Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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“Your grandfather?” asks City: “Isn’t he dead?”
Sirhan looks over the balcony, at the blood-seeping corpse of the
intruder. “Not according to his second wife’s latest incarnation.”
*
Funding the family reunion isn’t going to be a problem, as Amber
discovers when she receives an offer of reincarnation good for all the
passengers and crew of the Field Circus.
She isn’t sure quite where the money is coming from. Presumably it’s
some creaky financial engine designed by Dad, stirring from its
bear-market bunker for the first time in decades to suck dusty
syndication feeds and liquidate long-term assets held against her
return. She’s duly grateful - even fervently so - for the details of
her own impecunious position grow more depressing the more she learns
about them. Her sole asset is the Field Circus, a
thirty-years-obsolete starwhisp massing less than twenty kilograms
including what’s left of its tattered sail, along with its cargo of
uploaded passengers and crew. Without the farsighted trust fund that
has suddenly chugged into life, she’d be stranded in the realm of
ever-circling leptons. But now the fund has sent her its offer of
incarnation, she’s got a dilemma. Because one of the Field Circus’s
passengers has never actually had a meatspace body …
Amber finds the Slug browsing quietly in a transparent space filled
with lazily waving branches that resemble violet coral fans. They’re a
ghost-memory of alien life, an order of thermophilic quasi fungi with
hyphae ridged in actin/myosin analogues, muscular and slippery filter
feeders that eat airborne unicellular organisms. The Slug itself is
about two meters long and has a lacy white exoskeleton of curves and
arcs that don’t repeat, disturbingly similar to a Penrose tiling.
Chocolate brown organs pulse slowly under the skeleton. The ground
underfoot is dry but feels swampy.
Actually, the Slug is a surgical disguise. Both it and the
quasi-fungal ecosystem have been extinct for millions of years,
existing only as cheap stage props in an interstellar medicine show
run by rogue financial instruments. The Slug itself is one such
self-aware scam, probably a pyramid scheme or even an entire
compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to hide from
its creditors by masquerading as a life-form. But there’s a problem
with incarnating itself down in Sirhan’s habitat - the ecosystem it
evolved for is a cool Venusiform, thirty atmospheres of saturated
steam baked under a sky the color of hot lead streaked with yellow
sulphuric acid clouds. The ground is mushy because it’s melting, not
because it’s damp.
“You’re going to have to pick another somatotype,” Amber explains,
laboriously rolling her interface around the red-hot coral reef like a
giant soap bubble. The environmental interface is transparent and
infinitely thin, a discontinuity in the physics model of the
simulation space, mapping signals between the human-friendly
environment on one side and the crushing, roasting hell on the other.
“This one is simply not compatible with any of the supported
environments where we’re going.”
“I am not understanding. Surely I can integrate with the available
worlds of our destination?”
“Uh, things don’t work that way outside cyberspace.” Suddenly Amber is
at a bit of a loss. “The physics model could be supported, but the
energy input to do so would be prohibitive, and you would not be able
to interact as easily with other physics models as we can now.” She
forks a ghost, demonstrates a transient other-Amber in a refrigerated
tank rolling across the Slug’s backyard, crushing coral and hissing
and clanking noisily. “You’d be like this.”
“Your reality is badly constructed, then,” the Slug points out.
“It’s not constructed at all, it just evolved, randomly.” Amber
shrugs. “We can’t exercise the same level of control over the
underlying embedded context that we can over this one. I can’t simply
magic you an interface that will let you bathe in steam at three
hundred degrees.”
“Why not?” asks the Slug. Translation wetware adds a nasty, sharp
rising whine to the question, turning it into a demand.
“It’s a privilege violation,” Amber tries to explain. “The reality
we’re about to enter is, uh, provably consistent. It has to be,
because it’s consistent and stable, and if we could create new local
domains with different rules, they might propagate uncontrollably.
It’s not a good idea, believe me. Do you want to come with us or not?”
“I have no alternative,” the Slug says, slightly sulkily. “But do you
have a body I can use?”
“I think -” Amber stops, suddenly. She snaps her fingers. “Hey, cat!”
A Cheshire grin ripples into view, masked into the domain wall between
the two embedded realities. “Hey, human.”
“Whoa!” Amber takes a backward step from the apparition. “Our friend
here’s got a problem, no suitable downloadable body. Us meat puppets
are all too closely tied to our neural ultrastructure, but you’ve got
a shitload of programmable gate arrays. Can we borrow some?”
“You can do better than that.” Aineko yawns, gathering substance by
the moment. The Slug is rearing up and backing away like an alarmed
sausage: Whatever it perceives in the membrane seems to frighten it.
“I’ve been designing myself a new body. I figured it was time to
change my style for a while. Your corporate scam artist here can
borrow my old template until something better comes up. How’s that?”
“Did you hear that?” Amber asks the Slug. “Aineko is kindly offering
to donate her body to you. Will that do?” Without waiting, she winks
at her cat and taps her heels together, fading out with a whisper and
a smile: “See you on the other side …”
*
It takes several minutes for the Field Circus’s antique transceiver to
download the dozens of avabits occupied by the frozen state vectors of
each of the people running in its simulation engines. Tucked away with
most of them is a resource bundle consisting of their entire sequenced
genome, a bunch of phenotypic and proteome hint markers, and a wish
list of upgrades. Between the gene maps and the hints, there’s enough
data to extrapolate a meat machine. So the festival city’s body shop
goes to work turning out hacked stem cells and fabbing up incubators.
