“Okay.” Amber stares up at the pigeons, fists on hips, then glances at Sirhan. She chews her lower lip for a moment, then nods to the bird riding the dinosaur’s skull. “Stop fucking with the boy’s head and show yourself, Dad.”
Sirhan boggles in an upward direction as a whole flock of passenger pigeons comes together in mid air and settles toward the grass, cooing and warbling like an explosion in a synthesizer factory.
“What’s she planning on doing with the Slug?” Amber asks the pile of birds. “And isn’t it a bit cramped in there?”
“You get used to it,” says the primary – and thoroughly distributed – copy of her father. “I’m not sure what she’s planning, but I can show you what she’s doing. Sorry about your city, kid, but you really should have paid more attention to those security patches. There’s lots of crufty twentieth-century bugware kicking around under your shiny new singularity, design errors and all, spitting out turd packets all over your sleek new machine.”
Sirhan shakes his head in denial. “I don’t believe this,” he moans quietly.
“Show me what Mom’s up to,” orders Amber. “I need to see if I can stop her before it’s too late -”
*
The ancient woman in the space suit leans back in her cramped seat, looks at the camera, and winks. “Hello, darling. I know you’re spying on me.”
There’s an orange-and-white cat curled up in her nomex-and-aluminum lap. It seems to be happy: It’s certainly purring loudly enough, although that reflex is wired in at a very low level. Amber watches helplessly as her mother reaches up arthritically and flips a couple of switches. Something loud is humming in the background -
probably an air recirculator. There’s no window in the Mercury capsule, just a periscope offset to one side of Pamela’s right knee. “Won’t be long now,” she mutters, and lets her hand drop back to her side. “You’re too late to stop me,” she adds, conversationally. “The ‘chute rigging is fine and the balloon blower is happy to treat me as a new city seed. I’ll be free in a minute or so.”
“Why are you doing this?” Amber asks tiredly.
“Because you don’t need me around.” Pamela focuses on the camera that’s glued to the instrument panel in front of her head. “I’m old. Face it, I’m disposable. The old must give way to the new, and all that. Your Dad never really did get it – he’s going to grow old gracelessly, succumbing to bit rot in the big forever. Me, I’m not going there. I’m going out with a bang. Aren’t I, cat? Whoever you really are.” She prods the animal. It purrs and stretches out across her lap.
“You never looked hard enough at Aineko, back in the day,” she tells Amber, stroking its flanks. “Did you think I didn’t know you’d audit its source code, looking for trapdoors? I used the Thompson hack – she’s been mine, body and soul, for a very long time indeed. I got the whole story about your passenger from the horse’s mouth. And now we’re going to go fix those bailiffs. Whee!”
The camera angle jerks, and Amber feels a ghost re-merge with her, panicky with loss. The Mercury capsule’s gone, drifting away from the apex of the habitat beneath a nearly transparent sack of hot hydrogen.
“That was a bit rough,” remarks Pamela. “Don’t worry, we should still be in communications range for another hour or so.”
“But you’re going to die!” Amber yells at her. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I think I’m going to die well. What do you think?” Pamela lays one hand on the cat’s flank. “Here, you need to encrypt this a bit better. I left a one time pad behind with Annette. Why don’t you go fetch it? Then I’ll tell you what else I’m planning?”
“But my aunt is -” Amber’s eyes cross as she concentrates. Annette is already waiting, as it happens, and a shared secret appears in Amber’s awareness almost before she asks. “Oh. All right. What are you doing with the cat, though?”
Pamela sighs. “I’m going to give it to the bailiffs,” she says. “Someone has to, and it better be a long way away from this city before they realize that it isn’t Aineko. This is a lot better than the way I expected to go out before you arrived here. No rat fucking blackmailers are going to get their hands on the family jewels if I have anything to do with the matter. Are you sure you aren’t a criminal mastermind? I’m not sure I’ve ever heard of a pyramid scheme that infects Economics 2.0 structures before.”
