Accelerando (61 page)

“What do you want?”
Sirhan demands angrily over the channel. He's still not looking at her, and not just because he's focusing on the vision in blue that dominates the shared space of the team meeting.

“Stop lying to yourself,”
Rita sends back.
“You're lying about your own goals and motivations.
You
may not want to know the truth your own ghost worked out, but I do. And I'm not going to let you deny it happened.”

“So one of your agents seduced a personality image of me—”

“Bullshit—”

“Do you mean to declare this platform openly?” asks the young-old
guy near the platform, the europol. “Because if so, you're going to undermine Amber's campaign—”

“That's all right,” Amber says tiredly. “I'm used to Dad supporting me in his own inimitable way.”

“Is okay,” says a new voice. “I are happy wait-state grazing in ecliptic.” It's the friendly lobster lifeboat, light-lagged by its trajectory outside the ring system.

“—You're happy to hide behind a hypocritical sense of moral purity when it makes you feel you can look down on other people, but underneath it you're just like everyone else—”

“
—She
set you up to corrupt me, didn't she? You're just bait in her scheme
—
”

“The idea was to store incremental backups in the Panuliran's cargo cache in case a weakly godlike agency from the inner system attempts to activate the antibodies they've already disseminated throughout the festival culture,” Annette explains, stepping in on Manfred's behalf.

Nobody else in the discussion space seems to notice that Rita and Sirhan are busy ripping the shit out of each other over a private channel, throwing emotional hand grenades back and forth like seasoned divorcees. “It's not a satisfactory solution to the evacuation question, but it ought to satisfy the conservatives' baseline requirement, and as insurance—”

“—That's right, blame your eigenmother! Has it occurred to you that she doesn't care enough about you to try a stunt like that? I think you spent too much time with that crazy grandmother of yours. You didn't even integrate that ghost, did you? Too afraid of polluting yourself! I bet you never even bothered to check what it felt like from inside—”

“—I did—”
Sirhan freezes for a moment, personality modules paging in and out of his brain like a swarm of angry bees—
“make a fool of myself,”
he adds quietly, then slumps back in his seat.
“This is
so
embarrassing . . .”
He covers his face with his hands.
“You're right.”

“I am?”
Rita's puzzlement slowly gives way to understanding; Sirhan has finally integrated the memories from the partials they hybridized earlier. Stuck-up and proud, the cognitive dissonance must be enormous.
“No, I'm not. You're just overly defensive.”

“I'm—”
Embarrassed. Because Rita knows him, inside out. Has the ghost-memories of six months in a simspace with him, playing with
ideas, exchanging intimacies, later confidences. She holds ghost-memories of his embrace, a smoky affair that might have happened in real space if his instant reaction to realizing that it
could
happen hadn't been to dump the splinter of his mind that was contaminated by impure thoughts to cold storage and deny everything.

“We have no threat profile yet,” Annette says, cutting right across their private conversation. “If there
is
a direct threat—and we don't know that for sure, yet; the Vile Offspring might be enlightened enough simply to be leaving us alone—it'll probably be some kind of subtle attack aimed directly at the foundations of our identity. Look for a credit bubble, distributed trust metrics devaluing suddenly as people catch some kind of weird religion, something like that. Maybe a perverse election outcome. And it won't be sudden. They are not stupid, to start a headlong attack without slow corruption to soften the way.”

“You've obviously been thinking about this for some time,” Sameena says with dry emphasis. “What's in it for your friend, uh, Blue? Did you squirrel away enough credit to cover the price of renting a starship from the Economics 2.0 metabubble? Or is there something you aren't telling us?”

“Um.” Manfred looks like a small boy with his hand caught in the sweets jar. “Well, as a matter of fact—”

“Yes, Dad, why don't you tell us just what this is going to cost?” Amber asks.

“Ah, well.” He looks embarrassed. “It's the lobsters, not Aineko. They want some payment.”

Rita reaches out and grabs Sirhan's hand: He doesn't resist.
“Do you know about this?”
Rita queries him.

“All new to me . . .”
A confused partial thread follows his reply down the pipe, and for a while she joins him in introspective reverie, trying to work out the implications of knowing what they know about the possibility of a mutual relationship.

“They want a written conceptual map. A map of all the accessible meme spaces hanging off the router network, compiled by human explorers who they can use as a baseline, they say. It's quite simple—in return for a ticket-out system, some of us are going to have to go exploring. But that doesn't mean we can't leave backups behind.”

“Do they have any particular explorers in mind?” Amber sniffs.

“No,” says Manfred. “Just a team of us, to map out the router network and ensure they get some warning of threats from outside.” He pauses. “You're going to want to come along, aren't you?”

The pre-election campaign takes approximately three minutes and consumes more bandwidth than the sum of all terrestrial communications channels from prehistory to 2008. Approximately six million ghosts of Amber, individually tailored to fit the profile of the targeted audience, fork across the dark fiber meshwork underpinning of the lily-pad colonies, then out through ultrawideband mesh networks, instantiated in implants and floating dust motes to buttonhole the voters. Many of them fail to reach their audience, and many more hold fruitless discussions; about six actually decide they've diverged so far from their original that they constitute separate people and register for independent citizenship, two defect to the other side, and one elopes with a swarm of highly empathic modified African honeybees.

