Accelerando

'My mother -' Amber stops dead and spawns a vaporous cloud of memory retrievals. They fan out through the space around her mind like the tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network parsers and class filters, she turns the memories into reified images and blats them at the webcam's tiny brain so he can see them.

Some of the memories are so painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in full office war paint, leaning over Amber, promising to disable her lexical enhancements forcibly if she doesn't work on her grammar without them.

Mom telling Amber that they're moving again, abruptly, dragging her away from school and the friends she'd tentatively started to like. The church-of-the-month business. Mom catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table, forcing her to eat – 'My mother likes control.'

'Ah.' Sadeq's expression turns glassy. 'And this is how you feel about her? How long have you had that level of – no, please forgive me for asking. You obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know? Did you talk to them?'

'My grandparents?' Amber stifles a snort. 'Mom's parents are dead. Dad's are still alive, but they won't talk to him – they like Mom. They think I'm creepy. I know little things, their tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data with my head when I was four. I'm not built like little girls were in their day, and they don't understand.

You know the old ones don't like us at all? Some of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who think their kids are possessed.'

'Well.' Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. 'I must say, this is a lot to learn. But you know your mother has accepted Islam, don't you? This means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally speaks for you. And she says this makes you my problem. Hmm.'

'I'm not a Muslim.' Amber stares at the screen. 'I'm not a child, either.' Her threads are coming together, whispering scarily behind her eyes: Her head is suddenly dense and turgid with ideas, heavy as a stone and twice as old as time. 'I am nobody's chattel. What does your law say about people who are born with implants? What does it say about people who want to live forever? I don't believe in any god, Mr. Judge. I don't believe in limits. Mom can't, physically, make me do anything, and she sure can't speak for me. All she can do is challenge my legal status, and if I choose to stay where she can't touch me, what does that matter?'

'Well, if that is what you have to say, I must think on the matter.' He catches her eye; his expression is thoughtful, like a doctor considering a diagnosis. 'I will call you again in due course. In the meantime, if you need to talk to anyone, remember that I am always available. If there is anything I can do to help ease your pain, I would be pleased to be of service. Peace be unto you, and those you care for.'

'Same to you, too,' she mutters darkly, as the connection goes dead. ' Now what?' she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across the wall, begging for attention.

'I think it's the lander,' Pierre says helpfully. 'Is it down yet?'

She rounds on him: 'Hey, I thought I told you to get lost!'

'What, and miss all the fun?' He grins at her impishly. 'Amber's got a new boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody…'

* * *

Sleep cycles pass; the borrowed 3D printer on Object Barney's surface

spews bitmaps of atoms in quantum lockstep at its rendering platform,

building up the control circuitry and skeletons of new printers (There are

no clunky nanoassemblers here, no robots the size of viruses busily

sorting molecules into piles – just the bizarre quantized magic of atomic

holography, modulated Bose – Einstein condensates collapsing into

strange, lacy, supercold machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable

loops as they slice through Jupiter's magnetosphere, slowly converting

the rock's momentum into power. Small robots grovel in the orange dirt,

scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber's

garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according to a

schema designed by preteens at an industrial school in Poland, with

barely any need for human guidance.

High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed and

conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating trade with the

alien intelligences believed to have been detected eight years earlier by

SETI, they function equally well as fiscal gatekeepers for space colonies.

The Sanger's bank accounts in California and Cuba are looking

acceptable – since entering Jupiter space, the orphanage has staked a

claim on roughly a hundred gigatons of random rocks and a moon that's

just small enough to creep in under the International Astronomical Union's

definition of a sovereign planetary body. The borg are working hard,

leading their eager teams of child stakeholders in their plans to build the

industrial metastructures necessary to support mining helium-three from

Jupiter. They're so focused that they spend much of their time being

themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared identity that gives them

their messianic drive.

Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and slumbers in time to its

ancient orbital dynamics. A religious college in Cairo is considering issues

of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of

bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a

pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into

a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its

synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are

its rights and duties?) Riots in Borneo underline the urgency of this

theotechnological inquiry.

More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Marseilles also

underline a rising problem: the social chaos caused by cheap anti-aging

treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of disaffected youth

against the formerly graying gerontocracy of Europe, insist that people

who predate the supergrid and can't handle implants aren't really

conscious: Their ferocity is equaled only by the anger of the dynamic

septuagenarians of the baby boom, their bodies partially restored to the

flush of sixties youth, but their minds adrift in a slower, less contingent

century. The faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the

labor pool, but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the

new millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by

deflationary time.

The Bangladeshi economic miracle is typical of the age. With growth

rates running at over twenty percent, cheap out-of-control

bioindustrialization has swept the nation: Former rice farmers harvest

plastics and milk cows for silk, while their children study mariculture and

design seawalls. With cellphone ownership nearing eighty percent and

literacy at ninety, the once-poor country is finally breaking out of its

historical infrastructure trap and beginning to develop: In another

generation, they'll be richer than Japan.

Radical new economic theories are focusing around bandwidth, speed-of-