Accelerando (64 page)

Manfred walks down a hall of mirrors. At the far end, he emerges in a public space modeled on a Menger sponge—a cube diced subtractively into ever-smaller cubic volumes until its surface area tends toward infinity. This being meatspace, or a reasonable simulation thereof, it isn't a
real
Menger sponge; but it looks good at a distance, going down at least four levels.

He pauses behind a waist-high diamond barrier and looks down into the almost-tesseract-shaped depths of the cube's interior, at a verdant garden landscape with charming footbridges that cross streams laid out with careful attention to the requirements of feng shui. He looks up: Some of the cube-shaped subtractive openings within the pseudofractal structure are occupied by windows belonging to dwellings or shared buildings that overlook the public space. High above, butterfly-shaped beings with exotic colored wings circle in the ventilation currents. It's hard to tell from down here, but the central cuboid opening looks to be at least half a kilometer on a side, and they might very well be posthumans with low-gee wings—angels.

Angels, or rats in the walls?
he asks himself, and sighs. Half his extensions are off-line, so hopelessly obsolete that the temple's assembler
systems didn't bother replicating them, or even creating emulation environments for them to run in. The rest . . . well, at least he's still physically orthohuman, he realizes. Fully functional, fully male.
Not everything has changed—only the important stuff.
It's a scary-funny thought, laden with irony. Here he is, naked as the day he was born—newly re-created, in fact, released from the wake-experience-reset cycle of the temple of history—standing on the threshold of a posthuman civilization so outrageously rich and powerful that they can build mammal-friendly habitats that resemble works of art in the cryogenic depths of space. Only he's
poor,
this whole polity is
poor,
and it can't ever be anything else, in fact, because it's a dumping ground for merely posthuman also-rans, the singularitarian equivalent of australopithecines. In the brave new world of the Vile Offspring, they can't get ahead any more than a protohominid could hack it as a rocket scientist in Werner von Braun's day. They're born to be primitive, wallowing happily in the mud bath of their own limited cognitive bandwidth. So they fled into the darkness and built a civilization so bright it can put anything earthbound that came before the singularity into the shade . . . and it's still a shantytown inhabited by the mentally handicapped.

The incongruity of it amuses him, but only for a moment. He has, after all, electively reincarnated for a reason: Sirhan's throwaway comment about the cat caught his attention. “City, where can I find some clothes?” he asks. “Something socially appropriate, that is. And some, uh, brains. I need to be able to off-load . . .”

Citymind chuckles inside the back of his head, and Manfred realizes that there's a public assembler on the other side of the ornamental wall he's leaning on. “Oh,” he mutters, as he finds himself imagining something not unlike his clunky old direct neural interface, candy-colored icons and overlays and all. It's curiously mutable, and with a weird sense of detachment he realizes that it's not his imagination at all, but an infinitely customizable interface to the pervasive information spaces of the polity, currently running in dumbed-down stupid mode for his benefit. It's true; he needs training wheels. But it doesn't take him long to figure out how to ask the assembler to make him a pair of pants and a plain black vest, and to discover that as long as he keeps his requests simple the results are free—just like back home on Saturn. The spaceborn polities are kind to indigents, for the basic requirements of life are cheap, and to
withhold them would be tantamount to homicide. (If the presence of transhumans has upset a whole raft of prior assumptions, at least it hasn't done more than superficial damage to the Golden Rule.)

Clothed and more or less conscious—at least at a human level—Manfred takes stock. “Where do Sirhan and Rita live?” he asks. A dotted route makes itself apparent to him, snaking improbably through a solid wall that he understands to be an instantaneous wormhole gate connecting points light years apart. He shakes his head, bemused.
I suppose I'd better go and see them,
he decides. It's not as if there's anyone else for him to look up, is it? The Franklins vanished into the solar Matrioshka brain, Pamela died ages ago (and there's a shame, he'd never expected to miss her), and Annette hooked up with Gianni while he was being a flock of pigeons. (Draw a line under that one and say it's all over.) His daughter vanished into the long-range exploration program. He's been dead for so long that his friends and acquaintances are scattered across a light cone centuries across. He can't think of anyone else here who he might run into, except for the loyal grandson, keeping the candle of filial piety burning with unasked-for zeal. “Maybe he needs help,” Manfred thinks aloud as he steps into the gate, rationalizing. “And then again, maybe
he
can help
me
figure out what to do?”

Sirhan gets home anticipating trouble. He finds it, but not in any way he'd expected. Home is a split-level manifold, rooms connected by T-gates scattered across a variety of habitats: low-gee sleeping den, high-gee exercise room, and everything in between. It's furnished simply, tatami mats and programmable matter walls able to extrude any desired furniture in short order. The walls are configured to look and feel like paper, but can damp out even infant tantrums. But right now the antisound isn't working, and the house he comes home to is overrun by shrieking yard apes, a blur of ginger-and-white fur, and a distraught Rita trying to explain to her neighbor Eloise why her orthodaughter Sam is bouncing around the place like a crazy ball.

“—The cat, he gets them worked up.” She wrings her hands and begins to turn as Sirhan comes into view. “At last!”

