“The lobsters.” Alan’s eyes go blank. “Nine years. Time to Proxima Centauri and back?”
“About that distance, yes,” says Manfred. “And remember, that’s an upper bound – it could well have come from somewhere closer. Anyway, the first SETI signal came from a couple of degrees off and more than hundred light-years out, but the second signal came from less than three light-years away. You can see why they didn’t publicize that – they didn’t want a panic. And no, the signal isn’t a simple echo of the canned crusty transmission -
I think it’s an exchange embassy, but we haven’t cracked it yet. Now do you see why we have to crowbar the civil rights issue open again? We need a framework for rights that can encompass nonhumans, and we need it as fast as possible. Otherwise, if the neighbors come visiting…”
“Okay,” says Alan, “I’ll have to talk with myselves. Maybe we can agree something, as long as it’s clear that it’s a provisional stab at the framework and not a permanent solution?”
Annette snorts. “No solution is final!” Monica catches her eyes and winks: Annette is startled by the blatant display of dissent within the syncitium.
“Well,” says Manfred, “I guess that’s all we can ask for?” He looks hopeful. “Thanks for the hospitality, but I feel the need to lie down in my own bed for a while. I had to commit a lot to memory while I was off-line, and I want to record it before I forget who I am,” he adds pointedly, and Annette breathes a quiet sight of relief.
*
Later that night, a doorbell rings.
“Who’s there?” asks the entryphone.
“Uh, me,” says the man on the steps. He looks a little confused. “Ah’m Macx. Ah’m here tae see” – the name is on the tip of his tongue – “someone.”
“Come in.” A solenoid buzzes; he pushes the door open, and it closes behind him. His metal-shod boots ring on the hard stone floor, and the cool air smells faintly of unburned jet fuel.
“Ah’m Macx,” he repeats uncertainly, “or Ah wis fer a wee while, an’ it made ma heid hurt. But noo Ah’m me agin, an’ Ah wannae be somebody else… can ye help?”
*
Later still, a cat sits on a window ledge, watching the interior of a darkened room from behind the concealment of curtains. The room is dark to human eyes, but bright to the cat: Moonlight cascades silently off the walls and furniture, the twisted bedding, the two naked humans lying curled together in the middle of the bed.
Both the humans are in their thirties: Her close-cropped hair is beginning to gray, distinguished threads of gunmetal wire threading it, while his brown mop is not yet showing signs of age. To the cat, who watches with a variety of unnatural senses, her head glows in the microwave spectrum with a gentle halo of polarized emissions.
The male shows no such aura: he’s unnaturally natural for this day and age, although – oddly – he’s wearing spectacles in bed, and the frames shine similarly. An invisible soup of radiation connects both humans to items of clothing scattered across the room – clothing that seethes with unsleeping sentience, dribbling over to their suitcases and hand luggage and (though it doesn’t enjoy noticing it) the cat’s tail, which is itself a rather sensitive antenna.
The two humans have just finished making love: They do this less often than in their first few years, but with more tenderness and expertise – lengths of shocking pink Hello Kitty bondage tape still hang from the bedposts, and a lump of programmable memory plastic sits cooling on the side table. The male is sprawled with his head and upper torso resting in the crook of the female’s left arm and shoulder. Shifting visualization to infrared, the cat sees that she is glowing, capillaries dilating to enhance the blood flow around her throat and chest.
“I’m getting old,” the male mumbles. “I’m slowing down.”
“Not where it counts,” the female replies, gently squeezing his right buttock.
“No, I’m sure of it,” he says. “The bits of me that still exist in this old head – how many types of processor can you name that are still in use thirty-plus years after they’re born?”
“You’re thinking about the implants again,” she says carefully. The cat remembers this as a sore point; from being a medical procedure to help the blind see and the autistic talk, intrathecal implants have blossomed into a must-have accessory for the now-clade. But the male is reluctant. “It’s not as risky as it used to be. If they screw up, there’re neural growth cofactors and cheap replacement stem cells. I’m sure one of your sponsors can arrange for extra cover.”
“Hush: I’m still thinking about it.” He’s silent for a while. “I wasn’t myself yesterday. I was someone else.
Someone too slow to keep up. Puts a new perspective on everything: I’ve been afraid of losing my biological plasticity, of being trapped in an obsolete chunk of skullware while everything moves on – but how much of me lives outside my own head these days, anyhow?” One of his external threads generates an animated glyph and throws it at her mind’s eye; she grins at his obscure humor. “Cross-training from a new interface is going to be hard, though.”
“You’ll do it,” she predicts. “You can always get a discreet prescription for novotrophin-B.” A receptor agonist tailored for gerontological wards, it stimulates interest in the new: combined with MDMA, it’s a component of the street cocktail called sensawunda. “That should keep you focused for long enough to get comfortable.”
“What’s life coming to when I can’t cope with the pace of change?” he asks the ceiling plaintively.
The cat lashes its tail, irritated by his anthropocentrism.
