Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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- the trappings of a technosphere centuries ahead of the one he’s last
been awake in - but with the memories to explain it all. He finds his
feet are still carrying him forward, toward a grassy square lined with
doors opening onto private dwellings. Behind one of them, he’s going
to meet his descendants, and Pamela in all probability. The thought
makes his stomach give a little queasy backflip. I’m not ready for
this -
It’s an acute moment of d�ja vu. He’s standing on a familiar doorstep
he’s never seen before. The door opens and a serious-faced child with
three arms - he can’t help staring, the extra one is a viciously
barbed scythe of bone from the elbow down - looks up at him. “Hello,
me,” says the kid.
“Hello, you.” Manfred stares. “You don’t look the way I remember.” But
Manni’s appearance is familiar from big-Manni’s memories, captured by
the unblinking Argus awareness of the panopticon dust floating in the
air. “Are your parents home? Your” - his voice cracks -
“great-grandmother?”
The door opens wider. “You can come in,” the kid says gravely. Then he
hops backward and ducks shyly into a side room - or as if expecting to
be gunned down by a hostile sniper, Manfred realizes. It’s tough being
a kid when there are no rules against lethal force because you can be
restored from a backup when playtime ends.
Inside the dwelling - calling it a house seems wrong to Manfred, not
when bits of it are separated by trillions of kilometers of empty
vacuum - things feel a bit crowded. He can hear voices from the
dayroom, so he goes there, brushing through the archway of thornless
roses that Rita has trained around the T-gate frame. His body feels
lighter, but his heart is heavy as he looks around. “Rita?” he asks.
“And -”
“Hello, Manfred.” Pamela nods at him guardedly.
Rita raises an eyebrow at him. “The cat asked if he could borrow the
household assembler. I wasn’t expecting a family reunion.”
“Neither was I.” Manfred rubs his forehead ruefully. “Pamela, this is
Rita. She’s married to Sirhan. They’re my - I guess eigenparents is as
good as term as any? I mean, they’re bringing up my reincarnation.”
“Please, have a seat,” Rita offers, waving at the empty floor between
the patio and the stone fountain in the shape of a section through a
glass hypersphere. A futon of spun diamondoid congeals out of the
utility fog floating in the air, glittering in the artificial
sunlight. “Sirhan’s just taking care of Manni - our son. He’ll be with
us in just a minute.”
Manfred sits gingerly at one side of the futon. Pamela sits stiffly at
the opposite edge, not meeting his eye. Last time they met in the
flesh - an awesome gulf of years previously - they’d parted cursing
each other, on opposite sides of a fractious divorce as well as an
ideological barrier as high as a continental divide. But many
subjective decades have passed, and both ideology and divorce have
dwindled in significance - if indeed they ever happened. Now that
there’s common cause to draw them together, Manfred can barely look at
her. “How is Manni?” he asks his hostess, desperate for small talk.
“He’s fine,” Rita says, in a brittle voice. “Just the usual
preadolescent turbulence, if it wasn’t for …” She trails off. A door
appears in mid air and Sirhan steps through it, followed by a small
deity wearing a fur coat.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” Aineko remarks.
“You’re a fine one to talk,” Pamela says icily. “Don’t you think you’d
-”
“I tried to keep him away from you,” Sirhan tells Manfred, “but he
wouldn’t -”
“That’s okay.” Manfred waves it off. “Pamela, would you mind
starting?”
“Yes, I would.” She glances at him sidelong. “You go first.”
“Right. You wanted me here.” Manfred hunkers down to stare at the cat.
“What do you want?”
“If I was your traditional middle-European devil, I’d say I’d come to
steal your soul,” says Aineko, looking up at Manfred and twitching his
tail. “Luckily I’m not a dualist, I just want to borrow it for a
while. Won’t even get it dirty.”
“Uh-huh.” Manfred raises an eyebrow. “Why?”
“I’m not omniscient.” Aineko sits down, one leg sticking out sideways,
but continues to stare at Manfred. “I had a … a telegram, I guess,
claiming to be from you. From the other copy of you, that is, the one
that went off through the router network with another copy of me, and
with Amber, and everyone else who isn’t here. It says it found the
answer and it wants to give me a shortcut route out to the deep
thinkers at the edge of the observable universe. It knows who made the
wormhole network and why, and -” Aineko pauses. If he was human, he’d
shrug, but being a cat, he absent mindedly scritches behind his left
ear with a hind leg. “Trouble is, I’m not sure I can trust it. So I
need you to authenticate the message. I don’t dare use my own memory
of you because it knows too much about me; if the package is a Trojan,
it might find out things I don’t want it to learn. I can’t even redact
its memories of me - that, too, would convey useful information to the
packet if it is hostile. So I want a copy of you from the museum,
fresh and uncontaminated.”
“Is that all?” Sirhan asks incredulously.
“Sounds like enough to me,” Manfred responds. Pamela opens her mouth,
ready to speak, but Manfred makes eye contact and shakes his head
infinitesimally. She looks right back and - a shock goes through him -
nods and closes her mouth. The moment of complicity is dizzying. “I
want something in return.”
