Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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The cat sneezes, then looks disgusted. “This wasn’t my idea, big shot.
Your father is a very weird guy, and your mother hates him lots
because she’s still in love with him. She’s got kinks, y’know? Or
maybe she’s sublimating them, if she’s serious about this church shit
she’s putting you through. He thinks she’s a control freak, and he’s
not entirely wrong. Anyway, after your dad ran off in search of
another dom, she took out an injunction against him. But she forgot to
cover his partner, and she bought this parcel of worms and sent them
to you, okay? Annie is a real bitch, but he’s got her wrapped right
around his finger, or something. Anyway, he built these companies and
this printer - which isn’t hardwired to a filtering proxy, like your
mom’s - specifically to let you get away from her legally. If that’s
what you want to do.”
Amber fast-forwards through the dynamic chunks of the README - boring
legal UML diagrams, mostly - soaking up the gist of the plan. Yemen is
one of the few countries to implement traditional Sunni shari’a law
and a limited liability company scam at the same time. Owning slaves
is legal - the fiction is that the owner has an option hedged on the
indentured laborer’s future output, with interest payments that grow
faster than the unfortunate victim can pay them off - and companies
are legal entities. If Amber sells herself into slavery to this
company, she will become a slave and the company will be legally
liable for her actions and upkeep. The rest of the legal instrument -
about ninety percent of it, in fact - is a set of self-modifying
corporate mechanisms coded in a variety of jurisdictions that permit
Turing-complete company constitutions, and which act as an ownership
shell for the slavery contract. At the far end of the corporate shell
game is a trust fund of which Amber is the prime beneficiary and
shareholder. When she reaches the age of majority, she’ll acquire
total control over all the companies in the network and can dissolve
her slave contract; until then, the trust fund (which she essentially
owns) oversees the company that owns her (and keeps it safe from
hostile takeover bids). Oh, and the company network is primed by an
extraordinary general meeting that instructed it to move the trust’s
assets to Paris immediately. A one-way airline ticket is enclosed.
“You think I should take this?” she asks uncertainly. It’s hard to
tell how smart the cat really is - there’s probably a yawning vacuum
behind those semantic networks if you dig deep enough - but it tells a
pretty convincing tale.
The cat squats and curls its tail protectively around its paws: “I’m
saying nothing, you know what I mean? You take this, you can go live
with your dad. But it won’t stop your ma coming after him with a
horsewhip, and after you with a bunch of lawyers and a set of
handcuffs. You want my advice, you’ll phone the Franklins and get
aboard their off-planet mining scam. In space, no one can serve a writ
on you. Plus, they got long-term plans to get into the CETI market,
cracking alien network packets. You want my honest opinion, you
wouldn’t like it in Paris after a bit. Your Dad and the frog bitch,
they’re swingers, y’know? No time in their lives for a kid. Or a cat
like me, now I think of it. They’re working all day for the Senator,
and out all hours of night doing drugs, fetish parties, raves, opera,
that kind of adult shit. Your Dad dresses in frocks more than your
mom, and your Tante ‘Nettie leads him around the apartment on a chain
when they’re not having noisy sex on the balcony. They’d cramp your
style, kid. You shouldn’t have to put up with parents who have more of
a life than you do.”
“Huh.” Amber wrinkles her nose, half-disgusted by the cat’s
transparent scheming, and half-acknowledging its message: I better
think hard about this, she decides. Then she flies off in so many
directions at once that she nearly browns out the household broadband.
Part of her is examining the intricate card pyramid of company
structures; somewhere else, she’s thinking about what can go wrong,
while another bit (probably some of her wet, messy glandular
biological self) is thinking about how nice it would be to see Daddy
again, albeit with some trepidation. Parents aren’t supposed to have
sex - isn’t there a law, or something? “Tell me about the Franklins?
Are they married? Singular?”
The 3D printer is cranking up. It hisses slightly, dissipating heat
from the hard vacuum chamber in its supercooled workspace. Deep in its
guts it creates coherent atom beams, from a bunch of Bose-Einstein
condensates hovering on the edge of absolute zero. By superimposing
interference patterns on them, it generates an atomic hologram,
building a perfect replica of some original artifact, right down to
the atomic level - there are no clunky moving nanotechnology parts to
break or overheat or mutate. Something is going to come out of the
printer in half an hour, something cloned off its original right down
to the individual quantum states of its component atomic nuclei. The
cat, seemingly oblivious, shuffles closer to the warm air exhaust
ducts.
“Bob Franklin, he died about two, three years before you were born -
your dad did business with him. So did your mom. Anyway, he had chunks
of his noumen preserved and the estate trustees are trying to
re-create his consciousness by cross-loading him in their implants.
