Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable loops as they
slice through Jupiter’s magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock’s
momentum into power. Small robots grovel in the orange dirt,
scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber’s
garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according
to a schema designed by preteens at an industrial school in Poland,
with barely any need for human guidance.
High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed
and conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating
trade with the alien intelligences believed to have been detected
eight years earlier by SETI, they function equally well as fiscal
gatekeepers for space colonies. The Sanger’s bank accounts in
California and Cuba are looking acceptable - since entering Jupiter
space, the orphanage has staked a claim on roughly a hundred
gigatons of random rocks and a moon that’s just small enough to
creep in under the International Astronomical Union’s definition of
a sovereign planetary body. The borg are working hard, leading
their eager teams of child stakeholders in their plans to build the
industrial metastructures necessary to support mining helium-three
from Jupiter. They’re so focused that they spend much of their time
being themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared identity
that gives them their messianic drive.
Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and slumbers in time to
its ancient orbital dynamics. A religious college in Cairo is
considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to
prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular
level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be
treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a
computing machine’s memory by mapping and simulating all its
synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so,
what are its rights and duties?) Riots in Borneo underline the
urgency of this theotechnological inquiry.
More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Marseilles also
underline a rising problem: the social chaos caused by cheap
anti-aging treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of
disaffected youth against the formerly graying gerontocracy of
Europe, insist that people who predate the supergrid and can’t
handle implants aren’t really conscious: Their ferocity is equaled
only by the anger of the dynamic septuagenarians of the baby boom,
their bodies partially restored to the flush of sixties youth, but
their minds adrift in a slower, less contingent century. The
faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the labor pool,
but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the new
millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by
deflationary time.
The Bangladeshi economic miracle is typical of the age. With growth
rates running at over twenty percent, cheap out-of-control
bioindustrialization has swept the nation: Former rice farmers
harvest plastics and milk cows for silk, while their children study
mariculture and design seawalls. With cellphone ownership nearing
eighty percent and literacy at ninety, the once-poor country is
finally breaking out of its historical infrastructure trap and
beginning to develop: In another generation, they’ll be richer than
Japan.
Radical new economic theories are focusing around bandwidth,
speed-of-light transmission time, and the implications of CETI,
communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Cosmologists and
quants collaborate on bizarre relativistically telescoped financial
instruments. Space (which lets you store information) and structure
(which lets you process it) acquire value while dumb mass - like
gold - loses it. The degenerate cores of the traditional stock
markets are in free fall, the old smokestack microprocessor and
biotech/nanotech industries crumbling before the onslaught of
matter replicators and self-modifying ideas. The inheritors look
set to be a new wave of barbarian communicators, who mortgage their
future for a millennium against the chance of a gift from a
visiting alien intelligence. Microsoft, once the US Steel of the
silicon age, quietly fades into liquidation.
An outbreak of green goo - a crude biomechanical replicator that
eats everything in its path - is dealt with in the Australian
outback by carpet-bombing with fuel-air explosives. The USAF
subsequently reactivates two wings of refurbished B-52s and places
them at the disposal of the UN standing committee on
self-replicating weapons. (CNN discovers that one of their newest
pilots, re-enlisting with the body of a twenty-year-old and an
empty pension account, first flew them over Laos and Cambodia.) The
news overshadows the World Health Organization’s announcement of
the end of the HIV pandemic, after more than fifty years of
bigotry, panic, and megadeath.
*
“Breathe steadily. Remember your regulator drill? If you spot your
heart rate going up or your mouth going dry, take five.”
“Shut the fuck up, ‘Neko, I’m trying to concentrate.” Amber fumbles
with the titanium D-ring, trying to snake the strap through it. The
gauntlets are getting in her way. High orbit space suits - little more
than a body stocking designed to hold your skin under compression and
help you breathe - are easy, but this deep in Jupiter’s radiation belt
she has to wear an old Orlan-DM suit that comes in about thirteen
layers. The gloves are stiff and hard to work in. It’s Chernobyl
weather outside, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons storming
through the void, and she really needs the extra protection. “Got it.”
She yanks the strap tight, pulls on the D-ring, then goes to work on
the next strap. Never looking down; because the wall she’s tying
herself to has no floor, just a cutoff two meters below, then empty
space for a hundred kilometers before the nearest solid ground.
The ground sings to her moronically: “I love you, you love me, it’s
the law of gravity -”
She shoves her feet down onto the platform that juts from the side of
the capsule like a suicide’s ledge: metallized Velcro grabs hold, and
she pulls on the straps to turn her body round until she can see past
the capsule, sideways. The capsule masses about five tonnes, barely
bigger than an ancient Soyuz. It’s packed to overflowing with
environment-sensitive stuff she’ll need, and a honking great high-gain
antenna. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” someone says over the
intercom.
