Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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simply not suited to life in the interstellar void, especially in
orbit around a brown dwarf whose planets make Pluto seem like a
tropical paradise, they’ve taken over the whole damn system.
New Japan is one of the newer human polities in this system, a
bunch of nodes physically collocated in the humaniformed spaces of
the colony cylinders. Its designers evidently only knew about old
Nippon from recordings made back before Earth was dismantled, and
worked from a combination of nostalgia-trip videos, Miyazaki
movies, and anime culture. Nevertheless, it’s the home of numerous
human beings - even if they are about as similar to their
historical antecedents as New Japan is to its long-gone namesake.
Humanity?
Their grandparents would recognize them, mostly. The ones who are
truly beyond the ken of twentieth-century survivors stayed back
home in the red-hot clouds of nanocomputers that have replaced the
planets that once orbited Earth’s sun in stately Copernican
harmony. The fast-thinking Matrioshka brains are as
incomprehensible to their merely posthuman ancestors as an ICBM to
an amoeba - and about as inhabitable. Space is dusted with the
corpses of Matrioshka brains that have long since burned out,
informational collapse taking down entire civilizations that stayed
in close orbit around their home stars. Farther away, galaxy-sized
intelligences beat incomprehensible rhythms against the darkness of
the vacuum, trying to hack the Planck substrate into doing their
bidding. Posthumans, and the few other semitranscended species to
have discovered the router network, live furtively in the darkness
between these islands of brilliance. There are, it would seem,
advantages to not being too intelligent.
Humanity. Monadic intelligences, mostly trapped within their own
skulls, living in small family groups within larger tribal
networks, adaptable to territorial or migratory lifestyles. Those
were the options on offer before the great acceleration. Now that
dumb matter thinks, with every kilogram of wallpaper potentially
hosting hundreds of uploaded ancestors, now that every door is
potentially a wormhole to a hab half a parsec away, the humans can
stay in the same place while the landscape migrates and mutates
past them, streaming into the luxurious void of their personal
history. Life is rich here, endlessly varied and sometimes
confusing. So it is that tribal groups remain, their associations
mediated across teraklicks and gigaseconds by exotic agencies. And
sometimes the agencies will vanish for a while, reappearing later
like an unexpected jape upon the infinite.
*
Ancestor worship takes on a whole new meaning when the state vectors
of all the filial entities’ precursors are archived and indexed for
recall. At just the moment that the tiny capillaries in Rita’s face
are constricting in response to a surge of adrenaline, causing her to
turn pale and her pupils to dilate as she focuses on the
pussycat-thing, Sirhan is kneeling before a small shrine, lighting a
stick of incense, and preparing to respectfully address his
grandfather’s ghost.
The ritual is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. Sirhan can speak to his
grandfather’s ghost wherever and whenever he wants, without any
formality, and the ghost will reply at interminable length, cracking
puns in dead languages and asking about people who died before the
temple of history was established. But Sirhan is a sucker for rituals,
and anyway, it helps him structure an otherwise-stressful encounter.
If it were up to Sirhan, he’d probably skip chatting to grandfather
every ten megaseconds. Sirhan’s mother and her partner aren’t
available, having opted to join one of the long-distance exploration
missions through the router network that were launched by the
accelerationistas long ago; and Rita’s antecedents are either fully
virtualized or dead. They are a family with a tenuous grip on history.
But both of them spent a long time in the same state of half-life in
which Manfred currently exists, and he knows his wife will take him to
task if he doesn’t bring the revered ancestor up to date on what’s
been happening in the real world while he’s been dead. In Manfred’s
case, death is not only potentially reversible, but almost inevitably
so. After all, they’re raising his clone. Sooner or later, the kid is
going to want to visit the original, or vice versa.
What a state we have come to, when the restless dead refuse to stay a
part of history? He wonders ironically as he scratches the
self-igniter strip on the red incense stick and bows to the mirror at
the back of the shrine. “Your respectful grandson awaits and expects
your guidance,” he intones formally - for in addition to being
conservative by nature, Sirhan is acutely aware of his family’s
relative poverty and the need to augment their social credit, and in
this reincarnation-intermediated traditionalist polity for the
hopelessly orthohuman, you can score credit for formality. He sits
back on his heels to await the response.
Manfred doesn’t take long to appear in the depths of the mirror. He
takes the shape of an albino orangutan, as usual: He was messing
around with Great Aunt Annette’s ontological wardrobe right before
this copy of him was recorded and placed in the temple - they might
have separated, but they remained close. “Hi, lad. What year is it?”
Sirhan suppresses a sigh. “We don’t do years anymore,” he explains,
not for the first time. Every time he consults his grandfather, the
new instance asks this question sooner or later. “Years are an
archaism. It’s been ten megs since we last spoke - about four months,
if you’re going to be pedantic about it, and a hundred and eighty
years since we emigrated. Although correcting for general relativity
adds another decade or so.”
“Oh. Is that all?” Manfred manages to look disappointed. This is a new
one on Sirhan: Usually the diverging state vector of Gramps’s ghost
asks after Amber or cracks a feeble joke at this point. “No changes in
the Hubble constant, or the rate of stellar formation? Have we heard
from any of the exploration eigenselves yet?”
