Accelerando (26 page)

“So?” The cat looks at her insolently. “I kept it in my sandbox. And I got it working, on the seven hundred and forty-first attempt. It'd have
worked for Pamela's bounty-hunter friends, too, if I'd tried it. But it's here, now, when you need it. Would you like to swallow the packet?”

Amber straightens out, sits up in her throne. “I just told you, if you think I'm going to link some flaky chunk of alien neural programming into my core dialogue, or even my exocortex, you're crazy!” Her eyes narrow. “Can it use your grammar model?”

“Sure.” If the cat was human, it would be shrugging nonchalantly at this point. “It's safe, Amber, really and truly. I found out what it is.”

“I want to talk to it,” she says impetuously—and before the cat can reply, adds, “So what
is
it?”

“It's a protocol stack. Basically it allows new nodes to connect to a network, by providing high-level protocol conversion services. It needs to learn how to think like a human so it can translate for us when we arrive at the router, which is why they bolted a lobster's neural network on top of it—they wanted to make it architecturally compatible with us. But there are no buried time bombs, I assure you. I've had plenty of time to check. Now, are you
sure
you don't want to let it into your head?”

Greetings from the fifth decade of the century of wonders.

The solar system that lies roughly twenty-eight trillion kilometers—just short of three light years—behind the speeding starwhisp
Field Circus
is seething with change. There have been more technological advances in the past ten years than in the entire previous expanse of human history—and more unforeseen accidents.

Lots of hard problems have proven to be tractable. The planetary genome and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the biosciences are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome—plotting the phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and biochemical structures, understanding how extended phenotypic traits are generated and contribute to evolutionary fitness. The biosphere has become surreal: Small dragons have been sighted nesting in the Scottish highlands, and in the American Midwest, raccoons have been caught programming microwave ovens.

The computing power of the solar system is now around one
thousand MIPS per gram, and is unlikely to increase in the near term—all but a fraction of one percent of the dumb matter is still locked up below the accessible planetary crusts, and the sapience/mass ratio has hit a glass ceiling that will only be broken when people, corporations, or other posthumans get around to dismantling the larger planets. A start has already been made in Jupiter orbit and the asteroid belt. Greenpeace has sent squatters to occupy Eros and Juno, but the average asteroid is now surrounded by a reef of specialized nanomachinery and debris, victims of a cosmic land grab unmatched since the days of the wild west. The best brains flourish in free fall, minds surrounded by a sapient aether of extensions that out-think their meaty cortices by many orders of magnitude—minds like Amber, Queen of the Inner Ring Imperium, the first self-extending power center in Jupiter orbit.

Down at the bottom of the terrestrial gravity well, there has been a major economic catastrophe. Cheap immortagens, out-of-control personality adjuvants, and a new formal theory of uncertainty have knocked the bottom out of the insurance and underwriting industries. Gambling on a continuation of the worst aspects of the human condition—disease, senescence, and death—looks like a good way to lose money, and a deflationary spiral lasting almost fifty hours has taken down huge swaths of the global stock market. Genius, good looks, and long life are now considered basic human rights in the developed world: Even the poorest backwaters are feeling extended effects from the commoditization of intelligence.

Not everything is sweetness and light in the era of mature nanotechnology. Widespread intelligence amplification doesn't lead to widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults explode across the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened by successive semiotic jihads. India and Pakistan have held their long-awaited nuclear war: External intervention by US and EU nanosats prevented most of the IRBMs from getting through, but the subsequent spate of network raids and Basilisk attacks cause havoc. Luckily, infowar turns out to be more survivable than nuclear war—especially once it is discovered that a
simple anti-aliasing filter stops nine out of ten neural-wetware-crashing Langford fractals from causing anything worse than a mild headache.

New discoveries this decade include the origins of the weakly repulsive force responsible for changes in the rate of expansion of the universe after the big bang, and on a less abstract level, experimental implementations of a Turing Oracle using quantum entanglement circuits: a device that can determine whether a given functional expression can be evaluated in finite time. It's boom time in the field of Extreme Cosmology, where some of the more recherché researchers are bickering over the possibility that the entire universe was created as a computing device, with a program encoded in the small print of the Planck constant. And theorists are talking again about the possibility of using artificial wormholes to provide instantaneous connections between distant corners of space-time.

Most people have forgotten about the well-known extraterrestrial transmission received fifteen years earlier. Very few people know anything about the second, more complex transmission received a little later. Many of those are now passengers or spectators of the
Field Circus:
a light-sail craft that is speeding out of Sol system on a laser beam generated by Amber's installations in low-Jupiter orbit. (Superconducting tethers anchored to Amalthea drag through Jupiter's magnetosphere, providing gigawatts of electricity for the hungry lasers: energy that comes in turn from the small moon's orbital momentum.)

