Funding the family reunion isn’t going to be a problem, as Amber discovers when she receives an offer of reincarnation good for all the passengers and crew of the Field Circus.
She isn’t sure quite where the money is coming from. Presumably it’s some creaky financial engine designed by Dad, stirring from its bear-market bunker for the first time in decades to suck dusty syndication feeds and liquidate long-term assets held against her return. She’s duly grateful—even fervently so—for the details of her own impecunious position grow more depressing the more she learns about them. Her sole asset is the Field Circus, a thirty-years-obsolete starwhisp massing less than twenty kilograms including what’s left of its tattered sail, along with its cargo of uploaded passengers and crew. Without the farsighted trust fund that has suddenly chugged into life, she’d be stranded in the realm of ever-circling leptons. But now the fund has sent her its offer of incarnation, she’s got a dilemma. Because one of the Field Circus’s passengers has never actually had a meatspace body . . .
Amber finds the Slug browsing quietly in a transparent space filled with lazily waving branches that resemble violet coral fans. They’re a ghost-memory of alien life, an order of thermophilic quasi fungi with hyphae ridged in actin/myosin analogues, muscular and slippery filter feeders that eat airborne unicellular organisms. The Slug itself is about two meters long and has a lacy white exoskeleton of curves and arcs that don’t repeat, disturbingly similar to a Penrose tiling. Chocolate brown organs pulse slowly under the skeleton. The ground underfoot is dry but feels swampy.
Actually, the Slug is a surgical disguise. Both it and the quasi-fungal ecosystem have been extinct for millions of years, existing only as cheap stage props in an interstellar medicine show run by rogue financial instruments. The Slug itself is one such self-aware scam, probably a pyramid scheme or even an entire compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to hide from its creditors by masquerading as a life-form. But there’s a problem with incarnating itself down in Sirhan’s habitat—the ecosystem it evolved for is a cool Venusiform, thirty atmospheres of saturated steam baked under a sky the color of hot lead streaked with yellow sulphuric acid clouds. The ground is mushy because it’s melting, not because it’s damp.
“You’re going to have to pick another somatotype,” Amber explains, laboriously rolling her interface around the red-hot coral reef like a giant soap bubble. The environmental interface is transparent and infinitely thin, a discontinuity in the physics model of the simulation space, mapping signals between the human-friendly environment on one side and the crushing, roasting hell on the other. “This one is simply not compatible with any of the supported environments where we’re going.”
“I am not understanding. Surely I can integrate with the available worlds of our destination?”
“Uh, things don’t work that way outside cyberspace.” Suddenly Amber is at a bit of a loss. “The physics model could be supported, but the energy input to do so would be prohibitive, and you would not be able to interact as easily with other physics models as we can now.” She forks a ghost, demonstrates a transient other-Amber in a refrigerated tank rolling across the Slug’s backyard, crushing coral and hissing and clanking noisily. “You’d be like this.”
“Your reality is badly constructed, then,” the Slug points out.
“It’s not constructed at all. It just evolved, randomly.” Amber shrugs. “We can’t exercise the same level of control over the underlying embedded context that we can over this one. I can’t simply magic you an interface that will let you bathe in steam at three hundred degrees.”
“Why not?” asks the Slug. Translation wetware adds a nasty, sharp rising whine to the question, turning it into a demand.
“It’s a privilege violation,” Amber tries to explain. “The reality we’re about to enter is, uh, provably consistent. It has to be, because it’s consistent and stable, and if we could create new local domains with different rules, they might propagate uncontrollably. It’s not a good idea, believe me. Do you want to come with us or not?”
“I have no alternative,” the Slug says, slightly sulkily. “But do you have a body I can use?”
“I think—” Amber stops, suddenly. She snaps her fingers. “Hey, cat!”
A Cheshire grin ripples into view, masked into the domain wall between the two embedded realities. “Hey, human.”
“Whoa!” Amber takes a backward step from the apparition. “Our friend here’s got a problem, no suitable downloadable body. Us meat puppets are all too closely tied to our neural ultrastructure, but you’ve got a shitload of programmable gate arrays. Can we borrow some?”