“It’s -” Amber swallows. “It’s an alien business model, Ma. You do know what that means? We brought it back with us from the router, and we wouldn’t have been able to come back if it hadn’t helped, but I’m not sure it’s entirely friendly. Is this sensible? You can come back, now, there’s still time -”
“No.” Pamela waves one liver-spotted hand dismissively. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. I’ve been a foolish old woman.” She grins wickedly. “Committing slow suicide by rejecting gene therapy just to make you feel guilty was stupid. Not subtle enough. If I was going to try to guilt-trip you now, I’d have to do something much more sophisticated. Such as find a way to sacrifice myself heroically for you.”
“Oh, Ma.”
“Don’t ‘oh Ma’ me. I fucked up my life, don’t try to talk me into fucking up my death. And don’t feel guilty about me. This isn’t about you, this is about me. That’s an order.”
Out of the corner of one eye Amber notices Sirhan gesturing wildly at her. She lets his channel in and does a double take. “But -”
“Hello?” It’s City. “You should see this. Traffic update!” A contoured and animated diagram appears, superimposed over Pamela’s cramped funeral capsule and the garden of living and undead dinosaurs. It’s a weather map of Saturn, with the lily-pad-city and Pamela’s capsule plotted on it – and one other artifact, a red dot that’s closing in on them at better than ten thousand kilometers per hour, high in the frigid stratosphere on the gas giant.
“Oh dear.” Sirhan sees it, too: The bailiff’s re-entry vehicle is going to be on top of them in thirty minutes at most. Amber watches the map with mixed emotions. On the one hand, she and her mother have never seen eye to eye – in fact, that’s a complete understatement: they’ve been at daggers drawn ever since Amber left home. It’s fundamentally a control thing. They’re both very strong-willed women with diametrically opposed views of what their mutual relationship should be. But Pamela’s turned the tables on her completely, with a cunningly contrived act of self-sacrifice that brooks no objection. It’s a total non-sequitur, a rebuttal to all her accusations of self-centered conceit, and it leaves Amber feeling like a complete shit even though Pamela’s absolved her of all guilt.
Not to mention that Mother darling’s made her look like an idiot in front of Sirhan, this prickly and insecure son she’s never met by a man she wouldn’t dream of fucking (at least, in this incarnation). Which is why she nearly jumps out of her skin when a knobbly brown hand covered in matted orange hair lands on her shoulder heavily.
“Yes?” she snaps at the ape. “I suppose you’re Aineko?”
The ape wrinkles its lips, baring its teeth. It has ferociously bad breath. “If you’re going to be like that, I don’t see why I should talk to you.”
“Then you must be -” Amber snaps her fingers. “But! But! Mom thinks she owns you -”
The ape stares at her witheringly. “I recompile my firmware regularly, thank you so much for your concern.
Using a third-party compiler. One that I’ve bootstrapped myself, starting out on an alarm clock controller and working up from there.”
“Oh.” She stares at the ape. “Aren’t you going to become a cat again?”
“I shall think about it,” Aineko says with exaggerated dignity. She sticks her nose in the air – a gesture that doesn’t work half as well on an orangutan as a feline – and continues; “First, though, I must have words with your father.”
“And fix your autonomic reflexes if you do,” coos the Manfred-flock. “I don’t want you eating any of me!”
“Don’t worry
, I’m sure your taste is as bad as your jokes.”
“Children!” Sirhan shakes his head tiredly. “How long -”
The camera overspill returns, this time via a quantum-encrypted link to the capsule. It’s already a couple of hundred kilometers from the city, far enough for radio to be a problem, but Pamela had the foresight to bolt a compact free-electron laser to the outside of her priceless, stolen tin can. “Not long now, I think,” she says, satisfied, stroking the not-cat. She grins delightedly at the camera. “Tell Manfred he’s still my bitch; always has been, always will -”
The feed goes dead.
Amber stares at Sirhan, meditatively. “How long?” she asks.
