Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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scanty waste photons from reversible computation. Now the room is
empty.
“Since I became curator here, I’ve turned the museum’s structural
supports into a dedicated high-density memory store. One of the fringe
benefits of a supervisory post, of course. I have about a billion
avabits of capacity, enough to archive the combined sensory bandwidth
and memories of the entire population of twentieth-century Earth - if
that was what interested me.”
Slowly the walls and ceiling are coming to life, brightening,
providing a dizzyingly vibrant view of dawn over the rim wall of
Meteor Crater, Arizona - or maybe it’s downtown Baghdad.
“Once I realized how my mother had squandered the family fortune, I
spent some time looking for a solution to the problem,” Sirhan
continues. “And it struck me, then, that there’s only one commodity
that is going to appreciate in value as time continues:
reversibility.”
“Reversibility? That doesn’t make much sense.” Pierre shakes his head.
He still feels slightly dizzy from his decanting. He’s only been awake
an hour or so and is still getting used to the vagaries of a universe
that doesn’t bend its rules to fit his whim of iron - that, and
worrying about Amber, of whom there is no sign in the hall of growing
bodies. “Excuse me, please, but do you know where Amber is?”
“Hiding, probably,” Sirhan says, without rancor. “Her mother’s about,”
he adds. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know what you know about us.” Pierre looks at him askance:
“We were aboard the Field Circus for a long time.”
“Oh, don’t worry on my behalf. I know you’re not the same people who
stayed behind to contribute to the Ring Imperium’s collapse,” Sirhan
says dismissively, while Pierre hastily spawns a couple of ghosts to
search for the history he’s alluding to. What they discover shocks him
to the core as they integrate with his conscious narrative.
“We didn’t know about any of that!” Pierre crosses his arms
defensively. “Not about you, or your father either,” he adds quietly.
“Or my other … life.” Shocked: Did I kill myself? Why would I do a
thing like that? Nor can he imagine what Amber might see in an
introverted cleric like Sadeq; not that he wants to.
“I’m sure this must come as a big shock to you,” Sirhan says
condescendingly, “but it’s all to do with what I was talking about.
Reversibility. What does it mean to you, in your precious context? You
are, if you like, an opportunity to reverse whatever ill fortune made
your primary instance autodarwinate himself. He destroyed all the
backups he could get his ghosts to ferret out, you know. Only a
light-year delay line and the fact that as a running instance you’re
technically a different person saved you. And now, you’re alive, and
he’s dead - and whatever made him kill himself doesn’t apply to you.
Think of it as natural selection among different versions of yourself.
The fittest version of you survives.”
He points at the wall of the crater. A tree diagram begins to grow
from the bottom left corner of the wall, recurving and recomplicating
as it climbs toward the top right, zooming and fracturing into
taxonomic fault lines. “Life on Earth, the family tree, what
paleontology has been able to deduce of it for us,” he says pompously.
“The vertebrates begin there” - a point three quarters of the way up
the tree - “and we’ve got an average of a hundred fossil samples per
megayear from then on. Most of them collected in the past two decades,
as exhaustive mapping of the Earth’s crust and upper mantle at the
micrometer level has become practical. What a waste.”
“That’s” - Pierre does a quick sum - “fifty thousand different
species? Is there a problem?”
“Yes!” Sirhan says vehemently, no longer aloof or distant. He
struggles visibly to get himself under control. “At the beginning of
the twentieth century, there were roughly two million species of
vertebrate and an estimated thirty or so million species of
multicellular organisms - it’s hard to apply the same statistical
treatment to prokaryotes, but doubtless there were huge numbers of
them, too. The average life span of a species is about five megayears.
It used to be thought to be about one, but that’s a very
vertebrate-oriented estimate - many insect species are stable over
deep time. Anyway, we have a total sample, from all of history, of
only fifty thousand known prehistoric species - out of a population of
thirty million, turning over every five million years. That is, we
know of only one in a million life-forms, of those that ever existed
on Earth. And the situation with human history is even worse.”
“Aha! So you’re after memoriesy yes? What really happened when we
colonized Barney. Who released Oscar’s toads in the free-fall core of
the Ernst Sanger, that sort of thing?”
“Not exactly.” Sirhan looks pained, as if being forced to spell it out
devalues the significance of his insight. “I’m after history. All of
it. I intend to corner the history futures market. But I need my
grandfather’s help - and you’re here to help me get it.”
*
Over the course of the day, various refugees from the Field Circus
hatch from their tanks and blink in the ringlight, stranded creatures
from an earlier age. The inner system is a vague blur from this
distance, a swollen red cloud masking the sun that rides high above
the horizon. However, the great restructuring is still visible to the
naked eye - here, in the shape of the rings, which show a disturbingly
organized fractal structure as they whirl in orbit overhead. Sirhan
(or whoever is paying for this celebration of family flesh) has
provided for their physical needs: food, water, clothes, housing and
bandwidth, they’re all copiously available. A small town of bubble
homes grows on the grassy knoll adjacent to the museum, utility
foglets condensing in a variety of shapes and styles.
