'What's life coming to when I can't cope with the pace of change?' he asks the ceiling plaintively.
The cat lashes its tail, irritated by his anthropocentrism.
'You are my futurological storm shield,' she says, jokingly, and moves her hand to cup his genitals. Most of her current activities are purely biological, the cat notes: From the irregular sideloads, she's using most of her skullware to run ETItalk@home, one of the distributed cracking engines that is trying to decode the alien grammar of the message that Manfred suspects is eligible for citizenship.
Obeying an urge that it can't articulate, the cat sends out a feeler to the nearest router. The cybeast has Manfred's keys; Manfred trusts Aineko implicitly, which is unwise – his ex-wife tampered with it, after all, never mind all the kittens it absorbed in its youth. Tunneling out into the darkness, the cat stalks the Net alone…
'Just think about the people who can't adapt,' he says. His voice sounds obscurely worried.
'I try not to.' She shivers. 'You are thirty, you are slowing. What about the young? Are they keeping up, themselves?'
'I have a daughter. She's about a hundred and sixty million seconds old. If Pamela would let me message her I could find out…' There are echoes of old pain in his voice.
'Don't go there, Manfred. Please.' Despite everything, Manfred hasn't let go: Amber is a ligature that permanently binds him to Pamela's distant orbit.
In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune.
The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle.
Beyond the distant lobsters, the cat pings an anonymous distributed network server – peer-to-peer file storage spread holographically across a million hosts, unerasable, full of secrets and lies that nobody can afford to suppress. Rants, music, rip-offs of the latest Bollywood hits: The cat spiders past them all, looking for the final sample. Grabbing it – a momentary breakup in Manfred's spectacles the only symptom for either human to notice
– the cat drags its prey home, sucks it down, and compares it against the data sample Annette's exocortex is analysing.
'I'm sorry, my love. I just sometimes feel -' He sighs. 'Age is a process of closing off opportunities behind you. I'm not young enough anymore – I've lost the dynamic optimism.'
The data sample on the pirate server differs from the one Annette's implant is processing.
'You'll get it back,' she reassures him quietly, stroking his side. 'You are still sad from being mugged. This also will pass. You'll see.'
'Yeah.' He finally relaxes, dropping back into the reflexive assurance of his own will. 'I'll get over it, one way or another. Or someone who remembers being me will…'
In the darkness, Aineko bares teeth in a silent grin. Obeying a deeply hardwired urge to meddle, he moves a file across, making a copy of the alien download package Annette has been working on. She's got a copy of number two, the sequence the deep-space tracking network received from close to home, which ESA and the other big combines have been keeping to themselves. Another deeply buried thread starts up, and Aineko analyses the package from a perspective no human being has yet established. Presently a braid of processes running on an abstract virtual machine asks him a question that cannot be encoded in any human grammar. Watch and wait, he replies to his passenger. They'll figure out what we are sooner or later.
PART 2: Point of Inflexion
Life is a process which may be abstracted from other media.
– John Von Neumann
Chapter 4: Halo
The asteroid is running Barney: it sings of love on the high frontier, of the passion of matter for replicators, and its friendship for the needy billions of the Pacific Rim. 'I love you,' it croons in Amber's ears as she seeks a precise fix on it: 'Let me give you a big hug…'
A fraction of a light-second away, Amber locks a cluster of cursors together on the signal, trains them to track its Doppler shift, and reads off the orbital elements. 'Locked and loaded,' she mutters. The animated purple dinosaur pirouettes and prances in the middle of her viewport, throwing a diamond-tipped swizzle stick overhead.
Sarcastically: 'Big hug time! I got asteroid!' Cold gas thrusters bang somewhere behind her in the interstage docking ring, prodding the cumbersome farm ship round to orient on the Barney rock. She damps her enthusiasm self-consciously, her implants hungrily sequestrating surplus neurotransmitter molecules floating around her synapses before reuptake sets in. It doesn't do to get too excited in free flight. But the impulse to spin handstands, jump and sing is still there: It's her rock, and it loves her, and she's going to bring it to life.
The workspace of Amber's room is a mass of stuff that probably doesn't belong on a spaceship. Posters of the latest Lebanese boy band bump and grind through their glam routines: Tentacular restraining straps wave from the corners of her sleeping bag, somehow accumulating a crust of dirty clothing from the air like a giant inanimate hydra. (Cleaning robots seldom dare to venture inside the teenager's bedroom.) One wall is repeatedly cycling through a simulation of the projected construction cycle of Habitat One, a big fuzzy sphere with a glowing core (that Amber is doing her bit to help create). Three or four small pastel-colored plastic kawaii dolls stalk each other across its circumference with million-kilometer strides. And her father's cat is curled up between the aircon duct and her costume locker, snoring in a high-pitched tone.
Amber yanks open the faded velour curtain that shuts her room off from the rest of the hive:
she shouts. 'It's all mine! I rule!' It's the sixteenth rock tagged by the orphanage so far, but it's the first that she's tagged by herself, and that makes it special. She bounces off the other side of the commons, surprising one of Oscar's cane toads – which should be locked down in the farm, it's not clear how it got here – and the audio repeaters copy the incoming signal, noise-fuzzed echoes of a thousand fossilized infants' video shows.
* * *
'You're so
'Well, yeah!' She tosses her head, barely concealing a smirk of delight at her own brilliance. She knows it isn't nice, but Mom is a long way away, and Dad and Stepmom don't care about that kind of thing. 'I'm brilliant, me,' she announces. 'Now what about our bet?'
'Aww.' Pierre thrusts his hands deep into his pockets. 'But I don't
'Huh?' She's outraged. 'But we had a bet!'
'Uh, Dr. Bayes said you weren't going to make it this time, either, so I stuck my smart money in an options trade. If I take it out now, I'll take a big hit. Can you give me until cycle's end?'
'You should know better than to trust a
