Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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He nods. Now she takes a step forwards. “We can talk about it, if you
want. Whatever you want,” she says. And she leans toward him, and he
feels his resistance crumbling. He reaches out and hugs her, and she
wraps her arms around him and leans her chin on his shoulder, and this
doesn’t feel wrong: How can anything this good be bad?
“It made me uncomfortable,” he mumbles into her hair. “Need to sort
myself out.”
“Oh, Pierre.” She strokes the down at the back of his neck. “You
should have said. We don’t have to do it that way if you don’t want
to.”
How to tell her how hard it is to admit that anything’s wrong? Ever?
“You didn’t drag me here to tell me that,” he says, implicitly
changing the subject.
Amber lets go of him, backs away almost warily. “What is it?” she
asks.
“Something’s wrong?” he half asks, half asserts. “Have we made contact
yet?”
“Yeah,” she says, pulling a face. “There’s an alien trade delegation
in the Louvre. That’s the problem.”
“An alien trade delegation.” He rolls the words around the inside of
his mouth, tasting them. They feel paradoxical, cold and slow after
the hot words of passion he’s been trying to avoid uttering. It’s his
fault for changing the subject.
“A trade delegation,” says Amber. “I should have anticipated. I mean,
we were going to go through the router ourselves, weren’t we?”
He sighs. “We thought we were going to do that.” A quick prod at the
universe’s controls determines that he has certain capabilities: He
invokes an armchair, sprawls across it. “A network of point-to-point
wormholes linking routers, self-replicating communication hubs, in
orbit around most of the brown dwarfs of the galaxy. That’s what the
brochure said, right? That’s what we expected. Limited bandwidth, not
a lot of use to a mature superintelligence that has converted the free
mass of its birth solar system into computronium, but sufficient to
allow it to hold conversations with its neighbors. Conversations
carried out via a packet-switched network in real time, not limited by
the speed of light, but bound together by a common reference frame and
the latency between network hops.”
“That’s about the size of it,” she agrees from the carved-ruby throne
beside him. “Except there’s a trade delegation waiting for us. In
fact, they’re coming aboard already. And I don’t buy it - something
about the whole setup stinks.”
Pierre’s brow wrinkles. “You’re right, it doesn’t make sense,” he
says, finally. “Doesn’t make sense at all.”
Amber nods. “I carry a ghost of Dad around. He’s really upset about
it.”
“Listen to your old man.” Pierre’s lips quirk humorlessly. “We were
going to jump through the looking glass, but it seems someone has
beaten us to the punch. Question is why?”
“I don’t like it.” Amber reaches out sideways, and he catches her
hand. “And then there’s the lawsuit. We have to hold the trial sooner
rather than later.”
He lets go of her fingers. “I’d really be much happier if you hadn’t
named me as your champion.”
“Hush.” The scenery changes; her throne is gone, and instead she’s
sitting on the arm of his chair, almost on top of him. “Listen. I had
a good reason.”
“Reason?”
“You have choice of weapons. In fact, you have the choice of the
field. This isn’t just ‘hit ‘em with a sword until they die’ time.”
She grins, impishly. “The whole point of a legal system that mandates
trial by combat for commercial lawsuits, as opposed to an adjudication
system, is to work out who’s a fitter servant of society and hence
deserving of preferential treatment. It’s crazy to apply the same
legal model to resolving corporate disputes that we use for arguments
among people, especially as most companies are now software
abstractions of business models; the interests of society are better
served by a system that encourages efficient trade activity than by
one that encourages litigation. It cuts down on corporate bullshit
while encouraging the toughest ones to survive, which is why I was
going to set up the trial as a contest to achieve maximum competitive
advantage in a xenocommerce scenario. Assuming they really are
traders, I figure we have more to trade with them than some damn
lawyer from the depths of earth’s light cone.”
Pierre blinks. “Um.” Blinks again. “I thought you wanted me to
sideload some kind of fencing kinematics program and skewer the guy?”
“Knowing how well I know you, why did you ever think that?” She slides
down the arm of his chair and lands on his lap. She twists round to
face him in point-blank close-up. “Shit, Pierre, I know you’re not
some kind of macho psychopath!”
“But your mother’s lawyers -”
She shrugs dismissively. “They’re lawyers. Used to dealing with
precedents. Best way to fuck with their heads is to change the way the
universe works.” She leans against his chest. “You’ll make mincemeat
of them. Profit-to-earnings ratio through the roof, blood on the stock
exchange floor.” His hands meet around the small of her back. “My
hero!”
*
The Tuileries are full of confused lobsters.
Aineko has warped this virtual realm, implanting a symbolic gateway in
the carefully manicured gardens outside. The gateway is about two
meters in diameter, a verdigris-coated orouborous loop of bronze that
sits like an incongruous archway astride a gravel path in the grounds.
Giant black lobsters - each the size of a small pony - shuffle out of
the loop’s baby blue buffer field, antennae twitching. They wouldn’t
be able to exist in the real world, but the physics model here has
been amended to permit them to breathe and move, by special
dispensation.
Amber sniffs derisively as she enters the great reception room of the
Sully wing. “Can’t trust that cat with anything,” she mutters.