“You can do better than that.” Aineko yawns, gathering substance by the moment. The Slug is rearing up and backing away like an alarmed sausage. Whatever it perceives in the membrane seems to frighten it. “I’ve been designing myself a new body. I figured it was time to change my style for a while. Your corporate scam artist here can borrow my old template until something better comes up. How’s that?”
“Did you hear that?” Amber asks the Slug. “Aineko is kindly offering to donate her body to you. Will that do?” Without waiting, she winks at her cat and taps her heels together, fading out with a whisper and a smile. “See you on the other side . . .”
It takes several minutes for the Field Circus’s antique transceiver to download the dozens of avabits occupied by the frozen state vectors of each of the people running in its simulation engines. Tucked away with most of them is a resource bundle consisting of their entire sequenced genome, a bunch of phenotypic and proteome hint markers, and a wish list of upgrades. Between the gene maps and the hints, there’s enough data to extrapolate a meat machine. So the festival city’s body shop goes to work turning out hacked stem cells and fabbing up incubators.
It doesn’t take very long to reincarnate a starship full of relativity-lagged humans these days. First, City carves out skeletons for them (politely ignoring a crudely phrased request to cease and desist from Pamela, on the grounds that she has no power of attorney), then squirts osteoclasts into the spongy ersatz bone. They look like ordinary human stem cells at a distance, but instead of nuclei they have primitive pinpricks of computronium, blobs of smart matter so small they’re as dumb as an ancient Pentium, reading a control tape that is nevertheless better structured than anything Mother Nature evolved. These heavily optimized fake stem cells—biological robots in all but name—spawn like cancer, ejecting short-lived anucleated secondary cells. Then City infuses each mess of quasi-cancerous tissue with a metric shitload of carrier capsids, which deliver the real cellular control mechanisms to their target bodies. Within a megasecond, the almost random churning of the construction bots gives way to a more controlled process as nanoscale CPUs are replaced by ordinary nuclei and eject themselves from their host cells, bailing out via the half-formed renal system—except for those in the central nervous system, which have a final job to do. Eleven days after the invitation, the first passengers are being edited into the pattern of synaptic junctions inside the newly minted skulls.
(This whole process is tediously slow and laughably obsolescent technology by the standards of the fast-moving core. Down there, they’d just set up a wake shield in orbit, chill it down to a fractional Kelvin, whack two coherent matter beams together, teleport some state information into place, and yank the suddenly materialized meatbody in through an airlock before it has time to asphyxiate. But then again, down in the hot space, they don’t have much room for flesh anymore . . .)
Sirhan doesn’t pay much attention to the pseudocancers fermenting and churning in the row of tanks that lines the Gallery of the Human Body in the Bush wing of the museum. Newly formed, slowly unskeletonizing corpses—like a time-lapse process of decay with a finger angrily twisting the dial into high-speed reverse—is both distasteful and aesthetically displeasing to watch. Nor do the bodies tell him anything about their occupants. This sort of stuff is just a necessary prequel to the main event, a form
al reception and banquet to which he has devoted the full-time attention of four ghosts.
He could, given a few less inhibitions, go Dumpster-diving in their mental archives, but that’s one of the big taboos of the post-wetware age. (Spy agencies went meme-profiling and memory-mining in the third and fourth decades, gained a thought police rap sheet, and spawned a backlash of deviant mental architectures resilient to infowar intrusions. Now the nations that those spook institutions served no longer exist, their very landmasses being part of the orbiting nöosphere construction project that will ultimately turn the mass of the entire solar system into a gigantic Matrioshka brain. And Sirhan is left with an uneasy loyalty to the one great new taboo to be invented since the end of the twentieth century—freedom of thought.)
So, to indulge his curiosity, he spends most of his waking fleshbody hours with Pamela, asking her questions from time to time and mapping the splenetic overspill of her memeome into his burgeoning family knowledge base.
