Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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is chilly and smells slightly of ammonia, although that might be his
imagination at work - there’s little chance of any gas exchange taking
place across the transparent pressure wall of the flying city. He
feels as if he could reach out and touch the swirling vaporscape.
There’s nobody else around, this close to the edge - it’s an icy
sensation to look out across the roiling depths, at an ocean of gas so
cold human flesh would freeze within seconds of exposure, knowing that
there’s nothing solid out there for tens of thousands of kilometers.
The sense of isolation is aggravated by the paucity of bandwidth, this
far out of the system. Most people huddle close to the hub, for
comfort and warmth and low latency: posthumans are gregarious.
Beneath Sirhan’s feet, the lily-pad city is extending itself, mumbling
and churning in endless self-similar loops like a cubist blastoma
growing in the upper atmosphere of Saturn. Great ducts suck in methane
and other atmospheric gases, apply energy, polymerize and diamondize,
and crack off hydrogen to fill the lift cells high above. Beyond the
sapphire dome of the city’s gasbag, an azure star glares with the
speckle of laser light; humanity’s first - and so far, last -
starship, braking into orbit on the last shredded remnant of its light
sail.
He’s wondering maliciously how his mother will react to discovering
her bankruptcy when the light above him flickers. Something gray and
unpleasant splatters against the curve of nearly invisible wall in
front of him, leaving a smear. He takes a step back and looks up
angrily. “Fuck you!” he yells. Raucous cooing laughter follows him
away from the boundary, feral pigeon voices mocking. “I mean it,” he
warns, flicking a gesture at the air above his head. Wings scatter in
a burst of thunder as a slab of wind solidifies, thistledown-shaped
nanomachines suspended on the breeze locking edge to edge to form an
umbrella over his head. He walks away from the perimeter, fuming,
leaving the pigeons to look for another victim.
Annoyed, Sirhan finds a grassy knoll a couple of hundred meters from
the rim and around the curve of the lily-pad from the museum
buildings. It’s far enough from other humans that he can sit
undisturbed with his thoughts, far enough out to see over the edge
without being toilet-bombed by flocking flying rats. (The flying city,
despite being the product of an advanced technology almost
unimaginable two decades before, is full of bugs - software complexity
and scaling laws ensured that the preceding decades of change acted as
a kind of cosmological inflationary period for design glitches, and an
infestation of passenger pigeons is by no means the most inexplicable
problem this biosphere harbors.)
In an attempt to shut the more unwelcome manifestations of cybernature
out, he sits under the shade of an apple tree and marshals his worlds
around him. “When is my grandmother arriving?” he asks one of them,
speaking into an antique telephone in the world of servants, where
everything is obedient and knows its place. The city humors him, for
its own reasons.
“She is still containerized, but aerobraking is nearly over. Her body
will be arriving downwell in less than two megaseconds.” The city’s
avatar in this machinima is a discreet Victorian butler, stony-faced
and respectful. Sirhan eschews intrusive memory interfaces; for an
eighteen-year-old, he’s conservative to the point of affectation,
favoring voice commands and anthropomorphic agents over the invisible
splicing of virtual neural nets.
“You’re certain she’s transferred successfully?” Sirhan asks
anxiously. He heard a lot about his grandmama when he was young, very
little of it complimentary. Nevertheless, the old bat must be a lot
more flexible than his mother ever gave her credit for, to be
subjecting herself to this kind of treatment for the first time at her
current age.
“I’m as certain as I can be, young master, for anyone who insists on
sticking to their original phenotype without benefit of off-line
backup or medical implants. I regret that omniscience is not within my
remit. Would you like me to make further specific inquiries?”
“No.” Sirhan peers up at the bright flare of laser light, visible even
through the soap-bubble membrane that holds in the breathable gas mix,
and the trillions of liters of hot hydrogen in the canopy above it.
“As long as you’re sure she’ll arrive before the ship?” Tuning his
eyes to ultraviolet, he watches the emission spikes, sees the slow
strobing of the low-bandwidth AM modulation that’s all the starship
can manage by way of downlink communication until it comes within
range of the system manifold. It’s sending the same tiresomely
repetitive question about why it’s being redirected to Saturn that
it’s been putting out for the past week, querying the refusal to
supply terawatts of propulsion energy on credit.
“Unless there’s a spike in their power beam, you can be certain of
that,” City replies reassuringly. “And you can be certain also that
your grandmother will revive comfortably.”
“One may hope so.” To undertake the interplanetary voyage in corporeal
person, at her age, without any upgrades or augmentation, must take
courage, he decides. “When she wakes up, if I’m not around, ask her
for an interview slot on my behalf. For the archives, of course.”
“It will be my pleasure.” City bobs his head politely.
“That will be all,” Sirhan says dismissively, and the window into
servantspace closes. Then he looks back up at the pinprick of glaring
blue laser light near the zenith. Tough luck, Mom, he subvocalizes for
his journal cache. Most of his attention is forked at present, focused
on the rich historical windfall from the depths of the singularity
that is coming his way, in the form of the thirty-year-old starwhisp’s
Cartesian theatre. But he can still spare some schadenfreude for the
family fortunes. All your assets belong to me, now. He smiles,
inwardly. I’ll just have to make sure they’re put to a sensible use
this time.
