“Backward.” Amber takes a deep breath. “You’re telling me Mom is so unhappy she’s trying to kill herself by growing old? Isn’t that a bit slow?”
Annette shakes her head lugubriously. “She’s had fifty years to practice. You have been away twenty-eight years! She was thirty when she bore you. Now she is over eighty, and a telomere refusenik, a charter member of the genome conservation front. To accept a slow virus purge and aging reset would be to lay down a banner she has carried for half a century. To accept uploading, that, too, is wrong in her mind: She will not admit her identity is a variable, not a constant. She came out here in a can, frozen, with more radiation damage. She is not going back home. This is where she plans to end her days. Do you see? That is why you were brought here. That, and because of the bailiffs who have bought title to your other self’s business debts. They are waiting for you in Jupiter system with warrants and headsuckers to extract your private keys.”
“She’s cornered me!”
“Oh, I would not say that. We all change our convictions sometime or other, perhaps. She is inflexible, she will not bend; but she is not stupid. Nor is she as vindictive as perhaps she herself believes. She thinks she must a scorned woman be, even though there is more to her than that. Your father and I, we -”
“Is he still alive?” Amber demands eagerly, half-anxious to know, half-wishing she could be sure the news won’t be bad.
“Yes.” Annette grins again, but it’s not a happy expression, more a baring of teeth at the world. “As I was saying, your father and I, we have tried to help her. Pamela denies him. He is, she says, not a man. No more so am I myself a woman? No, but she’ll still talk to me. You will do better. But his assets, they are spent. He is not a rich man this epoch, your father.”
“Yeah, but.” Amber nods to herself. “He may be able to help me.”
“Oh? How so?”
“You remember the original goal of the Field Circus? The sapient alien transmission?”
“Yes, of course.” Annette snorts. “Junk bond pyramid schemes from credulous saucer wisdom airheads.”
Amber licks her lips. “How susceptible to interception are we here?”
“Here?” Annette glances round. “Very. You can’t maintain a habitat in a nonbiosphere environment without ubiquitous surveillance.”
“Well, then…”
Amber dives inward, forks her identity, collects a complex bundle of her thoughts and memories, marshals them, offers Annette one end of an encryption tunnel, then stuffs the frozen mindstorm into her head. Annette sits still for approximately ten seconds, then shudders and whimpers quietly. “You must ask your father,” she says, growing visibly agitated. “I must leave, now. I should not have known that! It is dynamite, you see. Political dynamite. I must return to my primary sister-identity and warn her.”
“Your – wait!” Amber stands up as fast as her ill-coordinated body will let her, but Annette is moving fast, swarming up a translucent ladder in the air.
“Tell Manfred!” calls her aunt through the body of an ape: “Trust no one else!” She throws another packet of compressed, encrypted memories down the tunnel to Amber; then, a moment later, the orange skull touches the ceiling and dissolves, a liquid flow of dissociating utility foglets letting go of one another and dispersing into the greater mass of the building that spawned the fake ape.
*
Snapshots from the family album: While you were gone…
*
Amber, wearing a brocade gown and a crown encrusted with
diamond processors and external neural taps, her royal party gathered
around her, attends the pan-Jovian constitutional conference with the
majesty of a confirmed head of state and ruler of a small inner moon. She
smiles knowingly at the camera viewpoint, with the professional shine that
comes from a good public relations video filter. “We are very happy to be
here,” she says, “and we are pleased that the commission has agreed to
lend its weight to the continued progress of the Ring Imperium’s deep-space program.”
*
A piece of dumb paper, crudely stained with letters written in a faded
brown substance – possibly blood – says “I’m checking out, don’t delta
me.” This version of Pierre didn’t go to the router: He stayed at home,
deleted all his backups, and slit his wrists, his epitaph sharp and self—
inflicted. It comes as a cold shock, the first chill gust of winter’s gale
blowing through the outer system’s political elite. And it’s the start of a
regime of censorship directed toward the already speeding starwhisp:
Amber, in her grief, makes an executive decision not to tell her embassy
to the stars that one of them is dead and, therefore, unique.
*
Manfred – fifty, with the fashionably pale complexion of the digerati,
healthy-looking for his age, standing beside a transmigration bush with a
stupid grin on his face. He’s decided to take the final step, not simply to
spawn external mental processes running in an exocortex of distributed
processors, but to move his entire persona right out of meatspace, into
wherever it is that the uploads aboard the Field Circus have gone.
Annette, skinny, elegant, and very Parisian, stands beside him, looking as
uncertain as the wife of a condemned man.
*
A wedding, shi’ite, Mut’ah – of limited duration. It’s scandalous to
many, but the mamtu’ah isn’t moslem, she wears a crown instead of a
veil, and her groom is already spoken of in outraged terms by most other
members of the trans-Martian Islamic clergy. Besides which, in addition to
being in love, the happy couple have more strategic firepower than a late—
twentieth-century superpower. Their cat, curled at their feet, looks smug:
She’s the custodian of the permissive action locks on the big lasers.
