Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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Sam.” She glances over her shoulder at Rita apologetically, then dives
into the exercise room.
Sirhan takes a step toward the hallway. “Let’s talk,” he says tightly.
“In my study.” He glares at the cat. “I want an explanation. I want to
know the truth.”
*
Meanwhile, in a cognitive wonderland his parents know about but deeply
underestimate, parts of Manni are engaging in activities far less
innocent than they imagine.
Back in the twenty-first century, Sirhan lived through loads of
alternate childhoods in simulation, his parents’ fingers pressing
firmly on the fast-forward button until they came up with someone who
seemed to match their preconceptions. The experience scarred him as
badly as any nineteenth-century boarding school experience, until he
promised himself no child he raised would be subjected to such; but
there’s a difference between being shoved through a multiplicity of
avatars, and voluntarily diving into an exciting universe of myth and
magic where your childhood fantasies take fleshy form, stalking those
of your friends and enemies through the forests of the night.
Manni has grown up with neural interfaces to City’s mindspace an order
of magnitude more complex than those of Sirhan’s youth, and parts of
him - ghosts derived from a starting image of his neural state vector,
fertilized with a scattering borrowed from the original Manfred,
simulated on a meat machine far faster than real time - are fully
adult. Of course, they can’t fit inside his seven-year-old skull, but
they still watch over him. And when he’s in danger, they try to take
care of their once and future body.
Manni’s primary adult ghost lives in some of New Japan’s virtual
mindspaces (which are a few billion times more extensive than the
physical spaces available to stubborn biologicals, for the
computational density of human habitats have long since ceased to make
much sense when measured in MIPS per kilogram). They’re modeled on
presingularity Earth. Time is forever frozen on the eve of the real
twenty-first century, zero eight-forty-six hours on September 11: An
onrushing wide-body airliner hangs motionless in the air forty meters
below the picture window of Manni’s penthouse apartment on the one
hundred and eighth floor of the North Tower. In historical reality,
the one hundred and eighth floor was occupied by corporate offices;
but the mindspace is a consensual fiction, and it is Manni’s conceit
to live at this pivotal point. (Not that it means much to him - he was
born well over a century after the War on Terror - but it’s part of
his childhood folklore, the fall of the Two Towers that shattered the
myth of Western exceptionalism and paved the way for the world he was
born into.)
Adult-Manni wears an avatar roughly modeled on his clone-father
Manfred - skinnier, pegged at a youthful twentysomething, black-clad,
and gothic. He’s taking time out from a game of Matrix to listen to
music, Type O Negative blaring over the sound system as he twitches in
the grip of an ice-cold coke high. He’s expecting a visit from a
couple of call girls - themselves the gamespace avatars of force-grown
adult ghosts whose primaries may not be adult, or female, or even
human - which is why he’s flopped bonelessly back in his Arne Jacobsen
recliner, waiting for something to happen.
The door opens behind him. He doesn’t show any sign of noticing the
intrusion, although his pupils dilate slightly at the faint reflection
of a woman, stalking toward him, glimpsed dimly in the window glass.
“You’re late,” he says tonelessly. “You were supposed to be here ten
minutes ago -” He begins to look round, and now his eyes widen.
“Who were you expecting?” asks the ice blond in the black business
suit, long-skirted and uptight. There’s something predatory about her
expression: “No, don’t tell me. So you’re Manni, eh? Manni’s partial?”
She sniffs, disapproval. “Fin de si�cle decadence. I’m sure Sirhan
wouldn’t approve.”
“My father can go fuck himself,” Manni says truculently. “Who the hell
are you?”
The blond snaps her fingers: An office chair appears on the carpet
between Manni and the window, and she sits on the edge of it,
smoothing her skirt obsessively. “I’m Pamela,” she says tightly. “Has
your father told you about me?”
Manni looks puzzled. In the back of his mind, raw instincts alien to
anyone instantiated before the midpoint of the twenty-first century
tug on the fabric of pseudoreality. “You’re dead, aren’t you?” he
asks. “One of my ancestors.”
“I’m as dead as you are.” She gives him a wintry smile. “Nobody stays
dead these days, least of all people who know Aineko.”
Manni blinks. Now he’s beginning to feel a surge of mild irritation.
“This is all very well, but I was expecting company,” he says with
heavy emphasis. “Not a family reunion, or a tiresome attempt to preach
your puritanism -”
Pamela snorts. “Wallow in your pigsty for all I care, kid, I’ve got
more important things to worry about. Have you looked at your primary
recently?”
“My primary?” Manni tenses. “He’s doing okay.” For a moment his eyes
focus on infinity, a thousand-yard stare as he loads and replays the
latest brain dump from his infant self. “Who’s the cat he’s playing
with? That’s no companion!”
“Aineko. I told you.” Pamela taps the arm of her chair impatiently.
“The family curse has come for another generation. And if you don’t do
something about it -”
“About what?” Manni sits up. “What are you talking about?” He comes to
his feet and turns toward her. Outside the window, the sky is growing
dark with an echo of his own foreboding. Pamela is on her feet before
him, the chair evaporated in a puff of continuity clipping, her
expression a cold-eyed challenge.
