to actually use him, if you follow my drift. I’m a bit worried that Aineko is spending so much time in there.”
“So that’s where she is? I’d been worrying.”
“Cats never come when you call them, do they?”
“There is that,” she agrees. Then, with a worried glance at the vision of Jupiter’s cloudscape: “I wonder what we’ll find when we get there?”
Outside the window, the imaginary Jovian terminator is sweeping toward them with eerie rapidity, sucking them toward an uncertain nightfall.
PART 3
SINGULARITY
There’s a sucker born every minute.
—P. T. BARNUM
7: CURATOR
SIRHAN STANDS ON THE EDGE OF AN ABYSS, LOOKING down at a churning orange-and-gray cloudscape far below. The air this close to the edge is chilly and smells slightly of ammonia, although that might be his imagination at work—there’s little chance of any gas exchange taking place across the transparent pressure wall of the flying city. He feels as if he could reach out and touch the swirling vaporscape. There’s nobody else around, this close to the edge—it’s an icy sensation to look out across the roiling depths, at an ocean of gas so cold human flesh would freeze within seconds of exposure, knowing that there’s nothing solid out there for tens of thousands of kilometers. The sense of isolation is aggravated by the paucity of bandwidth, this far out of the system. Most people huddle close to the hub, for comfort and warmth and low latency: Posthumans are gregarious.
Beneath Sirhan’s feet, the lily-pad city is extending itself, mumbling and churning in endless self-similar loops like a cubist blastoma growing in the upper atmosphere of Saturn. Great ducts suck in methane and other atmospheric gases, apply energy, polymerize and diamondize, and crack off hydrogen to fill the lift cells high above. Beyond the sapphire dome of the city’s gasbag, an azure star glares with the speckle of laser light; humanity’s first—and so far, last—starship, braking into orbit on the last shredded remnant of its light sail.
He’s wondering maliciously how his mother will react to discovering her bankruptcy when the light above him flickers. Something gray and unpleasant splatters against the curve of nearly invisible wall in front of him, leaving a smear. He takes a step back and looks up angrily. “Fuck you!” he yells. Raucous cooing laughter follows him away from the boundary, feral pigeon voices mocking. “I mean it,” he warns, flicking a gesture at the air above his head. Wings scatter in a burst of thunder as a slab of wind solidifies, thistledown-shaped nanomachines suspended on the breeze locking edge to edge to form an umbrella over his head. He walks away from the perimeter, fuming, leaving the pigeons to look for another victim.
Annoyed, Sirhan finds a grassy knoll a couple of hundred meters from the rim and around the curve of the lily pad from the museum buildings. It’s far enough from other humans that he can sit undisturbed with his thoughts, far enough out to see over the edge without being toilet-bombed by flocking flying rats. (The flying city, despite being the product of an advanced technology almost unimaginable two decades before, is full of bugs—software complexity and scaling laws ensured that the preceding decades of change acted as a kind of cosmological inflationary period for design glitches, and an infestation of passenger pigeons is by no means the most inexplicable problem this biosphere harbors.)
In an attempt to shut the more unwelcome manifestations of cyber-nature out, he sits under the shade of an apple tree and marshals his worlds around him. “When is my grandmother arriving?” he asks one of them, speaking into an antique telephone in the world of servants, where everything is obedient and knows its place. The city humors him, for its own reasons.
“She is still containerized, but aerobraking is nearly over. Her body will be arriving down-well in less than two megaseconds.” The city’s avatar in this machinima is a discreet Victorian butler, stony-faced and respectful. Sirhan eschews intrusive memory interfaces; for an eighteen-year-old, he’s conservative to the point of affectation, favoring voice commands and anthropomorphic agents over the invisible splicing of virtual neural nets.
“You’re certain she’s transferred successfully?” Sirhan asks anxiously. He heard a lot about his grandmama when he was young, very little of it complimentary. Nevertheless, the old bat must be a lot more flexible than his mother ever gave her credit for, to be subjecting herself to this kind of treatment for the first time at her current age.
“I’m as certain as I can be, young master, for anyone who insists on sticking to their original phenotype without benefit of off-line backup or medical implants. I regret that omniscience is not within my remit. Would you like me to make further specific inquiries?”