“I wasn’t always this bitter and cynical,” Pamela explains, waving her cane in the vague direction of the cloudscape beyond the edge of the world and fixing Sirhan with a beady stare. (He’s brought her out here hoping that it will trigger another cascade of memories, sunsets on honeymoon island resorts and the like, but all that seems to be coming up is bile.) “It was the successive betrayals. Manfred was the first, and the worst in some ways, but that little bitch Amber hurt me more, if anything. If you ever have children, be careful to hold something back for yourself; because if you don’t, when they throw it all in your face, you’ll feel like dying. And when they’re gone, you’ve got no way of patching things up.”
“Is dying inevitable?” asks Sirhan, knowing damn well that it isn’t, but more than happy to give her an excuse to pick at her scabbed-over love wound. He more than half suspects she’s still in love with Manfred. This is great family history, and he’s having the time of his flinty-hearted life leading her up to the threshold of the reunion he’s hosting.
“Sometimes I think death is even more inevitable than taxes,” his grandmother replies bleakly. “Humans don’t live in a vacuum; we’re part of a larger pattern of life.” She stares out across the troposphere of Saturn, where a thin rime of blown methane snow catches the distant sunrise in a ruby-tinted fog. “The old gives way to the new.” She sighs, and tugs at her cuffs. (Ever since the incident with the gate-crashing ape, she’s taken to wearing an antique formal pressure suit, all clinging black spider silk woven with flexible pipes and silvery smart sensor nets.) “There’s a time to get out of the way of the new, and I think I passed it sometime ago.”
“Um,” says Sirhan, who is somewhat surprised by this new angle in her lengthy, self-justifying confession. “But what if you’re just saying this because you feel old? If it’s just a physiological malfunction, we could fix it and you’d—”
“No! I’ve got a feeling that life prolongation is morally wrong, Sirhan. I’m not passing judgment on you, just stating that I think it’s wrong for me. It’s immoral because it blocks up the natural order, keeps us old cobweb strands hanging around and getting in you young things’ way. And then there are the theological questions. If you try to live forever, you never get to meet your maker.”
“Your maker? Are you a theist, then?”
“I—think so.” Pamela is silent for a minute. “Although there are so many different approaches to the subject that it’s hard to know which version to believe. For a long time, I was secretly afraid your grandfather might actually have had the answers. That I might have been wrong all along. But now—” She leans on her cane. “When he announced that he was uploading, I figured out that all he really had was a life-hating antihuman ideology he’d mistaken for a religion. The rapture of the nerds and the heaven of the AIs. Sorry, no thanks. I don’t buy it.”
“Oh.” Sirhan squints out at the cloudscape. For a moment, he thinks he can see something in the distant mist, an indeterminate distance away—it’s hard to distinguish centimeters from megameters, with no scale indicator and a horizon a continental distance away—but he’s not sure what it is. Maybe another city, mollusk-curved and sprouting antennae, a strange tail of fabricator nodes wavering below and beneath it. Then a drift of cloud hides it for a moment, and, when it clears, the object is gone. “What’s left, then? If you don’t really believe in some kind of benign creator, dying must be frightening. Especially as you’re doing it so slowly.”
Pamela smiles skeletally, a particularly humorless expression. “It’s perfectly natural, darling! You don’t need to believe in God to believe in embedded realities. We use them every day, as mind tools. Apply anthropic reasoning and isn’t it clear that our entire universe is probably a simulation? We’re living in the early epoch of the universe. Probably this”—she prods at the spun-diamond inner wall of the bubble that holds in the precarious terrestrial atmosphere, holding out the howling cryogenic hydrogen and methane gales of Saturn—“is but a simulation in some ancient history engine’s panopticon, rerunning the sum of all possible origins of sentience, a billion trillion megayears down the line. Death will be like waking up as someone bigger, that’s all.” Her grin slides away. “And if not, I’ll just be a silly old fool who deserves the oblivion she yearns for.”
“Oh, but—” Sirhan stops, his skin crawling. She may be mad, he realizes abruptly. Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire universe. Locked into a pathological view of her own role in reality. “I’d hoped for a reconciliation,” he says quietly. “Your extended family has lived through some extraordinary times. Why spoil it with acrimony?”
