“I have a suspicion.” Amber stands poised, as if ready to run. Run away from me? Rita thinks, startled. “You said, what if the resimulants came from a subconscious function of the Offspring? And funnily enough, I’ve been discussing that possibility with Dad. He’s still got the spark when you show him a problem, you know.”
“I don’t understand!”
“No, I don’t think you do,” says Amber, and Rita can feel vast stresses in the space around her. The whole ubicomp environment, dust-sized chips and utility fog and hazy clouds of diamond-bright optical processors in the soil and the air and her skin, is growing blotchy and sluggish, thrashing under the load of whatever Amber—with her management-grade ackles—is ordering it to do. For a moment, Rita can’t feel half her mind, and she gets the panicky claustrophobic sense of being trapped inside her own head. Then it stops.
“Tell me!” Rita insists. “What are you trying to prove? It’s some mistake—” And Amber is nodding, much to her surprise, looking weary and morose. “What do you think I’ve done?”
“Nothing. You’re coherent. Sorry about that.”
“Coherent?” Rita hears her voice rising with her indignation as she feels bits of herself, cut off from her for whole seconds, shivering with relief. “I’ll give you coherent! Assaulting my exocortex—”
“Shut up.” Amber rubs her face and simultaneously throws Rita one end of an encrypted channel.
“Why should I?” Rita demands, not accepting the handshake.
“Because.” Amber glances round. She’s scared! Rita suddenly realizes. “Just do it,” she hisses.
Rita accepts the endpoint and a huge lump of undigested expository data slides down it, structured and tagged with entry points and metainformation directories pointing to—
“Holy shit,” she whispers, as she realizes what it is.
“Yes.” Amber grins humorlessly. She continues, over the open channel: It looks like they’re cognitive antibodies, generated by the devil’s own semiotic immune system. That’s what Sirhan is focusing on, how to avoid triggering them and bringing everything down at once. Forget the election. We’re going to be in deep shit sooner rather than later, and we’re still trying to work out how to survive. Now are you sure you still want in?
“Want in on what?” Rita asks, shakily.
The lifeboat Dad’s trying to get us all into under cover of the accelerationista/conservationista split, before the Vile Offspring’s immune system figures out how to lever us apart into factions and make us kill each other . . .
Welcome to the afterglow of the intelligence supernova, little tapeworm.
Tapeworms have on the order of a thousand neurons, pulsing furiously to keep their little bodies twitching. Human beings have on the order of a hundred billion neurons. What is happening in the inner solar system as the Vile Offspring churn and reconfigure the fast-thinking structured dust clouds that were once planets is as far beyond the ken of merely human consciousness as the thoughts of a Gödel are beyond the twitching tropisms of a worm. Personality modules bounded by the speed of light, sucking down billions of times the processing power of a human brain, form and re-form in the halo of glowing nanopro-cessors that shrouds the sun in a ruddy, glowing cloud.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Ceres, and the asteroids—all gone. Luna is a silvery iridescent sphere, planed smooth down to micrometer heights, luminous with diffraction patterns. Only Earth, the cradle of human civilization, remains untransformed; and Earth, too, will be dismantled soon enough, for already a trellis of space elevators webs the planet around its equator, lifting refugee dumb matter into orbit and flinging it at the wildlife preserves of the outer system.
The intelligence bloom that gnaws at Jupiter’s moons with claws of molecular machinery won’t stop until it runs out of dumb matter to convert into computronium. By the time it does, it will have as much brainpower as you’d get if you placed a planet with a population of six billion future-shocked primates in orbit around every star in the Milky Way galaxy. But right now, it’s still stupid, having converted barely a percentage point of the mass of the solar system—it’s a mere Magellanic Cloud civilization, infantile and unsubtle and still perilously close to its carbon-chemistry roots.