*
“I don’t see why they’re diverting us toward Saturn. It’s not as if
they can possibly have dismantled Jupiter already, is it?” asks
Pierre, rolling the chilled beer bottle thoughtfully between fingers
and thumb.
“Why not you ask Amber?” replies the velociraptor squatting beside the
log table. (Boris’s Ukrainian accent is unimpeded by the
dromaeosaurid’s larynx; in point of fact, it’s an affectation, one he
could easily fix by sideloading an English pronunciation patch if he
wanted to.)
“Well.” Pierre shakes his head. “She’s spending all her time with that
Slug, no multiplicity access, privacy ackles locked right down. I
could get jealous.” His voice doesn’t suggest any deep concern.
“What’s to get jealous about? Just ask to fork instance to talk to
you, make love, show boyfriend good time, whatever.”
“Hah!” Pierre chuckles grimly, then drains the last drops from the
bottle into his mouth. He throws it away in the direction of a clump
of cycads, then snaps his fingers; another one appears in its place.
“Are two megaseconds out from Saturn in any case,” Boris points out,
then pauses to sharpen his inch-long incisors on one end of the table.
Fangs crunch through timber like wet cardboard. “Grrrrn. Am seeing
most peculiar emission spectra from inner solar system. Foggy flying
down bottom of gravity well. Am wondering, does ensmartening of dumb
matter extend past Jovian orbit now?”
“Hmm.” Pierre takes a swig from the bottle and puts it down. “That
might explain the diversion. But why haven’t they powered up the
lasers on the Ring for us? You missed that, too.” For reasons unknown,
the huge battery of launch lasers had shut down, some millions of
seconds after the crew of the Field Circus had entered the router,
leaving it adrift in the cold darkness.
“Don’t know why are not talking.” Boris shrugged. “At least are still
alive there, as can tell from the ‘set course for Saturn, following
thus-and-such orbital elements’ bit. Someone is paying attention. Am
telling you from beginning, though, turning entire solar system into
computronium is real bad idea, long-term. Who knows how far has gone
already?”
“Hmm, again.” Pierre draws a circle in the air. “Aineko,” he calls,
“are you listening?”
“Don’t bug me.” A faint green smile appears in the circle, just the
suggestion of fangs and needle-sharp whiskers. “I had an idea I was
sleeping furiously.”
Boris rolls one turreted eye and drools on the tabletop. “Munch
munch,” he growls, allowing his saurian body-brain to put in a word.
“What do you need to sleep for? This is a fucking sim, in case you
hadn’t noticed.”
“I enjoy sleeping,” replies the cat, irritably lashing its
just-now-becoming-visible tail. “What do you want? Fleas?”
“No thanks,” Pierre says hastily. Last time he called Aineko’s bluff
the cat had filled three entire pocket universes with scurrying gray
mice. One of the disadvantages of flying aboard a starship the size of
a baked bean can full of smart matter was the risk that some of the
passengers could get rather too creative with the reality control
system. This Cretaceous kaffee klatsch was just Boris’s entertainment
partition; compared to some of the other simulation spaces aboard the
Field Circus, it was downright conservative. “Look, do you have any
updates on what’s going on downwell? We’re only twenty objective days
out from orbital insertion, and there’s so little to see -”
“They’re not sending us power.” Aineko materializes fully now, a large
orange-and-white cat with a swirl of brown fur in the shape on an
@-symbol covering her ribs. For whatever reason, she plants herself on
the table tauntingly close to Boris’s velociraptor body’s nose. “No
propulsion laser means insufficient bandwidth. They’re talking in
Latin-1 text at 1200 baud, if you care to know.” (Which is an insult,
given the ship’s multi-avabit storage capacity - one avabit is
Avogadro’s number of bits; about 1023 bytes, several billion times the
size of the Internet in 2001 - and outrageous communications
bandwidth.) “Amber says, come and see her now. Audience chamber.
Informal, of course. I think she wants to discuss it.”
“Informal? Am all right without change bodies?”
The cat sniffs. “I’m wearing a real fur coat,” it declares haughtily,
“but no knickers.” Then blinks out a fraction of a second ahead of the
snicker-snack of Bandersnatch-like jaws.
“Come on,” says Pierre, standing up. “Time to see what Her Majesty
wants with us today.”
*
Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the
phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally
becoming visible on a cosmological scale.
There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various
states of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of
them cluster where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in
the water zone around old Earth. Earth’s biosphere has been in the
intensive care ward for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning
replicators erupting across it before the World Health Organization
can fix them - gray goo, thylacines, dragons. The last great
transglobal trade empire, run from the arcologies of Hong Kong, has
collapsed along with capitalism, rendered obsolete by a bunch of
superior deterministic resource allocation algorithms collectively
known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well
on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy
stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster so
thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red
ball of wool the size of a young red giant.
Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian
evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use
converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient
in smarts. Now the brightly burning beacon of sapience isn’t held
by
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