Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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crippled minds and broken bodies. Now, most people multitask: Their
meatbrains sit at the core of a haze of personality, much of it
virtualized on stacked layers of structured reality far from their
physical bodies. Wars and revolutions, or their subtle latter-day
cognates, sweep the globe as constants become variables; many
people find the death of stupidity even harder to accept than the
end of mortality. Some have vitrified themselves to await an
uncertain posthuman future. Others have modified their core
identities to better cope with the changed demands of reality.
Among these are beings whom nobody from a previous century would
recognize as human - human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades
dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels and devils of
software, slyly self-aware financial instruments. Even their
popular fictions are self-deconstructing these days.
None of this, other than the barest news summary, reaches the Field
Circus: The starwhisp is a fossil, left behind by the broad sweep
of accelerating progress. But it is aboard the Field Circus that
some of the most important events remaining in humanity’s future
light cone take place.
*
“Say hello to the jellyfish, Boris.”
Boris, in human drag, for once, glares at Pierre, and grips the
pitcher with both hands. The contents of the jug swirl their tentacles
lazily: One of them flips almost out of solution, dislodging an
impaled cocktail cherry. “Will get you for this,” Boris threatens. The
smoky air around his head is a-swirl with daemonic visions of
vengeance.
Su Ang stares intently at Pierre who is watching Boris as he raises
the jug to his lips and begins to drink. The baby jellyfish - small,
pale blue, with cuboid bells and four clusters of tentacles trailing
from each corner - slips down easily. Boris winces momentarily as the
nematocysts let rip inside his mouth, but in a moment or so, the
cubozoan slips down, and in the meantime, his biophysics model clips
the extent of the damage to his stinger-ruptured oropharynx.
“Wow,” he says, taking another slurp of sea wasp margaritas. “Don’t
try this at home, fleshboy.”
“Here.” Pierre reaches out. “Can I?”
“Invent your own damn poison,” Boris sneers - but he releases the jug
and passes it to Pierre, who raises it and drinks. The cubozoan
cocktail reminds him of fruit jelly drinks in a hot Hong Kong summer.
The stinging in his palate is sharp but fades rapidly, producing an
intimate burn when the alcohol hits the mild welts that are all this
universe will permit the lethal medusa to inflict on him.
“Not bad,” says Pierre, wiping a stray loop of tentacle off his chin.
He pushes the pitcher across the table toward Su Ang. “What’s with the
wicker man?” He points a thumb over his back at the table jammed in
the corner opposite the copper-topped bar.
“Who cares?” asks Boris. “S part of the scenery, isn’t it?”
The bar is a three-hundred-year-old brown caf� with a beer menu that
runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale ale.
The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer’s yeast, and
melatonin spray: and none of it exists. Amber dragged it out of the
Franklin borg’s collective memories, by way of her father’s
scattershot e-mails annotating her corporeal origins - the original is
in Amsterdam, if that city still exists.
“I care who it is,” says Pierre.
“Save it,” Ang says quietly. “I think it’s a lawyer with a privacy
screen.”
Pierre glances over his shoulder and glares. “Really?”
Ang puts a restraining hand on his wrist: “Really. Don’t pay it any
attention. You don’t have to, until the trial, you know.”
The wicker man sits uneasily in the corner. It resembles a
basket-weave silhouette made from dried reeds, dressed in a red
kerchief. A glass of doppelbock fills the mess of tied-off ends where
its right hand ought to be. From time to time, it raises the glass as
if to take a mouthful, and the beer vanishes into the singular
interior.
“Fuck the trial,” Pierre says shortly. And fuck Amber, too, for naming
me her public defender -
“Since when do lawsuits come with an invisible man?” asks Donna the
Journalist, blitting into the bar along with a patchy historical trail
hinting that she’s just come from the back room.
“Since -” Pierre blinks. “Hell.” When Donna entered, so did Aineko; or
maybe the cat’s been there all the time, curled up loaf-of-bread
fashion on the table in front of the wicker man. “You’re damaging the
continuity,” Pierre complains. “This universe is broken.”
“Fix it yourself,” Boris tells him. “Everybody else is coping.” He
snaps his fingers. “Waiter!”
“Excuse me.” Donna shakes her head. “I didn’t mean to harm anything.”
Ang, as always, is more accommodating. “How are you?” she asks
politely: “Would you like to try this most excellent poison cocktail?”
“I am well,” says Donna. A heavily built German woman - blonde and
solidly muscular, according to the avatar she’s presenting to the
public - she’s surrounded by a haze of viewpoints. They’re camera
angles on her society of mind, busily integrating and splicing her
viewpoint threads together in an endless journal of the journey. A
stringer for the CIA media consortium, she uploaded to the ship in the
same packet stream as the lawsuit. “Danke, Ang.”
“Are you recording right now?” asks Boris.
Donna sniffs. “When am I not?” A momentary smile: “I am only a
scanner, no? Five hours, until arrival, to go. I may stop after then.”
Pierre glances across the table at Su Ang’s hands; her knuckles are
white and tense. “I am to avoid missing anything if possible,” Donna
continues, oblivious to Ang’s disquiet. “There are eight of me at
present! All recording away.”
