Accelerando e-3

by Charles Stross

  Concern, alarm, agitation. “You cannot do that! You are not untranslatable entity signifier.”

  Amber raises a hand. “You said untranslatable entity signifier. I did not understand that. Can you paraphrase?”

  “We, like you, are not untranslatable entity signifier. The network is for untranslatable entity signifier. We are to the untranslatable concept #1 as a single-celled organism is to ourselves. You and we cannot untranslatable concept #2. To attempt trade with untranslatable entity signifier is to invite death or transition to untranslatable concept #1.”

  Amber snaps her fingers: time freezes. She glances round at Su Ang, Pierre, the other members of her primary team. “Opinions, anyone?”

  Aineko, hitherto invisible, sits up on the carpet at the foot of the dais. “I’m not sure. The reason those macros are tagged is that there’s something wrong with their semantics.”

  “Wrong with – how?” asks Su Ang.

  The cat grins, cavernously, and begins to fade. “Wait!” snaps Amber.

  Aineko continues her fade, but leaves a shimmering presence behind: not a grin, but a neural network weighting map, three-dimensional and incomprehensibly complicated. “The untranslatable entity concept #1 when mapped onto the lobster’s grammar network has elements of ‘god’ overloaded with attributes of mysticism and zenlike incomprehensibility. But I’m pretty sure that what it really means is ‘optimized conscious upload that runs much faster than realtime’. A type-one weakly superhuman entity, like, um, the folks back home. The implication is that this Wunch wants us to view them as gods.” The cat fades back in. “Any takers?”

  “Small-town hustlers,” mutters Amber. “Talking big – or using a dodgy metagrammar that makes them sound bigger than they are – to bilk the hayseeds new to the big city.”

  “Most likely.” Aineko turns and begins to wash her flank.

  “What are we going to do?” asks Su Ang.

  “Do?” Amber raises a pencil-lined eyebrow, then flashes a grin that chops a decade off her apparent age:

  “We’re going to mess with their heads!” She snaps her fingers again and time unfreezes. There’s no change in continuity except that Aineko is still present, at the foot of the throne. The cat looks up and gives the queen a dirty look. “We understand your concern,” Amber says smoothly, “but we have already given you the physiology models and neural architecture of the bodies that you are wearing. We want to communicate. Why won’t you show us your real selves or your real language?”

  “This is trade language!” protests Lobster Number One. “Wunch am/are metabolically variable coalition from number of worlds. No uniformity of interface. Easiest to conform to one plan and speak one tongue optimized for your comprehension.”

  “Hmm.” Amber leans forward. “Let me see if I understand you. You are a coalition of individuals from a number of species. You prefer to use the common user interface model we sent you, and offered us the language module you’re using for an exchange? And you want to trade with us.”

  “Exchange interest,” the Wunch emphasizes, bouncing up and down on its legs. “Can offer much! Sense of identity of a thousand civilizations. Safe tunnels to a hundred archives on the net suitable for beings who are not untranslatable entity signifier. Able to control risks of communication. Have technique of manipulating matter at molecular level. Solution to algorithmic iterated systems based on quantum entanglement.”

  ” Old-fashioned nanotechnology and shiny beads to dazzle the primitives,” Pierre mutters on Amber’s multicast channel. “H ow backward do they think we are ? “

  ” The physics model in here is really overdone,” comments Boris. ” They may even think this is real, that we’re primitives coat-tailing it on the back of the lobsters’ efforts.”

  Amber forces a smile. “That is most interesting!” she trills at the Wunch’s representatives. “I have appointed two representatives who will negotiate with you; this is an internal contest within my own court. I commend to you Pierre Naqet, my own commercial representative. In addition, you may want to deal with Alan Glashwiecz, an independent factor who is not currently present. Others may come forward in due course if that is acceptable.”

  “It pleases us,” says Lobster Number One. “We are tired and disoriented by the long journey through gateways to this place. Request resumption of negotiations later?”

