Accelerando (35 page)

The hazy shells of computronium that ring the sun—concentric clouds of nanocomputers the size of rice grains, powered by sunlight, orbiting in shells like the packed layers of a Matrioshka doll—are still immature, holding barely a thousandth of the physical planetary mass of the system, but they already support a classical computational density of 10
⁴²
MIPS; enough to support a billion civilizations as complex as the one that existed immediately before the great disassembly. The conversion hasn't yet reached the gas giants, and some scant outer-system enclaves remain independent—Amber's Ring Imperium still exists as a separate entity, and will do so for some years to come—but the inner solar system planets, with the exception of Earth, have been colonized more thoroughly than any dusty NASA proposal from the dawn of the space age could have envisaged.

From outside the Accelerated civilization, it isn't really possible to know what's going on inside. The problem is bandwidth: While it's possible to send data in and get data out, the sheer amount of computation going on in the virtual spaces of the Acceleration dwarfs any external observer. Inside that swarm, minds a trillion or more times as complex as humanity think thoughts as far beyond human imagination as a microprocessor is beyond a nematode worm. A million random human civilizations flourish in worldscapes tucked in the corner of this world-mind. Death is abolished, life is triumphant. A thousand
ideologies flower, human nature adapted where necessary to make this possible. Ecologies of thought are forming in a Cambrian explosion of ideas, for the solar system is finally rising to consciousness, and mind is no longer restricted to the mere kilotons of gray fatty meat harbored in fragile human skulls.

Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in furious sleep remember a tiny starship launched years ago, and pay attention. Soon, they realize, the starship will be in position to act as their proxy in an ages-long conversation. Negotiations for access to Amber's extrasolar asset commence; the Ring Imperium prospers, at least for a while.

But first, the operating software on the human side of the network link will require an upgrade.

The audience chamber in the
Field Circus
is crammed. Everybody aboard the ship—except the still-frozen lawyer and the alien barbarian intruders—is present. They've just finished reviewing the recordings of what happened in the Tuileries, of Glashwiecz's fatal last conversation with the Wunch, the resulting fight for survival. And now the time has come for decisions.

“I'm not saying you have to follow me,” says Amber, addressing her court, “just, it's what we came here for. We've established that there's enough bandwidth to transmit people and their necessary support VMs; we've got some basic expectancy of goodwill at the other end, or at least an agalmic willingness to gift us with advice about the untrustworthiness of the Wunch.
I
propose to copy myself through and see what's at the other side of the wormhole. What's more, I'm going to suspend myself on this side and hand over to whichever instance of me comes back, unless there's a long hiatus. How long, I haven't decided yet. Are you guys happy to join me?”

Pierre stands behind her throne, hands on the back. Looking down over her head, at the cat in her lap, he's sure he sees it narrow its eyes at him.
Funny,
he thinks,
we're talking about jumping down a rabbit hole and trusting whoever lives at the other end with our personalities. After seeing the Wunch. Does this make sense
?

“Forgive, please, but am not stupid,” says Boris. “This is Fermi paradox territory, no? Instantaneous network exists, is traversable, with bandwidth adequate for human-equivalent minds. Where are alien visitors, in history? Must be overriding reason for absence. Think will wait here and see what comes back.
Then
make up mind to drink the poison Kool-Aid.”

“I've got half a mind to transmit myself through without a backup,” says someone else, “but that's okay, half a mind is all we've got the bandwidth for.” Halfhearted laughter shores up his wisecrack, supports a flagging determination to press through.

“I'm with Boris,” says Su Ang. She glances at Pierre, catches his eye. Suddenly a number of things become clear to him. He shakes his head minutely.
You never had a chance—I belong to Amber,
he thinks, but deletes the thought before he can send it to her. Maybe in another instantiation his issues with the Queen's
droit de seigneur
would have bulked up larger, splintered his determination; maybe in another world it has already happened? “I think this is very rash,” she says in a hurry. “We don't know enough about postsingularity civilizations.”

“It's not a singularity,” Amber says waspishly. “It's just a brief burst of acceleration. Like cosmological inflation.”

“Smooths out inhomogeneities in the initial structure of consciousness,” purrs the cat. “Don't I get a vote?”

“You do.” Amber sighs. She glances round. “Pierre?”

Heart in his mouth: “I'm with you.”

She smiles, brilliantly. “Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?”

Suddenly, the audience chamber is half-empty.

“I'm setting a watchdog timer for a billion seconds into the future, to restart us from this point if the router doesn't send anyone back in the intervening time,” she announces gravely, taking in the serious-faced avatars of those who remain. Surprised: “Sadeq! I didn't think this was your type of—”

He doesn't smile. “Would I be true to my faith if I wasn't prepared to bring the words of Mohammed, peace be unto him, to those who may never have heard his name?”

Amber nods. “I guess.”

“Do it,” Pierre says urgently. “You can't keep putting it off forever.”

Aineko raises her head. “Spoilsport!”

