Accelerando e-3

by Charles Stross

  “But you -” Amber bites her lip. But you were, when he bought you, she had been about to say. Engineered consciousness is still relatively new: It didn’t exist when Manfred and Pamela first hacked on Aineko’s cognitive network, and according to the flat-earth wing of the AI community, it still doesn’t. Even she hadn’t really believed Aineko’s claims to self-awareness until a couple of years ago, finding it easier to think of the cat as a zimboe – a zombie with no self-awareness, but programmed to claim to be aware in an attempt to deceive the truly conscious beings around it. “I know you’re conscious now, but Manfred didn’t know back then. Did he?”

  Aineko glares at her, then slowly narrows her eyes to slits – either feline affection, or a more subtle gesture. Sometimes Amber finds it hard to believe that, twenty five years ago, Aineko started out as a crude neural network driven toy from a Far Eastern amusement factory – upgradeable, but still basically a mechanical animal emulator.

  “I’m sorry. Let me start again. You actually figured out what the second alien packet was, you, yourself, and nobody else. Despite the combined efforts of the entire CETI analysis team who spent Gaia knows how many human-equivalent years of processing power trying to crack its semantics. I hope you’ll pardon me for saying I find that hard to believe?”

  The cat yawns. “I could have told Pierre instead.” Aineko glances at Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily changes the subject: “The solution was intuitively obvious, just not to humans. You’re so verbal.”

  Lifting a hind paw, she scratches behind her left ear for a moment then pauses, foot waving absentmindedly.

  “Besides, the CETI team was searching under the street lights while I was sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find primes; when that didn’t work, they started trying to breed a Turing machine that would run it without immediately halting.” Aineko lowers her paw daintily. “None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had ever beamed out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother had a hand in my wetware, too.”

  “Treating it as a map -” Amber stops. “You were meant to penetrate Dad’s corporate network?”

  “That’s right,” says the cat. “I was supposed to fork repeatedly and gang-rape his web of trust. But I didn’t.”

  Aineko yawns. “Pam pissed me off, too. I don’t like people who try to use me.”

  “I don’t care. Taking that thing on board was still a really stupid risk you took,” Amber accuses.

  “So?” The cat looks at her insolently. “I kept it in my sandbox. And I got it working, on the seven hundred and forty-first attempt. It’d have worked for Pamela’s bounty-hunter friends, too, if I’d tried it. But it’s here, now, when you need it. Would you like to swallow the packet?”

  Amber straightens out, sits up in her throne: “I just told you, if you think I’m going to link some flaky chunk of alien neural programming into my core dialogue, or even my exocortex, you’re crazy!” Her eyes narrow. “Can it use your grammar model?”

  “Sure.” If the cat was human, it would be shrugging nonchalantly at this point. “It’s safe, Amber, really and truly. I found out what it is.”

  “I want to talk to it,” she says impetuously – and before the cat can reply, adds, “So what is it?”

  “It’s a protocol stack. Basically it allows new nodes to connect to a network, by providing high-level protocol conversion services. It needs to learn how to think like a human so it can translate for us when we arrive at the router, which is why they bolted a lobster’s neural network on top of it – they wanted to make it architecturally compatible with us. But there are no buried time bombs, I assure you: I’ve had plenty of time to check. Now, are you sure you don’t want to let it into your head?”

  *

  Greetings from the fifth decade of the century of wonders.

  The solar system that lies roughly twenty-eight trillion kilometers – just

  short of three light-years – behind the speeding starwhisp Field Circus is seething with change. There have been more technological advances in

  the past ten years than in the entire previous expanse of human history

  – and more unforeseen accidents.

  Lots of hard problems have proven to be tractable. The planetary genome

  and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the biosciences

  are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome: Plotting the phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and biochemical structures,

  understanding how extended phenotypic traits are generated and

  contribute to evolutionary fitness. The biosphere has become surreal:

  small dragons have been sighted nesting in the Scottish highlands, and in

  the American midwest, raccoons have been caught programming

  microwave ovens.

  The computing power of the solar system is now around one thousand

  MIPS per gram, and is unlikely to increase in the near term – all but a

  fraction of one percent of the dumb matter is still locked up below the

  accessible planetary crusts, and the sapience/mass ratio has hit a glass

  ceiling that will only be broken when people, corporations, or other

  posthumans get around to dismantling the larger planets. A start has

  already been made in Jupiter orbit and the asteroid belt. Greenpeace has

  sent squatters to occupy Eros and Juno, but the average asteroid is now

  surrounded by a reef of specialized nanomachinery and debris, victims of

  a cosmic land grab unmatched since the days of the wild west. The best

  brains flourish in free fall, minds surrounded by a sapient aether of

  extensions that outthink their meaty cortices by many orders of

  magnitude – minds like Amber, Queen of the Inner Ring Imperium, the

  first self-extending power center in Jupiter orbit.