It’s hard for tapeworms living in warm intestinal mulch to wrap their thousand-neuron brains around whatever it is that the vastly more complex entities who host them are discussing, but one thing’s sure—the owners have a lot of things going on, not all of them under conscious control. The churning of gastric secretions and the steady ventilation of lungs are incomprehensible to the simple brains of tapeworms, but they serve the purpose of keeping the humans alive and provide the environment the worms live in. And other more esoteric functions that contribute to survival—the intricate dance of specialized cloned lymphocytes in their bone marrow and lymph nodes, the random permutations of antibodies constantly churning for possible matches to intruder molecules warning of the presence of pollution—are all going on beneath the level of conscious control.
Autonomic defenses. Antibodies. Intelligence blooms gnawing at the edges of the outer system. And humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run but over how far and how fast?
There’s a team meeting early the next morning. It’s still dark outside, and most of the attendees who are present in vivo have the faintly haggard look that comes from abusing melatonin antagonists. Rita stifles a yawn as she glances around the conference room—the walls expanded into huge virtual spaces to accommodate thirty or so exocortical ghosts from sleeping partners who will wake with memories of a particularly vivid lucid dream—and sees Amber talking to her famous father and a younger-looking man who one of her partials recognizes as a last-century EU politician. There seems to be some tension between them.
Now that Amber has granted Rita her conditional trust, a whole new tier of campaigning information has opened up to her inner eye—stuff steganographically concealed in a hidden layer of the project’s collective memory space. There’s stuff in here she hadn’t suspected, frightening studies of resimulant demographics, surveys of emigration rates from the inner system, cladistic trees dissecting different forms of crude tampering that have been found skulking in the wetware of refugees. The reason why Amber and Manfred and—reluctantly—Sirhan are fighting for one radical faction in a planetwide election, despite their various misgivings over the validity of the entire concept of democracy in this posthuman era. She blinks it aside, slightly bewildered, forking a couple of dozen personality subthreads to chew on it at the edges. “Need coffee,” she mutters to the table, as it offers her a chair.
“Everyone online?” asked Manfred. “Then I’ll begin.” He looks tired and worried, physically youthful but showing the full weight of his age. “We’ve got a crisis coming, folks. About a hundred kiloseconds ago, the bit rate on the resimulation stream jumped. We’re now fielding about one resimulated state vector a second, on top of the legitimate immigration we’re dealing with. If it jumps again by the same factor, it’s going to swamp our ability to check the immigrants for zimboes in vivo—we’d have to move to running them in secure storage or just resurrecting them blind, and if there are any jokers in the pack that’s about the riskiest thing we could do.”
“Why do you not spool them to memory diamond?” asks the handsome young ex-politician to his left, looking almost amused—as if he already knows the answer.
“Politics.” Manfred shrugs.
“It would blow a hole in our social contract,” says Amber, looking as if she’s just swallowed something unpleasant, and Rita feels a flicker of admiration for the way they’re stage-managing the meeting. Amber’s even talking to her father, as if she feels comfortable with him around, although he’s a walking reminder of her own lack of success. Nobody else has gotten a word in yet. “If we don’t instantiate them, the next logical step is to deny resimulated minds the fr
anchise. Which in turn puts us on the road to institutional inequality. And that’s a very big step to take, even if you have misgivings about the idea of settling complex policy issues on the basis of a popular vote, because our whole polity is based on the idea that less competent intelligences—us—deserve consideration.”
“Hrmph.” Someone clears their throat. Rita glances round and freezes, because it’s Amber’s screwed-up eigenchild, and he’s just about materialized in the chair next to her. So he adopted Superplonk after all? she observes cynically. He doggedly avoids looking at her. “That was my analysis,” he says reluctantly. “We need them alive. For the ark option, at least, and if not, even the accelerationista platform will need them on hand later.”
Concentration camps, thinks Rita, trying to ignore Sirhan’s presence near her, for it’s a constant irritant, where most of the inmates are confused, frightened human beings—and the ones who aren’t think they are. It’s an eerie thought, and she spawns a couple of full ghosts to dream it through for her, gaming the possible angles.
“How are your negotiations over the lifeboat designs going?” Amber asks her father. “We need to get a portfolio of design schemata out before we go into the election—”
“Change of plan.” Manfred hunches forward. “This doesn’t need to go any further, but Sirhan and Aineko have come up with something interesting.” He looks worried.