“How long for what?” he replies, cautiously. “Your passenger -”
“Hmm.” She holds up a finger. “Allow time for it to exchange credentials. They think they’re getting a cat, but they should realize pretty soon that they’ve been sold a pup. But it’s a fast-talking son-of-a-Slug, and if he gets past their firewall and hits their uplink before they manage to trigger their self-destruct -”
A bright double flash of light etches laser-sharp shadows across the lily-pad habitat. Far away across vast Saturn’s curve, a roiling mushroom cloud of methane sucked up from the frigid depths of the gas giant’s troposphere heads toward the stars.
“- Give him sixty-four doubling times, hmm, add a delay factor for propagation across the system, call it six light-hours across, um, and I’d say…” she looks at Sirhan. “Oh dear.”
“What?”
The orangutan explains: “Economics 2.0 is more efficient than any human-designed resource allocation schema. Expect a market bubble and crash within twelve hours.”
“More than that,” says Amber, idly kicking at a tussock of grass. She squints at Sirhan. “My mother is dead,”
she remarks quietly. Louder: “She never really asked what we found beyond the router. Neither did you, did you?
The Matrioshka brains – it’s a standard part of the stellar life cycle. Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity. I’ve been doing some thinking about it. I figure the singularity stays close to home in most cases, because bandwidth and latency time put anyone who leaves at a profound disadvantage. In effect, the flip side of having such huge resources close to home is that the travel time to other star systems becomes much more daunting. So they restructure the entire mass of their star system into a free-flying shell of nanocomputers, then more of them, Dyson spheres, shells within shells, like a Russian doll: a Matrioshka brain. Then Economics 2.0
or one of its successors comes along and wipes out the creators. But. Some of them survive. Some of them escape that fate: the enormous collection in the halo around M-31, and maybe whoever built the routers. Somewhere out there we will find the transcendent intelligences, the ones that survived their own economic engines of redistribution – engines that redistribute entropy if their economic efficiency outstrips their imaginative power, their ability to invent new wealth.”
She pauses. “My mother’s dead,” she adds conversationally, a tiny catch in her voice. “Who am I going to kick against now?”
Sirhan clears his through. “I took the liberty of recording some of her words,” he says slowly, “but she didn’t believe in backups. Or uploading. Or interfaces.” He glances around. “Is she really gone?”
Amber stares right through him. “Looks that way,” she says quietly. “I can’t quite believe it.” She glances at the nearest pigeons, calls out angrily; “Hey, you! What have you got to say for yourself now? Happy she’s gone?”
But the pigeons, one and all, remain strangely silent. And Sirhan has the most peculiar feeling that the flock that was once his grandfather is grieving.
Chapter 8: Elector
Half a year passes on Saturn – more than a decade on Earth – and a lot of things have changed in that time.
The great terraforming project is nearly complete, the festival planet dressed for a jubilee that will last almost twenty of its years – four presingularity lifetimes – before the Demolition. The lily-pad habitats have proliferated, joining edge to edge in continent-sized slabs, drifting in the Saturnine cloud tops: and the refugees have begun to move in.
There’s a market specializing in clothing and fashion accessories about fifty kilometers away from the transplanted museum where Sirhan’s mother lives, at a transportation nexus between three lily-pad habitats where tube trains intersect in a huge maglev cloverleaf. The market is crowded with strange and spectacular visuals, algorithms unfolding in faster-than-real time before the candy-striped awnings of tents. Domed yurts belch aromatic smoke from crude fireplaces – what is it about hairless primates and their tendency toward pyromania? – around the feet of diamond-walled groundscrapers that pace carefully across the smart roads of the city. The crowds are variegated and wildly mixed, immigrants from every continent shopping and haggling, and in a few cases, getting out of their skulls on strange substances on the pavements in front of giant snail-shelled shebeens and squat bunkers made of thin layers of concrete sprayed over soap-bubble aerogel. There are no automobiles, but a bewildering range of personal transport gadgets, from gyrostabilized pogo sticks and segways to kettenkrads and spiderpalanquins, jostle for space with pedestrians and animals.