“I think you know exactly what I’m talking about, Manni. It’s time to
stop playing this fucking game. Grow up, while you’ve still got the
chance!”
“I’m -” He stops. “Who am I?” he asks, a chill wind of uncertainty
drying the sweat that has sprung up and down his spine. “And what are
you doing here?”
“Do you really want to know the answer? I’m dead, remember. The dead
know everything. And that isn’t necessarily good for the living …”
He takes a deep breath. “Am I dead too?” He looks puzzled. “There’s an
adult-me in Seventh Cube Heaven, what’s he doing here?”
“It’s the kind of coincidence that isn’t.” She reaches out and takes
his hand, dumping encrypted tokens deep into his sensorium, a trail of
bread crumbs leading into a dark and trackless part of mindspace.
“Want to find out? Follow me.” Then she vanishes.
Manni leans forward, baffled and frightened, staring down at the
frozen majesty of the onrushing airliner below his window. “Shit,” he
whispers. She came right through my defenses without leaving a trace.
Who is she? The ghost of his dead great-grandmother, or something
else?
I’ll have to follow her if I want to find out, he realizes. He holds
up his left hand, stares at the invisible token glowing brightly
inside his husk of flesh. “Resynchronize me with my primary,” he says.
A fraction of a second later, the floor of the penthouse bucks and
quakes wildly and fire alarms begin to shriek as time comes to an end
and the frozen airliner completes its journey. But Manni isn’t there
anymore. And if a skyscraper falls in a simulation with nobody to see
it, has anything actually happened?
*
“I’ve come for the boy,” says the cat. It sits on the hand woven rug
in the middle of the hardwood floor with one hind leg sticking out at
an odd angle, as if it’s forgotten about it. Sirhan teeters on the
edge of hysteria for a moment as he apprehends the sheer size of the
entity before him, the whimsical posthuman creation of his ancestors.
Originally a robotic toy companion, Aineko was progressively upgraded
and patched. By the eighties, when Sirhan first met the cat in the
flesh, he was already a terrifyingly alien intelligence, subtle and
ironic. And now …
Sirhan knows Aineko manipulated his eigenmother, bending her natural
affections away from his real father and toward another man. In
moments of black introspection, he sometimes wonders if the cat wasn’t
also responsible in some way for his own broken upbringing, the
failure to relate to his real parents. After all, it was a pawn in the
vicious divorce battle between Manfred and Pamela - decades before his
birth - and there might be long-term instructions buried in its
preconscious drives. What if the pawn is actually a hidden king,
scheming in the darkness?
“I’ve come for Manny.”
“You’re not having him.” Sirhan maintains an outer facade of calm,
even though his first inclination is to snap at Aineko. “Haven’t you
done enough damage already?”
“You’re not going to make this easy, are you?” The cat stretches his
head forward and begins to lick obsessively between the splayed toes
of his raised foot. “I’m not making a demand, kid, I said I’ve come
for him, and you’re not really in the frame at all. In fact, I’m going
out of my way to warn you.”
“And I say -” Sirhan stops. “Shit!” Sirhan doesn’t approve of
swearing: The curse is an outward demonstration of his inner turmoil.
“Forget what I was about to say, I’m sure you already know it. Let me
begin again, please.”
“Sure. Let’s play this your way.” The cat chews on a loose nail sheath
but his innerspeech is perfectly clear, a casual intimacy that keeps
Sirhan on edge. “You’ve got some idea of what I am, clearly. You know
- I ascribe intentionality to you - that my theory of mind is
intrinsically stronger than yours, that my cognitive model of human
consciousness is complete. You might well suspect that I use a Turing
Oracle to think my way around your halting states.” The cat isn’t
worrying at a loose claw now, he’s grinning, pointy teeth gleaming in
the light from Sirhan’s study window. The window looks out onto the
inner space of the habitat cylinder, up at a sky with hillsides and
lakes and forests plastered across it: It’s like an Escher landscape,
modeled with complete perfection. “You’ve realized that I can think my
way around the outside of your box while you’re flailing away inside
it, and I’m always one jump ahead of you. What else do you know I
know?”
Sirhan shivers. Aineko is staring up at him, unblinking. For a moment,
he feels at gut level that he is in the presence of an alien god: It’s
the simple truth, isn’t it? But - “Okay, I concede the point,” Sirhan
says after a moment in which he spawns a blizzard of panicky cognitive
ghosts, fractional personalities each tasked with the examination of a
different facet of the same problem. “You’re smarter than I am. I’m
just a boringly augmented human being, but you’ve got a flashy new
theory of mind that lets you work around creatures like me the way I
can think my way around a real cat.” He crosses his arms defensively.
“You do not normally rub this in. It’s not in your interests to do so,
is it? You prefer to hide your manipulative capabilities under an
affable exterior, to play with us. So you’re revealing all this for a
reason.” There’s a note of bitterness in his voice now. Glancing
round, Sirhan summons up a chair - and, as an afterthought, a cat
basket. “Have a seat. Why now, Aineko? What makes you think you can
take my eigenson?”
“I didn’t say I was going
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