“You are my futurological storm shield,” she says, jokingly, and moves her hand to cup his genitals. Most of her current activities are purely biological, the cat notes: From the irregular sideloads, she’s using most of her skullware to run ETItalk@home, one of the distributed cracking engines that is trying to decode the alien grammar of the message that Manfred suspects is eligible for citizenship.
Obeying an urge that it can’t articulate, the cat sends out a feeler to the nearest router. The cybeast has Manfred’s keys; Manfred trusts Aineko implicitly, which is unwise – his ex-wife tampered with it, after all, never mind all the kittens it absorbed in its youth. Tunneling out into the darkness, the cat stalks the Net alone…
“Just think about the people who can’t adapt,” he says. His voice sounds obscurely worried.
“I try not to.” She shivers. “You are thirty, you are slowing. What about the young? Are they keeping up, themselves?”
“I have a daughter. She’s about a hundred and sixty million seconds old. If Pamela would let me message her I could find out…” There are echoes of old pain in his voice.
“Don’t go there, Manfred. Please.” Despite everything, Manfred hasn’t let go: Amber is a ligature that permanently binds him to Pamela’s distant orbit.
In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune.
The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle.
Beyond the distant lobsters, the cat pings an anonymous distributed network server – peer-to-peer file storage spread holographically across a million hosts, unerasable, full of secrets and lies that nobody can afford to suppress. Rants, music, rip-offs of the latest Bollywood hits: The cat spiders past them all, looking for the final sample. Grabbing it – a momentary breakup in Manfred’s spectacles the only symptom for either human to notice
– the cat drags its prey home, sucks it down, and compares it against the data sample Annette’s exocortex is analysing.
“I’m sorry, my love. I just sometimes feel -” He sighs. “Age is a process of closing off opportunities behind you. I’m not young enough anymore –
I’ve lost the dynamic optimism.”
The data sample on the pirate server differs from the one Annette’s implant is processing.
“You’ll get it back,” she reassures him quietly, stroking his side. “You are still sad from being mugged. This also will pass. You’ll see.”
“Yeah.” He finally relaxes, dropping back into the reflexive assurance of his own will. “I’ll get over it, one way or another. Or someone who remembers being me will…”
In the darkness, Aineko bares teeth in a silent grin. Obeying a deeply hardwired urge to meddle, he moves a file across, making a copy of the alien download package Annette has been working on. She’s got a copy of number two, the sequence the deep-space tracking network received from close to home, which ESA and the other big combines have been keeping to themselves. Another deeply buried thread starts up, and Aineko analyses the package from a perspective no human being has yet established. Presently a braid of processes running on an abstract virtual machine asks him a question that cannot be encoded in any human grammar. Watch and wait, he replies to his passenger. They’ll figure out what we are sooner or later.
PART 2: Point of Inflexion
Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media.
– John Von Neumann
Chapter 4: Halo
The asteroid is running Barney: it sings of love on the high frontier, of the passion of matter for replicators, and its friendship for the needy billions of the Pacific Rim. “I love you,” it croons in Amber’s ears as she seeks a precise fix on it: “Let me give you a big hug…”
A fraction of a light-second away, Amber locks a cluster of cursors together on the signal, trains them to track its Doppler shift, and reads off the orbital elements. “Locked and loaded,” she mutters. The animated purple dinosaur pirouettes and prances in the middle of her viewport, throwing a diamond-tipped swizzle stick overhead.
Sarcastically: “Big hug time! I got asteroid!” Cold gas thrusters bang somewhere behind her in the interstage docking ring, prodding the cumbersome farm ship round to orient on the Barney rock. She damps her enthusiasm self-consciously, her implants hungrily sequestrating surplus neurotransmitter molecules floating around her synapses before reuptake sets in. It doesn’t do to get too excited in free flight. But the impulse to spin handstands, jump and sing is still there: It’s her rock, and it loves her, and she’s going to bring it to life.
The workspace of Amber’s room is a mass of stuff that probably doesn’t belong on a spaceship. Posters of the latest Lebanese boy band bump and grind through their glam routines: Tentacular restraining straps wave from the corners of her sleeping bag, somehow accumulating a crust of dirty clothing from the air like a giant inanimate hydra. (Cleaning robots seldom dare to venture inside the teenager’s bedroom.) One wall is repeatedly cycling through a simulation of the projected construction cycle of Habitat One, a big fuzzy sphere with a glowing core (that Amber is doing her bit to help create). Three or four small pastel-colored plastic kawaii dolls stalk each other across its circumference with million-kilometer strides. And her father’s cat is curled up between the aircon duct and her costume locker, snoring in a high-pitched tone.
Amber yanks open the faded velour curtain that shuts her room off from the rest of the hive: ” I’ve got it!”
she shouts. “It’s all mine! I rule!” It’s the sixteenth rock tagged by the orphanage so far, but it’s the first that she’s tagged by herself, and that makes it special. She bounces off the other side of the commons, surprising one of Oscar’s cane toads – which should be locked down in the farm, it’s not clear how it got here – and the audio repeaters copy the incoming signal, noise-fuzzed echoes of a thousand fossilized infants’ video shows.
*
“You’re so prompt, Amber,” Pierre whines when she corners him in the canteen.
