Accelerando (50 page)

The spell is broken. “Thank you,” Sirhan says gravely, taking a cracker and feeling the tension fall as Amber and her mother stop preparing to nuke each other and focus on the issue at hand—which is that food comes before fighting at any social event, not vice versa.

“You might enjoy the egg mayonnaise, too,” Sirhan hears himself saying. “It goes a long way to explaining why the dodo became extinct first time around.”

“Dodoes.” Amber keeps one eye warily on her mother as she accepts a plate from a silently gliding silver bush-shaped waitron. “What was that about the family investment project?” she asks.

“Just that without your cooperation your family will likely go the way of the bird,” her mother cuts in before Sirhan can muster a reply. “Not that I expect you to care.”

Boris butts in. “Core worlds are teeming with corporates. Is bad
business for us, good business for them. If you are seeing what we are seen—”

“Don't remember
you
being there,” Pierre says grumpily.

“In any event,” Sirhan says smoothly, “the core isn't healthy for us one-time fleshbodies anymore. There are still lots of people there, but the ones who uploaded expecting a boom economy were sadly disappointed. Originality is at a premium, and the human neural architecture isn't optimized for it—we are, by disposition, a conservative species, because in a static ecosystem that provides the best return on sunk reproductive investment costs. Yes, we change over time—we're more flexible than almost any other animal species to arise on Earth—but we're like granite statues compared to organisms adapted to life under Economics 2.0.”

“You tell 'em, boy,” Pamela chirps, almost mockingly. “It wasn't that bloodless when I lived through it.” Amber casts her a cool stare.

“Where was I?” Sirhan snaps his fingers, and a glass of fizzy grape juice appears between them. “Early upload entrepreneurs forked repeatedly, discovered they could scale linearly to occupy processor capacity proportional to the mass of computronium available, and that computationally trivial tasks became tractable. They could also run faster, or slower, than real time. But they were still
human,
and unable to operate effectively outside human constraints. Take a human being and bolt on extensions that let them take full advantage of Economics 2.0, and you essentially break their narrative chain of consciousness, replacing it with a journal file of bid/request transactions between various agents; it's incredibly efficient and flexible, but it isn't a conscious human being in any recognizable sense of the word.”

“All right,” Pierre says slowly. “I think we've seen something like that ourselves. At the router.”

Sirhan nods, not sure whether he's referring to anything important. “So you see, there are limits to human progress—but not to progress itself! The uploads found their labor to be a permanently deflating commodity once they hit their point of diminishing utility. Capitalism doesn't have a lot to say about workers whose skills are obsolete, other than that they should invest wisely while they're earning and maybe retrain. But just knowing
how
to invest in Economics 2.0 is beyond an unaugmented human. You can't retrain as a seagull, can you, and it's quite as hard to retool for Economics 2.0. Earth is—” He shudders.

“There's a phrase I used to hear in the old days,” Pamela says calmly. “Ethnic cleansing. Do you know what that means, darling idiot daughter? You take people who you define as being of little worth, and first you herd them into a crowded ghetto with limited resources, then you decide those resources aren't worth spending on them, and bullets are cheaper than bread. ‘Mind children' the extropians called the posthumans, but they were more like Vile Offspring. There was a
lot
of that, during the fast sigmoid phase. Starving among plenty, compulsory conversions, the very antithesis of everything your father said he wanted . . .”

“I don't believe it,” Amber says hotly. “That's crazy! We can't go the way of—”

“Since when has human history been anything else?” asks the woman with the camera on her shoulder—Donna, being some sort of public archivist, is in Sirhan's estimate likely to be of use to him. “Remember what we found in the DMZ?”

“The DMZ?” Sirhan asks, momentarily confused.

“After we went through the router,” Pierre says grimly. “You tell him, love.” He looks at Amber.

Sirhan, watching him, feels it fall into place at that moment, a sense that he's stepped into an alternate universe, one where the woman who might have been his mother isn't, where black is white, his kindly grandmother is the wicked witch of the west, and his feckless grandfather is a farsighted visionary.

“We uploaded via the router,” Amber says, and looks confused for a moment. “There's a network on the other side of it. We were told it was FTL, instantaneous, but I'm not so sure now. I think it's something more complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from our perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a technological singularity—they're bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman descendants evolve Economics 2.0, or 3.0, or something else, and it, uh,
eats
the original conscious instigators. Or uses them as currency or something. The end result we found is a howling wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for processing power. We were”—she licks her lips—“lucky to escape with our minds. We only
did it because of a friend. It's like the main sequence in stellar evolution; once a G-type star starts burning helium and expands into a red giant, it's ‘game over' for life in what used to be its liquid-water zone. Conscious civilizations sooner or later convert all their available mass into computronium, powered by solar output. They don't go interstellar because they want to stay near the core where the bandwidth is high and latency is low, and sooner or later competition for resources hatches a new level of metacompetition that obsoletes them.”

“That sounds plausible,” Sirhan says slowly. He puts his glass down and chews distractedly on one knuckle. “I thought it was a low-probability outcome, but . . .”

“I've been saying all along, your grandfather's ideas would backfire in the end,” Pamela says pointedly.

“But—” Amber shakes her head. “There's more to it than that, isn't there?”

“Probably,” Sirhan says, then shuts up.

“So are you going to tell us?” asks Pierre, looking annoyed. “What's the big idea, here?”