  “By all means.” Amber nods. A sergeant-at-arms, a mindless but impressive zimboe controlled by her spider’s nest of personality threads, blows a sharp note on his trumpet. The first audience is at an end.

  *

  Outside the light cone of the Field Circus, on the other side of the

  spacelike separation between Amber’s little kingdom in motion and the

  depths of empire time that grip the solar system’s entangled quantum

  networks, a singular new reality is taking shape.

  Welcome to the moment of maximum change.

  About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind

  surrounded by an exocortex of distributed agents, threads of personality

  spun right out of their heads to run on the clouds of utility fog – infinitely

  flexible computing resources as thin as aerogel – in which they live. The

  foggy depths are alive with high-bandwidth sparkles; most of Earth’s

  biosphere has been wrapped in cotton wool and preserved for future

  examination. For every living human, a thousand million software agents

  carry information into the farthest corners of the consciousness address

  space.

  The sun, for so long an unremarkable mildly variable G2 dwarf, has

  vanished within a gray cloud that englobes it except for a narrow belt

  around the plane of the ecliptic. Sunlight falls, unchanged, on the inner

  planets: Except for Mercury, which is no longer present, having been

  dismantled completely and turned into solar-powered high-temperature

  nanocomputers. A much fiercer light falls on Venus, now surrounded by

  glittering ferns of carbon crystals that pump angular momentum into the

  barely spinning planet via huge superconducting loops wound around its

  equator. This planet, too, is due to be dismantled. Jupiter, Neptune,

  Uranus – all sprout rings as impressive as Saturn’s. But the task of

  cannibalizing the gas giants will take many times longer than the small

  rocky bodies of the inner system.

  The ten billion inhabitants of this radically changed star system remember

  being human; almost half of them predate the millennium. Some of them

  still are human, untouched by the drive of meta-evolution that has

  replaced blind Darwinian change with a goal-directed teleological

  progress. They cower in gated communities and hill forts, mumbling

  prayers and cursing the ungodly meddlers with the natural order of things.

  But eight out of every ten living humans are included in the phase-change. It’s the most inclusive revolution in the human condition since the

  discovery of speech.

  A million outbreaks of gray goo – runaway nanoreplicator excursions -

  threaten to raise the temperature of the biosphere dramatically. They’re

  all contained by the planetary-scale immune system fashioned from what

  was once the World Health Organization. Weirder catastrophes threaten

  the boson factories in the Oort cloud. Antimatter factories hover over the

  solar poles. Sol system shows all the symptoms of a runaway intelligence

  excursion, exuberant blemishes as normal for a technological civilization

  as skin problems on a human adolescent.

  The economic map of the planet has changed beyond recognition. Both

  capitalism and communism, bickering ideological children of a

  protoindustrial ou
tlook, are as obsolete as the divine right of kings:

  Companies are alive, and dead people may live again, too. Globalism and

  tribalism have run to completion, diverging respectively into

  homogeneous interoperability and the Schwarzschild radius of insularity.

  Beings that remember being human plan the deconstruction of Jupiter,

  the creation of a great simulation space that will expand the habitat

  available within the solar system. By converting all the nonstellar mass of

  the solar system into processors, they can accommodate as many

  human-equivalent minds as a civilization with a planet hosting ten billion

  humans in orbit around every star in the galaxy.

  A more mature version of Amber lives down in the surging chaos of near—

  Jupiter space; there’s an instance of Pierre, too, although he has

  relocated light-hours away, near Neptune. Whether she still sometimes

  thinks of her relativistic twin, nobody can tell. In a way, it doesn’t matter,

  because by the time the Field Circus returns to Jupiter orbit, as much

  subjective time will have elapsed for the fast-thinkers back home as will

  flash by in the real universe between this moment and the end of the era

  of star formation, many billions of years hence.

  *

  “As your theologian, I am telling you that they are not gods.”

  Amber nods patiently. She watches Sadeq closely.

  Sadeq coughs grumpily. “Tell her, Boris.”

