Accelerando (59 page)

“Oh, pressing the flesh, I guess. Auntie 'Nette wanted me to meet some old political hack contact of hers who she figures can help with the program, but he was holed up with her and Dad all day.” She pulls a
face. “I had another fitting session with the image merchants. They're trying to turn me into a political catwalk clotheshorse. Then there's the program demographics again. We're getting about a thousand new immigrants a day, planetwide, but it's accelerating rapidly, and we should be up to eighty an hour by the time of the election. Which is going to be a huge problem, because if we start campaigning too early a quarter of the electorate won't know what they're meant to be voting about.”

“Maybe it's deliberate,” Rita suggests. “The Vile Offspring are trying to rig the outcome by injecting voters.” She pings a smiley emoticon off Wednesday's open channel, raising a flickering grin in return. “The party of fuckwits will win, no question about it.”

“Uh-huh.” Amber snaps her fingers and pulls an impatient face as she waits for a passing cloud to solidify above her head and lower a glass of cranberry juice to her. “Dad said one thing that's spot-on. We're framing this entire debate in terms of what we should do to avoid conflict with the Offspring. The main bone of contention is how to run away and how far to go and which program to put resources into, not whether or when to run, let alone what else we could do. Maybe we should have given it some more thought. Are we being manipulated?”

Rita looks vacant for a moment. “Is that a question?” she asks. Amber nods, and she shakes her head. “Then I'd have to say that I don't know. The evidence is inconclusive, so far. But I'm not really happy. The Offspring won't tell us what they want, but there's no reason to believe they don't know what
we
want. I mean, they can think rings round us, can't they?”

Amber shrugs, then pauses to unlatch a hedge gate that gives admission to a maze of sweet-smelling shrubs. “I really don't know. They may not care about us, or even remember we exist—the resimulants may be being generated by some autonomic mechanism, not really part of the higher consciousness of the Offspring. Or it may be some whacked-out post-Tiplerite meme that's gotten hold of more processing resources than the entire presingularity net, some kind of MetaMormon project directed at ensuring that everyone who can possibly ever have lived lives in the
right way
to fit some weird quasi-religious requirement we don't know about. Or it might be a message we're simply not smart enough to decode. That's the trouble, we don't know.”

She vanishes around the curve of the maze. Rita hurries to catch up,
sees her about to turn into another alleyway, and leaps after her. “What else?” she pants.

“Could be”—left turn—“anything, really.” Six steps lead down into a shadowy tunnel; fork right, five meters forward, then six steps up lead back to the surface. “Question is, why don't they”—left turn—“just
tell
us what they want?”

“Speaking to tapeworms.” Rita nearly manages to catch up with Amber, who is trotting through the maze as if she's memorized it perfectly. “That's how much the nascent Matrioshka brain can outthink us by, as humans to segmented worms. Would we do. What they told us?”

“Maybe.” Amber stops dead, and Rita glances around. They're in an open cell near the heart of the maze, five meters square, hedged in on all sides. There are three entrances and a slate altar, waist high, lichen-stained with age. “I think you know the answer to that question.”

“I—” Rita stares at her.

Amber stares back, eyes dark and intense. “You're from one of the Ganymede orbitals by way of Titan. You knew my eigensister while I was out of the solar system flying a diamond the size of a Coke can. That's what you told me. You've got a skill set that's a perfect match for the campaign research group, and you asked me to introduce you to Sirhan, then you pushed his buttons like a pro. Just what
are
you trying to pull? Why should I trust you?”

“I—” Rita's face crumples. “I
didn't
push his buttons! He
thought
I was trying to drag him into bed.” She looks up defiantly. “I wasn't. I want to learn, what makes you—him—work—” Huge, dark, structured information queries batter at her exocortex, triggering warnings. Someone is churning through distributed time-series databases all over the outer system, measuring her past with a micrometer. She stares at Amber, mortified and angry. It's the ultimate denial of trust, the need to check her statements against the public record for truth. “What are you doing?”

“I have a suspicion.” Amber stands poised, as if ready to run.
Run away from me?
Rita thinks, startled. “You said, what if the resimulants came from a subconscious function of the Offspring? And funnily enough, I've been discussing that possibility with Dad. He's still got the spark when you show him a problem, you know.”

“I don't understand!”

“No, I don't think you do,” says Amber, and Rita can feel vast
stresses in the space around her. The whole ubicomp environment, dust-sized chips and utility fog and hazy clouds of diamond-bright optical processors in the soil and the air and her skin, is growing blotchy and sluggish, thrashing under the load of whatever Amber—with her management-grade ackles—is ordering it to do. For a moment, Rita can't feel half her mind, and she gets the panicky claustrophobic sense of being trapped inside her own head. Then it stops.

“Tell me!” Rita insists. “What are you trying to prove? It's some mistake—” And Amber is nodding, much to her surprise, looking weary and morose. “What do you think I've done?”