“It was your idea, wasn’t it?” asks Su Ang, trying to duck past the
zombie ladies-in-waiting who carry Amber’s train. Soldiers line the
passage to either side, forming rows of steel to let the Queen pass
unhindered.
“To let the cat have its way, yes,” Amber is annoyed. “But I didn’t
mean to let it wreck the continuity! I won’t have it!”
“I never saw the point of all this medievalism, before,” Ang observes.
“It’s not as if you can avoid the singularity by hiding in the past.”
Pierre, following the Queen at a distance, shakes his head, knowing
better than to pick a fight with Amber over her idea of stage scenery.
“It looks good,” Amber says tightly, standing before her throne and
waiting for the ladies-in-waiting to arrange themselves before her.
She sits down carefully, her back straight as a ruler, voluminous
skirts belling up. Her dress is an intricate piece of sculpture that
uses the human body within as a support. “It impresses the yokels and
looks convincing on narrowcast media. It provides a prefabricated
sense of tradition. It hints at the political depths of fear and
loathing intrinsic to my court’s activities, and tells people not to
fuck with me. It reminds us where we’ve come from … and it doesn’t
give away anything about where we’re going.”
“But that doesn’t make any difference to a bunch of alien lobsters,”
points out Su Ang. “They lack the reference points to understand it.”
She moves to stand behind the throne. Amber glances at Pierre, waves
him over.
Pierre glances around, seeking real people, not the vacant eigenfaces
of the zombies that give this scenery added biological texture. There
in the red gown, isn’t that Donna the Journalist? And over there, too,
with shorter hair and wearing male drag; she gets everywhere. That’s
Boris, sitting behind the bishop.
“You tell her,” Ang implores him.
“I can’t,” he admits. “We’re trying to establish communication, aren’t
we? But we don’t want to give too much away about what we are, how we
think. A historical distancing act will keep them from learning too
much about us: The phase-space of technological cultures that could
have descended from these roots is too wide to analyse easily. So
we’re leaving them with the lobster translators and not giving
anything away. Try to stay in character as a fifteenth-century duchess
from Alb� - it’s a matter of national security.”
“Humph.” Ang frowns as a flunky hustles forward to place a folding
chair behind her. She turns to face the expanse of red-and-gold carpet
that stretches to the doorway as trumpets blat and the doors swing
open to admit the deputation of lobsters.
The lobsters are as large as wolves, black and spiny and ominous.
Their monochrome carapaces are at odds with the brightly colored garb
of the human crowd. Their antennae are large and sharp as swords. But
for all that, they advance hesitantly, eye turrets swiveling from side
to side as they take the scene in. Their tails drag ponderously on the
carpet, but they have no trouble standing.
The first of the lobsters halts short of the throne and angles itself
to train an eye on Amber. “Am inconsistent,” it complains. “There is
no liquid hydrogen monoxide here, and you-species am misrepresented by
initial contact. Inconsistency, explain?”
“Welcome to the human physical space-traveling interface unit Field
Circus,” Amber replies calmly. “I am pleased to see your translator is
working adequately. You are correct, there is no water here. The
lobsters don’t normally need it when they visit us. And we humans are
not water-dwellers. May I ask who you are when you’re not wearing
borrowed lobster bodies?”
Confusion. The second lobster rears up and clatters its long, armored
antennae together. Soldiers to either side tighten their grips on
their spears, but it drops back down again soon enough.
“We are the Wunch,” announces the first lobster, speaking clearly.
“This is a body-compliant translation layer. Based on map received
from yourspace, units forty thousand trillion light-kilometers ago?”
“He means twenty years,” Pierre whispers on a private channel Amber
has multicast for the other real humans in the audience chamber
reality. “They’ve confused space and time for measurement purposes.
Does this tell us something?”
“Relatively little,” comments someone else - Chandra? A round of
polite laughter greets the joke, and the tension in the room eases
slightly.
“We are the Wunch,” the lobster repeats. “We come to exchange
interest. What have you got that we want?”
Faint frown lines appear on Amber’s forehead. Pierre can see her
thinking very rapidly. “We consider it impolite to ask,” she says
quietly.
Clatter of claws on underlying stone floor. Chatter of clicking
mandibles. “You accept our translation?” asks the leader.
“Are you referring to the transmission you sent us, uh, thirty
thousand trillion light-kilometers behind?” asks Amber.
The lobster bobs up and down on its legs. “True. We send.”
“We cannot integrate that network,” Amber replies blandly, and Pierre
forces himself to keep a straight face. (Not that the lobsters can
read human body language yet, but they’ll undoubtedly be recording
everything that happens here for future analysis.) “They come from a
radically different species. Our goal in coming here is to connect our
species to the network. We wish to exchange advantageous information
with many other species.”
Concern, alarm, agitation. “You cannot do that! You are not
untranslatable entity signifier.”
Amber raises a hand. “You said untranslatable entity signifier. I did
not understand that. Can you paraphrase?”
“We, like you, are not untranslatable entity signifier. The network is
for untranslatable entity signifier. We are to the untranslatable
concept #1 as a single-celled organism is to ourselves. You and we
cannot untranslatable concept #2. To attempt trade with untranslatable
entity
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