Accelerando e-3

by Charles Stross

  ” – They’re the new aristocracy. Right?”

  “Wrong. When they take over, what you get is more like the new biosphere. Hell, the new primordial soup: prokaryotes, bacteria, and algae, mindlessly swarming, trading money for plasmids.” The Queen passes her consort a wineglass. When he drinks from it, it refills miraculously. “Basically, sufficiently complex resource-allocation algorithms reallocate scarce resources… and if you don’t jump to get out of their way, they’ll reallocate you. I think that’s what happened inside the Matrioshka brain we ended up in: Judging by the Slug it happens elsewhere, too.

  You’ve got to wonder where the builders of that structure came from. And where they went. And whether they realized that the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments.”

  “Maybe they tried to dismantle the companies before the companies spent them.” Pierre looks worried.

  “Running up a national debt, importing luxurious viewpoint extensions, munching exotic dreams. Once they plugged into the Net, a primitive Matrioshka civilization would be like, um.” He pauses. “Tribal. A primitive postsingularity civilization meeting the galactic net for the first time. Overawed. Wanting all the luxuries. Spending their capital, their human – or alien – capital, the meme machines that built them. Until there’s nothing left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking for someone to own.”

  “Speculation.”

  “Idle speculation,” he agrees.

  “But we can’t ignore it.” She nods. “Maybe some early corporate predator built the machines that spread the wormholes around brown dwarfs and ran the router network on top of them in an attempt to make money fast. By not putting them in the actual planetary systems likely to host tool-using life, they’d ensure that only near-singularity civilizations would stumble over them. Civilizations that had gone too far to be easy prey probably wouldn’t send a ship out to look… so the network would ensure a steady stream of yokels new to the big city to fleece. Only they set the mechanism in motion billions of years ago and went extinct, leaving the network to propagate, and now there’s nothing out there but burned-out Matrioshka civilizations and howling parasites like the angry ghosts and the Wunch. And victims like us.” She shudders and changes the subject: “Speaking of aliens, is the Slug happy?”

  “Last time I checked on him, yeah.” Pierre blows on his wineglass and it dissolves into a million splinters of light. He looks dubious at the mention of the rogue corporate instrument they’re taking with them. “I don’t trust him out in the unrestricted simspaces yet, but he delivered on the fine control for the router’s laser. I just hope you don’t ever have to actually use him, if you follow my drift. I’m a bit worried that Aineko is spending so much time in there.”

  “So that’s where she is? I’d been worrying.”

  “Cats never come when you call them, do they?”

  “There is that,” she agrees. Then, with a worried glance at the vision of Jupiter’s cloudscape: “I wonder what we’ll find when we get there?”

  Outside the window, the imaginary Jovian terminator is sweeping toward them with eerie rapidity, sucking them toward an uncertain nightfall.

  PART 3: Singularity

  There’s a sucker born every minute.

  – P. T. Barnum

  Chapter 7: Curator

  Sirhan stands on the edge of an abyss, looking down at a churning orange-and-gray cloudscape far below.

  The air this close to the edge is chilly and smells slightly of ammonia, although that might be his imagination at work – there’s little chance of any gas exchange taking place across the transparent pressure wall of the flying city.

  He feels as if he could reach out and touch the swirling vaporscape. There’s nobody else around, this close to the edge – it’s an icy sensation to look out across the roiling depths, at an ocean of gas so cold human flesh would freeze within seconds of exposure, knowing that there’s nothing solid out there for tens of thousands of kilometers.

  The sense of isolation is aggravated by the paucity of bandwidth, this far out of the system. Most people huddle close to the hub, for comfort and warmth and low latency: posthumans are gregarious.

  Beneath Sirhan’s feet, the lily-pad city is extending itself, mumbling and churning in endless self-similar loops like a cubist blastoma growing in the upper atmosphere of Saturn. Great ducts suck in methane and other atmospheric gases, apply energy, polymerize and diamondize, and crack off hydrogen to fill the lift cells high above. Beyond the sapphire dome of the city’s gasbag, an azure star glares with the speckle of laser light; humanity’s first – and so far, last – starship, braking into orbit on the last shredded remnant of its light sail.

  He’s wondering maliciously how his mother will react to discovering her bankruptcy when the light above him flickers. Something gray and unpleasant splatters against the curve of nearly invisible wall in front of him, leaving a smear. He takes a step back and looks up angrily. “Fuck you!” he yells. Raucous cooing laughter follows him away from the boundary, feral pigeon voices mocking. “I mean it,” he warns, flicking a gesture at the air above his head. Wings scatter in a burst of thunder as a slab of wind solidifies, thistledown-shaped nanomachines suspended on the breeze locking edge to edge to form an umbrella over his head. He walks away from the perimeter, fuming, leaving the pigeons to look for another victim.