“No.” Sirhan peers up at the bright flare of laser light, visible even through the soap-bubble membrane that holds in the breathable gas mix, and the trillions of liters of hot hydrogen in the canopy above it. “As long as you’re sure she’ll arrive before the ship?” Tuning his eyes to ultraviolet, he watches the emission spikes, sees the slow strobing of the low-bandwidth AM modulation that’s all the starship can manage by way of downlink communication until it comes within range of the system manifold. It’s sending the same tiresomely repetitive question about why it’s being redirected to Saturn that it’s been putting out for the past week, querying the refusal to supply terawatts of propulsion energy on credit.
“Unless there’s a spike in their power beam, you can be certain of that,” City replies reassuringly. “And you can be certain also that your grandmother will revive comfortably.”
“One may hope so.” To undertake the interplanetary voyage in corporeal person, at her age, without any upgrades or augmentation, must take courage, he decides. “When she wakes up, if I’m not around, ask her for an interview slot on my behalf. For the archives, of course.”
“It will be my pleasure.” City bobs his head politely.
“That will be all,” Sirhan says dismissively, and the window into servantspace closes. Then he looks back up at the pinprick of glaring blue laser light near the zenith. Tough luck, Mom, he subvocalizes for his journal cache. Most of his attention is forked at present, focused on the rich historical windfall from the depths of the singularity that is coming his way, in the form of the thirty-year-old starwhisp’s Cartesian theatre. But he can still spare some schadenfreude for the family fortunes. All your assets belong to me, now. He smiles, inwardly. I’ll just have to make sure they’re put to a sensible use this time.
“I don’t see why they’re diverting us toward Saturn. It’s not as if they can possibly have dismantled Jupiter already, is it?” asks Pierre, rolling the chilled beer bottle thoughtfully between fingers and thumb.
“Why not you ask Amber?” replies the velociraptor squatting beside the log table. (Boris’s Ukrainian accent is unimpeded by the dromaeosaurid’s larynx; in point of fact, it’s an affectation, one he could easily fix by sideloading an English pronunciation patch if he wanted to.)
“Well.” Pierre shakes his head. “She’s spending all her time with that Slug, no multiplicity access, privacy ackles locked right down. I could get jealous.” His voice doesn’t suggest any deep concern.
“What’s to get jealous about? Just ask to fork instance to talk to you, make love, show boyfriend good time, whatever.”
“Hah!” Pierre chuckles grimly, then drains the last drops from the bottle into his mouth. He throws it away in the direction of a clump of cycads, then snaps his fingers; another one appears in its place.
“Are two megaseconds out from Saturn in any case,” Boris points out, then pauses to sharpen his inch-long incisors on one end of the table. Fangs crunch through timber like wet cardboard. “Grrrrn. Am seeing most peculiar emission spectra from inner solar system. Foggy flying down bottom of gravity well. Am wondering, does ensmartening of dumb matter extend past Jovian orbit now?”
“Hmm.” Pierre takes a
swig from the bottle and puts it down. “That might explain the diversion. But why haven’t they powered up the lasers on the Ring for us? You missed that, too.” For reasons unknown, the huge battery of launch lasers had shut down, some millions of seconds after the crew of the Field Circus had entered the router, leaving it adrift in the cold darkness.
“Don’t know why are not talking.” Boris shrugged. “At least are still alive there, as can tell from the ‘set course for Saturn, following thus-and-such orbital elements’ bit. Someone is paying attention. Am telling you from beginning, though, turning entire solar system into computronium is real bad idea, long-term. Who knows how far has gone already?”
“Hmm, again.” Pierre draws a circle in the air. “Aineko,” he calls, “are you listening?”
“Don’t bug me.” A faint green smile appears in the circle, just the suggestion of fangs and needle-sharp whiskers. “I had an idea I was sleeping furiously.”
Boris rolls one turreted eye and drools on the tabletop. “Munch munch,” he growls, allowing his saurian body-brain to put in a word.
“What do you need to sleep for? This is a fucking sim, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I enjoy sleeping,” replies the cat, irritably lashing its just-now-becoming-visible tail. “What do you want? Fleas?”
“No thanks,” Pierre says hastily. Last time he called Aineko’s bluff, the cat had filled three entire pocket universes with scurrying gray mice. One of the disadvantages of flying aboard a starship the size of a baked bean can full of smart matter was the risk that some of the passengers could get rather too creative with the reality control system. This Cretaceous kaffee klatsch was just Boris’s entertainment partition; compared to some of the other simulation spaces aboard the Field Circus, it was downright conservative. “Look, do you have any updates on what’s going on down-well? We’re only twenty objective days out from orbital insertion, and there’s so little to see—”
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