“That’s all?” Ang asks, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes, that is all, and I have a job to do! Don’t tell me you do not
enjoy what it is that you do here?”
“Right.” Pierre glances in the corner again, avoiding eye contact with
the hearty Girl Friday wannabe. He has a feeling, that if there were
any hills hereabouts to animate, she’d be belting out the music.
“Amber told you about the privacy code here?”
“There is a privacy code?” asks Donna, swinging at least three
subjective ghosts to bear on him for some reason - evidently he’s hit
an issue she has mixed feelings about.
“A privacy code,” Pierre confirms. “No recording in private, no
recording where people withhold permission in public, and no sandboxes
and cutups.”
Donna looks offended. “I would never do such a thing! Trapping a copy
of someone in a virtual space to record their responses would be
assault under Ring legal code, not true?”
“Your mother,” Boris says snidely, brandishing a fresh jug of iced
killer jellyfish in her direction.
“As long as we all agree,” Ang interrupts, searching for accord. “It’s
all going to be settled soon, isn’t it?”
“Except for the lawsuit,” mutters Pierre, glancing at the corner
again.
“I don’t see the problem,” says Donna, “that’s just between Amber and
her downlink adversaries!”
“Oh, it’s a problem all right,” says Boris, his tone light. “What are
your options worth?”
“My -” Donna shakes her head. “I’m not vested.”
“Plausible.” Boris doesn’t crack a smile. “Even so, when we go home,
your credibility metric will bulge. Assuming people still use
distributed trust markets to evaluate the stability of their business
partners.”
Not vested. Pierre turns it over in his mind, slightly surprised. He’d
assumed that everybody aboard the ship - except, perhaps, the lawyer,
Glashwiecz - was a fully vested member of the expeditionary company.
“I am not vested,” Donna insists. “I’m listed independently.” For a
moment, an almost-smile tugs at her face, a charmingly reticent
expression that has nothing to do with her bluff exterior. “Like the
cat.”
“The -” Pierre turns round in a hurry. Yes, Aineko appears to be
sitting silently at the table with the wicker man; but who knows
what’s going through that furry head right now? I’ll have to bring
this up with Amber, he realizes uneasily. I ought to bring this up
with Amber … “but your reputation won’t suffer for being on this
craft, will it?” he asks aloud.
“I will be all right,” Donna declares. The waiter comes over: “Mine
will be a bottle of schneiderweisse,” she adds. And then, without
breaking step: “Do you believe in the singularity?”
“Am I a singularitarian, do you mean?” asks Pierre, a fixed grin
coming to his face.
“Oh, no, no, no!” Donna waves him down, grins broadly, nods at Su Ang:
“I do not mean it like that! Attend: What I meant to ask was whether
you in the concept of a singularity believe, and if so, where it is?”
“Is this intended for a public interview?” asks Ang.
“Well, I cannot into a simulation drag you off and expose you to an
imitative reality excursion, can I?” Donna leans back as the bartender
places a ceramic stein in front of her.
“Oh. Well.” Ang glances warningly at Pierre and dispatches a very
private memo to scroll across his vision: Don’t play with her, this is
serious. Boris is watching Ang with an expression of hopeless longing.
Pierre tries to ignore it all, taking the journalist’s question
seriously. “The singularity is a bit like that old-time American
Christian rapture nonsense, isn’t it?” he says. “When we all go
a-flying up to heaven, leaving our bodies behind.” He snorts, reaches
into thin air and gratuitously violates causality by summoning a jug
of ice-cold sangria into existence. “The rapture of the nerds. I’ll
drink to that.”
“But when did it take place?” asks Donna. “My audience, they will to
know your opinion be needing.”
“Four years ago, when we instantiated this ship,” Pierre says
promptly.
“Back in the teens,” says Ang. “When Amber’s father liberated the
uploaded lobsters.”
“Is not happening yet,” contributes Boris. “Singularity implies
infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable
thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not
happened.”
“Au contraire. It happened on June 6th, 1969, at eleven hundred hours,
eastern seaboard time,” Pierre counters. “That was when the first
network control protocol packets were sent from the data port of one
IMP to another - the first ever Internet connection. That’s the
singularity. Since then we’ve all been living in a universe that was
impossible to predict from events prior to that time.”
“It’s rubbish,” counters Boris. “Singularity is load of religious
junk. Christian mystic rapture recycled for atheist nerds.”
“Not so.” Su Ang glances at him, hurt. “Here we are, sixty something
human minds. We’ve been migrated - while still awake - right out of
our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and
electron spin resonance mapping, and we’re now running as software in
an operating system designed to virtualize multiple physics models and
provide a simulation of reality that doesn’t let us go mad from
sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a
fingertip, crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother’s old
Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three light-years
from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by
incredibly ancient alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the
idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?”
“Mmph.” Boris looks perplexed. “Would not put it that way. The
singularity is nonsense, not uploading or -”
“Yah, right.” Ang smiles winningly at Boris. After a moment, he wilts.
Donna beams at them enthusiastically. “Fascinating!” she
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