Accelerando (60 page)

“Everyone online?” asked Manfred. “Then I'll begin.” He looks tired and worried, physically youthful but showing the full weight of his age. “We've got a crisis coming, folks. About a hundred kiloseconds ago, the bit rate on the resimulation stream jumped. We're now fielding about one resimulated state vector a second, on top of the legitimate immigration we're dealing with. If it jumps again by the same factor, it's going to swamp our ability to check the immigrants for zimboes in vivo—we'd have to move to running them in secure storage or just resurrecting them blind, and if there
are
any jokers in the pack that's about the riskiest thing we could do.”

“Why do you not spool them to memory diamond?” asks the handsome young ex-politician to his left, looking almost amused—as if he already knows the answer.

“Politics.” Manfred shrugs.

“It would blow a hole in our social contract,” says Amber, looking as if she's just swallowed something unpleasant, and Rita feels a flicker of admiration for the way they're stage-managing the meeting. Amber's even talking to her father, as if she feels comfortable with him around, although he's a walking reminder of her own lack of success. Nobody else has gotten a word in yet. “If we don't instantiate them, the next logical step is to deny resimulated minds the franchise. Which in turn puts us on the road to institutional inequality. And that's a very big step to take, even if you have misgivings about the idea of settling complex policy issues on the basis of a popular vote, because our whole polity is based on the idea that less competent intelligences—us—deserve consideration.”

“Hrmph.” Someone clears their throat. Rita glances round and freezes, because it's Amber's screwed-up eigenchild, and he's just about materialized in the chair next to her.
So he adopted Superplonk after all?
she observes cynically. He doggedly avoids looking at her. “That was my analysis,” he says reluctantly. “We need them alive. For the ark option, at least, and if not, even the
accelerationista
platform will need them on hand later.”

Concentration camps,
thinks Rita, trying to ignore Sirhan's presence near her, for it's a constant irritant,
where most of the inmates are confused, frightened human beings—and the ones who aren't
think
they
are
. It's an eerie thought, and she spawns a couple of full ghosts to dream it through for her, gaming the possible angles.

“How are your negotiations over the lifeboat designs going?” Amber asks her father. “We need to get a portfolio of design schemata out before we go into the election—”

“Change of plan.” Manfred hunches forward. “This doesn't need to go any further, but Sirhan and Aineko have come up with something interesting.” He looks worried.

Sirhan is staring at his eigenmother with narrowed eyes, and Rita has to resist the urge to elbow him savagely in the ribs. She knows enough about him now to realize it wouldn't get his attention—at least, not the way she'd want it, not for the right reasons—and in any case, he's more wrapped up in himself than her ghost ever saw him as likely to be. (How
anyone
could be party to such a detailed exchange of simulated lives and still reject the opportunity to do it in real life is beyond her, unless it's an artifact of his youth, when his parents pushed him through a dozen simulated childhoods in search of knowledge and ended up with a stubborn oyster-head of a son . . .) “We still need to look as if we're planning on using a lifeboat,” he says aloud. “There's the small matter of the price they're asking in return for the alternative.”

“What? What are you talking about?” Amber sounds confused. “I thought you were working on some kind of cladistic map. What's this about a price?”

Sirhan smiles coolly. “I
am
working on a cladistic map, in a manner of speaking. You wasted much of your opportunity when you journeyed to the router, you know. I've been talking to Aineko.”

“You—” Amber flushes. “What about?” She's visibly angry, Rita notices. Sirhan is needling his eigenmother.
Why?

“About the topology of some rather interesting types of small-world network.” Sirhan leans back in his chair, watching the cloud above her head. “And the router. You went through it, then you came back with your tail between your legs as fast as you could, didn't you? Not even checking your passenger to see if it was a hostile parasite.”

“I don't have to take this,” Amber says tightly. “You weren't there, and you have no idea what constraints we were working under.”