  Boris tilts his chair back and turns it toward the Queen. “He is right, Amber. They are traders, and not clever ones either. Is hard to get handle on their semiotics while they hide behind the lobster model we uploaded in their direction twenty years ago, but are certainly not crusties, and are definite not human either. Or transhuman. My guess, they are bunch of dumb hicks who get hands on toys left behind by much smarter guys. Like the rejectionist factions back home. Imagine they are waking up one morning and find everyone else is gone to the great upload environment in the sky. Leaving them with the planet to themselves. What you think they do with whole world, with any gadgets they trip over? Some will smash everything they come across, but others not so stupid. But they think small. Scavengers, deconstructionists. Their whole economic outlook are negative-sum game. Go visit aliens to rip them off, take ideas, not expand selves and transcend.”

  Amber stands up, walks toward the windows at the front of the bridge. In black jeans and chunky sweater, she barely resembles the feudal queen whose role she plays for tourists. “Taking them on board was a big risk. I’m not happy about it.”

  “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Sadeq smiles crookedly. “We have an answer. But they may not even realize they are dancing with us. These are not the gods you were afraid of finding.”

  “No.” Amber sighs. “Not too different from us, though. I mean, we aren’t exactly well adapted to this environment, are we? We tote these body-images along, rely on fake realities that we can map into our human-style senses. We’re emulations, not native AIs. Where’s Su Ang?”

  “I can find her.” Boris frowns.

  “I asked her to analyse the alien’s arrival times,” Amber adds as an afterthought. “They’re close – too close.

  And they showed up too damn fast when we first tickled the router. I think Aineko’s theories are flawed. The real owners of this network we’ve plugged into probably use much higher-level protocols to communicate; sapient packets to build effective communications gateways. This Wunch, they probably lurk in wait for newbies to exploit.

  Pedophiles hiding outside the school gate. I don’t want to give them that opportunity before we make contact with the real thing!”

  “You may have little choice,” says Sadeq. “If they are without insight, as you suspect, they may become afraid if you edit their environment. They may lash out. I doubt they even understand how they created the contaminated metagrammar that they transmitted back to us. It will be to them just a tool that makes simpleminded aliens more gullible, easier to negotiate with. Who knows where they got it?”

  “A grammatical weapon.” Boris spins himself round slowly. “Build propaganda into your translation software if you want to establish a favorable trading relationship. How cute. Haven’t these guys ever heard of Newspeak?”

  “Probably not,” Amber says slowly, pausing for a moment to spawn spectator threads to run down the book and all three movie versions of Nineteen Eighty-Four, followed by the sharecropped series of sequel novels. She shivers uncomfortably as she reintegrates the memories. “Ick. That’s not a very nice vision. Reminds me of” – she snaps her fingers, trying to remember Dad’s favorite – “Dilbert.”

  “Friendly fascism,” says Sadeq. “It matters not, whosoever is in charge. I could tell you tales from my parents, of growing up with a revolution. To never harbor self-doubt is poison for the soul, and these aliens want to inflict their certainties upon us.”

  “I think we ought to see how Pierre is doing,” Amber says aloud. “I certainly don’t want them poisoning him.” Grin: “That’s my job.”

  *

  Donna the Journalist is everywhere simultaneously. It’s a handy talent: Makes for even-handed news coverage when you can interview both sides at the same time.

  Right now, one of her is in the bar with Alan Glashwiecz, who evidently hasn’t realized that he can modulate his ethanol dehydrogenase levels voluntarily and who is consequently well on the way to getting steaming drunk.

  Donna is assisting the process: She finds it fascinating to watch this bitter young man who has lost his youth to a runaway self-enhancement process.

  “I’m a full partner,” he says bitterly, “in Glashwiecz and Selves. I’m one of the Selves. We’re all partners, but it’s only Glashwiecz Prime who has any clout. The old bastard – if I’d known I’d grow up to become that, I’d have run away to join some hippie antiglobalist commune instead.” He drains his glass, demonstrating his oropharyngeal integrity, snaps his fingers for a refill. “I just woke up one morning to find I’d been resurrected by my older self. He said he valued my youthful energy and optimistic outlook, then offered me a minority stake with stock options that would take five years to vest. The bastard.”