  Annoyed, Sirhan finds a grassy knoll a couple of hundred meters from the rim and around the curve of the lily-pad from the museum buildings. It’s far enough from other humans that he can sit undisturbed with his thoughts, far enough out to see over the edge without being toilet-bombed by flocking flying rats. (The flying city, despite being the product of an advanced technology almost unimaginable two decades before, is full of bugs -

  software complexity and scaling laws ensured that the preceding decades of change acted as a kind of cosmological inflationary period for design glitches, and an infestation of passenger pigeons is by no means the most inexplicable problem this biosphere harbors.)

  In an attempt to shut the more unwelcome manifestations of cybernature out, he sits under the shade of an apple tree and marshals his worlds around him. “When is my grandmother arriving?” he asks one of them, speaking into an antique telephone in the world of servants, where everything is obedient and knows its place. The city humors him, for its own reasons.

  “She is still containerized, but aerobraking is nearly over. Her body will be arriving downwell in less than two megaseconds.” The city’s avatar in this machinima is a discreet Victorian butler, stony-faced and respectful.

  Sirhan eschews intrusive memory interfaces; for an eighteen-year-old, he’s conservative to the point of affectation, favoring voice commands and anthropomorphic agents over the invisible splicing of virtual neural nets.

  “You’re certain she’s transferred successfully?” Sirhan asks anxiously. He heard a lot about his grandmama when he was young, very little of it complimentary. Nevertheless, the old bat must be a lot more flexible than his mother ever gave her credit for, to be subjecting herself to this kind of treatment for the first time at her current age.

  “I’m as certain as I can be, young master, for anyone who insists on sticking to their original phenotype without benefit of off-line backup or medical implants. I regret that omniscience is not within my remit. Would you like me to make further specific inquiries?”

  “No.” Sirhan peers up at the bright flare of laser light, visible even through the soap-bubble membrane that holds in the breathable gas mix, and the trillions of liters of hot hydrogen in the canopy above it. “As long as you’re sure she’ll arrive before the ship?” Tuning his eyes to ultraviolet, he watches the emission spikes, sees the slow strobing of the low-bandwidth AM modulation that’s all the starship can manage by way of downlink communication until it comes within range of the system manifold. It’s sending the same tiresomely repetitive question about why it’s being
redirected to Saturn that it’s been putting out for the past week, querying the refusal to supply terawatts of propulsion energy on credit.

  “Unless there’s a spike in their power beam, you can be certain of that,” City replies reassuringly. “And you can be certain also that your grandmother will revive comfortably.”

  “One may hope so.” To undertake the interplanetary voyage in corporeal person, at her age, without any upgrades or augmentation, must take courage, he decides. “When she wakes up, if I’m not around, ask her for an interview slot on my behalf. For the archives, of course.”

  “It will be my pleasure.” City bobs his head politely.

  “That will be all,” Sirhan says dismissively, and the window into servantspace closes. Then he looks back up at the pinprick of glaring blue laser light near the zenith. Tough luck, Mom, he subvocalizes for his journal cache.

  Most of his attention is forked at present, focused on the rich historical windfall from the depths of the singularity that is coming his way, in the form of the thirty-year-old starwhisp’s Cartesian theatre. But he can still spare some schadenfreude for the family fortunes. All your assets belong to me, now. He smiles, inwardly. I’ll just have to make sure they’re put to a sensible use this time.

  *

  “I don’t see why they’re diverting us toward Saturn. It’s not as if they can possibly have dismantled Jupiter already, is it?” asks Pierre, rolling the chilled beer bottle thoughtfully between fingers and thumb.

  “Why not you ask Amber?” replies the velociraptor squatting beside the log table. (Boris’s Ukrainian accent is unimpeded by the dromaeosaurid’s larynx; in point of fact, it’s an affectation, one he could easily fix by sideloading an English pronunciation patch if he wanted to.)

  “Well.” Pierre shakes his head. “She’s spending all her time with that Slug, no multiplicity access, privacy ackles locked right down. I could get jealous.” His voice doesn’t suggest any deep concern.

  “What’s to get jealous about? Just ask to fork instance to talk to you, make love, show boyfriend good time, whatever.”

  “Hah!” Pierre chuckles grimly, then drains the last drops from the bottle into his mouth. He throws it away in the direction of a clump of cycads, then snaps his fingers; another one appears in its place.

  “Are two megaseconds out from Saturn in any case,” Boris points out, then pauses to sharpen his inch-long incisors on one end of the table. Fangs crunch through timber like wet cardboard. “Grrrrn. Am seeing most peculiar emission spectra from inner solar system. Foggy flying down bottom of gravity well. Am wondering, does ensmartening of dumb matter extend past Jovian orbit now?”

  “Hmm.” Pierre takes a swig from the bottle and puts it down. “That might explain the diversion. But why haven’t they powered up the lasers on the Ring for us? You missed that, too.” For reasons unknown, the huge battery of launch lasers had shut down, some millions of seconds after the crew of the Field Circus had entered the router, leaving it adrift in the cold darkness.

