Accelerando (56 page)

Which is why you're stuck here with us apes,
Sirhan-prime cynically notes as he spawns an Eliza ghost to carry on nodding at the cat while he experiences the party.

It's uncomfortably warm in the Atomium sphere—not surprising,
there must be thirty people milling around up here, not counting the waitrons—and several local multicast channels are playing a variety of styles of music to synchronize the mood swings of the revelers to hardcore techno, waltz, raga . . .

“Having a good time, are we?” Sirhan breaks away from integrating one of his timid philosophers and realizes that his glass is empty, and his mother is grinning alarmingly at him over the rim of a cocktail glass containing something that glows in the dark. She's wearing spike-heeled boots and a black velvet cat suit that hugs her contours like a second skin, and she's already getting drunk. In wall-clock years she is younger than Sirhan; it's like having a bizarrely knowing younger sister mysteriously injected into his life to replace the eigenmother who stayed home and died with the Ring Imperium decades ago. “Look at you, hiding in a corner at your grandfather's party! Hey, your glass is empty. Want to try this caipirinha? There's someone you've got to meet over here—”

It's at moments like this that Sirhan really wonders what in Jupiter's orbit his father ever saw in this woman. (But then again, in the world line this instance of her has returned from, he didn't. So what does that signify?) “As long as there's no fermented grape juice in it,” he says resignedly, allowing himself to be led past a gaggle of conversations and a mournful-looking gorilla slurping a long drink through a straw. “More of your
accelerationista
allies?”

“Maybe not.” It's the girl gang he avoided noticing in the lift, their eyes sparkling, really getting into this early twen-cen drag party thing, waving their cigarette holders and cocktail glasses around with wild abandon. “Rita, I'd like you to meet Sirhan, my other fork's son. Sirhan, this is Rita? She's an historian, too. Why don't you—”

Dark eyes, emphasized not by powder or paint but by chromatophores inside her skin cells: black hair, chain of enormous pearls, slim black dress sweeping the floor, a look of mild embarrassment on her heart-shaped face. She could be a clone of Audrey Hepburn. “Didn't I just meet you in the elevator?” The embarrassment shifts to her cheeks, becoming visible.

Sirhan flushes, unsure how to reply. Just then an interloper arrives on the scene, pushing in between them. “Are you the curator who
reorganized the Precambrian gallery along teleology lines? I've got some things to say about
that
!” The interloper is tall, assertive, and blond. Sirhan hates her from the first sight of her wagging finger.

“Oh shut up, Marissa, this is a party. You've been being a pain all evening.” To his surprise, Rita the historian rounds on the interloper angrily.

“It's not a problem,” he manages to say. In the back of his mind, something makes the Rogerian puppet-him that's listening to the cat sit up and dump-merge a whole lump of fresh memories into his mind—something important, something about the Vile Offspring sending a starship to bring something back from the router—but the people around him are soaking up so much attention that he has to file it for later.

“Yes it
is
a problem,” Rita declares. She points at the interloper, who is saying something about the invalidity of teleological interpretations, trying to justify herself, and says, “
Plonk
. Phew. Where were we?”

Sirhan blinks. Suddenly everyone but him seems to be ignoring that annoying Marissa person. “What just happened?” he asks cautiously.

“I killfiled her. Don't tell me, you aren't running Superplonk yet, are you?” Rita flicks a location-cached idea at him and he takes it cautiously, spawning a couple of specialized Turing Oracles to check it for halting states. It seems to be some kind of optic lobe hack that accesses a collaborative database of eigenfaces, with some sort of side interface to Broca's region. “Share and enjoy, confrontation-free parties.”

“I've never seen—” Sirhan trails off as he loads the module distractedly. (The cat is rambling on about god modules and metastatic entanglement and the difficulty of arranging to have personalities custom-grown to order somewhere in the back of his head, while his fractional-self nods wisely whenever it pauses.) Something like an inner eyelid descends. He looks round; there's a vague blob at one side of the room, making an annoying buzzing sound. His mother seems to be having an animated conversation with it. “That's rather interesting.”

“Yes, it helps no end at this sort of event.” Rita startles him by taking his left arm in hand—her cigarette holder shrivels and condenses until
it's no more than a slight thickening around the wrist of her opera glove—and steers him toward a waitron. “I'm sorry about your foot, earlier. I was a bit overloaded. Is Amber Macx really your mother?”

“Not exactly, she's my eigenmother,” he mumbles. “The reincarnated download of the version who went out to Hyundai
⁺⁴⁹⁰⁴
/
_-56
aboard the
Field Circus
. She married a French-Algerian confidence-trick analyst instead of my father, but I think they divorced a couple of years ago. My
real
mother married an imam, but they died in the aftermath of Economics 2.0.” She seems to be steering him in the direction of the window bay Amber dragged him away from earlier. “Why do you ask?”

“Because you're not very good at making small talk,” Rita says quietly, “and you don't seem very good in crowds. Is that right? Was it you who performed that amazing dissection of Wittgenstein's cognitive map? The one with the preverbal Gödel string in it?”

“It was—” He clears his throat. “You thought it was amazing?” Suddenly, on impulse, he detaches a ghost to identify this Rita person and find out who she is, what she wants. It's not normally worth the effort to get to know someone more closely than casual small talk, but she seems to have been digging into his background, and he wants to know why. Along with the him that's chatting to Aineko, that makes about three instances pulling in near-real-time resources. He'll be running up an existential debt soon if he keeps forking ghosts like this.