“Really?” Sirhan raises an eyebrow. “Anyway, you missed an opportunity. We know that the routers—for whatever reason—are
self-replicating. They spread from brown dwarf to brown dwarf, hatch, tap the protostar for energy and material, and send a bunch of children out. Von Neumann machines, in other words. We also know that they provide high-bandwidth communications to other routers. When you went through the one at Hyundai
⁺⁴⁹⁰⁴
/
_-56
, you ended up in an unmaintained DMZ attached to an alien Matrioshka brain that had degenerated, somehow. It follows that
someone
had collected a router and carried it home, to link into the MB. So why didn't
you
bring one home with you?”

Amber glares at him. “Total payload on board the
Field Circus
was about ten grams. How large do you think a router seed is?”

“So you brought the Slug home instead, occupying maybe half your storage capacity and ready to wreak seven shades of havoc on—”

“Children!” They both look round automatically. It's Annette, Rita realizes, and she doesn't look amused. “Why do you not save this bickering for later?” she asks. “We have our own goals to be pursuing.” Unamused is an understatement. Annette is fuming.

“This charming family reunion was your idea, I believe?” Manfred smiles at her, then nods coolly at the retread EU politician in the next seat.

“Please.” It's Amber. “Dad, can you save this for later?” Rita sits up. For a moment, Amber looks ancient, far older than her subjective gigasecond of age. “She's right. She didn't mean to screw up. Let's leave the family history for some time when we can work it out in private. Okay?”

Manfred looks abashed. He blinks rapidly. “All right.” He takes a breath. “Amber, I brought some old acquaintances into the loop. If we win the election, then to get out of here as fast as possible we'll have to use a combination of the two main ideas we've been discussing: spool as many people as possible into high-density storage until we get somewhere with space and mass and energy to reincarnate them and get our hands on a router. The entire planetary polity can't afford to pay the energy budget of a relativistic starship big enough to hold everyone, even as uploads, and a subrelativistic ship would be too damn vulnerable to the Vile Offspring. And it follows that, instead of taking potluck on the destination, we should learn about the network protocols the routers use, figure out some kind of transferable currency we can use to pay for our reinstantiation at the other end, and also how to make some kind of
map so we know where we're going. The two hard parts are getting at or to a router, and paying—that's going to mean traveling with someone who understands Economics 2.0 but doesn't want to hang around the Vile Offspring.

“As it happens, these old acquaintances of mine went out and fetched back a router seed, for their own purposes. It's sitting about thirty light-hours away from here, out in the Kuiper belt. They're trying to hatch it right now. And I
think
Aineko might be willing to go with us and handle the trade negotiations.” He raises the palm of his right hand and flips a bundle of tags into the shared spatial cache of the inner circle's memories.

Lobsters
. Decades ago, back in the dim wastelands of the depression-ridden naughty oughties, the uploaded lobsters had escaped. Manfred brokered a deal for them to get their very own cometary factory colony. Years later, Amber's expedition to the router had run into eerie zombie lobsters, upload images that had been taken over and reanimated by the Wunch. But where the real lobsters had gotten to . . .

For a moment, Rita sees herself hovering in darkness and vacuum, the distant siren song of a planetary gravity well far below. Off to her—left? north?—glows a hazy dim red cloud the size of the full moon as seen from Earth, a cloud that hums with a constant background noise, the waste heat of a galactic civilization dreaming furious colorless thoughts to itself. Then she figures out how to slew her unblinking, eyeless viewpoint round and sees the craft.

It's a starship in the shape of a crustacean three kilometers long. It's segmented and flattened, with legs projecting from the abdominal floor to stretch stiffly sideways and clutch fat balloons of cryogenic deuterium fuel. The blue metallic tail is a flattened fan wrapped around the delicate stinger of a fusion reactor. Near the head, things are different: no huge claws there, but the delicately branching fuzz of bush robots, nanoassemblers poised ready to repair damage in flight and spin the parachute of a ramscoop when the ship is ready to decelerate. The head is massively armored against the blitzkrieg onslaught of interstellar dust, its radar eyes a glint of hexagonal compound surfaces staring straight at her.