  “Don’t know why are not talking.” Boris shrugged. “At least are still alive there, as can tell from the ‘set course for Saturn, following thus-and-such orbital elements’ bit. Someone is paying attention. Am telling you from beginning, though, turning entire solar system into computronium is real bad idea, long-term. Who knows how far has gone already?”

  “Hmm, again.” Pierre draws a circle in the air. “Aineko,” he calls, “are you listening?”

  “Don’t bug me.” A faint green smile appears in the circle, just the suggestion of fangs and needle-sharp whiskers. “I had an idea I was sleeping furiously.”

  Boris rolls one turreted eye and drools on the tabletop. “Munch munch,” he growls, allowing his saurian body-brain to put in a word.

  “What do you need to sleep for? This is a fucking sim, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I enjoy sleeping,” replies the cat, irritably lashing its just-now-becoming-visible tail. “What do you want?

  Fleas?”

  “No thanks,” Pierre says hastily. Last time he called Aineko’s bluff the cat had filled three entire pocket universes with scurrying gray mice. One of the disadvantages of flying aboard a starship the size of a baked bean can full of smart matter was the risk that some of the passengers could get rather too creative with the reality control system. This Cretaceous kaffee klatsch was just Boris’s entertainment partition; compared to some of the other simulation spaces aboard the Field Circus, it was downright conservative. “Look, do you have any updates on what’s going on downwell? We’re only twenty objective days out from orbital insertion, and there’s so little to see

  – “

  “They’re not sending us power.” Aineko materializes fully now, a large orange-and-white cat with a swirl of brown fur in the shape on an @-symbol covering her ribs. For whatever reason, she plants herself on the table tauntingly close to Boris’s velociraptor body’s nose. “No propulsion laser means insufficient bandwidth. They’re talking in Latin-1 text at 1200 baud, if you care to know.” (Which is an insult, given the ship’s multi-avabit storage capacity – one avabit is Avogadro’s number of bits; about 1023 bytes, several billion times the size of the Internet in 2001 – and outrageous communications bandwidth.) “Amber says, come and see her now. Audience chamber.

  Informal, of course. I think she wants to discuss it.”

  “Informal? Am all right without change bodies?”

  The cat sniffs. ” I’m wearing a real fur coat,” it declares haughtily, “but no knickers.” Then blinks out a fraction of a second ahead of the snicker-snack of Bandersnatch-like jaws.

  “Come on,” says Pierre, standing up. “Time to see what Her Majesty wants with us today.”

  *

  Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the

  phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally becoming

  visible on a cosmological scale.

  There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various states

  of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of them cluster

  where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in the water zone

  around old Earth. Earth’s biosphere has been in the intensive care ward

  for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning replicators erupting across it

  before the World Health Organization can fix them – gray goo,

  thylacines, dragons. The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the

  arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered

  obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation

  algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars,

  and Luna are all well on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit

  with energy stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster

  so thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red ball

  of wool the size of a young red giant.

  Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary

  selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the

  average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts. Now the brightly

  burning beacon of sapience isn’t held by humans anymore – their cross—

  infectious enthusiasms have spread to a myriad of other hosts, several

  types of which are qualitatively better at thinking. At last count, there were

  about a thousand nonhuman intelligent species in Sol space, split evenly

  between posthumans on one side, naturally self-organizing AIs in the

  middle, and mammalian nonhumans on the other. The common mammal

  neural chassis is easily upgraded to human-style intelligence in most

  species that can carry, feed and cool a half kilogram of gray matter, and

  the descendants of a hundred ethics-challenged docto
ral theses are now

  demanding equal rights. So are the unquiet dead; the panopticon-logged

  Net ghosts of people who lived recently enough to imprint their identities

  on the information age, and the ambitious theological engineering

  schemes of the Reformed Tiplerite Church of Latter-day Saints (who want

  to emulate all possible human beings in real time, so that they can have

  the opportunity to be saved).

  The human memesphere is coming alive, although how long it remains

  recognizably human is open to question. The informational density of the

  inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro’s number of bits per mole,

  one bit per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter of the inner planets

  (apart from Earth, preserved for now like a picturesque historic building

  stranded in an industrial park) is converted into computronium. And it’s

  not just the inner system. The same forces are at work on Jupiter’s

  moons, and those of Saturn, although it’ll take thousands of years rather

  than mere decades to dismantle the gas giants themselves. Even the

  entire solar energy budget isn’t enough to pump Jupiter’s enormous mass

  to orbital velocity in less than centuries. The fast-burning primitive

  thinkers descended from the African plains apes may have vanished

  completely or transcended their fleshy architecture before the solar

  Matrioshka brain is finished.

  It won’t be long now…

  *

  Meanwhile, there’s a party brewing down in Saturn’s well.