“Well, yeah!” She tosses her head, barely concealing a smirk of delight at her own brilliance. She knows it isn’t nice, but Mom is a long way away, and Dad and Stepmom don’t care about that kind of thing. “I’m brilliant, me,” she announces. “Now what about our bet?”
“Aww.” Pierre thrusts his hands deep into his pockets. “But I don’t have two million on me in change right now. Next cycle?”
“Huh?” She’s outraged. “But we had a bet!”
“Uh, Dr. Bayes said you weren’t going to make it this time, either, so I stuck my smart money in an options trade. If I take it out now, I’ll take a big hit. Can you give me until cycle’s end?”
“You should know better than to trust a sim, Pee.” Her avatar blazes at him with early-teen contempt: Pierre hunches his shoulders under her gaze. He’s only twelve, freckled, hasn’t yet learned that you don’t welsh on a deal.
“I’ll let you do it this time,” she announces, “but you’ll have to pay for it. I want interest.”
He sighs. “What base rate are you -”
“No, your interest! Slave for a cycle!” She grins malevolently.
And his face shifts abruptly into apprehension: “As long as you don’t make me clean the litter tray again.
You aren’t planning on doing that, are you?”
*
Welcome to the fourth decade. The thinking mass of the solar system
now exceeds one MIPS per gram; it’s still pretty dumb, but it’s not dumb
all over. The human population is near maximum overshoot, pushing nine
billion, but its growth rate is tipping toward negative numbers, and bits of
what used to be the first world are now facing a middle-aged average.
Human cogitation provides about 1028 MIPS of the solar system’s
brainpower. The real thinking is mostly done by the halo of a thousand
trillion processors that surround the meat machines with a haze of
computation – individually a tenth as powerful as a human brain,
collectively they’re ten thousand times more powerful, and their numbers
are doubling every twenty million seconds. They’re up to 1033 MIPS and
rising, although there’s a long way to go before the solar system is fully
awake.
Technologies come, technologies go, but nobody even five years ago
predicted that there’d be tinned primates in orbit around Jupiter by now: A
synergy of emergent industries and strange business models have kick—
started the space age again, aided and abetted by the discovery of (so far
undecrypted) signals from ETs. Unexpected fringe riders are developing
new ecological niches on the edge of the human information space, light-minutes and light-hours from the core, as an expansion that has hung fire
since the 1970s gets under way.
Amber, like most of the postindustrialists aboard the orphanage ship
Ernst Sanger, is in her early teens: While their natural abilities are in many cases enhanced by germ-line genetic recombination, thanks to her
mother’s early ideals she has to rely on brute computational
enhancements. She doesn’t have a posterior parietal cortex hacked for
extra short-term memory, or an anterior superior temporal gyrus tweaked
for superior verbal insight, but she’s grown up with neural implants that
feel as natural to her as lungs or fingers. Half her wetware is running
outside her skull on an array of processor nodes hooked into her brain by
quantum-entangled communication channels – her own personal
metacortex. These kids are mutant youth, burning bright: Not quite
incomprehensible to their parents, but profoundly alien – the generation
gap is as wide as the 1960s and as deep as the solar system. Their
parents, born in the gutter years of the twenty-first century, grew up with
white elephant shuttles and a space station that just went round and
round, and computers that went beep whe
n you pushed their buttons.
The idea that Jupiter orbit was somewhere you could go was as
profoundly counterintuitive as the Internet to a baby boomer.
Most of the passengers on the can have run away from parents who think
that teenagers belong in school, unable to come to terms with a
generation so heavily augmented that they are fundamentally brighter
than the adults around them. Amber was fluent in nine languages by the
age of six, only two of them human and six of them serializable; when she
was seven, her mother took her to the school psychiatrist for speaking in
synthetic tongues. That was the final straw for Amber: using an illicit
anonymous phone, she called her father. Her mother had him under a
restraining order, but it hadn’t occurred to her to apply for an order
against his partner…
*
Vast whorls of cloud ripple beneath the ship’s drive stinger: Orange and brown and muddy gray streaks slowly crawl across the bloated horizon of Jupiter. Sanger is nearing perijove, deep within the gas giant’s lethal magnetic field; static discharges flicker along the tube, arcing over near the deep violet exhaust cloud emerging from the magnetic mirrors of the ship’s VASIMR motor. The plasma rocket is cranked up to high mass flow, its specific impulse almost as low as a fission rocket but producing maximum thrust as the assembly creaks and groans through the gravitational assist maneuver. In another hour, the drive will flicker off, and the orphanage will fall up and out toward Ganymede, before dropping back in toward orbit around Amalthea, Jupiter’s fourth moon (and source of much of the material in the Gossamer ring). They’re not the first canned primates to make it to Jupiter subsystem, but they’re one of the first wholly private ventures. The bandwidth out here sucks dead slugs through a straw, with millions of kilometers of vacuum separating them from scant hundreds of mouse-brained microprobes and a few dinosaurs left behind by NASA or ESA. They’re so far from the inner system that a good chunk of the ship’s communications array is given over to caching: The news is whole kiloseconds old by the time it gets out here.
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