'It pleases us,' says Lobster Number One. 'We are tired and disoriented by the long journey through gateways to this place. Request resumption of negotiations later?'
'By all means.' Amber nods. A sergeant-at-arms, a mindless but impressive zimboe controlled by her spider's nest of personality threads, blows a sharp note on his trumpet. The first audience is at an end.
* * *
Outside the light cone of the Field Circus, on the other side of the
spacelike separation between Amber's little kingdom in motion and the
depths of empire time that grip the solar system's entangled quantum
networks, a singular new reality is taking shape.
Welcome to the moment of maximum change.
About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind
surrounded by an exocortex of distributed agents, threads of personality
spun right out of their heads to run on the clouds of utility fog – infinitely
flexible computing resources as thin as aerogel – in which they live. The
foggy depths are alive with high-bandwidth sparkles; most of Earth's
biosphere has been wrapped in cotton wool and preserved for future
examination. For every living human, a thousand million software agents
carry information into the farthest corners of the consciousness address
space.
The sun, for so long an unremarkable mildly variable G2 dwarf, has
vanished within a gray cloud that englobes it except for a narrow belt
around the plane of the ecliptic. Sunlight falls, unchanged, on the inner
planets: Except for Mercury, which is no longer present, having been
dismantled completely and turned into solar-powered high-temperature
nanocomputers. A much fiercer light falls on Venus, now surrounded by
glittering ferns of carbon crystals that pump angular momentum into the
barely spinning planet via huge superconducting loops wound around its
equator. This planet, too, is due to be dismantled. Jupiter, Neptune,
Uranus – all sprout rings as impressive as Saturn's. But the task of
cannibalizing the gas giants will take many times longer than the small
rocky bodies of the inner system.
The ten billion inhabitants of this radically changed star system remember
being human; almost half of them predate the millennium. Some of them
still are human, untouched by the drive of meta-evolution that has
replaced blind Darwinian change with a goal-directed teleological
progress. They cower in gated communities and hill forts, mumbling
prayers and cursing the ungodly meddlers with the natural order of things.
But eight out of every ten living humans are included in the phase-change. It's the most inclusive revolution in the human condition since the
discovery of speech.
A million outbreaks of gray goo – runaway nanoreplicator excursions -
threaten to raise the temperature of the biosphere dramatically. They're
all contained by the planetary-scale immune system fashioned from what
was once the World Health Organization. Weirder catastrophes threaten
the boson factories in the Oort cloud. Antimatter factories hover over the
solar poles. Sol system shows all the symptoms of a runaway intelligence
excursion, exuberant blemishes as normal for a technological civilization
as skin problems on a human adolescent.
The economic map of the planet has changed beyond recognition. Both
capitalism and communism, bickering ideological children of a
protoindustrial outlook, are as obsolete as the divine right of kings:
Companies are alive, and dead people may live again, too. Globalism and
tribalism have run to completion, diverging respectively into
homogeneous interoperability and the Schwarzschild radius of insularity.
Beings that remember being human plan the deconstruction of Jupiter,
the creation of a great simulation space that will expand the habitat
available within the solar system. By converting all the nonstellar mass of
the solar system into processors, they can accommodate as many
human-equivalent minds as a civilization with a planet hosting ten billion
humans in orbit around every star in the galaxy.
A more mature version of Amber lives down in the surging chaos of near-
Jupiter space; there's an instance of Pierre, too, although he has
relocated light-hours away, near Neptune. Whether she still sometimes
thinks of her relativistic twin, nobody can tell. In a way, it doesn't matter,
because by the time the Field Circus returns to Jupiter orbit, as much
subjective time will have elapsed for the fast-thinkers back home as will
flash by in the real universe between this moment and the end of the era
of star formation, many billions of years hence.
* * *
'As your theologian, I am telling you that they are not gods.'
Amber nods patiently. She watches Sadeq closely.
Sadeq coughs grumpily. 'Tell her, Boris.'
Boris tilts his chair back and turns it toward the Queen. 'He is right, Amber. They are traders, and not clever ones either. Is hard to get handle on their semiotics while they hide behind the lobster model we uploaded in their direction twenty years ago, but are certainly not crusties, and are definite not human either. Or transhuman. My guess, they are bunch of dumb hicks who get hands on toys left behind by much smarter guys. Like the rejectionist factions back home. Imagine they are waking up one morning and find everyone else is gone to the great upload environment in the sky. Leaving them with the planet to themselves. What you think they do with whole world, with any gadgets they trip over? Some will smash everything they come across, but others not so stupid. But they think
Amber stands up, walks toward the windows at the front of the bridge. In black jeans and chunky sweater, she barely resembles the feudal queen whose role she plays for tourists. 'Taking them on board was a big risk. I'm not happy about it.'
'How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?' Sadeq smiles crookedly. 'We have an answer. But they may not even realize they are dancing with us. These are not the gods you were afraid of finding.'
'No.' Amber sighs. 'Not too different from us, though. I mean, we aren't exactly well adapted to this environment, are we? We tote these body-images along, rely on fake realities that we can map into our human- style senses. We're emulations, not native AIs. Where's Su Ang?'
'I can find her.' Boris frowns.
'I asked her to analyse the alien's arrival times,' Amber adds as an afterthought. 'They're close – too close.
And they showed up too damn fast when we first tickled the router. I think Aineko's theories are flawed. The