Manufactured by Airbus-Cisco years earlier, the
Field Circus
is a hick backwater, isolated from the mainstream of human culture, its systems complexity limited by mass. The destination lies nearly three light years from Earth, and even with high acceleration and relativistic cruise speeds the one-kilogram starwhisp and its hundred-kilogram light sail will take the best part of seven years to get there. Sending a human-sized probe is beyond even the vast energy budget of the new orbital states in Jupiter system—near-lightspeed travel is horrifically expensive. Rather than a big, self-propelled ship with canned primates for passengers, as previous generations had envisaged, the starship
is a Coke-can-sized slab of nanocomputers, running a neural simulation of the uploaded brain states of some tens of humans at merely normal speed. By the time its occupants beam themselves home again for download into freshly cloned bodies, a linear extrapolation shows that as much change will have overtaken human civilization as in the preceding fifty millennia—the sum total of
H. sapiens sapiens
' time on Earth.

But that's okay by Amber, because what she expects to find in orbit around the brown dwarf Hyundai
⁺⁴⁹⁰⁴
/
_-56
will be worth the wait.

Pierre is at work in another virtual environment, the one currently running the master control system of the
Field Circus
. He's supervising the sail-maintenance bots when the message comes in. Two visitors are on their way up the beam from Jupiter orbit. The only other person around is Su Ang, who showed up sometime after he arrived, and she's busy with some work of her own. The master control VM—like all the other human-accessible environments at this level of the ship's virtualization stack—is a construct modeled on a famous movie; this one resembles the bridge of a long-since-sunk ocean liner, albeit with discreetly informative user interfaces hovering in front of the ocean views outside the windows. Polished brass gleams softly everywhere. “What was that?” he calls out, responding to the soft chime of a bell.

“We have visitors,” Ang repeats, interrupting her rhythmic chewing. (She's trying out a betel-nut kick, but she's magicked the tooth-staining dye away and will probably detox herself in a few hours.) “They're buffering up the line already; just acknowledging receipt is sucking most of our downstream bandwidth.”

“Any idea who they are?” asks Pierre; he puts his boots up on the back of the vacant helmsman's chair and stares moodily at the endless expanse of green-gray ocean ahead.

Ang chews a bit more, watching him with an expression he can't interpret. “They're still locked,” she says. A pause. “But there was a flash from the Franklins, back home. One of them's some kind of lawyer, while the other's a film producer.”

“A film producer?”

“The Franklin Trust says it's to help defray our lawsuit expenses. Myanmar is gaining. They've already subpoenaed Amber's downline instance, and they're trying to bring this up in some kind of kangaroo jurisdiction—Oregon Christian Reconstructionist Empire, I think.”

“Ouch.” Pierre winces. The daily news from Earth, modulated onto a lower-powered communication laser, is increasingly bad. On the plus side, Amber is incredibly rich: The goodwill futures leveraged off her dad's trust metric means people will bend over backward to do things for her. And she owns a lot of real estate, too, a hundred gigatons of rock in low-Jupiter orbit with enough KE to power Northern Europe for a century. But her interstellar venture burns through money—both the traditional barter-indirection type and the more creative modern varieties—about the way you would if you heaped up the green pieces of paper and shoveled them onto a conveyor belt leading to the business end of a running rocket motor. Just holding off the environmental protests over deorbiting a small Jovian moon is a grinding job. Moreover, a whole bunch of national governments have woken up and are trying to legislate themselves a slice of the cake. Nobody's tried to forcibly take over yet (there are two hundred gigawatts of lasers anchored to the Ring Imperium, and Amber takes her sovereign status seriously, has even applied for a seat at the UN and membership in the EC), but the nuisance lawsuits are mounting up into a comprehensive denial of service attack, or maybe economic sanctions. And Uncle Gianni's retirement hasn't helped any, either. “Anything to say about it?”

“Mmph.” Ang looks irritated for some reason. “Wait your turn. They'll be out of the buffer in another couple of days. Maybe a bit longer in the case of the lawyer. He's got a huge infodump packaged on his person. Probably another semisapient class-action lawsuit.”

“I'll bet. They never learn, do they?”

“What, about the legal system here?”

“Yup.” Pierre nods. “One of Amber's smarter ideas, reviving eleventh-century Scots law and updating it with new options on barratry, trial by combat, and compurgation.” He pulls a face and detaches a couple of ghosts to go look out for the new arrivals; then he goes back to repairing sails. The interstellar medium is abrasive, full of dust—each
grain of which carries the energy of an artillery shell at this speed—and the laser sail is in a constant state of disintegration. A large chunk of the drive system's mass is silvery utility flakes for patching and replacing the soap-bubble-thin membrane as it ablates away. The skill is in knowing how best to funnel repair resources to where they're needed, while minimizing tension in the suspension lines and avoiding resonance and thrust imbalance. As he trains the patch bots, he broods about the hate mail from his elder brother (who still blames him for their father's accident), and about Sadeq's religious injunctions—
Superstitious nonsense,
he thinks—and the fickleness of powerful women, and the endless depths of his own nineteen-year-old soul.