Accelerando

It takes a conscious being to authenticate that kind of messenger. Unfortunately, the history temple is annoyingly resistant to unauthorized extraction – I can't just go in and steal a copy of him – and I don't want to use my own model of Manfred: It knows too much. So -'

'What's it promising?' Sirhan asks tensely.

Aineko looks at him through slitted eyes, a purring buzz at the base of his throat: ' Everything.'

* * *

'There are different kinds of death,' the woman called Pamela tells Manni, her bone-dry voice a whisper in the darkness. Manni tries to move, but he seems to be trapped in a confined space; for a moment, he begins to panic, but then he works it out. 'First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life – oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not just the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness.' The darkness is close and disorienting and Manni isn't sure which way up he is – nothing seems to work. Even Pamela's voice is a directionless ambiance, coming from all around him.

'Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding.' A dry chuckle: 'I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal's wager was right – exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.'

Manni tries to say, I'm not dead, but his throat doesn't seem to be working. And now that he thinks about it, he doesn't seem to be breathing, either.

'Now, consciousness. That's a fun thing, isn't it? Product of an arms race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a mouse, you'll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the cat having a theory of mind concerning the mouse – an internal simulation of the mouse's likely behavior when it notices the predator. Which way to run, for example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile, prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator's actions. Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling – so the tribe could work collectively – and then reflexively, to simulate the individual's own inner states. Put the two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, and you've got human-level consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus – signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals such as 'predator here' or 'food there.''

Get me out of this! Manny feels panic biting into him with liquid-helium-lubricated teeth. 'G-e-t -' For a miracle the words actually come out, although he can't tell quite how he's uttering them, his throat being quite as frozen as his innerspeech. Everything's off-lined, all systems down.

'So,' Pamela continues remorselessly, 'we come to the posthuman. Not just our own neural wetware, mapped out to the subcellular level and executed in an emulation environment on a honking great big computer, like this: That's not posthuman, that's a travesty. I'm talking about beings who are fundamentally better consciousness engines than us merely human types, augmented or otherwise. They're not just better at cooperation – witness Economics 2.0 for a classic demonstration of that – but better at simulation. A posthuman can build an internal model of a human-level intelligence that is, well, as cognitively strong as the original. You or I may think we know what makes other people tick, but we're quite often wrong, whereas real posthumans can actually simulate us, inner states and all, and get it right. And this is especially true of a posthuman that's been given full access to our memory prostheses for a period of years, back before we realized they were going to transcend on us. Isn't that the case, Manni?'

Manni would be screaming at her right now, if he had a mouth – but instead the panic is giving way to an enormous sense of deja vu. There's something about Pamela, something ominous that he knows… he's met her before, he's sure of it. And while most of his systems are off-line, one of them is very much active: There's a personality ghost flagging its intention of merging back in with him, and the memory delta it carries is enormous, years and years of divergent experiences to absorb. He shoves it away with a titanic effort – it's a very insistent ghost – and concentrates on imagining the feel of lips moving on teeth, a sly tongue obstructing his epiglottis, words forming in his throat – 'm-e…'

'We should have known better than to keep upgrading the cat, Manny. It knows us too well. I may have died in the flesh, but Aineko remembered me, as hideously accurately as the Vile Offspring remembered the random resimulated. And you can run away – like this, this second childhood – but you can't hide. Your cat wants you.

And there's more.' Her voice sends chills up and down his spine, for without him giving it permission, the ghost has begun to merge its stupendous load of memories with his neural map, and her voice is freighted with erotic/repulsive significance, the result of conditioning feedback he subjected himself to a lifetime – lifetimes? -

ago: 'He's been playing with us, Manny, possibly from before we realized he was conscious.'

' Out -' Manfred stops. He can see again, and move, and feel his mouth. He's himself again, physically back as he was in his late twenties all those decades ago when he'd lived a peripatetic life in presingularity Europe.

He's sitting on the edge of a bed in a charmingly themed Amsterdam hotel with a recurrent motif of philosophers, wearing jeans and collarless shirt and a vest of pockets crammed with the detritus of a long-obsolete personal area network, his crazily clunky projection specs sitting on the bedside table. Pamela stands stiffly in front of the door, watching him. She's not the withered travesty he remembers seeing on Saturn, a half-blind Fate leaning on the shoulder of his grandson. Nor is she the vengeful Fury of Paris, or the scheming fundamentalist devil of the Belt.

Wearing a sharply tailored suit over a red-and-gold brocade corset, blonde hair drawn back like fine wire in a tight chignon, she's the focused, driven force of nature he first fell in love with: repression, domination, his very own strict machine.

'We're dead,' she says, then gives voice to a tense half laugh: 'We don't have to live through the bad times again if we don't want to.'

'What is this?' he asks, his mouth dry.

'It's the reproductive imperative.' She sniffs. 'Come on, stand up. Come here.'

He stands up obediently, but makes no move toward her. 'Whose imperative?'

'Not ours.' Her cheek twitches. 'You find things out when you're dead. That fucking cat has got a lot of questions to answer.'

'You're telling me that -'

She shrugs. 'Can you think of any other explanation for all this?' Then she steps forward and takes his hand.

'Division and recombination. Partitioning of memetic replicators into different groups, then careful cross- fertilization. Aineko wasn't just breeding a better Macx when he arranged all those odd marriages and divorces and eigenparents and forked uploads – Aineko is trying to breed our minds.' Her fingers are slim and cool in his hand.

He feels a momentary revulsion, as of the grave, and he shudders before he realizes it's his conditioning cutting in.

Crudely implanted reflexes that shouldn't still be active after all this time. 'Even our divorce. If -'

'Surely not.' Manny remembers that much already. 'Aineko wasn't even conscious back then!'

Pamela raises one sharply sculpted eyebrow: 'Are you sure?'

'You want an answer,' he says.

She breathes deeply, and he feels it on his cheek – it raises the fine hairs on the back of his neck. Then she nods stiffly. 'I want to know how much of our history was scripted by the cat. Back when we thought we were upgrading his firmware, were we? Or was he letting us think that we were?' A sharp hiss of breath: 'The divorce.