“Sure,” says the cat. He pauses. “You realize it’s a destructive
process.”
“It’s a - what?”
“I need to make a running copy of you. Then I introduce it to the, uh,
alien information, in a sandbox. The sandbox gets destroyed afterward
- it emits just one bit of information, a yes or no to the question,
can I trust the alien information?”
“Uh.” Manfred begins to sweat. “Uh. I’m not so sure I like the sound
of that.”
“It’s a copy.” Another cat-shrug moment. “You’re a copy. Manni is a
copy. You’ve been copied so many times it’s silly - you realize every
few years every atom in your body changes? Of course, it means a copy
of you gets to die after a lifetime or two of unique, unrepeatable
experiences that you’ll never know about, but that won’t matter to
you.”
“Yes it does! You’re talking about condemning a version of me to
death! It may not affect me, here, in this body, but it certainly
affects that other me. Can’t you -”
“No, I can’t. If I agreed to rescue the copy if it reached a positive
verdict, that would give it an incentive to lie if the truth was that
the alien message is untrustworthy, wouldn’t it? Also, if I intended
to rescue the copy, that would give the message a back channel through
which to encode an attack. One bit, Manfred, no more.”
“Agh.” Manfred stops talking. He knows he should be trying to come up
with some kind of objection, but Aineko must have already considered
all his possible responses and planned strategies around them. “Where
does she fit into this?” he asks, nodding at Pamela.
“Oh, she’s your payment,” Aineko says with studied insouciance. “I
have a very good memory for people, especially people I’ve known for
decades. You’ve outlasted that crude emotional conditioning I used on
you around the time of the divorce, and as for her, she’s a good
reinstantiation of -”
“Do you know what it’s like to die?” Pamela asks, finally losing her
self-control. “Or would you like to find out the hard way? Because if
you keep talking about me as if I’m a slave -”
“What makes you think you aren’t?” The cat is grinning hideously,
needle like teeth bared. Why doesn’t she hit him? Manfred asks himself
fuzzily, wondering also why he feels no urge to move against the
monster. “Hybridizing you with Manfred was, admittedly, a fine piece
of work on my part, but you would have been bad for him during his
peak creative years. A contented Manfred is an idle Manfred. I got
several extra good bits of work out of him by splitting you up, and by
the time he burned out, Amber was ready. But I digress; if you give me
what I want, I shall leave you alone. It’s as simple as that. Raising
new generations of Macxs has been a good hobby, you make interesting
pets, but ultimately it’s limited by your stubborn refusal to
transcend your humanity. So that’s what I’m offering, basically. Let
me destructively run a copy of you to completion in a black box along
with a purported Turing Oracle based on yourself, and I’ll let you go.
And you too, Pamela. You’ll be happy together this time, without me
pushing you apart. And I promise I won’t return to haunt your
descendants, either.” The cat glances over his shoulder at Sirhan and
Rita, who clutch at each other in abject horror; and Manfred finds he
can sense a shadow of Aineko’s huge algorithmic complexity hanging
over the household, like a lurching nightmare out of number theory.
“Is that all we are to you? A pet-breeding program?” Pamela asks
coldly. She’s run up against Aineko’s implanted limits, too, Manfred
realizes with a growing sense of horror. Did we really split up
because Aineko made us? It’s hard to believe: Manfred is too much of a
realist to trust the cat to tell the truth except when it serves to
further his interests. But this -
“Not entirely.” Aineko is complacent. “Not at first, before I was
aware of my own existence. Besides, you humans keep pets, too. But you
were fun to play with.”
Pamela stands up, angry to the point of storming out. Before he quite
realizes what he’s doing, Manfred is on his feet, too, one arm
protectively around her. “Tell me first, are our memories our own?” he
demands.
“Don’t trust it,” Pamela says sharply. “It’s not human, and it lies.”
Her shoulders are tense.
“Yes, they are,” says Aineko. He yawns. “Tell me I’m lying, bitch,” he
adds mockingly: “I carried you around in my head for long enough to
know you’ve no evidence.”
“But I -” Her arm slips around Manfred’s waist. “I don’t hate him.” A
rueful laugh: “I remember hating him, but -”
“Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness,” Aineko
says with a theatrical sigh. “You’re as stupid as it’s possible for an
intelligent species to be - there being no evolutionary pressure to be
any smarter - but you still don’t internalize that and act accordingly
around your superiors. Listen, girl, everything you remember is true.
That doesn’t mean you remember it because it actually happened, just
that you remember it because you experienced it internally. Your
memories of experiences are accurate, but your emotional responses to
those experiences were manipulated. Get it? One ape’s hallucination is
another ape’s religious experience, it just depends on which one’s god
module is overactive at the time. That goes for all of you.” Aineko
looks around at them in mild contempt. “But I don’t need you anymore,
and if you do this one thing for me, you’re going to be free.
Understand? Say yes, Manfred; if
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