“Why spoil it?” She looks at him pityingly. “It was spoiled to begin with, dear, too much selfless sacrifice and too little skepticism. If Manfred hadn’t wanted so badly not to be human, and if I’d learned to be a bit more flexible in time, we might still—” She trails off. “That’s odd.”
“What is?”
Pamela raises her cane and points out into the billowing methane thunderclouds, her expression puzzled. “I’ll swear I saw a lobster out there . . .”
Amber awakens in the middle of the night in darkness and choking pressure, and senses that she’s drowning. For a moment she’s back in the ambiguous space on the far side of the router, a horror of crawling instruments tracing her every experience back to the nooks and crannies of her mind; then her lungs turn to glass and shatter, and she’s coughing and wheezing in the cold air of the museum at midnight.
The hard stone floor beneath her, and an odd pain in her knees, tells her that she’s not aboard the Field Circus anymore. Rough hands hold her shoulders up as she vomits a fine blue mist, racked by a coughing fit. More bluish liquid is oozing from the pores of the skin on her arms and breasts, evaporating in strangely purposeful streamers. “Thank you,” she finally manages to gasp. “I can breathe now.”
She sits back on her heels, realizes she’s naked, and opens her eyes. Everything’s confusingly strange, even though it shouldn’t be. There’s a moment of resistance as if her eyelids are sealed—then they respond. It all feels strangely familiar to her, like waking up again inside a house she grew up in and moved away from years ago. But the scene around her is hardly one to inspire confidence. Shadows lie thick and deep across ovoid tanks filled with an anatomist’s dream, bodies in various nightmarish stages of assembly. And sitting in the middle of them, whence it has retreated after letting go of her shoulders, is a strangely misshapen person—also nude, but for a patchy coat of orange hair.
“Are you awake yet, ma chérie?” asks the orangutan.
“Um.” Amber shakes her head, cautiously, feeling the drag of damp hair, the faint caress of a breeze—she reaches out with another sense and tries to grab hold of reality, but it slithers away, intransigent and un-embedded. Everything around her is so solid and immutable that for a moment she feels a stab of claustrophobic panic. Help! I’m trapped in the real universe! Another quick check reassures her that she’s got access to something outside her
own head, and the panic begins to subside. Her exocortex has migrated successfully to this world. “I’m in a museum? On Saturn? Who are you—have we met?”
“Not in person,” the ape says carefully. “We ’ave corresponded. Annette Dimarcos.”
“Auntie—” A flood of memories rattle Amber’s fragile stream of consciousness apart, forcing her to fork repeatedly until she can drag them together. Annette, in a recorded message: Your father sends you this escape package. The legal key to her mother’s gilded custodial cage. Freedom a necessity. “Is Dad here?” she asks hopefully, even though she knows full well that here in the real world at least thirty years have passed in linear time. In a century where ten years of linear time is enough for several industrial revolutions, that’s a lot of water under the bridge.
“I am not sure.” The orangutan blinks lazily, scratches at her left forearm, and glances round the chamber. “He might be in one of these tanks, playing a shell game. Or he might be leaving well enough alone until the dust settles.” She turns back to stare at Amber with big, brown, soulful eyes. “This is not to be the reunion you were hoping for.”
“Not—” Amber takes a deep breath, the tenth or twelfth that these new lungs have inspired. “What’s with the body? You used to be human. And what’s going on?”
“I still am human, where it counts,” says Annette. “I use these bodies because they are good in low gravity, and they remind me that meatspace is no longer where I live. And for another reason.” She gestures fluidly at the open door. “You will find big changes. Your son has organized—”
“My son.” Amber blinks. “Is this the one who’s suing me? Which version of me? How long ago?” A torrent of questions stream through her mind, exploding out into structured queries throughout the public sections of mindspace that she has access to. Her eyes widen as she absorbs the implications. “Oh shit! Tell me she isn’t here already!”
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