Torpid and full, she strokes the cat that lies curled in her lap. Pierre is off
somewhere, touring one or another of the prototype ecosystems that one
or another of the borg's special interest minds is testing. Amber, for her
part, can't be bothered. She's just had a great meal, she doesn't have any
lawsuits to worry about, everything back home is on the critpath, and
quality time like this is so hard to come by -
'Do you keep in touch with your father?' asks Monica.
'Mmm.' The cat purrs quietly, and Amber strokes its flank. 'We e-mail.
Sometimes.'
'I just wondered.' Monica is the local borg den mother, willowy and
brown-eyed and with a deceptively lazy drawl – Yorkshire English
overlaid with Silicon Valley speak. 'I hear from him, y'know. From time to
time. Now that Gianni's retired, he doesn't have much to do downwell
anymore. So he was talking about coming out here.'
'What? To Perijove?' Amber's eyes open in alarm: Aineko stops purring
and looks round at Monica accusingly.
'Don't worry.' Monica sounds vaguely amused: 'He wouldn't cramp your
style, I think.'
'But, out here -' Amber sits up. 'Damn,' she says, quietly. 'What got into him?'
'Middle-aged restlessness, my downwell sibs say.' Monica shrugs. 'This
time Annette didn't stop him. But he hasn't made up his mind to travel
yet.'
'Good. Then he might not -' Amber stops. 'The phrase, 'made up his
mind', what exactly do you mean?'
Monica's smile mocks her for a few seconds before the older woman
surrenders. 'He's talking about uploading.'
'Is that embarrassing or what?' asks Ang. Amber glances at her, mildly
annoyed, but Ang isn't looking her way. So much for friends, Amber thinks. Being queen of all you survey is a great way of breaking up peer
relationships -
'He won't do it,' Amber predicts. 'Dad's burned out.'
'He thinks he'll get it back if he optimizes himself for re-entrancy.' Monica continues to smile. 'I've been telling him it's just what he needs.'
'I do not want my father bugging me. Or my mother. Or Auntie 'Nette and
Uncle Gianni. Memo to immigration control: No entry rights for Manfred
Macx or the other named individuals without clearance through the
Queen's secretary.'
'What did he do to get you so uptight?' asks Monica idly.
Amber sighs, and subsides. 'Nothing. It's not that I'm ungrateful or
anything, but he's just so extropian, it's embarrassing. Like, that was the
last century's apocalypse. Y'know?'
'I think he was a really very forward-looking organic,' Monica, speaking
for the Franklin borg, asserts. Amber looks away. Pierre would get it, she thinks. Pierre would understand her aversion to Manfred's showing up.
Pierre, too, wants to carve out his own niche without parents looking over
his shoulders, although for very different reasons. She focuses on
someone male and more or less mature – Nicky, she thinks, though she
hasn't seen him for a long time – walking toward the piazza, bare-ass
naked and beautifully tanned.
'Parents. What are they good for?' asks Amber, with all the truculence of
her seventeen years. 'Even if they stay neotenous, they lose flexibility.
And there's that long Paleolithic tradition of juvenile slavery. Inhuman, I
call it.'
'How old were you when it was safe to leave you around the house on
your own?' challenges Monica.
'Three. That's when I had my first implants.' Amber smiles at the
approaching young Adonis, who smiles back: Yes, it's Nicky, and he
seems pleased to see her. Life is good, she thinks, idly considering whether or not to tell Pierre.
'Times change,' remarks Monica. 'Don't write your family off too soon;
there might come a time when you want their company.'
'Huh.' Amber pulls a face at the old borg component. 'That's what you all say!'
* * *
As soon as Amber steps onto the grass, she can feel possibilities open up around her. She has management authority here, and this universe is
'Wow! Back in the real world at last!' She can hardly contain her excitement, even forgetting to be pissed at Sadeq for thinking she was just an actor in his Cartesian theatre's performance of Puritan Hell. 'Look! It's the DMZ!'
They're standing on a grassy knoll overlooking a gleaming Mediterranean city. It snoozes beneath a Mandelbrot-fuzzy not-sun that hangs at the center of a hyperbolic landscape, which dwindles into a blue yonder that seems incomprehensibly distant. Circular baby-blue wells open in the walls of the world at regular intervals, connecting to other parts of the manifold. 'How big is it, ghost? In planetary simulation-equivalents.'
'This demilitarized zone is an embedded reality, funneling all transfers between the local star system's router and the civilization that built it. It uses on the order of a thousandth of the capacity of the Matrioshka brain it is part of, although the runaway excursion currently in force has absorbed most of that. Matrioshka brain, you are familiar with the concept?' The ghost sounds fussily pedantic.
Sadeq shakes his head. Amber glances at him, askance. 'Take all the planets in a star system and dismantle them,' she explains. 'Turn them into dust – structured nanocomp, powered by heat exchangers, spread in concentric orbits around the central star. The inner orbitals run close to the melting point of iron, the outer ones are cold as liquid nitrogen, and each layer runs off the waste heat of the next shell in. It's like a Russian doll made out of Dyson spheres, shell enclosing shell enclosing shell, but it's not designed to support human life. It's computronium, matter optimized at the atomic level to support computing, and they're all running uploads – Dad figured our own solar system could support, uh, about a hundred billion times as many inhabitants as Earth. At a conservative estimate. As uploads, living in simulation space. If you first dismantle all the planets and use the resulting materials to build a Matrioshka brain.'
'Ah.' Sadeq nods thoughtfully. 'Is that your definition, too?' he asks, glancing up at the glowing point the ghost uses to localize its presence.
'Substantially,' it says, almost grudgingly.
'Substantially?' Amber glances around.