“Okay.” Amber nods. “Let's
do
—”

She punches an imaginary switch, and time stops.

At the far end of a wormhole, two hundred light years distant in real space, coherent photons begin to dance a story of human identity before the sensoria of those who watch. And all is at peace in orbit around Hyundai
⁺⁴⁹⁰⁴
/
_-56
, for a while . . .

A
SYNTHETIC GEMSTONE THE SIZE OF A
C
OKE CAN
falls through silent darkness. The night is quiet as the grave, colder than midwinter on Pluto. Gossamer sails as fine as soap bubbles droop, the gust of sapphire laser light that inflated them long since darkened. Ancient starlight picks out the outline of a huge planetlike body beneath the jewel-and-cobweb corpse of the starwhisp.

Eight Earth years have passed since the good ship
Field Circus
slipped into close orbit around the frigid brown dwarf Hyundai
⁺⁴⁹⁰⁴
/
_-56
. Five years have gone by since the launch lasers of the Ring Imperium shut down without warning, stranding the light-sail-powered craft three light years from home. There has been no response from the router, the strange alien artifact in orbit around the brown dwarf, since the crew of the starwhisp uploaded themselves through its strange quantum entanglement interface for transmission to whatever alien network it connects to. In fact, nothing happens; nothing save the slow trickle of seconds, as a watchdog timer counts down the moments remaining until it is due to resurrect stored snapshots of the
crew, on the assumption that their uploaded copies are beyond help.

Meanwhile, outside the light cone—

Amber jolts into wakefulness, as if from a nightmare. She sits bolt upright, a thin sheet falling from her chest; air circulating around her back chills her rapidly, cold sweat evaporating. She mutters aloud, unable to subvocalize, “Where am I—oh. A bedroom. How did I get here?”
Mumble
. “Oh, I see.” Her eyes widen in horror.
“It's not a dream
 . . .
”

“Greetings, human Amber,” says a ghost-voice that seems to come from nowhere. “I see you are awake. Would you like anything?”

Amber rubs her eyes tiredly. Leaning against the bedstead, she glances around cautiously. She takes in a bedside mirror, her reflection in it—a young woman, gaunt in the manner of those whose genome bears the p53 calorie-restriction hack; she has disheveled blond hair and dark eyes. She could pass for a dancer or a soldier; not, perhaps, a queen. “What's going on? Where am I? Who are you, and
what am I doing in your head?
”

Her eyes narrow. Analytical intellect comes to the fore as she takes stock of her surroundings. “The router,” she mutters. Structures of strange matter orbit a brown dwarf scant light years from Earth. “How long ago did we come through?” Glancing round, she sees a room walled in slabs of close-fitting stone. A window bay is recessed into them, after the style of the Crusader castles many centuries in the past, but there's no glass in it—just a blank white screen. The only furniture in the room, besides a Persian carpet on the cold flagstones, is the bed she sits upon. She's reminded of a scene from an old movie, Kubrick's enigma; this whole setup has got to be deliberate, and it isn't funny.

“I'm waiting,” she announces, and leans back against the headboard.

“According to our records this reaction indicates that you are now fully self-aware,” says the ghost. “This is good. You have not been conscious for a very long time. Explanations will be complex and discursive. Can I offer you refreshments? What would you like?”

“Coffee, if you have it. Bread and hummus. Something to wear.” Amber crosses her arms, abruptly self-conscious. “I'd prefer to have management ackles to this universe, though. As realities go, it's a bit
lacking in creature comforts.” Which isn't entirely true—it seems to have a comprehensive, human-friendly biophysics model; it's not just a jumped-up first-person shooter. Her eyes focus on her left forearm, where tanned skin and a puckered dime of scar tissue record a youthful accident with a pressure seal in Jovian orbit. Amber freezes for a moment. Her lips move in silence, but she's locked into place in this universe, unable to split or conjoin nested realities just by calling subroutines that have been spliced into the corners of her mind since she was a teenager. Finally, she asks, “How long have I been dead?”

“Longer than you were alive, by orders of magnitude,” says the ghost. A tray laden with pita breads, hummus, and olives congeals from the air above her bed, and a wardrobe appears at one side of the room. “I can begin the explanation now or wait for you to finish eating. Which would you prefer?”

Amber glances about again, then fixes on the white screen in the window bay. “Give it to me right now. I can take it,” she says, quietly bitter. “I like to understand my mistakes as soon as possible.”

“We-us can tell that you are a human of determination,” says the ghost, a hint of pride entering its voice. “That is a good thing, Amber. You will need all of your resolve if you are going to survive here . . .”

It is the time of repentance in a temple beside a tower that looms above a dry plain, and the thoughts of the priest who lives in the tower are tinged with regret. It is Ashura, the tenth day of Muhurram, according to a real-time clock still tuned to the pace of a different era: the one thousand, three hundred and fortieth anniversary of the martyrdom of the Third Imam, the Sayyid ash-Shuhada.

