Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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sunless planets that wander the interstellar void. The looted
mechanisms underlying the alien routers have been cannibalized,
simplified to a level the merely superhuman can almost comprehend,
turned into generators for paired wormhole endpoints that allow
instantaneous switched transport across vast distances. Other
mechanisms, the descendants of the advanced nanotechnologies
developed by the flowering of human techgnosis in the twenty-first
century, have made the replication of dumb matter trivial; this is
not a society accustomed to scarcity.
But in some respects, New Japan and the Invisible Empire and the
other polities of human space are poverty-stricken backwaters. They
take no part in the higher-order economies of the posthuman. They
can barely comprehend the idle muttering of the Vile Offspring,
whose mass/energy budget (derived from their complete restructuring
of the free matter of humanity’s original solar system into
computronium) dwarfs that of half a hundred human-occupied brown
dwarf systems. And they still know worryingly little about the deep
history of intelligence in this universe, about the origins of the
router network that laces so many dead civilizations into an
embrace of death and decay, about the distant galaxy-scale bursts
of information processing that lie at measurable red-shift
distances, even about the free posthumans who live among them in
some senses, collocated in the same light cone as these living
fossil relics of old-fashioned humanity.
Sirhan and Rita settled in this charming human-friendly backwater
in order to raise a family, study xenoarchaeology, and avoid the
turmoil and turbulence that have characterized his family’s history
across the last couple of generations. Life has been comfortable
for the most part, and if the stipend of an academic nucleofamilial
is not large, it is sufficient in this place and age to provide all
the necessary comforts of civilization. And this suits Sirhan (and
Rita) fine; the turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors
led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of
observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to
someone else.
Only …
Aineko is back. Aineko, who after negotiating the establishment of
the earliest of the refugee habs in orbit around Hyundai
+4904/[-56], vanished into the router network with Manfred’s other
instance - and the partial copies of Sirhan and Rita who had
forked, seeking adventure rather than cozy domesticity. Sirhan made
a devil’s bargain with Aineko, all those gigaseconds ago, and now
he is deathly afraid that Aineko is going to call the payment due.
*
Manfred walks down a hall of mirrors. At the far end, he emerges in a
public space modeled on a Menger sponge - a cube diced subtractively
into ever-smaller cubic volumes until its surface area tends toward
infinity. This being meatspace, or a reasonable simulation thereof, it
isn’t a real Menger sponge; but it looks good at a distance, going
down at least four levels.
He pauses behind a waist-high diamond barrier and looks down into the
almost-tesseract-shaped depths of the cube’s interior, at a verdant
garden landscape with charming footbridges that cross streams laid out
with careful attention to the requirements of feng shui. He looks up:
Some of the cube-shaped subtractive openings within the pseudofractal
structure are occupied by windows belonging to dwellings or shared
buildings that overlook the public space. High above, butterfly-shaped
beings with exotic colored wings circle in the ventilation currents.
It’s hard to tell from down here, but the central cuboid opening looks
to be at least half a kilometer on a side, and they might very well be
posthumans with low-gee wings - angels.
Angels, or rats in the walls? he asks himself, and sighs. Half his
extensions are off-line, so hopelessly obsolete that the temple’s
assembler systems didn’t bother replicating them, or even creating
emulation environments for them to run in. The rest … well, at least
he’s still physically orthohuman, he realizes. Fully functional, fully
male. Not everything has changed - only the important stuff. It’s a
scary-funny thought, laden with irony. Here he is, naked as the day he
was born - newly re-created, in fact, released from the
wake-experience-reset cycle of the temple of history - standing on the
threshold of a posthuman civilization so outrageously rich and
powerful that they can build mammal-friendly habitats that resemble
works of art in the cryogenic depths of space. Only he’s poor, this
whole polity is poor, and it can’t ever be anything else, in fact,
because it’s a dumping ground for merely posthuman also-rans, the
singularitarian equivalent of australopithecines. In the brave new
world of the Vile Offspring, they can’t get ahead any more than a
protohominid could hack it as a rocket scientist in Werner von Braun’s
day. They’re born to be primitive, wallowing happily in the mud-bath
of their own limited cognitive bandwidth. So they fled into the
darkness and built a civilization so bright it can put anything
earthbound that came before the singularity into the shade … and
it’s still a shanty town inhabited by the mentally handicapped.
The incongruity of it amuses him, but only for a moment. He has, after
all, electively reincarnated for a reason: Sirhan’s throwaway comment
about the cat caught his attention. “City, where can I find some
clothes?” he asks. “Something socially appropriate, that is. And some,
uh, brains. I need to be able to off-load …”
Citymind chuckles inside the back of his head, and Manfred realizes
that there’s a public assembler on the other side of the ornamental
wall he’s leaning on. “Oh,” he mutters, as he finds himself imagining
something not unlike his clunky old direct neural interface,
candy-colored icons and overlays and all. It’s curiously mutable, and
with a weird sense of detachment, he realizes that it’s not his
imagination at all, but an infinitely customizable interface to the
pervasive information spaces of the polity, currently running in
dumbed-down stupid mode for his benefit. It’s true; he needs training
wheels. But it doesn’t take him long to figure out how to ask the
assembler to make him a pair of pants and a plain black vest, and to
discover that, as long as he keeps his requests simple, the results
are free - just like back home on Saturn. The spaceborn polities are
kind to indigents, for the basic requirements of life are cheap, and
to withhold them would be tantamount to homicide. (If the presence of
transhumans has upset a whole raft of prior assumptions, at least it
hasn’t done more than superficial damage to the Golden Rule.)