*
A speck of ruby light against the darkness – red-shifted almost into
the infrared, it’s the return signal from the Field Circus’s light sail as the
starwhisp passes the one-light-year mark, almost twelve trillion kilometers
out beyond Pluto. (Although how can you call it a starwhisp when it
masses almost a hundred kilograms, including propulsion module?
Starwhisps are meant to be tiny!)
*
Collapse of the trans-Lunar economy: Deep in the hot thinking
depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new theory
of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than the previously
pervasive Free Market 1.0. With no local minima to hamper them, and no
need to spawn and reap startups Darwin-style, the companies, group
minds, and organizations that adopt the so-called Accelerated Salesman
Infrastructure of Economics 2.0 trade optimally with each other. The
phase change accelerates as more and more entities join in, leveraging
network externalities to overtake the traditional ecosystem. Amber and
Sadeq are late on the train, Sadeq obsessing about how to reconcile ASI
with murabaha and mudaraba while the postmodern economy of the mid—
twenty-first century disintegrates around them. Being late has punitive
consequences – the Ring Imperium has always been a net importer of
brainpower and a net exporter of gravitational potential energy. Now it’s a
tired backwater, the bit rate from the red-shifted relativisitic probe
insufficiently delightful to obsess the daemons of industrial routing. In
other words, they’re poor.
*
A message from beyond the
grave: The travelers aboard the
starship have reached their destination, an alien artifact drifting in chilly
orbit around a frozen brown dwarf. Recklessly they upload themselves
into it, locking the starwhisp down for years of sleep. Amber and her
husband have few funds with which to pay for the propulsion lasers: what
they have left of the kinetic energy of the Ring Imperium – based on the
orbital momentum of a small Jovian inner moon – is being sapped, fast,
at a near-loss, by the crude requirements of the exobionts and
metanthropes who fork and spawn in the datasphere of the outer Jovians.
The cost of importing brains to the Ring Imperium is steep: In near—
despair Amber and Sadeq produce a child, Generation 3.0, to populate
their dwindling kingdom. Picture the cat, offended, lashing its tail beside
the zero-gee crib.
*
Surprise and postcards from the inner orbitals – Amber’s mother
offers to help. For the sake of the child, Sadeq offers bandwidth and user
interface enrichment. The child forks, numerous times, as Amber
despairingly plays with probabilities, simulating upbringing outcomes.
Neither she nor Sadeq are good parents – the father absentminded and
prone to lose himself in the intertextual deconstruction of surahs, the
mother ragged-edged from running the economy of a small and failing
kingdom. In the space of a decade, Sirhan lives a dozen lives, discarding
identities like old clothes. The uncertainty of life in the decaying Ring
Imperium does not entrance him, his parents’ obsessions annoy him, and
when his grandmother offers to fund his delta vee and subsequent
education in one of the orbitals around Titan, his parents give their
reluctant assent.
*
Amber and Sadeq separate acrimoniously. Sadeq, studies
abandoned in the face of increasing intrusions from the world of what is
into the universe of what should be, joins a spacelike sect of sufis,
encysted in a matrix of vitrification nanomechs out in the Oort cloud to
await a better epoch. His instrument of will – the legal mechanism of his
resurrection – specifies that he is waiting for the return of the hidden,
twelfth imam.
*
For her part, Amber searches the inner system briefly for word of her
father – but there’s nothing. Isolated and alone, pursued by accusing
debts, she flings herself into a reborganization, stripping away those
aspects of her personality that have brought her low; in law, her liability is
tied to her identity. Eventually she donates herself to a commune of also-rans, accepting their personality in return for a total break with the past.
*
Without Queen and consort, the Ring Imperium – now unmanned,
leaking breathing gases, running on autonomic control – slowly deorbits
into the Jovian murk, beaming power to the outer moons until it punches
a hole in the cloud deck in a final incandescent smear of light, the like of
which has not been seen since the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact.
*
Sirhan, engrossed in Saturnalia, is offended by his parents’ failure to
make more of themselves. And he resolves to do it for them, if not
necessarily in a manner of their liking.
*
“You see, I am hoping you will help me with my history project,” says the serious-faced young man.
“History project.” Pierre follows him along the curving gallery, hands clasped behind his back self-consciously to keep from showing his agitation: “What history is this?”
“The history of the twenty-first century,” says Sirhan. “You remember it, don’t you?”
“Remember it -” Pierre pauses. “You’re serious?”
“Yes.” Sirhan opens a side door. “This way, please. I’ll explain.”
The door opens onto what used to be one of the side galleries of the museum building, full of interactive exhibits designed to explain elementary optics to hyperactive children and their indulgent parental units. Traditional optics are long since obsolete – tunable matter can slow photons to a stop, teleport them here to there, play ping-pong with spin and polarization – and besides, the dumb matter in the walls and floor has been replaced by low-power computronium, heat sinks dangling far below the floor of the lily-pad habitat to dispose of the scanty waste photons from reversible computation. Now the room is empty.