The priest of the tower has spent an indefinite time in prayer, locked in an eternal moment of meditation and recitation. Now, as the vast red sun drifts close to the horizon of the infinite desert, his thoughts drift toward the present. Ashura is a very special day, a day of atonement for collective guilt, evil committed through inactivity; but it is in Sadeq's nature to look outward toward the future. This is, he knows, a failing—but also characteristic of his generation. That's the generation of the Shi'ite clergy that reacted to the excesses of the previous century, the
generation that withdrew the
ulama
from temporal power, retreated from the
velyat i-faqih
of Khomenei and his successors, left government to the people, and began to engage fully with the paradoxes of modernity. Sadeq's focus, his driving obsession in theology, is a program of reappraisal of eschatology and cosmology. Here in a tower of white sunbaked clay, on an endless plain that exists only in the imaginary spaces of a starship the size of a soft drink can, the priest spends his processor cycles in contemplation of one of the most vicious problems ever to confront a
mujtahid
—the Fermi paradox.

(Enrico Fermi was eating his lunch one day, and his colleagues were discussing the possibility that sophisticated civilizations might populate other worlds. “Yes,” he said, “but if this is so, why haven't they already come visiting?”)

Sadeq finishes his evening devotions in near silence, then stands, stretches as is his wont, and leaves the small and lonely courtyard at the base of the tower. The gate—a wrought-iron gate, warmed by sunlight—squeals slightly as he opens it. Glancing at the upper hinge, he frowns, willing it clean and whole. The underlying physics model acknowledges his access controls: A thin rim of red around the pin turns silvery-fresh, and the squeaking ceases. Closing the gate behind him, Sadeq enters the tower.

He climbs with a heavy, even tread, a spiral staircase snaking ever upward above him. Narrow slit-windows line the outer wall of the staircase. Through each of them he sees a different world. Out there, nightfall in the month of Ramadan. And through the next, green misty skies and a horizon too close by far. Sadeq carefully avoids thinking about the implications of this manifold space. Coming from prayer, from a sense of the sacred, he doesn't want to lose his proximity to his faith. He's far enough from home as it is, and there is much to consider. He is surrounded by strange and curious ideas, all but lost in a corrosive desert of faith.

At the top of the staircase, Sadeq comes to a door of aged wood bound in iron. It doesn't belong here: It's a cultural and architectural anomaly. The handle is a loop of black metal. Sadeq regards it as if it's the head of an asp, poised to sting. Nevertheless, he reaches out and turns the handle, steps across the threshold into a palace out of fantasy.

None of this is real,
he reminds himself.
It's no more real than an illusion conjured by one of the jinni of the thousand and one nights.
Nevertheless, he can't save himself from smiling at the scene—a sardonic smile of self-deprecating humor, tempered by frustration.

Sadeq's captors have stolen his soul and locked it—him—in a very strange prison, a temple with a tower that rises all the way to Paradise. It's the whole classical litany of medievalist desires, distilled from fifteen hundred years of literature. Colonnaded courtyards, cool pools lined with rich mosaics, rooms filled with every imaginable dumb matter luxury, endless banquets awaiting his appetite—and dozens of beautiful un-women, eager to fulfill his every fantasy. Sadeq, being human, has fantasies by the dozen, but he doesn't dare permit himself to succumb to temptation.
I'm not dead,
he reasons;
therefore, how can I be in Paradise? Therefore, this must be a false paradise, a temptation sent to lead me astray. Probably. Unless I
am
dead, because Allah, peace be unto him, considers a human soul separated from its body to be dead. But if that's so, isn't uploading a sin? In which case, this can't be Paradise because I am a sinner. Besides which, this whole setup is so
puerile!

Sadeq has always been inclined to philosophical inquiry, and his vision of the afterlife is more cerebral than most, involving ideas as questionable within the framework of Islam as those of Teilhard de Chardin were to the twentieth-century Catholic Church. If there's one key indicator of a false paradise in his eschatology, it's two-and-seventy brainlessly beautiful houris waiting to do his bidding. So it follows that he can't really be dead . . .

The whole question of reality is so vexing that Sadeq does what he does every night. He strides heedlessly across priceless works of art, barging hastily through courtyards and passageways, ignoring niches in which nearly naked supermodels lie with their legs apart, climbing stairs—until he comes to a small unfurnished room with a single high window in one wall. There he sits on the floor, legs crossed, meditating; not in prayer, but in a more tightly focused ratiocination. Every false night (for there is no way to know how fast time is passing, outside this cyberspace pocket), Sadeq sits and
thinks,
grappling with Descartes's demon in the solitude of his own mind. And the question he asks himself every night is the same.
Can I tell if this is the true hell? And if it is not, how can I escape?

The ghost tells Amber that she has been dead for just under a third of a million years. She has been reinstantiated from storage—and has died again—many times in the intervening period, but she has no memory of this; she is a fork from the main bough, and the other branches expired in lonely isolation.