Accelerando e-3

by Charles Stross

  Before I can know what is the right thing to do.”

  “My mother -” Amber stops dead and spawns a vaporous cloud of memory retrievals. They fan out through the space around her mind like the tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network parsers and class filters, she turns the memories into reified images and blats them at the webcam’s tiny brain so he can see them.

  Some of the memories are so painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in full office war paint, leaning over Amber, promising to disable her lexical enhancements forcibly if she doesn’t work on her grammar without them.

  Mom telling Amber that they’re moving again, abruptly, dragging her away from school and the friends she’d tentatively started to like. The church-of-the-month business. Mom catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table, forcing her to eat – “My mother likes control.”

  “Ah.” Sadeq’s expression turns glassy. “And this is how you feel about her? How long have you had that level of – no, please forgive me for asking. You obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know? Did you talk to them?”

  “My grandparents?” Amber stifles a snort. “Mom’s parents are dead. Dad’s are still alive, but they won’t talk to him – they like Mom. They think I’m creepy. I know little things, their tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data with my head when I was four. I’m not built like little girls were in their day, and they don’t understand.

  You know the old ones don’t like us at all? Some of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who think their kids are possessed.”

  “Well.” Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. “I must say, this is a lot to learn. But you know your mother has accepted Islam, don’t you? This means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally speaks for you. And she says this makes you my problem. Hmm.”

  “I’m not a Muslim.” Amber stares at the screen. “I’m not a child, either.” Her threads are coming together, whispering scarily behind her eyes: Her head is suddenly dense and turgid with ideas, heavy as a stone and twice as old as time. “I am nobody’s chattel. What does your law say about people who are born with implants? What does it say about people who want to live forever? I don’t believe in any god, Mr. Judge. I don’t believe in limits. Mom can’t, physically, make me do anything, and she sure can’t speak for me. All she can do is challenge my legal status, and if I choose to stay where she can’t touch me, what does that matter?”

  “Well, if that is what you have to say, I must think on the matter.” He catches her eye; his expression is thoughtful, like a doctor considering a diagnosis. “I will call you again in due course. In the meantime, if you need to talk to anyone, remember that I am always available. If there is anything I can do to help ease your pain, I would be pleased to be of service. Peace be unto you, and those you care for.”

  “Same to you, too,” she mutters darkly, as the connection goes dead. ” Now what?” she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across the wall, begging for attention.

  “I think it’s the lander,” Pierre says helpfully. “Is it down yet?”

  She rounds on him: “Hey, I thought I told you to get lost!”

  “What, and miss all the fun?” He grins at her impishly. “Amber’s got a new boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody…”

  *

  Sleep cycles pass; the borrowed 3D printer on Object Barney’s surface

  spews bitmaps of atoms in quantum lockstep at its rendering platform,

  building up the control circuitry and skeletons of new printers (There are

  no clunky nanoassemblers here, no robots the size of viruses busily

  sorting molecules into piles – just the bizarre quantized magic of atomic

  holography, modulated Bose – Einstein condensates collapsing into

  strange, lacy, supercold machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable

  loops as they slice through Jupiter’s magnetosphere, slowly converting

  the rock’s momentum into power. Small robots grovel in the orange dirt,

  scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber’s

  garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according to a

  schema designed by preteens at an industrial school in Poland, with

  barely any need for human guidance.

  High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed and

  conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating trade with the

  alien intelligences believed to have been detected eight years earlier by

  SETI, they function equally well as fiscal gatekeepers for space colonies.

  The Sanger’s bank accounts in California and Cuba are looking

  acceptable – since entering Jupiter space, the orphanage has staked a

  claim on roughly a hundred gigatons of random rocks and a moon that’s

  just small enough to creep in under the International Astronomical Union’s

  definition of a sovereign planetary body. The borg are working hard,

  leading their eager teams of child stakeholders in their plans to build the

  industrial metastructures necessary to support mining helium-three from

  Jupiter. They’re so focused that they spend much of their time being

  themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared identity that gives them

  their messianic drive.

  Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and slumbers in time to its

  ancient orbital dynamics. A religious college in Cairo is considering issues

  of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of

  bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a

  pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into

  a computing machine’s memory by mapping and simulating all its

  synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are

  its rights and duties?) Riots in Borneo underline the urgency of this

  theotechnological inquiry.

  More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Marseilles also

  underline a rising problem: the social chaos caused by cheap anti-aging

  treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of disaffected youth

  against the formerly graying gerontocracy of Europe, insist that people

  who predate the supergrid and can’t handle implants aren’t really

  conscious: Their ferocity is equaled only by the anger of the dynamic

  septuagenarians of the baby boom, their bodies partially restored to the

  flush of sixties youth, but their minds adrift in a slower, less contingent

  century. The faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the

  labor pool, but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the

  new millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by

  deflationary time.