“Since I became curator here, I’ve turned the museum’s structural supports into a dedicated high-density memory store. One of the fringe benefits of a supervisory post, of course. I have about a billion avabits of capacity, enough to archive the combined sensory bandwidth and memories of the entire population of twentieth-century Earth – if that was what interested me.”
Slowly the walls and ceiling are coming to life, brightening, providing a dizzyingly vibrant view of dawn over the rim wall of Meteor Crater, Arizona – or maybe it’s downtown Baghdad.
“Once I realized how my mother had squandered the family fortune, I spent some time looking for a solution to the problem,” Sirhan continues. “And it struck me, then, that there’s only one commodity that is going to appreciate in value as time continues: reversibility.”
“Reversibility? That doesn’t make much sense.” Pierre shakes his head. He still feels slightly dizzy from his decanting. He’s only been awake an hour or so and is still getting used to the vagaries of a universe that doesn’t bend its rules to fit his whim of iron – that, and worrying about Amber, of whom there is no sign in the hall of growing bodies. “Excuse me, please, but do you know where Amber is?”
“Hiding, probably,” Sirhan says, without rancor. “Her mother’s about,” he adds. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know what you know about us.” Pierre looks at him askance: “We were aboard the Field Circus for a long time.”
“Oh, don’t worry on my behalf. I know you’re not the same people who stayed behind to contribute to the Ring Imperium’s collapse,” Sirhan says dismissively, while Pierre hastily spawns a couple of ghosts to search for the history he’s alluding to. What they discover shocks him to the core as they integrate with his conscious narrative.
“We didn’t know about any of that!” Pierre crosses his arms defensively. “Not about you, or your father either,” he adds quietly. “Or my other… life.” Shocked: Did I kill myself? Why would I do a thing like that? Nor can he imagine what Amber might see in an introverted cleric like Sadeq; not that he wants to.
“I’m sure this must come as a big shock to you,” Sirhan says condescendingly, “but it’s all to do with what I was talking about. Reversibility. What does it mean to you, in your precious context? You are, if you like, an opportunity to reverse whatever ill fortune made your primary instance autodarwinate himself. He destroyed all the backups he could get his ghosts to ferret out, you know. Only a light-year delay line and the fact that as a running instance you’re technically a different person saved you. And now, you’re alive, and he’s dead – and whatever made him kill himself doesn’t apply to you. Think of it as natural selection among different versions of yourself.
The fittest version of you survives.”
He points at the wall of the crater. A tree diagram begins to grow from the bottom left corner of the wall, recurving and recomplicating as it climbs toward the top right, zooming and fracturing into taxonomic fault lines.
“Life on Earth, the family tree, what paleontology has been able to deduce of it for us,” he says pompously. “The vertebrates begin there” – a point three quarters of the way up the tree – “and we’ve got an average of a hundred fossil samples per me
gayear from then on. Most of them collected in the past two decades, as exhaustive mapping of the Earth’s crust and upper mantle at the micrometer level has become practical. What a waste.”
“That’s” – Pierre does a quick sum – “fifty thousand different species? Is there a problem?”
“Yes!” Sirhan says vehemently, no longer aloof or distant. He struggles visibly to get himself under control.
“At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were roughly two million species of vertebrate and an estimated thirty or so million species of multicellular organisms – it’s hard to apply the same statistical treatment to prokaryotes, but doubtless there were huge numbers of them, too. The average life span of a species is about five megayears. It used to be thought to be about one, but that’s a very vertebrate-oriented estimate – many insect species are stable over deep time. Anyway, we have a total sample, from all of history, of only fifty thousand known prehistoric species – out of a population of thirty million, turning over every five million years. That is, we know of only one in a million life-forms, of those that ever existed on Earth. And the situation with human history is even worse.”
“Aha! So you’re after memoriesy yes? What really happened when we colonized Barney. Who released Oscar’s toads in the free-fall core of the Ernst Sanger, that sort of thing?”
“Not exactly.” Sirhan looks pained, as if being forced to spell it out devalues the significance of his insight.
“I’m after history. All of it. I intend to corner the history futures market. But I need my grandfather’s help – and you’re here to help me get it.”
*
Over the course of the day, various refugees from the Field Circus hatch from their tanks and blink in the ringlight, stranded creatures from an earlier age. The inner system is a vague blur from this distance, a swollen red cloud masking the sun that rides high above the horizon. However, the great restructuring is still visible to the naked eye – here, in the shape of the rings, which show a disturbingly organized fractal structure as they whirl in orbit overhead. Sirhan (or whoever is paying for this celebration of family flesh) has provided for their physical needs: food, water, clothes, housing and bandwidth, they’re all copiously available. A small town of bubble homes grows on the grassy knoll adjacent to the museum, utility foglets condensing in a variety of shapes and styles.
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