Ambers are not the only ghosts competing for attention in the public zeitgeist. In fact, they're in a minority. Most of the autonomous electoral agents are campaigning for a variety of platforms that range from introducing a progressive income tax—nobody is quite sure
why,
but it seems to be traditional—to a motion calling for the entire planet to be paved, which quite ignores the realities of element abundance in the upper atmosphere of a metal-poor gas giant, not to mention playing hell with the weather. The Faceless are campaigning for everyone to be assigned a new set of facial muscles every six months, the Livid Pranksters are demanding equal rights for subsentient entities, and a host of single-issue pressure groups are yammering about the usual lost causes.

Just how the election process anneals is a black mystery—at least, to those people who aren't party to the workings of the Festival Committee, the group who first had the idea of paving Saturn with hot-hydrogen balloons—but over the course of a complete diurn, almost forty thousand seconds, a pattern begins to emerge. This pattern will systematize the bias of the communications networks that traffic in reputation points across the planetary polity for a long time—possibly as
much as fifty million seconds, getting on for a whole Martian year (if Mars still existed). It will create a parliament—a merged group mind borganism that speaks as one supermind built from the beliefs of the victors. And the news isn't great, as the party gathered in the upper sphere of the Atomium (which Manfred insisted Amber rent for the dead dog party) is slowly realizing. Amber isn't there, presumably drowning her sorrows or engaging in postelection schemes of a different nature somewhere else. But other members of her team are about.

“It could be worse,” Rita rationalizes, late in the evening. She's sitting in a corner of the seventh-floor deck, in a 1950s wireframe chair, clutching a glass of synthetic single malt and watching the shadows. “We could be in an old-style contested election with seven shades of shit flying. At least this way we can be decently anonymous.”

One of the blind spots detaches from her peripheral vision and approaches. It segues into view, suddenly congealing into Sirhan. He looks morose.

“What's your problem?” she demands. “Your former faction is winning on the count.”

“Maybe so.” He sits down beside her, carefully avoiding her gaze. “Maybe this is a good thing. And maybe not.”

“So when are you going to join the syncitium?” she asks.

“Me? Join that?” He looks alarmed. “You think I want to become part of a parliamentary borg? What do you take me for?”

“Oh.” She shakes her head. “I assumed you were avoiding me because—”

“No.” He holds out his hand, and a passing waitron deposits a glass in it. He takes a deep breath. “I owe you an apology.”

About time,
she thinks, uncharitably. But he's like that. Stiff-necked and proud, slow to acknowledge a mistake but unlikely to apologize unless he really means it. “What for?” she asks.

“For not giving you the benefit of the doubt,” he says slowly, rolling the glass between his palms. “I should have listened to myself earlier instead of locking him out of me.”

The self he's talking about seems self-evident to her. “You're not an easy man to get close to,” she says quietly. “Maybe that's part of your problem.”

“Part of it?” He chuckles bitterly. “My mother—” He bites back whatever he originally meant to say. “Do you know I'm older than she is? Than this version, I mean. She gets up my nose with her assumptions about me . . .”

“They run both ways.” Rita reaches out and takes his hand—and he grips her right back, no rejection this time. “Listen, it looks as if she's not going to make it into the parliament of lies. There's a straight conservative sweep, these folks are in solid denial. About eighty percent of the population are resimulants or old-timers from Earth, and that's not going to change before the Vile Offspring turn on us. What are we going to do?”

He shrugs. “I suspect everyone who thinks we're really under threat will move on. You know this is going to destroy the
accelerationistas'
trust in democracy? They've still got a viable plan—Manfred's friendly lobster will work without the need for an entire planet's energy budget—but the rejection is going to hurt. I can't help thinking that maybe the real goal of the Vile Offspring was simply to gerrymander us into not diverting resources away from them. It's blunt, it's unsubtle, so we assumed that wasn't the point. But maybe there's a time for them to be blunt.”

She shrugs. “Democracy is a bad fit for lifeboats.” But she's still uncomfortable with the idea. “And think of all the people we'll be leaving behind.”

“Well.” He smiles tightly. “If you can think of any way to encourage the masses to join us . . .”

“A good start would be to stop thinking of them as masses to be manipulated.” Rita stares at him. “Your family appears to have been developing a hereditary elitist streak, and it's not attractive.”

Sirhan looks uncomfortable. “If you think I'm bad, you should talk to Aineko about it,” he says, self-deprecatingly. “Sometimes I wonder about that cat.”

“Maybe I will.” She pauses. “And you? What are you going to do with yourself? Are you going to join the explorers?”

“I—” He looks sideways at her. “I can see myself sending an eigen-brother,” he says quietly. “But I'm not going to gamble my entire future on a bid to reach the far side of the observable universe by router. I've
had enough excitement to last me a lifetime, lately. I think one copy for the backup archive in the icy depths, one to go exploring—and one to settle down and raise a family. What about you?”

“You'll go all three ways?” she asks.

“Yes, I think so. What about you?”

“Where you go, I go.” She leans against him. “Isn't that what matters in the end?” she murmurs.