Accelerando

Manfred realized, was damn well ready to use any restraint that came to

hand. Theirs was a very twenty-first-century kind of relationship, which is

to say one that would have been illegal a hundred years earlier and

fashionably scandalous a century before that. And whenever Manfred

upgraded his pet robot – transplanting its trainable neural network into a

new body with new and exciting expansion ports – Pamela would hack it.

They were married for a while, and divorced for a whole lot longer,

allegedly because they were both strong-willed people with philosophies

of life that were irreconcilable short of death or transcendence. Manny,

being wildly creative and outward-directed and having the attention span

of a weasel on crack, had other lovers. Pamela… who knows? If on some

evenings she put on a disguise and hung out at encounter areas in fetish

clubs, she wasn't telling anyone: She lived in uptight America, staidly

straitlaced, and had a reputation to uphold. But they both stayed in touch

with the cat, and although Manfred retained custody for some reason

never articulated, Aineko kept returning Pamela's calls – until it was time

to go hang out with their daughter Amber, tagging along on her rush into

relativistic exile, then keeping a proprietorial eye on her eigenson Sirhan,

and his wife and child (a clone off the old family tree, Manfred 2.0)…

Now, here's the rub: Aineko wasn't a cat. Aineko was an incarnate

intelligence, confined within a succession of catlike bodies that became

increasingly realistic over time, and equipped with processing power to

support a neural simulation that grew rapidly with each upgrade.

Did anyone in the Macx family ever think to ask what Aineko wanted?

And if an answer had come, would they have liked it?

*

Adult-Manfred, still disoriented from finding himself awake and reinstantiated a couple of centuries downstream from his hurried exile from Saturn system, is hesitantly navigating his way toward Sirhan and Rita's home when big-Manni-with-Manfred's-memory-ghost drops into his consciousness like a ton of computronium glowing red-hot at the edges.

It's a classic oh-shit moment. Between one foot touching the ground and the next, Manfred stumbles hard, nearly twisting an ankle, and gasps. He remembers. At third hand he remembers being reincarnated as Manni, a bouncing baby boy for Rita and Sirhan (and just why they want to raise an ancestor instead of creating a new child of their own is one of those cultural quirks that is so alien he can scarcely comprehend it). Then for a while he recalls living as Manni's amnesic adult accelerated ghost, watching over his original from the consensus cyberspace of the city: the arrival of Pamela, adult Manni's reaction to her, her dump of yet another copy of Manfred's memories into Manni, and now this – How many of me are there? he wonders nervously. Then: Pamela? What's she doing here?

Manfred shakes his head and looks about. Now he remembers being big-Manni, he knows where he is implicitly, and more importantly, knows what all these next-gen City interfaces are supposed to do. The walls and ceiling are carpeted in glowing glyphs that promise him everything from instant-access local services to teleportation across interstellar distances. So they haven't quite collapsed geography yet, he realizes gratefully, fastening on to the nearest comprehensible thought of his own before old-Manni's memories explain everything for him. It's a weird sensation, seeing all this stuff for the first time – the trappings of a technosphere centuries ahead of the one he's last been awake in – but with the memories to explain it all. He finds his feet are still carrying him forward, toward a grassy square lined with doors opening onto private dwellings. Behind one of them, he's going to meet his descendants, and Pamela in all probability. The thought makes his stomach give a little queasy backflip.

I'm not ready for this -

It's an acute moment of deja vu. He's standing on a familiar doorstep he's never seen before. The door opens and a serious-faced child with three arms – he can't help staring, the extra one is a viciously barbed scythe of bone from the elbow down – looks up at him. 'Hello, me,' says the kid.

'Hello, you.' Manfred stares. 'You don't look the way I remember.' But Manni's appearance is familiar from big-Manni's memories, captured by the unblinking Argus awareness of the panopticon dust floating in the air.

'Are your parents home? Your' – his voice cracks – 'great-grandmother?'

The door opens wider. 'You can come in,' the kid says gravely. Then he hops backward and ducks shyly into a side room – or as if expecting to be gunned down by a hostile sniper, Manfred realizes. It's tough being a kid when there are no rules against lethal force because you can be restored from a backup when playtime ends.

Inside the dwelling – calling it a house seems wrong to Manfred, not when bits of it are separated by trillions of kilometers of empty vacuum – things feel a bit crowded. He can hear voices from the dayroom, so he goes there, brushing through the archway of thornless roses that Rita has trained around the T-gate frame. His body feels lighter, but his heart is heavy as he looks around. 'Rita?' he asks. 'And -'

'Hello, Manfred.' Pamela nods at him guardedly.

Rita raises an eyebrow at him. 'The cat asked if he could borrow the household assembler. I wasn't expecting a family reunion.'

'Neither was I.' Manfred rubs his forehead ruefully. 'Pamela, this is Rita. She's married to Sirhan. They're my – I guess eigenparents is as good as term as any? I mean, they're bringing up my reincarnation.'

'Please, have a seat,' Rita offers, waving at the empty floor between the patio and the stone fountain in the shape of a section through a glass hypersphere. A futon of spun diamondoid congeals out of the utility fog floating in the air, glittering in the artificial sunlight. 'Sirhan's just taking care of Manni – our son. He'll be with us in just a minute.'

Manfred sits gingerly at one side of the futon. Pamela sits stiffly at the opposite edge, not meeting his eye.

Last time they met in the flesh – an awesome gulf of years previously – they'd parted cursing each other, on opposite sides of a fractious divorce as well as an ideological barrier as high as a continental divide. But many subjective decades have passed, and both ideology and divorce have dwindled in significance – if indeed they ever happened. Now that there's common cause to draw them together, Manfred can barely look at her. 'How is Manni?'

he asks his hostess, desperate for small talk.

'He's fine,' Rita says, in a brittle voice. 'Just the usual preadolescent turbulence, if it wasn't for…' She trails off. A door appears in mid air and Sirhan steps through it, followed by a small deity wearing a fur coat.

'Look what the cat dragged in,' Aineko remarks.

'You're a fine one to talk,' Pamela says icily. 'Don't you think you'd -'

'I tried to keep him away from you,' Sirhan tells Manfred, 'but he wouldn't -'

'That's okay.' Manfred waves it off. 'Pamela, would you mind starting?'

'Yes, I would.' She glances at him sidelong. 'You go first.'

'Right. You wanted me here.' Manfred hunkers down to stare at the cat. 'What do you want?'

'If I was your traditional middle-European devil, I'd say I'd come to steal your soul,' says Aineko, looking up at Manfred and twitching his tail. 'Luckily I'm not a dualist, I just want to borrow it for a while. Won't even get it dirty.'

'Uh-huh.' Manfred raises an eyebrow. 'Why?'

'I'm not omniscient.' Aineko sits down, one leg sticking out sideways, but continues to stare at Manfred. 'I had a… a telegram, I guess, claiming to be from you. From the other copy of you, that is, the one that went off through the router network with another copy of me, and with Amber, and everyone else who isn't here. It says it found the answer and it wants to give me a shortcut route out to the deep thinkers at the edge of the observable universe. It knows who made the wormhole network and why, and -' Aineko pauses. If he was human, he'd shrug, but being a cat, he absent mindedly scritches behind his left ear with a hind leg. 'Trouble is, I'm not sure I can trust it. So I need you to authenticate the message. I don't dare use my own memory of you because it knows too much