“I came fast.” He nods respectfully at Eloise, then frowns. “The children—” Something small and fast runs headfirst into him, grabs his
legs, and tries to head-butt him in the crotch. “Oof!” He bends down and lifts Manni up. “Hey, son, haven't I told you not to—”

“Not his fault,” Rita says hurriedly. “He's excited because—”

“I really don't think—” Eloise begins to gather steam, looking around uncertainly.

“Mrreeow?” something asks in a conversational tone of voice from down around Sirhan's ankles.

“Eek!” Sirhan jumps backward, flailing for balance under the weight of an excited toddler. There's a gigantic disturbance in the polity thoughtspace—like a stellar-mass black hole—and it appears to be stropping itself furrily against his left leg. “What are
you
doing here?” he demands.

“Oh, this and that,” says the cat, his innerspeech accent a sardonic drawl. “I thought it was about time I visited again. Where's your household assembler? Mind if I use it? Got a little something I need to make up for a friend . . .”

“What?” Rita demands, instantly suspicious. “Haven't you caused enough trouble already?” Sirhan looks at her approvingly; obviously Amber's long-ago warnings about the cat sank in deeply, because she's certainly not treating it as the small bundle of child-friendly fun it would like to be perceived as.

“Trouble?” The cat looks up at her sardonically, lashing his tail from side to side. “I won't make any trouble, I promise you. It's just—”

The door chime clears its throat, to announce a visitor: “Ren Fuller would like to visit, m'lord and lady.”

“What's
she
doing here?” Rita asks irritably. Sirhan can feel her unease, the tenuous grasping of her ghosts as she searches for reason in an unreasonable world, simulating outcomes, living through bad dreams, and backtracking to adjust her responses accordingly. “Show her in, by all means.” Ren is one of their neighbor-cognates (most of her dwelling is several light years away, but in terms of transit time it's a hop, skip, and a jump); she and her extruded family are raising a small herd of ill-behaved kids who occasionally hang out with Manni.

A small blue eeyore whinnies mournfully and dashes past the adults, pursued by a couple of children waving spears and shrieking. Eloise makes a grab for her own and misses, just as the door to the exercise room disappears and Manni's little friend Lis darts inside like a pint-sized
guided missile. “Sam, come here right now—” Eloise calls, heading toward the door.

“Look, what do you want?” Sirhan demands, hugging his son and looking down at the cat.

“Oh, not much,” Aineko says, turning to lick a mussed patch of fur on his flank. “I just want to play with
him
.”

“You want to—” Rita stops.

“Daddy!” Manni wants down.

Sirhan lowers him carefully, as if his bones are glass. “Run along and play,” he suggests. Turning to Rita: “Why don't you go and find out what Ren wants, dear?” he asks. “She's probably here to collect Lis, but you can never be sure.”

“I was just leaving,” Eloise adds, “as soon as I can catch up with Sam.” She glances over her shoulder at Rita apologetically, then dives into the exercise room.

Sirhan takes a step toward the hallway. “Let's talk,” he says tightly. “In my study.” He glares at the cat. “I want an explanation. I want to know the truth.”

Meanwhile, in a cognitive wonderland his parents know about but deeply underestimate, parts of Manni are engaging in activities far less innocent than they imagine.

Back in the twenty-first century, Sirhan lived through loads of alternate childhoods in simulation, his parents' fingers pressing firmly on the fast-forward button until they came up with someone who seemed to match their preconceptions. The experience scarred him as badly as any nineteenth-century boarding school experience, until he promised himself no child he raised would be subjected to such; but there's a difference between being shoved through a multiplicity of avatars and voluntarily diving into an exciting universe of myth and magic where your childhood fantasies take fleshy form, stalking those of your friends and enemies through the forests of the night.

Manni has grown up with neural interfaces to City's mindspace an order of magnitude more complex than those of Sirhan's youth, and parts of him—ghosts derived from a starting image of his neural state vector, fertilized with a scattering borrowed from the original Manfred,
simulated on a meat machine far faster than real time—are fully adult. Of course, they can't fit inside his seven-year-old skull, but they still watch over him. And when he's in danger, they try to take care of their once-and-future body.

Manni's primary adult ghost lives in some of New Japan's virtual mindspaces (which are a few billion times more extensive than the physical spaces available to stubborn biologicals, for the computational density of human habitats have long since ceased to make much sense when measured in MIPS per kilogram). They're modeled on presingularity Earth. Time is forever frozen on the eve of the real twenty-first century, zero eight-forty-six hours on September 11: An onrushing wide-body airliner hangs motionless in the air forty meters below the picture window of Manni's penthouse apartment on the one hundred and eighth floor of the North Tower. In historical reality, the one hundred and eighth floor was occupied by corporate offices; but the mindspace is a consensual fiction, and it is Manni's conceit to live at this pivotal point. (Not that it means much to him—he was born well over a century after the War on Terror—but it's part of his childhood folklore, the fall of the Two Towers that shattered the myth of Western exceptionalism and paved the way for the world he was born into.)