Sirhan is staring at his eigenmother with narrowed eyes, and Rita has to resist the urge to elbow him savagely in the ribs. She knows enough about him now to realize it wouldn’t get his attention—at least, not the way she’d want it, not for the right reasons—and in any case, he’s more wrapped up in himself than her ghost ever saw him as likely to be. (How anyone could be party to such a detailed exchange of simulated lives and still reject the opportunity to do it in real life is beyond her, unless it’s an artifact of his youth, when his parents pushed him through a dozen simulated childhoods in search of knowledge and ended up with a stubborn oyster-head of a son . . .) “We still need to look as if we’re planning on using a lifeboat,” he says aloud. “There’s the small matter of the price they’re asking in return for the alternative.”
“What? What are you talking about?” Amber sounds confused. “I thought you were working on some kind of cladistic map. What’s this about a price?”
Sirhan smiles coolly. “I am working on a cladistic map, in a manner of speaking. You wasted much of your opportunity when you journeyed to the router, you know. I’ve been talking to Aineko.”
“You—” Amber flushes. “What about?” She’s visibly angry, Rita notices. Sirhan is needling his eigenmother. Why?
“About the topology of some rather interesting types of small-world network.” Sirhan leans back in his chair, watching the cloud above her head. “And the router. You went through it, then you came back with your tail between your legs as fast as you could, didn’t you? Not even checking your passenger to see if it was a hostile parasite.”
“I don’t have to take this,” Amber says tightly. “You weren’t there, and you have no idea what constraints we were working under.”
“Really?” Sirhan raises an eyebrow. “Anyway, you missed an opportunity. We know that the routers—for whatever reason—are self-replicating. They spread from brown dwarf to brown dwarf, hatch, tap the protostar for energy and material, and send a bunch of children out. Von Neumann machines, in other words. We also know that they provide high-bandwidth communications to other routers. When you went through the one at Hyundai +4904/-56, you ended up in an unmaintained DMZ attached to an alien Matrioshka brain that had degenerated, somehow. It follows that someone had collected a router and carried it home, to link into the MB. So why didn’t you bring one home with you?”
Amber glares at him. “Total payload on board the Field Circus was about ten grams. How large do you think a router seed is?”
“So you brought the Slug home instead, occupying maybe half your storage capacity and ready to wreak seven shades of havoc on—”
“Children!” They both look round automatically. It’s Annette, Rita realizes, and she doesn’t look amused. “Why do you not save this bickering for later?” she asks. “We have our own goals to be pursuing.” Unamused is an understatement. Annette is fuming.
“This charming family reunion was your idea, I believe?” Manfred smiles at her, then nods coolly at the retread EU politician in the next seat.
“Please.” It’s Amber. “Dad, can you save this for later?” Rita sits up. For a moment, Amber looks ancient, far older than her subjective gigasecond of age. “She’s right. She didn’t mean to screw up. Let’s leave the family history for some time when we can work it out in private. Okay?”
Manfred looks abashed. He blinks rapidly. “All right.” He takes a breath. “Amber, I brought some old acquaintances into the loop. If we win the election, then to get out of here as fast as possible we’ll have to use a combination of the two main ideas we’ve been discussing: spool as many people as possible into high-density storage until we get somewhere with space and mass and energy to reincarnate them and get our hands on a router. The entire planetary polity can’t afford to pay the energy budget of a relativistic starship big enough to hold everyone, even as uploads, and a subrelativistic ship would be too damn vulnerable to the Vile Offspring. And it follows that, instead of taking potluck on the destination, we should learn about the network protocols the routers use, figure out some kind of transferable currency we can use to pay for our reinstantiation at the other end, and also how to make some kind of map so we know where we’re going. The two hard parts are getting at or to a router, and paying—that’s going to mean traveling with someone who understands Economics 2.0 but doesn’t want to hang around the Vile Offspring.
“As it happens, these old acquaintances of mine went out and fetched back a router seed, for their own purposes. It’s sitting about thirty light-hours away from here, out in the Kuiper belt. They’re trying to hatch it right now. And I think Aineko might be willing to go with us and handle the trade negotiations.” He raises the palm of his right hand and flips a bundle of tags into the shared spatial cache of the inner circle’s memories.