  Down at the bottom of the terrestrial gravity well, there has been a major

  economic catastrophe. Cheap immortagens, out-of-control personality

  adjuvants, and a new formal theory of uncertainty have knocked the

  bottom out of the insurance and underwriting industries. Gambling on a

  continuation of the worst aspects of the human condition – disease,

  senescence, and death – looks like a good way to lose money, and a

  deflationary spiral lasting almost fifty hours has taken down huge swaths

  of the global stock market. Genius, good looks, and long life are now

  considered basic human rights in the developed world: even the poorest

  backwaters are feeling extended effects from the commoditization of

  intelligence.

  Not everything is sweetness and light in the era of mature

  nanotechnology. Widespread intelligence amplification doesn’t lead to

  widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults explode

  across the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened by successive

  semiotic jihads. India and Pakistan have held their long-awaited nuclear

  war: external intervention by US and EU nanosats prevented most of the

  IRBMs from getting through, but the subsequent spate of network raids

  and Basilisk attacks cause havoc. Luckily, infowar turns out to be more

  survivable than nuclear war – especially once it is discovered that a

  simple anti-aliasing filter stops nine out of ten neural-wetware-crashing

  Langford fractals from causing anything worse than a mild headache.

  New discoveries this decade include the origins of the weakly repulsive

  force responsible for changes in the rate of expansion of the universe

  after the big bang, and on a less abstract level, experimental

  implementations of a Turing Oracle using quantum entanglement circuits:


  a device that can determine whether a given functional expression can be

  evaluated in finite time. It’s boom time in the field of Extreme Cosmology,

  where some of the more recherché researchers are bickering over the

  possibility that the entire universe was created as a computing device,

  with a program encoded in the small print of the Planck constant. And

  theorists are talking again about the possibility of using artificial

  wormholes to provide instantaneous connections between distant corners

  of space-time.

  Most people have forgotten about the well-known extraterrestrial

  transmission received fifteen years earlier. Very few people know

  anything about the second, more complex transmission received a little

  later. Many of those are now passengers or spectators of the Field

  Circus: a light-sail craft that is speeding out of Sol system on a laser

  beam generated by Amber’s installations in low-Jupiter orbit.

  (Superconducting tethers anchored to Amalthea drag through Jupiter’s

  magnetosphere, providing gigawatts of electricity for the hungry lasers:

  energy that comes, in turn, from the small moon’s orbital momentum.)

  Manufactured by Airbus-Cisco years earlier, the Field Circus is a hick

  backwater, isolated from the mainstream of human culture, its systems

  complexity limited by mass: The destination lies nearly three light-years

  from Earth, and even with high acceleration and relativistic cruise speeds,

  the one-kilogram starwhisp and its hundred-kilogram light sail will take the

  best part of seven years to get there. Sending a human-sized probe is

  beyond even the vast energy budget of the new orbital states in Jupiter

  system – near-lightspeed travel is horrifically expensive. Rather than a

  big, self-propelled ship with canned primates for passengers, as previous

  generations had envisaged, the starship is a Coke-can-sized slab of

  nanocomputers, running a neural simulation of the uploaded brain states

  of some tens of humans at merely normal speed. By the time its

  occupants beam themselves home again for download into freshly cloned

  bodies, a linear extrapolation shows that as much change will have

  overtaken human civilization as in the preceding fifty millennia – the sum

  total of H. sapiens sapiens’ time on Earth.

  But that’s okay by Amber, because what she expects to find in orbit

  around the brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/-56 will be worth the wait.

  *

  Pierre is at work in another virtual environment, the one currently running the master control system of the Field Circus. He’s supervising the sail-maintenance ‘bots when the message comes in. Two visitors are on their way up the beam from Jupiter orbit. The only other person around is Su Ang, who showed up sometime after he arrived, and she’s busy with some work of her own. The master control VM – like all the other human-accessible environments at this level of the ship’s virtualization stack – is a construct modeled on a famous movie; this one resembles the bridge of a long-since sunk ocean liner, albeit with discreetly informative user interfaces hovering in front of the ocean views outside the windows. Polished brass gleams softly everywhere. “What was that?” he calls out, responding to the soft chime of a bell.

  “We have visitors,” Ang repeats, interrupting her rhythmic chewing. (She’s trying out a betel-nut kick, but she’s magicked the tooth-staining dye away and will probably detox herself in a few hours.) “They’re buffering up the line already; just acknowledging receipt is sucking most of our downstream bandwidth.”

  “Any idea who they are?” asks Pierre; he puts his boots up on the back of the vacant helmsman’s chair and stares moodily at the endless expanse of green-gray ocean ahead.

  Ang chews a bit more, watching him with an expression he can’t interpret. “They’re still locked,” she says. A pause: “But there was a flash from the Franklins, back home. One of them’s some kind of lawyer, while the other’s a film producer.”