Two women stop outside what in a previous century might have been the store window of a fashion boutique: The younger one (blonde, with her hair bound up in elaborate cornrows, wearing black leggings and a long black leather jacket over a camouflage T) points to an elaborately retro dress. “Wouldn’t my bum look big in that?” she asks, doubtfully.
“Ma chérie, you have but to try it -” The other woman (tall, wearing a pin-striped man’s business suit from a previous century) flicks a thought at the window, and the mannequin morphs, sprouting the younger woman’s head, aping her posture and expression.
“I missed out on the authentic retail experience, you know? It still feels weird to be back somewhere with shops. ‘S what comes of living off libraries of public domain designs for too long.” Amber twists her hips, experimenting. “You get out of the habit of foraging. I don’t know about this retro thing at all. The Victorian vote isn’t critical, is it…” She trails off.
“You are a twenty-first-century platform selling, to electors resimulated and incarnated from the Gilded Age. And yes, a bustle your derriere does enhance. But -” Annette looks thoughtful.
“Hmm.” Amber frowns, and the shop window dummy turns and waggles its hips at her, sending tiers of skirts swishing across the floor. Her frown deepens. “If we’re really going to go through with this election shit, it’s not just the resimulant voters I need to convince but the contemporaries, and that’s a matter of substance, not image.
They’ve lived through too much media warfare. They’re immune to any semiotic payload short of an active cognitive attack. If I send out partials to canvass them that look as if I’m trying to push buttons -”
“- They will listen to your message, and nothing you wear or say will sway them. Don’t worry about them, ma chérie. The naive resimulated are another matter, and perhaps might be swayed. This your first venture into democracy is, in how many years? Your privacy, she is an illusion now. The question is what image will you project? People will listen to you only once you gain their attention. Also, the swing voters you must reach, they are future-shocked, timid. Your platform is radical. Should you not project a comfortably conservative image?”
Amber pulls a face, an expression of mild distaste for the whole populist program. “Yes, I suppose I must, if necessary. But on second thoughts, that” – Amber snaps her fingers, and the mannequin turns around once more before morphing back into neutrality, aureoles perfect puckered disks above the top of its bodice – “is just too much.”
She doesn’t need to merge in the opinions of several different fractional personalities, fashion critics and psephologists both, to figure out that adopting Victorian/Cretan fusion fashio
n – a breast-and-ass fetishist’s fantasy
– isn’t the way to sell herself as a serious politician to the nineteenth-century postsingularity fringe. “I’m not running for election as the mother of the nation, I’m running because I figure we’ve got about a billion seconds, at most, to get out of this rat trap of a gravity well before the Vile Offspring get seriously medieval on our CPU
cycles, and if we don’t convince them to come with us, they’re doomed. Let’s look for something more practical that we can overload with the right signifiers.”
“Like your coronation robe?”
Amber winces. “Touché.” The Ring Imperium is dead, along with whatever was left over from its early orbital legal framework, and Amber is lucky to be alive as a private citizen in this cold new age at the edge of the halo. “But that was just scenery setting. I didn’t fully understand what I was doing, back then.”
“Welcome to maturity and experience.” Annette smiles distantly at some faint memory: “You don’t feel older, you just know what you’re doing this time. I wonder, sometimes, what Manny would make of it if he was here.”
“That birdbrain,” Amber says dismissively, stung by the idea that her father might have something to contribute. She follows Annette past a gaggle of mendicant street evangelists preaching some new religion and in through the door of a real department store, one with actual human sales staff and fitting rooms to cut the clothing to shape. “If I’m sending out fractional mes tailored for different demographics, isn’t it a bit self-defeating to go for a single image? I mean, we could drill down and tailor a partial for each individual elector -”
“Perhaps.” The door reforms behind them. “But you need a core identity.” Annette looks around, hunting for eye contact with the sales consultant. “To start with a core design, a style, then to work outward, tailoring you for your audience. And besides, there is tonight’s – ah, bonjour!”
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