  The Bangladeshi economic miracle is typical of the age. With growth

  rates running at over twenty percent, cheap out-of-control

  bioindustrialization has swept the nation: Former rice farmers harvest

  plastics and milk cows for silk, while their children study mariculture and

  design seawalls. With cellphone ownership nearing eighty percent and

  literacy at ninety, the once-poor country is finally breaking out of its

  historical infrastructure trap and beginning to develop: In another

  generation, they’ll be richer than Japan.

  Radical new economic theories are focusing around bandwidth, speed-of—

  light transmission time, and the implications of CETI, communication with

  extraterrestrial intelligence. Cosmologists and quants collaborate on

&
nbsp; bizarre relativistically telescoped financial instruments. Space (which lets

  you store information) and structure (which lets you process it) acquire

  value while dumb mass – like gold – loses it. The degenerate cores of

  the traditional stock markets are in free fall, the old smokestack

  microprocessor and biotech/nanotech industries crumbling before the

  onslaught of matter replicators and self-modifying ideas. The inheritors

  look set to be a new wave of barbarian communicators, who mortgage

  their future for a millennium against the chance of a gift from a visiting

  alien intelligence. Microsoft, once the US Steel of the silicon age, quietly

  fades into liquidation.

  An outbreak of green goo – a crude biomechanical replicator that eats

  everything in its path – is dealt with in the Australian outback by carpet—

  bombing with fuel-air explosives. The USAF subsequently reactivates two

  wings of refurbished B-52s and places them at the disposal of the UN

  standing committee on self-replicating weapons. (CNN discovers that one

  of their newest pilots, re-enlisting with the body of a twenty-year-old and

  an empty pension account, first flew them over Laos and Cambodia.) The

  news overshadows the World Health Organization’s announcement of the

  end of the HIV pandemic, after more than fifty years of bigotry, panic, and

  megadeath.

  *

  “Breathe steadily. Remember your regulator drill? If you spot your heart rate going up or your mouth going dry, take five.”

  “Shut the fuck up, ‘Neko, I’m trying to concentrate.” Amber fumbles with the titanium D-ring, trying to snake the strap through it. The gauntlets are getting in her way. High orbit space suits – little more than a body stocking designed to hold your skin under compression and help you breathe – are easy, but this deep in Jupiter’s radiation belt she has to wear an old Orlan-DM suit that comes in about thirteen layers. The gloves are stiff and hard to work in. It’s Chernobyl weather outside, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons storming through the void, and she really needs the extra protection. “Got it.” She yanks the strap tight, pulls on the D-ring, then goes to work on the next strap. Never looking down; because the wall she’s tying herself to has no floor, just a cutoff two meters below, then empty space for a hundred kilometers before the nearest solid ground.

  The ground sings to her moronically: “I love you, you love me, it’s the law of gravity -”

  She shoves her feet down onto the platform that juts from the side of the capsule like a suicide’s ledge: metallized Velcro grabs hold, and she pulls on the straps to turn her body round until she can see past the capsule, sideways. The capsule masses about five tonnes, barely bigger than an ancient Soyuz. It’s packed to overflowing with environment-sensitive stuff she’ll need, and a honking great high-gain antenna. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” someone says over the intercom.

  “Of course I -” She stops. Alone in this Energiya NPO surplus iron maiden with its low-bandwidth coms and bizarre plumbing, she feels claustrophobic and helpless: Parts of her mind don’t work. When she was four, Mom took her down a famous cave system somewhere out west. When the guide turned out the lights half a kilometer underground, she’d screamed with surprise as the darkness had reached out and touched her. Now it’s not the darkness that frightens her, it’s the lack of thought. For a hundred kilometers below her there are no minds, and even on the surface there’s only the moronic warbling of ‘bots for company. Everything that makes the universe primate-friendly seems to be locked in the huge spaceship that looms somewhere just behind the back of her head, and she has to fight down an urge to shed her straps and swarm back up the umbilical that anchors the capsule to the Sanger. “I’ll be fine,” she forces herself to say. And even though she’s unsure that it’s true, she tries to make herself believe it. “It’s just leaving-home nerves. I’ve read about it, okay?”

  There’s a funny, high-pitched whistle in her ears. For a moment, the sweat on the back of her neck turns icy cold, then the noise stops. She strains for a moment, and when it returns she recognizes the sound: The hitherto-talkative cat, curled in the warmth of her pressurized luggage can, has begun to snore.

  “Let’s go,” she says, “Time to roll the wagon.” A speech macro deep in the Sanger’s docking firmware recognizes her authority and gently lets go of the pod. A couple of cold gas clusters pop, sending deep banging vibrations running through the capsule, and she’s on her way.

  “Amber. How’s it hanging?” A familiar voice in her ears: She blinks. Fifteen hundred seconds, nearly half an hour gone.