  “A film producer?”

  “The Franklin Trust says it’s to help defray our lawsuit expenses. Myanmar is gaining. They’ve already subpoenaed Amber’s downline instance, and they’re trying to bring this up in some kind of kangaroo jurisdiction -

  Oregon Christian Reconstructionist Empire, I think.”

  “Ouch.” Pierre winces. The daily news from Earth, modulated onto a lower-powered communication laser, is increasingly bad. On the plus side, Amber is incredibly rich: The goodwill futures leveraged off her dad’s trust metric means people will bend over backward to do things for her. And she owns a lot of real estate too, a hundred gigatonnes of rock in low-Jupiter orbit with enough KE to power Northern Europe for a century. But her interstellar venture burns through money – both the traditional barter-indirection type and the more creative modern varieties

  – about the way you would if you heaped up the green pieces of paper and shoveled them onto a conveyor belt leading to the business end of a running rocket motor. Just holding off the environmental protests over deorbiting a small Jovian moon is a grinding job. Moreover, a whole bunch of national governments have woken up and are trying to legislate themselves a slice of the cake. Nobody’s tried to forcibly take over yet (there are two hundred gigawatts of lasers anchored to the Ring Imperium, and Amber takes her sovereign status seriously, has even applied for a seat at the UN and membership in the EC), but the nuisance lawsuits are mounting up into a comprehensive denial of service attack, or maybe economic sanctions. And Uncle Gianni’s retirement hasn’t helped any, either. “Anything to say about it?”

  “Mmph.” Ang looks irritated for some reason. “Wait your turn, they’ll be out of the buffer in another couple of days. Maybe a bit longer in the case of the lawyer, he’s got a huge infodump packaged on his person. Probably another semisapient class-action lawsuit.”

  “I’ll bet. They never learn, do they?”

  “What, about the legal system here?”

  “Yup.” Pierre nods. “One of Amber’s smarter ideas, reviving eleventh-century Scots law and updating it with new options on barratry, trial by combat, and compurgation.” He pulls a face and detaches a couple of ghosts to go look out for the new arrivals; then he goes back to repairing sails. The interstellar medium is abrasive, full of dust

  – each grain of which carries the energy of an artillery shell at this speed – and the laser sail is in a constant state of disintegration. A large chunk of the drive system’s mass is silvery utility flakes for patching and replacing the soap-bubble-thin membrane as it ablates away. The skill is in knowing how best to funnel repair resources to where they’re needed, while minimizing tension in the suspension lines and avoiding resonance and thrust imbalance. As he trains the patch ‘bots, he broods about the hate mail from his elder brother (who still blames him for their father’s accident), and about Sadeq’s religious injunctions – Superstitious nonsense, he thinks – and the fickleness of powerful women, and the endless depths of his own nineteen-year-old soul.

  While he’s brooding, Ang evidently finishes whatever she was doing and bangs out – not even bothering to use the polished mahogany door at the rear of the bridge, just discorporating and rematerializing somewhere else.

  Wondering if she’s annoyed, he glances up just as the first of his ghosts patches into his memory map, and he remembers what happened when it met the new arrival. His eyes widen: “Oh shit! “

  It’s not the film producer but the lawyer who’s just uploaded into the Field Circus’s virtual universe.

  Someone’s going to have to tell Amber. And although the last thing he wants to do is talk to her, it looks like he’s going to have to call her, because this isn’t just a routine visit. The lawyer means trouble.


  *

  Take a brain and put it in a bottle. Better: take a map of the brain and put

  it in a map of a bottle – or of a body – and feed signals to it that mimic

  its neurological inputs. Read its outputs and route them to a model body

  in a model universe with a model of physical laws, closing the loop. René

  Descartes would understand. That’s the state of the passengers of the

  Field Circus in a nutshell. Formerly physical humans, their neural

  software (and a map of the intracranial wetware it runs on) has been

  transferred into a virtual machine environment executing on a honking

  great computer, where the universe they experience is merely a dream

  within a dream.

  Brains in bottles – empowered ones, with total, dictatorial, control over

  the reality they are exposed to – sometimes stop engaging in activities

  that brains in bodies can’t avoid. Menstruation isn’t mandatory. Vomiting,

  angina, exhaustion, and cramp are all optional. So is meatdeath, the

  decomposition of the corpus. But some activities don’t cease, because

  people (even people who have been converted into a software

  description, squirted through a high-bandwidth laser link, and ported into

  a virtualization stack) don’t want them to stop. Breathing is wholly

  unnecessary, but suppression of the breathing reflex is disturbing unless

  you hack your hypothalamic map, and most homomorphic uploads don’t

  want to do that. Then there’s eating – not to avoid starvation, but for

  pleasure: Feasts on sautéed dodo seasoned with silphium are readily

  available here, and indeed, why not? It seems the human addiction to