“Nope.” Sirhan relaxes slightly. So Manfred is going to ask about the
fool’s errand to the edge of the Beckenstein limit again, is he?
That’s canned conversation number twenty-nine. (Amber and the other
explorers who set out for the really long exploration mission shortly
after the first colony was settled aren’t due back for, oh, about 1019
seconds. It’s a long way to the edge of the observable universe, even
when you can go the first several hundred million light-years - to the
B�otes supercluster and beyond - via a small-world network of
wormholes. And this time, she didn’t leave any copies of herself
behind.)
Sirhan - either in this or some other incarnation - has had this talk
with Manfred many times before, because that’s the essence of the
dead. They don’t remember from one recall session to the next, unless
and until they ask to be resurrected because their restoration
criteria have been matched. Manfred has been dead a long time, long
enough for Sirhan and Rita to be resurrected and live a long family
life three or four times over after they had spent a century or so in
nonexistence. “We’ve received no notices from the lobsters, nothing
from Aineko either.” He takes a deep breath. “You always ask me where
we are next, so I’ve got a canned response for you -” and one of his
agents throws the package, tagged as a scroll sealed with red wax and
a silk ribbon, through the surface of the mirror. (After the tenth
repetition Rita and Sirhan agreed to write a basic briefing that the
Manfred-ghosts could use to orient themselves.)
Manfred is silent for a moment - probably hours in ghost-space - as he
assimilates the changes. Then: “This is true? I’ve slept through a
whole civilization?”
“Not slept, you’ve been dead,” Sirhan says pedantically. He realizes
he’s being a bit harsh: “Actually, so did we,” he adds. “We surfed the
first three gigasecs or so because we wanted to start a family
somewhere where our children could grow up the traditional way. Habs
with an oxidation-intensive triple-point water environment didn’t get
built until sometime after the beginning of the exile. That’s when the
fad for neomorphism got entrenched,” he adds with distaste. For quite
a while the neos resisted the idea of wasting resources building
colony cylinders spinning to provide vertebrate-friendly gee forces
and breathable oxygen-rich atmospheres - it had been quite a political
football. But the increasing curve of wealth production had allowed
the orthodox to reincarnate from death-sleep after a few decades, once
the fundamental headaches of building settlements in chilly orbits
around metal-deficient brown dwarfs were overcome.
“Uh.” Manfred takes a deep breath, then scratches himself under one
armpit, rubbery lips puckering. “So, let me get this straight: We -
you, they, whoever - hit the router at Hyundai +4904/[-56], replicated
a load of them, and now use the wormhole mechanism the routers rely on
as point-to-point gates for physical transport? And have spread
throughout a bunch of brown dwarf systems, and built a pure deep-space
polity based on big cylinder habitats connected by teleport gates
hacked out of routers?”
“Would you trust one of the original routers for switched data
communications?” Sirhan asks rhetorically. “Even with the source code?
They’ve been corrupted by all the dead alien Matrioshka civilizations
they’ve come into contact with, but they’re reasonably safe if all you
want to use them for is to cannibalize them for wormholes and tunnel
dumb mass from point to point.” He searches for a metaphor: “Like
using your, uh, internet, to emulate a nineteenth-century postal
service.”
“O-kay.” Manfred looks thoughtful, as he usually does at this point in
the conversation - which means Sirhan is going to have to break it to
him that his first thoughts for how to utilize the gates have already
been done. They’re hopelessly old hat. In fact, the main reason why
Manfred is still dead is that things have moved on so far that, sooner
or later, whenever he surfaces for a chat, he gets frustrated and
elects not to be reincarnated. Not that Sirhan is about to tell him
that he’s obsolete - that would be rude, not to say subtly inaccurate.
“That raises some interesting possibilities. I wonder, has anyone -”
“Sirhan, I need you!”
The crystal chill of Rita’s alarm and fear cuts through Sirhan’s
awareness like a scalpel, distracting him from the ghost of his
ancestor. He blinks, instantly transferring the full focus of his
attention to Rita without sparing Manfred even a ghost.
“What’s happening -”
He sees through Rita’s eyes: a cat with an orange-and-brown swirl on
its flank sits purring beside Manni in the family room of their
dwelling. Its eyes are narrowed as it watches her with unnatural
wisdom. Manni is running fingers through its fur and seems none the
worse for wear, but Sirhan still feels his fists clench.
“What -”
“Excuse me,” he says, standing up: “Got to go. Your bloody cat’s
turned up.” He adds “coming home now” for Rita’s benefit, then turns
and hurries out of the temple concourse. When he reaches the main
hall, he pauses, then Rita’s sense of urgency returns to him, and he
throws parsimony to the wind, stepping into a priority gate in order
to get home as fast as possible.
Behind him, Manfred’s melancholy ghost snorts, mildly offended, and
considers the existential choice: to be, or not to be. Then he makes a
decision.
*
Welcome to the twenty-third century, or the twenty-fourth. Or maybe
it’s the twenty-second, jet-lagged and dazed by spurious suspended
animation and relativistic travel; it hardly matters these days.
What’s left of recognizable humanity has scattered across a hundred
light-years, living in hollowed-out asteroids and cylindrical
spinning habitats strung in orbit around cold brown
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