“Of course I -” She stops. Alone in this Energiya NPO surplus iron
maiden with its low-bandwidth coms and bizarre plumbing, she feels
claustrophobic and helpless: Parts of her mind don’t work. When she
was four, Mom took her down a famous cave system somewhere out west.
When the guide turned out the lights half a kilometer underground,
she’d screamed with surprise as the darkness had reached out and
touched her. Now it’s not the darkness that frightens her, it’s the
lack of thought. For a hundred kilometers below her there are no
minds, and even on the surface there’s only the moronic warbling of
‘bots for company. Everything that makes the universe primate-friendly
seems to be locked in the huge spaceship that looms somewhere just
behind the back of her head, and she has to fight down an urge to shed
her straps and swarm back up the umbilical that anchors the capsule to
the Sanger. “I’ll be fine,” she forces herself to say. And even though
she’s unsure that it’s true, she tries to make herself believe it.
“It’s just leaving-home nerves. I’ve read about it, okay?”
There’s a funny, high-pitched whistle in her ears. For a moment, the
sweat on the back of her neck turns icy cold, then the noise stops.
She strains for a moment, and when it returns she recognizes the
sound: The hitherto-talkative cat, curled in the warmth of her
pressurized luggage can, has begun to snore.
“Let’s go,” she says, “Time to roll the wagon.” A speech macro deep in
the Sanger’s docking firmware recognizes her authority and gently lets
go of the pod. A couple of cold gas clusters pop, sending deep banging
vibrations running through the capsule, and she’s on her way.
“Amber. How’s it hanging?” A familiar voice in her ears: She blinks.
Fifteen hundred seconds, nearly half an hour gone.
“Robes-Pierre, chopped any aristos lately?”
“Heh!” A pause. “I can see your head from here.”
“How’s it looking?” she asks. There’s a lump in her throat; she isn’t
sure why. Pierre is probably hooked into one of the smaller proximity
cameras dotted around the outer hull of the big mother ship, watching
over her as she falls.
“Pretty much like always,” he says laconically. Another pause, this
time longer. “This is wild, you know? Su Ang says hi, by the way.”
“Su Ang, hi,” she replies, resisting the urge to lean back and look up
- up relative to her feet, not her vector - and see if the ship’s
still visible.
“Hi,” Ang says shyly. “You’re very brave?”
“Still can’t beat you at chess.” Amber frowns. Su Ang and her
overengineered algae. Oscar and his pharmaceutical factory toads.
People she’s known for three years, mostly ignored, and never thought
about missing. “Listen, are you going to come visiting?”
“You want us to visit?” Ang sounds dubious. “When will it be ready?”
“Oh, soon enough.” At four kilograms per minute of structured-matter
output, the printers on the surface have already built her a bunch of
stuff: a habitat dome, the guts of an algae/shrimp farm, an excavator
to bury it with, an airlock. Even a honey bucket. It’s all lying
around waiting for her to put it together and move into her new home.
“Once the borg get back from Amalthea.”
“Hey! You mean they’re moving? How did you figure that?”
“Go talk to them,” Amber says. Actually, she’s a large part of the
reason the Sanger is about to crank its orbit up and out toward the
other moon: She wants to be alone in coms silence for a couple of
million seconds. The Franklin collective is doing her a big favor.
“Ahead of the curve, as usual,” Pierre cuts in, with something that
sounds like admiration to her uncertain ears.
“You too,” she says, a little too fast: “Come visit when I’ve got the
life-support cycle stabilized.”
“I’ll do that,” he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the
capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring
blue laser line of the Sanger’s drive torch powering up.
*
Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, passes.
The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic
control display. These days, every shift seems to bring a new crewed
spaceship into Jupiter system: Space is getting positively crowded.
When he arrived, there were fewer than two hundred people here. Now
there’s the population of a small city, and many of them live at the
heart of the approach map centered on his display. He breathes deeply
- trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks - and studies the
map. “Computer, what about my slot?” he asks.
“Your slot: Cleared to commence final approach in six-nine-five
seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside ten kilometers,
drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of
forbidden thrust vectors now.” Chunks of the approach map turn red,
gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other craft in the
area.
Sadeq sighs. “We’ll go in using Kurs. I assume their Kurs guidance is
active?”
“Kurs docking target support available to shell level three.”
“Praise Allah.” He pokes around through the guidance subsystem’s
menus, setting up the software emulation of the obsolete (but highly
reliable) Soyuz docking system. At last he can leave the ship to look
after itself for a bit. He glances round. For two years he has lived
in this canister, and soon he will step outside it.
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