Sirhan isn’t the only inhabitant of the festival city, but the others
keep themselves to themselves. Only bourgeois isolationists and
reclusive weirdoes would want to live out here right now, with whole
light-minutes between themselves and the rest of civilization. The
network of lily-pad habitats isn’t yet ready for the Saturnalian
immigration wave that will break upon this alien shore when it’s time
for the Worlds’ Fair, a decade or more in the future. Amber’s flying
circus has driven the native recluses underground, in some cases
literally: Sirhan’s neighbor, Vinca Kovic, after complaining bitterly
about the bustle and noise (“Forty immigrants! An outrage!”), has
wrapped himself in an environment pod and is estivating at the end of
a spidersilk cable a kilometer beneath the space-frame underpinnings
of the city.
But that isn’t going to stop Sirhan from organizing a reception for
the visitors. He’s moved his magnificent dining table outside, along
with the Argentinosaurus skeleton. In fact, he’s built a dining room
within the dinosaur’s rib cage. Not that he’s planning on showing his
full hand, but it’ll be interesting to see how his guests respond. And
maybe it’ll flush out the mystery benefactor who’s been paying for all
these meatbodies.
Sirhan’s agents politely invite his visitors to the party as the
second sunset in this day cycle gently darkens the sky to violet. He
discusses his plans with Pamela via antique voice-only phone as his
silent valet dresses him with inhuman grace and efficiency. “I’m sure
they’ll listen when the situation is made clear to them,” he says. “If
not, well, they’ll soon find out what it means to be paupers under
Economics 2.0. No access to multiplicity, no willpower, to be limited
to purely spacelike resources, at the mercy of predatory borganisms
and metareligions - it’s no picnic out there!”
“You don’t have the resources to set this up on your own,” his
grandmother points out in dry, didactic tones. “If this was the old
economy, you could draw on the infrastructure of banks, insurers, and
other risk management mechanisms -”
“There’s no risk to this venture, in purely human terms,” Sirhan
insists. “The only risk is starting it up with such a limited
reserve.”
“You win some, you lose some,” Pamela points out. “Let me see you.”
With a sigh, Sirhan waves at a frozen camera; it blinks, surprised.
“Hey, you look good! Every inch the traditional family entrepreneur.
I’m proud of you, darling.”
Blinking back an unaccustomed tear of pride, Sirhan nods. “I’ll see
you in a few minutes,” he says, and cuts the call. To the nearest
valet: “Bring my carriage, now.”
A rippling cloud of utility foglets, constantly connecting and
disconnecting in the hazy outline of a 1910-vintage Rolls Royce Silver
Ghost, bears Sirhan silently away from his wing of the museum. It
drives him out onto the sunset path around the building, over to the
sunken amphitheatre, where the mounted skeleton of the Argentinosaurus
stands like a half-melted columnar sculpture beneath the
orange-and-silver ringlight. A small crowd of people are already
present, some dressed casually and some attired in the formal garb of
earlier decades. Most of them are passengers or crew recently decanted
from the starwhisp, but a handful are wary-eyed hermits, their body
language defensive and their persons the focus of a constant orbital
hum of security bees. Sirhan dismounts from his silvery car and magics
it into dissolution, a haze of foglets dispersing on the breeze.
“Welcome to my abode,” he says, bowing gravely to a ring of interested
faces. “My name is Sirhan al-Khurasani, and I am the prime contractor
in charge of this small corner of the temporary Saturn terraforming
project. As some of you probably know, I am related by blood and
design to your former captain, Amber Macx. I’d like to offer you the
comforts of my home while you acclimatize yourselves to the changed
circumstances prevailing in the system at large and work out where you
want to go next.”
He walks toward the front of the U-shaped table of solidified air that
floats beneath the dead dinosaur’s rib cage, slowly turns to take in
faces, and blinks down captions to remind him who’s who in this
gathering. He frowns slightly; there’s no sign of his mother. But that
wiry fellow, with the beard - surely that can’t be - “Father?” he
asks.
Sadeq blinks owlishly. “Have we met?”
“Possibly not.” Sirhan can feel his head spinning, because although
Sadeq looks like a younger version of his father, there’s something
wrong - some essential disconnect: the politely solicitous expression,
the complete lack of engagement, the absence of paternal involvement.
This Sadeq has never held the infant Sirhan in the control core of the
Ring’s axial cylinder, never pointed out the spiral storm raking vast
Jupiter’s face and told him stories of djinni and marvels to make a
boy’s hair stand on end. “I won’t hold it against you, I promise,” he
blurts.
Sadeq raises an eyebrow but passes no comment, leaving Sirhan at the
center of an uncomfortable silence. “Well then,” he says hastily. “If
you would like to help yourselves to food and drink, there’ll be
plenty of time to talk later.” Sirhan doesn’t believe in forking
ghosts simply to interact with other people - the possibilities for
confusion are embarrassing - but he’s going to be busy working the
party.
He glances round. Here’s a bald, aggressive-looking fellow,
beetle-browed, wearing what looks like a pair of cutoffs and a top
made by deconstructing a space suit. Who’s he? (Sirhan’s agents hint:
“Boris Denisovitch.” But what does that mean?) There’s an
amused-looking older woman, a beady-eyed camera painted in the violent
colors of a bird of paradise riding her shoulder. Behind her a younger
woman, dressed head to
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