They’re sort of a borganism, but with money and style. Anyway, Bob got
into the space biz back then, with some financial wizardry a friend of
your father whipped up for him, and now they’re building a spacehab
that they’re going to take all the way out to Jupiter, where they can
dismantle a couple of small moons and begin building helium-three
refineries. It’s that CETI scam I told you about earlier, but they’ve
got a whole load of other angles on it for the long term. See, your
dad’s friends have cracked the broadcast, the one everybody knows
about. It’s a bunch of instructions for finding the nearest router
that plugs into the galactic Internet. And they want to go out there
and talk to some aliens.”
This is mostly going right over Amber’s head - she’ll have to learn
what helium-three refineries are later - but the idea of running away
to space has a certain appeal. Adventure, that’s what. Amber looks
around the living room and sees it for a moment as a capsule, a small
wooden cell locked deep in a vision of a middle America that never was
- the one her mom wants to bring her up in, like a misshapen Skinner
box designed to train her to be normal. “Is Jupiter fun?” she asks. “I
know it’s big and not very dense, but is it, like, a happening place?
Are there any aliens there?”
“It’s the first place you need to go if you want to get to meet the
aliens eventually,” says the cat as the printer clanks and disgorges a
fake passport (convincingly aged), an intricate metal seal engraved
with Arabic script, and a tailored wide-spectrum vaccine targeted on
Amber’s immature immune system. “Stick that on your wrist, sign the
three top copies, put them in the envelope, and let’s get going. We’ve
got a flight to catch, slave.”
*
Sadeq is eating his dinner when the first lawsuit in Jupiter orbit
rolls in.
Alone in the cramped humming void of his station, he considers the
plea. The language is awkward, showing all the hallmarks of a crude
machine translation: The supplicant is American, a woman, and - oddly
- claims to be a Christian. This is surprising enough, but the nature
of her claim is, at face value, preposterous. He forces himself to
finish his bread, then bag the waste and clean the platter, before he
gives it his full consideration. Is it a tasteless joke? Evidently
not. As the only quadi outside the orbit of Mars, he is uniquely
qualified to hear it, and it is a case that cries out for justice.
A woman who leads a God-fearing life - not a correct one, no, but she
shows some signs of humility and progress toward a deeper
understanding - is deprived of her child by the machinations of a
feckless husband who deserted her years before. That the woman was
raising the child alone strikes Sadeq as disturbingly Western, but
pardonable when he reads her account of the feckless one’s behavior,
which is pretty lax; an ill fate indeed would await any child that
this man raises to adulthood. This man deprives her of her child, but
not by legitimate means: He doesn’t take the child into his own
household or make any attempt to raise her, either in accordance with
his own customs or the precepts of shari’a. Instead, he enslaves her
wickedly in the mire of the Western legal tradition, then casts her
into outer darkness to be used as a laborer by the dubious forces of
self-proclaimed “progress”. The same forces Sadeq has been sent to
confront, as representative of the umma in orbit around Jupiter.
Sadeq scratches his short beard thoughtfully. A nasty tale, but what
can he do about it? “Computer,” he says, “a reply to this supplicant:
My sympathies lie with you in the manner of your suffering, but I fail
to see in what way I can be of assistance. Your heart cries out for
help before God (blessed be his name), but surely this is a matter for
the temporal authorities of the dar al-Harb.” He pauses: Or is it? he
wonders. Legal wheels begin to turn in his mind. “If you can but find
your way to extending to me a path by which I can assert the primacy
of shari’a over your daughter, I shall apply myself to constructing a
case for her emancipation, to the greater glory of God (blessed be his
name). Ends, sigblock, send.”
Releasing the Velcro straps that hold him at the table, Sadeq floats
up and kicks gently toward the forward end of the cramped habitat. The
controls of the telescope are positioned between the ultrasonic
clothing cleaner and the lithium hydroxide scrubbers. They’re already
freed up, because he was conducting a wide-field survey of the inner
ring, looking for the signature of water ice. It is the work of a few
moments to pipe the navigation and tracking system into the
telescope’s controller and direct it to hunt for the big foreign ship
of fools. Something nudges at Sadeq’s mind urgently, an irritating
realization that he may have missed something in the woman’s e-mail:
there were a number of huge attachments. With half his mind he surfs
the news digest his scholarly peers send him daily. Meanwhile, he
waits patiently for the telescope to find the speck of light that the
poor woman’s daughter is enslaved within.
This might be a way in, he realizes, a way to enter dialogue with
them. Let the hard questions answer themselves, elegantly. There will
be no need for confrontation if they can be convinced that their plans
are faulty: no need to defend the godly from the latter-day Tower of
Babel these people propose to build. If this woman Pamela means what
she says, Sadeq need not end his days out here in the cold between the
worlds, away from his elderly parents and brother, and his colleagues
and friends. And he will be profoundly grateful, because in his heart
of hearts, he knows that he is less a warrior than a scholar.
*
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