“An archive store,” Sirhan says, deciding that this is the right time for his pitch. “At the lowest level, you can store backups of yourself here. So far so good, eh? But there's a bit more to it than that. I'm planning to offer a bunch of embedded universes—big, running faster than real time—sized and scoped to let human-equivalent intelligences do what-if modeling on themselves. Like forking off ghosts of yourself, but much more so—give them whole years to diverge, learn new skills, and evaluate them against market requirements, before deciding which version of you is most suited to run in the real world. I mentioned the retraining paradox. Think of this as a solution for level one, human-equivalent, intelligences. But that's just the short-term business model. Long-term, I want to acquire a total lock on the history futures market by having a
complete
archive of human experiences, from the dawn of the fifth singularity on up. No more unknown extinct species. That should give us something to trade with the next-generation intelligences—the ones who aren't our mind children and barely remember us. At the very least, it gives us a chance to live again, a long way out in deep time. Alternatively, it can be turned into a lifeboat. If we can't compete with our creations, at least we've got somewhere to flee, those of us who
want to. I've got agents working on a comet, out in the Oort cloud—we could move the archive to it, turn it into a generation ship with room for billions of evacuees running much slower than real time in archive space until we find a new world to settle.”

“Is not sounding good to me,” Boris comments. He spares a worried glance for an oriental-looking woman who is watching their debate silently from the fringe.

“Has it really gone that far?” asks Amber.

“There are bailiffs hunting you in the inner system,” Pamela says bluntly. “After your bankruptcy proceedings, various corporates got the idea that you might be concealing something. The theory was that you were insane to take such a huge gamble on the mere possibility of there being an alien artifact within a few light years of home, so you had to have information above and beyond what you disclosed. Theories include your cat—hardware tokens were in vogue in the fifties—being the key to a suite of deposit accounts; the fuss mainly died down after Economics 2.0 took over, but some fairly sleazy conspiracy freaks refuse to let go.”

She grins, frighteningly. “Which is why I suggested to your son that he make you an offer you can't refuse.”

“What's that?” asks a voice from below knee level.

Pamela looks down, an expression of deep distaste on her face. “Why should I tell
you
?” she asks, leaning on her cane. “After the disgraceful way you repaid my hospitality! All you've got coming from me is a good kicking. If only my knee was up to the job.”

The cat arches its back: Its tail fluffs out with fear as its hair stands on end, and it takes Amber a moment to realize that it isn't responding to Pamela, but to something behind the old woman. “Through the domain wall. Outside this biome. So cold. What's
that
?”

Amber turns to follow the cat's gaze, and her jaw drops. “Were you expecting visitors?” she asks Sirhan, shakily.

“Visit—” He looks round to see what everybody's gaping at and freezes. The horizon is brightening with a false dawn—the fusion spark of a de-orbiting spacecraft.

“It's bailiffs,” says Pamela, head cocked to one side as if listening to an antique bone-conduction earpiece. “They've come for your memories, dear,” she explains, frowning. “They say we've got five kiloseconds to surrender everything. Otherwise, they're going to blow us apart . . .”
“You're all in big trouble,” says the orangutan, sliding gracefully down one enormous rib to land in an ungainly heap in front of Sirhan.

Sirhan recoils in disgust. “You again! What do you want from me this time?”

“Nothing.” The ape ignores him. “Amber, it is time for you to call your father.”

“Yeah, but will he come when I call?” Amber stares at the ape. Her pupils expand. “Hey, you're not my—”

“You.” Sirhan glares at the ape. “Go away! I didn't invite you here!”

“More unwelcome visitors?” asks Pamela, raising an eyebrow.

“Yes, you did.” The ape grins at Amber, then crouches down, hoots quietly and beckons to the cat, who is hiding behind one of the graceful silver servitors.

“Manfred isn't welcome here. And neither is that woman,” Sirhan swears. He catches Pamela's eye. “Did you know anything about this? Or about the bailiffs?” He gestures at the window, beyond which the drive flare casts jagged shadows. It's dropping toward the horizon as it de-orbits—next time it comes into view, it'll be at the leading edge of a hypersonic shock wave, streaking toward them at cloud-top height in order to consummate the robbery.

“Me?” Pamela snorts. “Grow up.” She eyes the ape warily. “I don't have that much control over things. And as for bailiffs, I wouldn't set them on my worst enemies. I've seen what those things can do.” For a moment her eyes flash anger. “Grow up, why don't you!” she repeats.

“Yes, please do,” says another voice from behind Sirhan. The new speaker is a woman, slightly husky, accented—he turns to see her: tall, black-haired, wearing a dark man's suit of archaic cut and mirrored glasses. “Ah, Pamela,
ma chérie!
Long time no catfight.” She grins frighteningly and holds out a hand.

Sirhan is already off-balance. Now, seeing his honorary aunt in human skin for a change, he looks at the ape in confusion. Behind him Pamela advances on Annette and takes her hand in her own fragile fingers. “You look just the same,” she says gravely. “I can see why I was afraid of you.”

“You.” Amber backs away until she bumps into Sirhan, at whom
she glares. “What the fuck did you invite both of them for? Are you
trying
to start a thermonuclear war?”

“Don't ask me,” he says helplessly. “I don't know why they came! What's this about”—he focuses on the orangutan, who is now letting the cat lick one hairy palm—“your cat?”

“I don't think the orange hair suits Aineko,” Amber says slowly. “Did I tell you about our hitchhiker?”

Sirhan shakes his head, trying to dispel the confusion. “I don't think we've got time. In under two hours the bailiffs up there will be back. They're armed and dangerous, and if they turn their drive flame on the roof and set fire to the atmosphere in here, we'll be in trouble—it would rupture our lift cells, and even computronium doesn't work too well under a couple of million atmospheres of pressurized metallic hydrogen.”