“I thought so,” she says. There's a bench in front of the wall, and somehow he finds himself sitting on it next to her.
There's no danger, we're not in private or anything,
he tells himself stiffly. She's smiling at him, face tilted slightly to one side and lips parted, and for a moment, a dizzy sense of possibility washes over him.
What if she's about to throw all propriety aside? How undignified!
Sirhan believes in self-restraint and dignity. “I was really interested in this—” She passes him another dynamically loadable blob, encompassing a detailed critique of his analysis of Wittgenstein's matriophobia in the context of gendered language constructs and nineteenth-century Viennese society, along with a hypothesis that leaves Sirhan gasping with mild indignation at the very idea that
he
of all people might share Wittgenstein's skewed outlook. “What do you think?” she asks, grinning impishly at him.

“Nnngk.” Sirhan tries to unswallow his tongue. Rita crosses her legs, her gown hissing. “I, ah, that is to say—” At which moment, his
partials reintegrate, dumping a slew of positively pornographic images into his memories.
It's a trap!
they shriek, her breasts and hips and pubes—clean-shaven, he can't help noticing—thrusting at him in hotly passionate abandon.
Mother's trying to make you loose like her!
and he remembers what it
would
be like to wake up in bed next to this woman whom he barely knows after being married to her for a year, because one of his cognitive ghosts has just spent several seconds of network time (or several subjective months) getting hot and sweaty with a ghost of her own, and she
does
have interesting research ideas, even if she's a pushy over-Westernized woman who thinks she can run his life for him. “What
is
this?” he splutters, his ears growing hot and his garments constricting.

“Just speculating about possibilities. We could get a lot done together.” She snakes an arm round his shoulders and pulls him toward her, gently. “Don't you want to find out if we could work out?”

“But, but—” Sirhan is steaming.
Is she offering casual sex?
he wonders, profoundly embarrassed by his own inability to read her signals. “What do you
want
?” he asks.

“You
do
know that you can do more with Superplonk than just killfile annoying idiots?” she whispers in his ear. “We can be invisible right now, if you like. It's great for confidential meetings—other things, too. We can work beautifully together, our ghosts annealed really well . . .”

Sirhan jumps up, his face stinging, and turns away. “No thank you!” he snaps, angry at himself. “Goodbye!” His other instances, interrupted by his broadcast emotional overload, are distracted from their tasks and sputtering with indignation. Her hurt expression is too much for him: The killfile snaps down, blurring her into an indistinct black blob on the wall, veiled by his own brain as he turns and walks away, seething with anger at his mother for being so unfair as to make him behold his own face in the throes of fleshy passion.

Meanwhile, in one of the lower spheres, padded with silvery blue insulating pillows bound together with duct tape, the movers and shakers of the
accelerationista
faction are discussing their bid for world power at fractional-C velocities.

“We can't outrun everything. For example, a collapse of the false
vacuum,” Manfred insists, slightly uncoordinated and slurring his vowels under the influence of the first glass of fruit punch he's experienced in nigh-on twenty real-time years. His body is young and still relatively featureless, hair still growing out, and he's abandoned his old no-implants fetish at last to adopt an array of interfaces that let him internalize all the exocortex processes that he formerly ran on an array of dumb Turing machines outside his body. He's standing on his own sense of style and is the only person in the room who isn't wearing some variation of dinner jacket or classical evening dress. “Entangled exchange via routers is all very well, but it won't let us escape the universe itself—any phase change will catch up eventually. The network must have an end. And then where will we be, Sameena?”

“I'm not disputing that.” The woman he's talking to, wearing a green-and-gold sari and a medieval maharajah's ransom in gold and natural diamonds, nods thoughtfully. “But it hasn't happened yet, and we've got evidence that superhuman intelligences have been loose in this universe for gigayears, so there's a fair bet that the worst catastrophe scenarios are unlikely. And looking closer to home, we don't know what the routers are for, or who made them. Until then . . .” She shrugs. “Look what happened last time somebody tried to probe them. No offense intended.”

“It's already happened. If what I hear is correct, the Vile Offspring aren't nearly as negative about the idea of using the routers as we old-fashioned metahumans might like to believe.” Manfred frowns, trying to recall some hazy anecdote—he's experimenting with a new memory compression algorithm, necessitated by his pack rat mnemonic habits when younger, and sometimes the whole universe feels as if it's nearly on the tip of his tongue. “So, we seem to be in violent agreement about the need to
know more
about what's going on, and to find out what they're doing out there. We've got cosmic background anisotropies caused by the waste heat from computing processes millions of light years across—it takes a big interstellar civilization to do that, and they don't seem to have fallen into the same rat-trap as the local Matrioshka brain civilizations. And we've got worrying rumors about the VO messing around with the structure of space-time in order to find a way around the Beckenstein bound. If the VO are trying that, then the folks out near the supercluster already know the answers. The best way to
find out what's happening is to go and talk to whoever's responsible. Can we at least agree on that?”

“Probably not.” Her eyes glitter with amusement. “It all depends on whether one believes in these civilizations in the first place. I
know
your people point to deep-field camera images going all the way back to some wonky hubble-bubble scrying mirror from the late twentieth, but we've got no evidence except some theories about the Casimir effect and pair production and spinning beakers of helium-3—much less proof that whole bunch of alien galactic civilizations are trying to collapse the false vacuum and destroy the universe!” Her voice dropped a notch. “At least, not enough proof to convince most people, Manny dear. I know this comes as a shock to you, but not
everyone
is a neophiliac posthuman bodysurfer whose idea of a sabbatical is to spend twenty years as a flock of tightly networked seagulls in order to try to prove the Turing Oracle thesis—”