  “Robes-Pierre, chopped any aristos lately?”

  “Heh!” A pause. “I can see your head from here.”

  “How’s it looking?” she asks. There’s a lump in her throat; she isn’t sure why. Pierre is probably hooked into one of the smaller proximity cameras dotted around the outer hull of the big mother ship, watching over her as she falls.

  “Pretty much like always,” he says laconically. Another pause, this time longer. “This is wild, you know? Su Ang says hi, by the way.”

  “Su Ang, hi,” she replies, resisting the urge to lean back and look up – up relative to her feet, not her vector

  – and see if the ship’s still visible.

  “Hi,” Ang says shyly. “You’re very brave?”

  “Still can’t beat you at chess.” Amber frowns. Su Ang and her overengineered algae. Oscar and his pharmaceutical factory toads. People she’s known for three years, mostly ignored, and never thought about missing.

  “Listen, are you going to come visiting?”

  “You want us to visit?” Ang sounds dubious. “When will it be ready?”

  “Oh, soon enough.” At four kilograms per minute of structured-matter output, the printers on the surface have already built her a bunch of stuff: a habitat dome, the guts of an algae/shrimp farm, an excavator to bury it with, an airlock. Even a honey bucket. It’s all lying around waiting for her to put it together and move into her new home. “Once the borg get back from Amalthea.”

  “Hey! You mean they’re moving? How did you figure that?”

  “Go talk to them,” Amber says. Actually, she’s a large part of the reason the Sanger is about to crank its orbit up and out toward the other moon: She wants to be alone in coms silence for a couple of million seconds. The Franklin collective is doing her a big favor.

  “Ahead of the curve, as usual,” Pierre cuts in, with something that sounds like admiration to her uncertain ears.

  “You too,” she says, a little too fast: “Come visit when I’ve got the life-support cycle stabilized.”

  “I’ll do that,” he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring blue laser line of the Sanger’s drive torch powering up.

  *

  Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, passes.

  The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic control display. These days, every shift seems to bring a new crewed spaceship into Jupiter system: Space is getting positively crowded. When he arrived, there were fewer than two hundred people here. Now there’s the population of a small city, and many of them live at the heart of the approach map centered on his display. He breathes deeply – trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks – and studies the map. “Computer, what about my slot?” he asks.

  “Your slot: Cleared to commence final approach in six-nine-five seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside ten kilometers, drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of forbidden thrust vectors now.” Chunks of the approach map turn red, gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other craft in the area.

  Sadeq sighs. “We’ll go in using Kurs. I assume their Kurs guidance i
s active?”

  “Kurs docking target support available to shell level three.”

  “Praise Allah.” He pokes around through the guidance subsystem’s menus, setting up the software emulation of the obsolete (but highly reliable) Soyuz docking system. At last he can leave the ship to look after itself for a bit.

  He glances round. For two years he has lived in this canister, and soon he will step outside it. It hardly seems real.

  The radio, usually silent, crackles with unexpected life. “Bravo One One, this is Imperial Traffic Control.

  Verbal contact required, over.”

  Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds inhuman, paced with the cadences of a speech synthesizer, like so many of Her Majesty’s subjects. “Bravo One One to Traffic Control, I’m listening, over.”

  “Bravo One One, we have assigned you a landing slot on tunnel four, airlock delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance is set to seven-four-zero and slaved to our control.”

  He leans over the screen and rapidly checks the docking system’s settings. “Control, all in order.”

  “Bravo One One, stand by.”

  The next hour passes slowly as the traffic control system guides his Type 921 down to a rocky rendezvous.

  Orange dust streaks his one optical-glass porthole: A kilometer before touchdown, Sadeq busies himself closing protective covers, locking down anything that might fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls his mat against the floor in front of the console and floats above it for ten minutes, eyes closed in prayer. It’s not the landing that worries him, but what comes next.

  Her Majesty’s domain stretches out before the battered module like a rust-stained snowflake half a kilometer in diameter. Its core is buried in a loose snowball of grayish rubble, and it waves languid brittlestar arms at the gibbous orange horizon of Jupiter. Fine hairs, fractally branching down to the molecular level, split off the main collector arms at regular intervals. A cluster of habitat pods like seedless grapes cling to the roots of the massive structure. Already he can see the huge steel generator loops that climb from either pole of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma; the Jovian rings form a rainbow of darkness rising behind them.

  At last, the battered space station is on final approach. Sadeq watches the Kurs simulation output carefully, piping it directly into his visual field. There’s an external camera view of the rockpile and grapes. As the view expands toward the convex ceiling of the ship, he licks his lips, ready to hit the manual override and go around again – but the rate of descent is slowing, and by the time he’s close enough to see the scratches on the shiny metal docking cone ahead of the ship, it’s measured in centimeters per second. There’s a gentle bump, then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the latches on the docking ring fire – and he’s down.