Accelerando

early-teen contempt: Pierre hunches his shoulders under her gaze. He's only twelve, freckled, hasn't yet learned that you don't welsh on a deal.

'I'll let you do it this time,' she announces, 'but you'll have to pay for it. I want interest.'

He sighs. 'What base rate are you -'

'No, your interest! Slave for a cycle!' She grins malevolently.

And his face shifts abruptly into apprehension: 'As long as you don't make me clean the litter tray again.

You aren't planning on doing that, are you?'

* * *

Welcome to the fourth decade. The thinking mass of the solar system

now exceeds one MIPS per gram; it's still pretty dumb, but it's not dumb

all over. The human population is near maximum overshoot, pushing nine

billion, but its growth rate is tipping toward negative numbers, and bits of

what used to be the first world are now facing a middle-aged average.

Human cogitation provides about 1028 MIPS of the solar system's

brainpower. The real thinking is mostly done by the halo of a thousand

trillion processors that surround the meat machines with a haze of

computation – individually a tenth as powerful as a human brain,

collectively they're ten thousand times more powerful, and their numbers

are doubling every twenty million seconds. They're up to 1033 MIPS and

rising, although there's a long way to go before the solar system is fully

awake.

Technologies come, technologies go, but nobody even five years ago

predicted that there'd be tinned primates in orbit around Jupiter by now: A

synergy of emergent industries and strange business models have kick-

started the space age again, aided and abetted by the discovery of (so far

undecrypted) signals from ETs. Unexpected fringe riders are developing

new ecological niches on the edge of the human information space, light-minutes and light-hours from the core, as an expansion that has hung fire

since the 1970s gets under way.

Amber, like most of the postindustrialists aboard the orphanage ship

Ernst Sanger, is in her early teens: While their natural abilities are in many cases enhanced by germ-line genetic recombination, thanks to her

mother's early ideals she has to rely on brute computational

enhancements. She doesn't have a posterior parietal cortex hacked for

extra short-term memory, or an anterior superior temporal gyrus tweaked

for superior verbal insight, but she's grown up with neural implants that

feel as natural to her as lungs or fingers. Half her wetware is running

outside her skull on an array of processor nodes hooked into her brain by

quantum-entangled communication channels – her own personal

metacortex. These kids are mutant youth, burning bright: Not quite

incomprehensible to their parents, but profoundly alien – the generation

gap is as wide as the 1960s and as deep as the solar system. Their

parents, born in the gutter years of the twenty-first century, grew up with

white elephant shuttles and a space station that just went round and

round, and computers that went beep when you pushed their buttons.

The idea that Jupiter orbit was somewhere you could go was as

profoundly counterintuitive as the Internet to a baby boomer.

Most of the passengers on the can have run away from parents who think

that teenagers belong in school, unable to come to terms with a

generation so heavily augmented that they are fundamentally brighter

than the adults around them. Amber was fluent in nine languages by the

age of six, only two of them human and six of them serializable; when she

was seven, her mother took her to the school psychiatrist for speaking in

synthetic tongues. That was the final straw for Amber: using an illicit

anonymous phone, she called her father. Her mother had him under a

restraining order, but it hadn't occurred to her to apply for an order

against his partner…

* * *

Vast whorls of cloud ripple beneath the ship's drive stinger: Orange and brown and muddy gray streaks slowly crawl across the bloated horizon of Jupiter. Sanger is nearing perijove, deep within the gas giant's lethal magnetic field; static discharges flicker along the tube, arcing over near the deep violet exhaust cloud emerging from the magnetic mirrors of the ship's VASIMR motor. The plasma rocket is cranked up to high mass flow, its specific impulse almost as low as a fission rocket but producing maximum thrust as the assembly creaks and groans through the gravitational assist maneuver. In another hour, the drive will flicker off, and the orphanage will fall up and out toward Ganymede, before dropping back in toward orbit around Amalthea, Jupiter's fourth moon (and source of much of the material in the Gossamer ring). They're not the first canned primates to make it to Jupiter subsystem, but they're one of the first wholly private ventures. The bandwidth out here sucks dead slugs through a straw, with millions of kilometers of vacuum separating them from scant hundreds of mouse-brained microprobes and a few dinosaurs left behind by NASA or ESA. They're so far from the inner system that a good chunk of the ship's communications array is given over to caching: The news is whole kiloseconds old by the time it gets out here.

Amber, along with about half the waking passengers, watches in fascination from the common room. The commons are a long axial cylinder, a double-hulled inflatable at the center of the ship with a large part of their liquid water supply stored in its wall tubes. The far end is video-enabled, showing them a realtime 3D view of the planet as it rolls beneath them: in reality, there's as much mass as possible between them and the trapped particles in the Jovian magnetic envelope. 'I could go swimming in that,' sighs Lilly. 'Just imagine, diving into that sea…' Her avatar appears in the window, riding a silver surfboard down the kilometers of vacuum.

'Nice case of wind-burn you've got there,' someone jeers – Kas. Suddenly Lilly's avatar, hitherto clad in a shimmering metallic swimsuit, turns to the texture of baked meat and waggles sausage fingers up at them in warning.

'Same to you and the window you climbed in through!' Abruptly the virtual vacuum outside the window is full of bodies, most of them human, contorting and writhing and morphing in mock-combat as half the kids pitch into the virtual death match. It's a gesture in the face of the sharp fear that outside the thin walls of the orphanage lies an environment that really is as hostile as Lilly's toasted avatar would indicate.

Amber turns back to her slate: She's working through a complex mess of forms, necessary before the expedition can start work. Facts and figures that are never far away crowd around her, intimidating. Jupiter weighs 1.9 x 1027 kilograms. There are twenty-nine Jovian moons and an estimated two hundred thousand minor bodies, lumps of rock, and bits of debris crowded around them – debris above the size of ring fragments, for Jupiter (like Saturn) has rings, albeit not as prominent. A total of six major national orbiter platforms have made it out here -

and another two hundred and seventeen microprobes, all but six of them private entertainment platforms. The first human expedition was put together by ESA Studios six years ago, followed by a couple of wildcat mining prospectors and a µ-commerce bus that scattered half a million picoprobes throughout Jupiter subsystem. Now the