  “Tell me about it,” Donna coaxes sympathetically. “Here we are, stranded among idiopathic types, not among them a single multiplex -”

  “Damn straight.” Another bottle of Bud appears in Glashwiecz’a hands. “One moment I’m standing in this apartment in Paris facing total humiliation by a cross-dressing commie asshole called Macx and his slimy French manager bitch, and the next I’m on the carpet in front of my alter ego’s desk and he’s offering me a job as junior partner. It’s seventeen years later, all the weird nonsense that guy Macx was getting up to is standard business practice, and there’s six of me in the outer office taking research notes because myself-as-senior-partner doesn’t trust anyone else to work with him. It’s humiliating, that’s what it is.”

  “Which is why you’re here.” Donna waits while he takes a deep swig from the bottle.

  “Yeah. Better than working for myself, I can tell you – it’s not like being self-employed. You know how you sometimes get distant from your work? It’s really bad when you see yourself from the outside with another half gigasecond of experience and the new-you isn’t just distant from the client base, he’s distant from the you-you. So I went back to college and crammed up on artificial intelligence law and ethics, the jurisprudence of uploading, and recursive tort. Then I volunteered to come out here. He’s still handling her account, and I figured -” Glashwiecz shrugged.

  “Did any of the delta-yous contest the arrangement?” asks Donna, spawning ghosts to focus in on him from all angles. For a moment, she wonders if this is wise. Glashwiecz is dangerous – the power he wields over Amber’s mother, to twist her arm into extending his power of atto
rney, hints at dark secrets. Maybe there’s more to her persistent lawsuits than a simple family feud?

  Glashwiecz’s face is a study in perspectives. “Oh, one did,” he says dismissively: One of Donna’s viewports captures the contemptuous twitch in his cheek. “I left her in my apartment freezer. Figured it’d be a while before anybody noticed. It’s not murder – I’m still here, right? – and I’m not about to claim tort against myself. I think.

  It’d be a left-recursive lawsuit, anyway, if I did it to myself.”

  “The aliens,” prompts Donna, “and the trial by combat. What’s your take on that?”

  Glashwiecz sneers. “Little bitch-queen takes after her father, doesn’t she? He’s a bastard, too. The competitive selection filter she’s imposed is evil – it’ll cripple her society if she leaves it in place for too long, but in the short run, it’s a major advantage. So she wants me to trade for my life, and I don’t get to lay my formal claim against her unless I can outperform her pet day trader, that punk from Marseilles. Yes? What he doesn’t know is, I’ve got an edge. Full disclosure.” He lifts his bottle drunkenly. “Y’see, I know that cat. One that’s gotta brown @-

  sign on its side, right? It used to belong to queenie-darling’s old man, Manfred, the bastard. You’ll see. Her Mom, Pamela, Manfred’s ex, she’s my client in this case. And she gave me the cat’s ackle keys. Access control.” (Hic.)

  “Get ahold of its brains and grab that damn translation layer it stole from the CETI@home mob. Then I can talk to them straight.”

  The drunken, future-shocked lawyer is on a roll. “I’ll get their shit, and I’ll disassemble it. Disassembly is the future of industry, y’know?”

  “Disassembly?” asks the reporter, watching him in disgusted fascination from behind her mask of objectivity.

  “Hell, yeah. There’s a singularity going on, that implies disequilibrium. An’ wherever there’s a disequilibrium, someone is going to get rich disassembling the leftovers. Listen, I once knew this econo – economist, that’s what he was. Worked for the Eurofeds, rubber fetishist. He tole me about this fact’ry near Barcelona. It had a disassembly line running in it. Spensive servers in boxes’d roll in at one end. Be unpacked. Then workers’d take the cases off, strip the disk drives, memory, processors, bits’n’guts out. Bag and tag job. Throw the box, what’s left,