Accelerando (67 page)

Manni stands, but as he reaches out to touch the angel's thin, blue-skinned stomach with his third arm fingernail, he hears a voice.
“
W
ait
.
”
It's innerspeech, and it bears ackles of coercion, superuser privileges that lock his elbow joint in place. He mewls frustratedly and turns round, ready to fight.

It's the cat. He sits hunched on a boulder behind him—this is the odd thing—right where he was looking a moment ago, watching him with slitty eyes. Manni feels the urge to lash out at him, but his arms won't move, and neither will his legs: This may be the Dark Side of Red Plaza, where the bloody children play and anything goes, and Manni may have a much bigger claw here than anything the cat can muster, but City still has some degree of control, and the cat's ackles effectively immunize it from the carnage to either side. “Hello, Manni,” says the pussy-thing. “Your dad's worried: You're supposed to be in your room, and he's looking for you. Big-you gave you a back door, didn't he?”

Manni nods jerkily, his eyes going wide. He wants to shout and lash out at the pussy-thing but he can't. “What are you?”

“I'm your . . . fairy godfather.” The cat stares at him intently. “You know, I do believe you don't resemble your archetype very closely—not as he was at your age—but yes, I think on balance you'll do.”

“Do what?” Manni lets his motie-arm drop, perplexed.

“Put me in touch with your other self. Big-you.”

“I can't,” Manni begins to explain. But before he can continue, the pile of rock whines slightly and rotates beneath the cat, who has to stand and do a little twirl in place, tail bushing up in annoyance.

Manni's father steps out of the T-gate and glances around, his face a mask of disapproval. “Manni! What do you think you're doing here? Come home at—”

“He's with me, history-boy,” interrupts the cat, nettled by Sirhan's arrival. “I was just rounding him up.”

“Damn you, I don't need your help to control my son! In fact—”

“Mom said I could—” Manni begins.

“And what's that on your sword?” Sirhan's glare takes in the whole scene, the impromptu game of capture-the-gibbeted-torture-victim, the
bonfires and screams. The mask of disapproval cracks, revealing a core of icy anger. “You're coming home with me!” He glances at the cat. “You, too, if you want to talk to him—he's grounded.”

Once upon a time there was a pet cat.

Except, it wasn't a cat.

Back when a young entrepreneur called Manfred Macx was jetting around the not-yet-disassembled structures of an old continent called Europe, making strangers rich and fixing up friends with serendipitous business plans—a desperate displacement activity, spinning his wheels in a vain attempt to outrun his own shadow—he used to travel with a robotic toy of feline form. Programmable and upgradeable, Aineko was a third-generation descendant of the original luxury Japanese companion robots. It was all Manfred had room for in his life, and he loved that robot, despite the alarming way decerebrated kittens kept turning up on his doorstep. He loved it nearly as much as Pamela, his fiancée, loved him, and she knew it. Pamela, being a whole lot smarter than Manfred gave her credit for, realized that the quick-est way to a man's heart was through whatever he loved. And Pamela, being a whole lot more of a control freak than Manfred realized, was damn well ready to use any restraint that came to hand. Theirs was a very twenty-first-century kind of relationship, which is to say one that it would have been illegal a hundred years earlier and fashionably scandalous a century before that. And whenever Manfred upgraded his pet robot—transplanting its trainable neural network into a new body with new and exciting expansion ports—Pamela would hack it.

They were married for a while, and divorced for a whole lot longer, allegedly because they were both strong-willed people with philosophies of life that were irreconcilable short of death or transcendence. Manny, being wildly creative and outward-directed and having the attention span of a weasel on crack, had other lovers. Pamela . . . who knows? If on some evenings she put on a disguise and hung out at encounter areas in fetish clubs, she wasn't telling anyone: She lived in uptight America,
staidly straitlaced, and had a reputation to uphold. But they both stayed in touch with the cat, and although Manfred retained custody, for some reason never articulated, Aineko kept returning Pamela's calls—until it was time to go hang out with their daughter Amber, tagging along on her rush into relativistic exile, then keeping a proprietorial eye on her eigenson Sirhan and his wife and child (a clone off the old family tree, Manfred 2.0) . . .

Now, here's the rub: Aineko wasn't a cat. Aineko was an incarnate intelligence, confined within a succession of catlike bodies that became increasingly realistic over time, and equipped with processing power to support a neural simulation that grew rapidly with each upgrade.

Did anyone in the Macx family ever think to ask what
Aineko
wanted?

And if an answer had come, would they have liked it?

Adult-Manfred, still disoriented from finding himself awake and reinstantiated a couple of centuries downstream from his hurried exile from Saturn system, is hesitantly navigating his way toward Sirhan and Rita's home when big-Manni-with-Manfred's-memory-ghost drops into his consciousness like a ton of computronium glowing red-hot at the edges.

It's a classic
oh-shit
moment. Between one foot touching the ground and the next, Manfred stumbles hard, nearly twisting an ankle, and gasps. He
remembers
. At thirdhand he remembers being reincarnated as Manni, a bouncing baby boy for Rita and Sirhan (and just why they want to raise an ancestor instead of creating a new child of their own is one of those cultural quirks that is so alien he can scarcely comprehend it). Then for a while he recalls living as Manni's amnesic adult accelerated ghost, watching over his original from the consensus cyberspace of the city: the arrival of Pamela, adult Manni's reaction to her, her dump of yet another copy of Manfred's memories into Manni, and now this—
How many of me are there?
he wonders nervously. Then:
Pamela? What's
she
doing here?

Manfred shakes his head and looks about. Now he remembers being big-Manni, he knows where he is implicitly and, more importantly, knows what all these next-gen City interfaces are supposed to do. The
walls and ceiling are carpeted in glowing glyphs that promise him everything from instant-access local services to teleportation across interstellar distances.
So they haven't quite collapsed geography yet,
he realizes gratefully, fastening on to the nearest comprehensible thought of his own before old-Manni's memories explain everything for him. It's a weird sensation, seeing all this stuff for the first time—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 déjà 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 midair 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 absentmindedly 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.”