Behind and below the lobster-ship, a planetary ring looms vast and tenuous. The lobster is in orbit around Saturn, mere light seconds away. And as Rita stares at the ship in dumbstruck silence, it
winks
at her.

“They don't have names, at least not as individual identifiers,” Manfred says apologetically, “so I asked if he'd mind being called something. He said Blue, because he is. So I give you the good lobster
Something Blue.
”

Sirhan interrupts. “You still need my cladistics project”—he sounds somewhat smug—“to find your way through the network. Do you have a specific destination in mind?”

“Yeah, to both questions,” Manfred admits. “We need to send duplicate ghosts out to each possible router endpoint, wait for an echo, then iterate and repeat. Recursive depth-first traversal. The goal—that's harder.” He points at the ceiling, which dissolves into a chaotic 3D spiderweb that Rita recognizes, after some hours of subjective head-down archive time, as a map of the dark matter distribution throughout a radius of a billion light years, galaxies glued like fluff to the nodes where strands of drying silk meet. “We've known for most of a century that there's something flaky going on out there, out past the Böotes void—there are a couple of galactic superclusters, around which there's something flaky about the cosmic background anisotropy. Most computational processes generate entropy as a by-product, and it looks like something is dumping waste heat into the area from all the galaxies in the region, very evenly spread in a way that mirrors the metal distribution in those galaxies, except at the very cores. And according to the lobsters, who have been indulging in some
very
long baseline interferometry, most of the stars in the nearest cluster are redder than expected and metal-depleted. As if someone's been mining them.”

“Ah.” Sirhan stares at his grandfather. “Why should they be any different from the local nodes?”

“Look around you. Do you see any indications of large-scale cosmic engineering within a million light years of here?” Manfred shrugs. “Locally, nothing has quite reached . . . well. We can guess at the life cycle of a postspike civilization now, can't we? We've felt the elephant. We've seen the wreckage of collapsed Matrioshka minds. We know how unattractive exploration is to postsingularity intelligences. We've seen the bandwidth gap that keeps them at home.” He points at the ceiling. “But over
there
something different happened. They're making changes on the scale of an entire galactic supercluster, and they appear to be coordinated. They
did
get out and go places, and their descendants may still be
out there. It looks like they're doing something purposeful and coordinated, something vast—a timing channel attack on the virtual machine that's running the universe, perhaps, or an embedded simulation of an entirely different universe. Up or down, is it turtles all the way, or is there something out there that's more real than we are? And don't you think it's worth trying to find out?”

“No.” Sirhan crosses his arms. “Not particularly. I'm interested in saving people from the Vile Offspring, not taking a huge gamble on mystery transcendent aliens who may have built a galaxy-sized reality-hacking machine a billion years ago. I'll sell you my services, and even send a ghost along, but if you expect me to bet my entire future on it . . .”

It's too much for Rita. Diverting her attention away from the dizzying inner-space vista, she elbows Sirhan in the ribs. He looks round blankly for a moment, then with gathering anger as he lets his killfile filter slip. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” she hisses. Then succumbing to a secondary impulse she knows she'll regret later, she drops a private channel into his public in-tray.

“Nobody's asking you to,” Manfred is saying defensively, arms crossed. “I view this as a Manhattan project kind of thing, pursue all agendas in parallel. If we win the election, we'll have the resources we need to do that. We should
all
go through the router, and we will
all
leave backups aboard
Something Blue. Blue
is
slow,
tops out at about a tenth of cee, but what he can do is get a sufficient quantity of memory diamond the hell out of circumsolar space before the Vile Offspring's autonomic defenses activate whatever kind of trust exploit they're planning in the next few megaseconds—”