“Nothing. You're coherent. Sorry about that.”

“Coherent?” Rita hears her voice rising with her indignation as she feels bits of herself, cut off from her for whole seconds, shivering with relief. “I'll give you coherent! Assaulting my exocortex—”

“Shut up.” Amber rubs her face and simultaneously throws Rita one end of an encrypted channel.

“Why should I?” Rita demands, not accepting the handshake.

“Because.” Amber glances round.
She's scared!
Rita suddenly realizes. “Just
do
it,” she hisses.

Rita accepts the endpoint and a huge lump of undigested expository data slides down it, structured and tagged with entry points and metainformation directories pointing to—

“Holy
shit,
” she whispers, as she realizes what it is.

“Yes.” Amber grins humorlessly. She continues, over the open channel:
It looks like they're cognitive antibodies, generated by the devil's own semiotic immune system. That's what Sirhan is focusing on, how to avoid triggering them and bringing everything down at once. Forget the election. We're going to be in deep shit sooner rather than later, and we're still trying to work out how to survive. Now are you sure you still want in?

“Want in on
what
?” Rita asks, shakily.

The lifeboat Dad's trying to get us all into under cover of the
accelerationista/conservationista
split, before the Vile Offspring's immune system figures out how to lever us apart into factions and make us kill each other . . .

Welcome to the afterglow of the intelligence supernova, little tapeworm.

Tapeworms have on the order of a thousand neurons, pulsing furiously to keep their little bodies twitching. Human beings have on the order of a hundred billion neurons. What is happening in the inner solar system as the Vile Offspring churn and reconfigure the fast-thinking structured dust clouds that were once planets is as far beyond the ken of merely human consciousness as the thoughts of a Gödel are beyond the twitching tropisms of a worm. Personality modules bounded by the speed of light, sucking down billions of times the processing power of a human brain, form and re-form in the halo of glowing nanopro-cessors that shrouds the sun in a ruddy, glowing cloud.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Ceres, and the asteroids—all gone. Luna is a silvery iridescent sphere, planed smooth down to micrometer heights, luminous with diffraction patterns. Only Earth, the cradle of human civilization, remains untransformed; and Earth, too, will be dismantled soon enough, for already a trellis of space elevators webs the planet around its equator, lifting refugee dumb matter into orbit and flinging it at the wildlife preserves of the outer system.

The intelligence bloom that gnaws at Jupiter's moons with claws of molecular machinery won't stop until it runs out of dumb matter to convert into computronium. By the time it does, it will have as much brainpower as you'd get if you placed a planet with a population of six billion future-shocked primates in orbit around every star in the Milky Way galaxy. But right now, it's still stupid, having converted barely a percentage point of the mass of the solar system—it's a mere Magellanic Cloud civilization, infantile and unsubtle and still perilously close to its carbon-chemistry roots.

It's hard for tapeworms living in warm intestinal mulch to wrap their thousand-neuron brains around whatever it is that the vastly more complex entities who host them are discussing, but one thing's sure—the owners have a lot of things going on, not all of them under conscious control. The churning of gastric secretions and the steady ventilation of lungs are incomprehensible to
the simple brains of tapeworms, but they serve the purpose of keeping the humans alive and provide the environment the worms live in. And other more esoteric functions that contribute to survival—the intricate dance of specialized cloned lymphocytes in their bone marrow and lymph nodes, the random permutations of antibodies constantly churning for possible matches to intruder molecules warning of the presence of pollution—are all going on beneath the level of conscious control.

Autonomic defenses. Antibodies. Intelligence blooms gnawing at the edges of the outer system. And humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run but over how far and how fast?

There's a team meeting early the next morning. It's still dark outside, and most of the attendees who are present in vivo have the faintly haggard look that comes from abusing melatonin antagonists. Rita stifles a yawn as she glances around the conference room—the walls expanded into huge virtual spaces to accommodate thirty or so exocortical ghosts from sleeping partners who will wake with memories of a particularly vivid lucid dream—and sees Amber talking to her famous father and a younger-looking man who one of her partials recognizes as a last-century EU politician. There seems to be some tension between them.

Now that Amber has granted Rita her conditional trust, a whole new tier of campaigning information has opened up to her inner eye—stuff steganographically concealed in a hidden layer of the project's collective memory space. There's stuff in here she hadn't suspected, frightening studies of resimulant demographics, surveys of emigration rates from the inner system, cladistic trees dissecting different forms of crude tampering that have been found skulking in the wetware of refugees. The reason why Amber and Manfred and—reluctantly—Sirhan are fighting for one radical faction in a planetwide election, despite their various misgivings over the validity of the entire concept of democracy in this posthuman era. She blinks it aside, slightly bewildered, forking a couple of dozen personality subthreads to chew on it at
the edges. “Need coffee,” she mutters to the table, as it offers her a chair.