Clothed and more or less conscious - at least at a human level -
Manfred takes stock. “Where do Sirhan and Rita live?” he asks. A
dotted route makes itself apparent to him, snaking improbably through
a solid wall that he understands to be an instantaneous wormhole gate
connecting points light-years apart. He shakes his head, bemused. I
suppose I’d better go and see them, he decides. It’s not as if there’s
anyone else for him to look up, is it? The Franklins vanished into the
solar Matrioshka brain, Pamela died ages ago (and there’s a shame,
he’d never expected to miss her) and Annette hooked up with Gianni
while he was being a flock of pigeons. (Draw a line under that one and
say it’s all over.) His daughter vanished into the long-range
exploration program. He’s been dead for so long that his friends and
acquaintances are scattered across a light cone centuries across. He
can’t think of anyone else here who he might run into, except for the
loyal grandson, keeping the candle of filial piety burning with
unasked-for zeal. “Maybe he needs help,” Manfred thinks aloud as he
steps into the gate, rationalizing. “And then again, maybe he can help
me figure out what to do?”
*
Sirhan gets home, anticipating trouble. He finds it, but not in any
way he’d expected. Home is a split-level manifold, rooms connected by
T-gates scattered across a variety of habitats: low-gee sleeping den,
high-gee exercise room, and everything in between. It’s furnished
simply, tatami mats and programmable matter walls able to extrude any
desired furniture in short order. The walls are configured to look and
feel like paper, but can damp out even infant tantrums. But right now,
the antisound isn’t working, and the house he comes home to is overrun
by shrieking yard apes, a blur of ginger-and-white fur, and a
distraught Rita trying to explain to her neighbor Eloise why her
orthodaughter Sam is bouncing around the place like a crazy ball.
” - The cat, he gets them worked up.” She wrings her hands and begins
to turn as Sirhan comes into view. “At last!”
“I came fast.” He nods respectfully at Eloise, then frowns. “The
children -” Something small and fast runs headfirst into him, grabs
his legs, and tries to head-butt him in the crotch. “Oof!” He bends
down and lifts Manni up. “Hey, son, haven’t I told you not to -”
“Not his fault,” Rita says hurriedly. “He’s excited because -”
“I really don’t think -” Eloise begins to gather steam, looking around
uncertainly.
“Mrreeow?” something asks in a conversational tone of voice from down
around Sirhan’s ankles.
“Eek!” Sirhan jumps backward, flailing for balance under the weight of
an excited toddler. There’s a gigantic disturbance in the polity
thoughtspace - like a stellar-mass black hole - and it appears to be
stropping itself furrily against his left leg. “What are you doing
here?” He demands.
“Oh, this and that,” says the cat, his innerspeech accent a sardonic
drawl. “I thought it was about time I visited again. Where’s your
household assembler? Mind if I use it? Got a little something I need
to make up for a friend …”
“What?” Rita demands, instantly suspicious. “Haven’t you caused enough
trouble already?” Sirhan looks at her approvingly; obviously Amber’s
long-ago warnings about the cat sank in deeply, because she’s
certainly not treating it as the small bundle of child-friendly fun it
would like to be perceived as.
“Trouble?” The cat looks up at her sardonically, lashing his tail from
side to side. “I won’t make any trouble, I promise you. It’s just -”
The door chime clears its throat, to announce a visitor: “Ren Fuller
would like to visit, m’lord and lady.”
“What’s she doing here?” Rita asks irritably. Sirhan can feel her
unease, the tenuous grasping of her ghosts as she searches for reason
in an unreasonable world, simulating outcomes, living through bad
dreams, and backtracking to adjust her responses accordingly. “Show
her in, by all means.” Ren is one of their neighbor-cognates (most of
her dwelling is several light-years away, but in terms of transit
time, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump); she and her extruded family are
raising a small herd of ill-behaved kids who occasionally hang out
with Manni.
A small blue eeyore whinnies mournfully and dashes past the adults,
pursued by a couple of children waving spears and shrieking. Eloise
makes a grab for her own and misses, just as the door to the exercise
room disappears and Manni’s little friend Lis darts inside like a
pint-sized guided missile. “Sam, come here right now -” Eloise calls,
heading toward the door.
“Look, what do you want?” Sirhan demands, hugging his son and looking
down at the cat.
“Oh, not much,” Aineko says, turning to lick a mussed patch of fur on
his flank. “I just want to play with him.”
“You want to -” Rita stops.
“Daddy!” Manni wants down.
Sirhan lowers him carefully, as if his bones are glass. “Run along and
play,” he suggests. Turning to Rita: “Why don’t you go and find out
what Ren wants, dear?” he asks. “She’s probably here to collect Lis,
but you can never be sure.”
“I was just leaving,” Eloise
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