Lobsters. Decades ago, back in the dim wastelands of the depression-ridden naughty oughties, the uploaded lobsters had escaped. Manfred brokered a deal for them to get their very own cometary factory colony. Years later, Amber’s expedition to the router had run into eerie zombie lobsters, upload images that had been taken over and reanimated by the Wunch. But where the real lobsters had gotten to . . .
For a moment, Rita sees herself hovering in darkness and vacuum, the distant siren song of a planetary gravity well far below. Off to her—left? north?—glows a hazy dim red cloud the size of the full moon as seen from Earth, a cloud that hums with a constant background noise, the waste heat of a galactic civilization dreaming furious colorless thoughts to itself. Then she figures out how to slew her unblinking, eyeless viewpoint round and sees the craft.
It’s a starship in the shape of a crustacean three kilometers long. It’s segmented and flattened, with legs projecting from the abdominal floor to stretch stiffly sideways and clutch fat balloons of cryogenic deuterium fuel. The blue metallic tail is a flattened fan wrapped around the delicate stinger of a fusion reactor. Near the head, things are different: no huge claws there, but the delicately branching fuzz of bush robots, nanoassemblers poised ready to repair damage in flight and spin the parachute of a ramscoop when the ship is ready to decelerate. The head is massively armored against the blitzkrieg onslaught of interstellar dust, its radar eyes a glint of hexagonal compound surfaces staring straight at her.
Behind and below the lobster-ship, a planetary ring looms vast and tenuous. The lobster is in orbit around Saturn, mere light seconds away. And as Rita stares at the ship in dumbstruck silence, it winks at her.
“They don’t have names, at least not as individual identifiers,” Manfred says apologetically, “so I asked if he’d mind b
eing called something. He said Blue, because he is. So I give you the good lobster Something Blue.”
Sirhan interrupts. “You still need my cladistics project”—he sounds somewhat smug—“to find your way through the network. Do you have a specific destination in mind?”
“Yeah, to both questions,” Manfred admits. “We need to send duplicate ghosts out to each possible router endpoint, wait for an echo, then iterate and repeat. Recursive depth-first traversal. The goal—that’s harder.” He points at the ceiling, which dissolves into a chaotic 3D spiderweb that Rita recognizes, after some hours of subjective head-down archive time, as a map of the dark matter distribution throughout a radius of a billion light years, galaxies glued like fluff to the nodes where strands of drying silk meet. “We’ve known for most of a century that there’s something flaky going on out there, out past the Böotes void—there are a couple of galactic superclusters, around which there’s something flaky about the cosmic background anisotropy. Most computational processes generate entropy as a by-product, and it looks like something is dumping waste heat into the area from all the galaxies in the region, very evenly spread in a way that mirrors the metal distribution in those galaxies, except at the very cores. And according to the lobsters, who have been indulging in some very long baseline interferometry, most of the stars in the nearest cluster are redder than expected and metal-depleted. As if someone’s been mining them.”
“Ah.” Sirhan stares at his grandfather. “Why should they be any different from the local nodes?”
“Look around you. Do you see any indications of large-scale cosmic engineering within a million light years of here?” Manfred shrugs. “Locally, nothing has quite reached . . . well. We can guess at the life cycle of a postspike civilization now, can’t we? We’ve felt the elephant. We’ve seen the wreckage of collapsed Matrioshka minds. We know how unattractive exploration is to postsingularity intelligences. We’ve seen the bandwidth gap that keeps them at home.” He points at the ceiling. “But over there something different happened. They’re making changes on the scale of an entire galactic supercluster, and they appear to be coordinated. They did get out and go places, and their descendants may still be out there. It looks like they’re doing something purposeful and coordinated, something vast—a timing channel attack on the virtual machine that’s running the universe, perhaps, or an embedded simulation of an entirely different universe. Up or down, is it turtles all the way, or is there something out there that’s more real than we are? And don’t you think it’s worth trying to find out?”
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