It doesn’t take very long to reincarnate a starshipful of
relativity-lagged humans these days. First, City carves out skeletons
for them (politely ignoring a crudely phrased request to cease and
desist from Pamela, on the grounds that she has no power of attorney),
then squirts osteoclasts into the spongy ersatz bone. They look like
ordinary human stem cells at a distance, but instead of nuclei they
have primitive pinpricks of computronium, blobs of smart matter so
small they’re as dumb as an ancient Pentium, reading a control tape
that is nevertheless better structured than anything Mother Nature
evolved. These heavily optimized fake stem cells - biological robots
in all but name - spawn like cancer, ejecting short-lived anucleated
secondary cells. Then City infuses each mess of quasi-cancerous tissue
with a metric shitload of carrier capsids, which deliver the real
cellular control mechanisms to their target bodies. Within a
megasecond, the almost random churning of the construction ‘bots gives
way to a more controlled process as nanoscale CPUs are replaced by
ordinary nuclei and eject themselves from their host cells, bailing
out via the half-formed renal system - except for those in the central
nervous system, which have a final job to do. Eleven days after the
invitation, the first passengers are being edited into the pattern of
synaptic junctions inside the newly minted skulls.
(This whole process is tediously slow and laughably obsolescent
technology by the standards of the fast-moving core. Down there,
they’d just set up a wake shield in orbit, chill it down to a
fractional Kelvin, whack two coherent matter beams together, teleport
some state information into place, and yank the suddenly materialized
meatbody in through an airlock before it has time to asphyxiate. But
then again, down in the hot space, they don’t have much room for flesh
anymore …)
Sirhan doesn’t pay much attention to the pseudocancers fermenting and
churning in the row of tanks that lines the Gallery of the Human Body
in the Bush wing of the museum. Newly formed, slowly unskeletonizing
corpses - like a time-lapse process of decay with a finger angrily
twisting the dial into high-speed reverse - is both distasteful and
aesthetically displeasing to watch. Nor do the bodies tell him
anything about their occupants. This sort of stuff is just a necessary
prequel to the main event, a formal reception and banquet to which he
has devoted the full-time attention of four ghosts.
He could, given a few less inhibitions, go Dumpster-diving in their
mental archives, but that’s one of the big taboos of the post-wetware
age. (Spy agencies went meme-profiling and memory-mining in the third
and fourth decades, gained a thought police rap sheet, and spawned a
backlash of deviant mental architectures resilient to infowar
intrusions. Now the nations that those spook institutions served no
longer exist, their very landmasses being part of the orbiting
n�osphere construction project that will ultimately turn the mass of
the entire solar system into a gigantic Matrioshka brain. And Sirhan
is left with an uneasy loyalty to the one great new taboo to be
invented since the end of the twentieth century - freedom of thought.)
So, to indulge his curiosity, he spends most of his waking fleshbody
hours with Pamela, asking her questions from time to time and mapping
the splenetic overspill of her memeome into his burgeoning family
knowledge base.
“I wasn’t always this bitter and cynical,” Pamela explains, waving her
cane in the vague direction of the cloudscape beyond the edge of the
world and fixing Sirhan with a beady stare. (He’s brought her out here
hoping that it will trigger another cascade of memories, sunsets on
honeymoon island resorts and the like, but all that seems to be coming
up is bile.) “It was the successive betrayals. Manfred was the first,
and the worst in some ways, but that little bitch Amber hurt me more,
if anything. If you ever have children, be careful to hold something
back for yourself; because if you don’t, when they throw it all in
your face, you’ll feel like dying. And when they’re gone, you’ve got
no way of patching things up.”
“Is dying inevitable?” asks Sirhan, knowing damn well that it isn’t,
but more than happy to give her an excuse to pick at her scabbed-over
love wound: He more than half suspects she’s still in love with
Manfred. This is great family history, and he’s having the time of his
flinty-hearted life leading her up to the threshold of the reunion
he’s hosting.
“Sometimes I think death is even more inevitable than taxes,” his
grandmother replies bleakly. “Humans don’t live in a vacuum; we’re
part of a larger pattern of life.” She stares out across the
troposphere of Saturn, where a thin rime of blown methane snow catches
the distant sunrise in a ruby-tinted fog. “The old gives way to the
new,” She sighs, and tugs at her cuffs. (Ever since the incident with
the gate crashing ape, she’s taken to wearing an antique formal
pressure suit, all clinging black spidersilk woven with flexible pipes
and silvery smart sensor nets.) “There’s a time to get out of the way
of the new, and I think I passed it sometime ago.”
“Um,” says Sirhan, who is somewhat surprised by this new angle in her
lengthy, self-justifying confession: “but what if you’re just saying
this because you feel old? If it’s just a physiological malfunction,
we could fix it and you’d -”
“No! I’ve got a feeling that life prolongation
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