Accelerando

signal SETI announced, or the, uh, other one? And how long have you known about them?'

'Gianni has his fingers in a lot of pies,' Manfred comments blandly. 'And we still talk to the lobsters from time to time – you know, they're only a couple of light-hours away, right? They told us about the signals.'

'Er.' Alan's eyes glaze over for a moment; Annette's prostheses paint her a picture of false light spraying from the back of his head, his entire sensory bandwidth momentarily soaking up a huge peer-to-peer download from the server dust that wallpapers every room in the building. Monica looks irritated, taps her fingernails on the back of her chair. 'The signals. Right. Why wasn't this publicized?'

'The first one was.' Annette's eyebrows furrow. 'We couldn't exactly cover it up, everyone with a backyard dish pointed in the right direction caught it. But most people who're interested in hearing about alien contacts already think they drop round on alternate Tuesdays and Thursdays to administer rectal exams. Most of the rest think it's a hoax. Quite a few of the remainder are scratching their heads and wondering whether it isn't just a new kind of cosmological phenomenon that emits a very low entropy signal. Of the six who are left over, five are trying to get a handle on the message contents, and the last is convinced it's a practical joke. And the other signal, well, that was weak enough that only the deep-space tracking network caught it.'

Manfred fiddles with the bed control system. 'It's not a practical joke,' he adds. 'But they only captured about sixteen megabits of data from the first one, maybe double that in the second. There's quite a bit of noise, the signals don't repeat, their length doesn't appear to be a prime, there's no obvious metainformation that describes the internal format, so there's no easy way of getting a handle on them. To make matters worse, pointy-haired management at Arianespace' – he glances at Annette, as if seeking a response to the naming of her ex- employers

– 'decided the best thing to do was to cover up the second signal and work on it in secret – for competitive advantage, they say – and as for the first, to pretend it never happened. So nobody really knows how long it'll take to figure out whether it's a ping from the galactic root domain servers or a pulsar that's taken to grinding out the eighteen-quadrillionth digits of pi, or what.'

'But,' Monica glances around, 'you can't be sure.'

'I think it may be sapient,' says Manfred. He finds the right button at last, and the bed begins to fold itself back into a lounger. Then he finds the wrong button; the duvet dissolves into viscous turquoise slime that slurps and gurgles away through a multitude of tiny nozzles in the headboard. 'Bloody aerogel. Um, where was I?' He sits up.

'Sapient network packet?' asks Alan.

'Nope.' Manfred shakes his head, grins. 'Should have known you'd read Vinge… or was it the movie? No, what I think is that there's only one logical thing to beam backward and forward out there, and you may remember I asked you to beam it out about, oh, nine years ago?'

'The lobsters.' Alan's eyes go blank. 'Nine years. Time to Proxima Centauri and back?'

'About that distance, yes,' says Manfred. 'And remember, that's an upper bound – it could well have come from somewhere closer. Anyway, the first SETI signal came from a couple of degrees off and more than hundred light-years out, but the second signal came from less than three light-years away. You can see why they didn't publicize that – they didn't want a panic. And no, the signal isn't a simple echo of the canned crusty transmission -

I think it's an exchange embassy, but we haven't cracked it yet. Now do you see why we have to crowbar the civil rights issue open again? We need a framework for rights that can encompass nonhumans, and we need it as fast as possible. Otherwise, if the neighbors come visiting…'

'Okay,' says Alan, 'I'll have to talk with myselves. Maybe we can agree something, as long as it's clear that it's a provisional stab at the framework and not a permanent solution?'

Annette snorts. 'No solution is final!' Monica catches her eyes and winks: Annette is startled by the blatant display of dissent within the syncitium.

'Well,' says Manfred, 'I guess that's all we can ask for?' He looks hopeful. 'Thanks for the hospitality, but I feel the need to lie down in my own bed for a while. I had to commit a lot to memory while I was off-line, and I want to record it before I forget who I am,' he adds pointedly, and Annette breathes a quiet sight of relief.

* * *

Later that night, a doorbell rings.

'Who's there?' asks the entryphone.

'Uh, me,' says the man on the steps. He looks a little confused. 'Ah'm Macx. Ah'm here tae see' – the name is on the tip of his tongue – 'someone.'

'Come in.' A solenoid buzzes; he pushes the door open, and it closes behind him. His metal-shod boots ring on the hard stone floor, and the cool air smells faintly of unburned jet fuel.

'Ah'm Macx,' he repeats uncertainly, 'or Ah wis fer a wee while, an' it made ma heid hurt. But noo Ah'm me agin, an' Ah wannae be somebody else… can ye help?'

* * *

Later still, a cat sits on a window ledge, watching the interior of a darkened room from behind the concealment of curtains. The room is dark to human eyes, but bright to the cat: Moonlight cascades silently off the walls and furniture, the twisted bedding, the two naked humans lying curled together in the middle of the bed.

Both the humans are in their thirties: Her close-cropped hair is beginning to gray, distinguished threads of gunmetal wire threading it, while his brown mop is not yet showing signs of age. To the cat, who watches with a variety of unnatural senses, her head glows in the microwave spectrum with a gentle halo of polarized emissions.

The male shows no such aura: he's unnaturally natural for this day and age, although – oddly – he's wearing spectacles in bed, and the frames shine similarly. An invisible soup of radiation connects both humans to items of clothing scattered across the room – clothing that seethes with unsleeping sentience, dribbling over to their suitcases and hand luggage and (though it doesn't enjoy noticing it) the cat's tail, which is itself a rather sensitive antenna.

The two humans have just finished making love: They do this less often than in their first few years, but with more tenderness and expertise – lengths of shocking pink Hello Kitty bondage tape still hang from the bedposts, and a lump of programmable memory plastic sits cooling on the side table. The male is sprawled with his head and upper torso resting in the crook of the female's left arm and shoulder. Shifting visualization to infrared, the cat sees that she is glowing, capillaries dilating to enhance the blood flow around her throat and chest.

'I'm getting old,' the male mumbles. 'I'm slowing down.'

'Not where it counts,' the female replies, gently squeezing his right buttock.

'No, I'm sure of it,' he says. 'The bits of me that still exist in this old head – how many types of processor can you name that are still in use thirty-plus years after they're born?'

'You're thinking about the implants again,' she says carefully. The cat remembers this as a sore point; from being a medical procedure to help the blind see and the autistic talk, intrathecal implants have blossomed into a must-have accessory for the now-clade. But the male is reluctant. 'It's not as risky as it used to be. If they screw up, there're neural growth cofactors and cheap replacement stem cells. I'm sure one of your sponsors can arrange for extra cover.'

'Hush: I'm still thinking about it.' He's silent for a while. 'I wasn't myself yesterday. I was someone else.

Someone too slow to keep up. Puts a new perspective on everything: I've been afraid of losing my biological plasticity, of being trapped in an obsolete chunk of skullware while everything moves on – but how much of me lives outside my own head these days, anyhow?' One of his external threads generates an animated glyph and throws it at her mind's eye; she grins at his obscure humor. 'Cross-training from a new interface is going to be hard, though.'

'You'll do it,' she predicts. 'You can always get a discreet prescription for novotrophin-B.' A receptor agonist tailored for gerontological wards, it stimulates interest in the new: combined with MDMA, it's a component of the street cocktail called sensawunda. 'That should keep you focused for long enough to get comfortable.'