Accelerando

The bridge of the Field Circus is in constant use at this time, a meeting ground for minds with access to the restricted areas. Pierre is spending more and more time here, finding it a convenient place to focus his trading campaign and arbitrage macros. At the same time that Donna is picking the multiplexed lawyer's strategy apart, Pierre is present in neomorphic form – a quicksilver outline of humanity, six-armed and two-headed, scanning with inhuman speed through tensor maps of the information traffic density surrounding the router's clump of naked singularities.

There's a flicker in the emptiness at the rear of the bridge, then Su Ang has always been there. She watches Pierre in contemplative silence for a minute. 'Do you have a moment?'

Pierre superimposes himself: One shadowy ghost keeps focused on the front panel, but another instance turns round, crosses his arms, waits for her to speak.

'I know you're busy -' she begins, then stops. 'Is it that important?' she asks.

'It is.' Pierre blurs, resynchronizing his instances. 'The router – there are four wormholes leading off from it, did you know that? Each of them is radiating at about 1011 Kelvins, and every wavelength is carrying data connections, multiplexed, with a protocol stack that's at least eleven layers deep but maybe more – they show signs of self-similarity in the framing headers. You know how much data that is? It's about 1012 times as much as our high-bandwidth uplink from home. But compared to what's on the other side of the 'holes -' he shakes his head.

'It's big?'

'It's unimaginably big! These wormholes, they're a low- bandwidth link compared to the minds they're hooking up to.' He blurs in front of her, unable to stay still and unable to look away from the front panel.

Excitement or agitation? Su Ang can't tell. With Pierre, sometimes the two states are indistinguishable. He gets emotional easily. 'I think we have the outline of the answer to the Fermi paradox. Transcendents don't go traveling because they can't get enough bandwidth – trying to migrate through one of these wormholes would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly, if they are what I think they are – and the slower-than-light route is out, too, because they couldn't take enough computronium along. Unless -'

He's off again. But before he can blur out, Su Ang steps across and lays hands on him. 'Pierre. Calm down.

Disengage. Empty yourself.'

'I can't!' He really is agitated, she sees. 'I've got to figure out the best trading strategy to get Amber off the hook with that lawsuit, then tell her to get us out of here; being this close to the router is seriously dangerous! The Wunch are the least of it.'

'Stop.'

He pauses his multiplicity of presences, converges on a single identity focused on the here and now. 'Yes?'

'That's better.' She walks round him, slowly. 'You've got to learn to deal with stress more appropriately.'

'Stress!' Pierre snorts. He shrugs, an impressive gesture with three sets of shoulder blades. 'That's something I can turn off whenever I need to. Side effect of this existence; we're pigs in cyberspace, wallowing in fleshy simulations, but unable to experience the new environment in the raw. What did you want from me, Ang?

Honestly? I'm a busy man, I've got a trading network to set up.'

'We've got a problem with the Wunch right now, even if you think something worse is out there,' Ang says patiently. 'Boris thinks they're parasites, negative-sum gamers who stalk newbies like us. Glashwiecz is apparently talking about cutting a deal with them. Amber's suggestion is that you ignore them completely, cut them out, and talk to anyone else who'll listen.'

'Anyone else who'll listen, right,' Pierre says heavily. 'Any other gems of wisdom to pass on from the throne?'

Ang takes a deep breath. He's infuriating, she realizes. And worst of all, he doesn't realize. Infuriating but cute. 'You're setting up a trading network, yes?' she asks.

'Yes. A standard network of independent companies, instantiated as cellular automata within the Ring Imperium switched legal service environment.' He relaxes slightly. 'Each one has access to a compartmentalized chunk of intellectual property and can call on the corrected parser we got from that cat. They're set up to communicate with a blackboard system – a souk – and I'm bringing up a link to the router, a multicast link that'll broadcast the souk's existence to anyone who's listening. Trade…' his eyebrows furrow. 'There are at least two different currency standards in this network, used to buy quality-of-service precedence and bandwidth. They depreciate with distance, as if the whole concept of money was invented to promote the development of long-range network links. If I can get in first, when Glashwiecz tries to cut in on the dealing by offering IP at discounted rates

– '

'He's not going to, Pierre,' she says as gently as possible. 'Listen to what I said: Glashwiecz is going to focus on the Wunch. He's going to offer them a deal. Amber wants you to ignore them. Got that?'

'Got it.' There's a hollow bong! from one of the communication bells. 'Hey, that's interesting.'

'What is?' She stretches, neck extending snakelike so that she can see the window on underlying reality that's flickered into existence in the air before him.

'An ack from…' he pauses, then plucks a neatly reified concept from the screen in front of him and presents it to her in a silvery caul of light.'… about two hundred light-years away! Someone wants to talk.' He smiles. Then the front panel workstation bong's again. 'Hey again. I wonder what that says.'

It's the work of a moment to pipe the second message through the translator. Oddly, it doesn't translate at first. Pierre has to correct for some weird destructive interference in the fake lobster network before it'll spill its guts. 'That's interesting,' he says.

'I'll say.' Ang lets her neck collapse back to normal. 'I'd better go tell Amber.'

'You do that,' Pierre says worriedly. He makes eye contact with her, but what she's hoping to see in his face just isn't there. He's wearing his emotions entirely on the surface. 'I'm not surprised their translator didn't want to pass that message along.'

'It's a deliberately corrupted grammar,' Ang murmurs, and bangs out in the direction of Amber's audience chamber; 'and they're actually making threats.' The Wunch, it seems, have acquired a very bad reputation somewhere along the line – and Amber needs to know.

* * *

Glashwiecz leans toward Lobster Number One, stomach churning. It's only a realtime kilosecond since his bar-room interview, but in the intervening subjective time, he's abolished a hangover, honed his brief, and decided to act. In the Tuileries. 'You've been lied to,' he confides quietly, trusting the privacy ackles that he browbeat Amber's mother into giving him – access lists that give him a degree of control over the regime within this virtual universe that the cat dragged in.

'Lied? Context rendered horizontal in past, or subjected to grammatical corruption? Linguistic evil?'

'The latter.' Glashwiecz enjoys this, even though it forces him to get rather closer to the two-meter-long virtual crustacean than he'd like. Showing a mark how they've been scammed is always good, especially when you hold the keys to the door of the cage they're locked inside. 'They are not telling you the truth about this system.'

'We received assurances,' Lobster Number One says clearly. Its mouthparts move ceaselessly – the noise comes from somewhere inside its head. 'You do not share this phenotype. Why?'

'That information will cost you,' says Glashwiecz. 'I am willing to provide it on credit.'

They haggle briefly. An exchange rate in questions is agreed, as is a trust metric to grade the answers by.