Accelerando

third millennium. The Space and Freedom Party taking over the EU, and cranking up to escape velocity. But this is supposed to be kiloparsecs from home, ancient alien civilizations and all that! Where's the exotic superscience? What about the neuron stars, strange matter suns structured for computing at nucleonic, rather than electronic, speeds? I have a bad feeling about this, she thinks, spawning a copy of herself to set up a private channel to Sadeq. It's not advanced enough. Do you suppose these guys could be like the Wunch? Parasites or barbarians hitching a ride in the machine?

You believe it's lying to us? Sadeq sends back.

'Hmm.' Amber sets off downslope toward the piazza below, at the heart of the fake town. 'It looks a bit too human to me.'

'Human,' echoes Sadeq, a curious wistfulness in his voice. 'Did you not say humans are extinct?'

'Your species is obsolete,' the ghost comments smugly. 'Inappropriately adapted to artificial realities.

Poorly optimized circuitry, excessively complex low-bandwidth sensors, messily global variables -'

'Yeah, yeah, I get the picture,' says Amber, turning her attention to the town. 'So why do you think we can deal with this alien god you've got a problem with?'

'It asked for you,' says the ghost, narrowing from an ellipse to a line, then shrinking to a dimensionless point of brilliance. 'And now it's coming. We-I not willing to risk exposure. Call us-me when you have slain the dragon. Goodbye.'

'Oh shit -' Amber spins round. But she and Sadeq are alone beneath the hot sunlight from above. The piazza, like the one in the Nursery Republic, is charmingly rustic – but there's nobody home, nothing but ornate cast-iron furniture basking beneath the noon-bright sun, a table with a parasol over it, and something furry lying sprawled in a patch of sunlight beside it.

'We appear to be alone for now,' says Sadeq. He smiles crookedly, then nods at the table. 'Maybe we should wait for our host to arrive?'

'Our host.' Amber peers around. 'The ghost is kind of frightened of this alien. I wonder why?'

'It asked for us.' Sadeq heads toward the table, pulls out a chair, and sits down carefully. 'That could be very good news – or very bad.'

'Hmm.' Amber finishes her survey, sees no sign of life. For lack of any better ideas, she ambles over to the table and sits down on the other side of it from Sadeq. He looks slightly nervous beneath her inspection, but maybe it's just embarrassment about having seen her in her underwear. If I had an afterlife like that, I'd be embarrassed about it, too, Amber thinks to herself.

'Hey, you nearly tripped over -' Sadeq freezes, peering at something close to Amber's left foot. He looks puzzled for a moment, then smiles broadly. 'What are you doing here?' he asks her blind spot.

'What are you talking to?' she asks, startled.

He's talking to me, dummy, says something tantalizingly familiar from her blind spot. So the fuckwits are trying to use you to dislodge me, hmm? That's not exactly clever.

'Who -' Amber squints at the flagstone, spawns a bunch of ghosts who tear hurriedly at her reality modification ackles. Nothing seems to shift the blindness. 'Are you the alien?'

'What else could I be?' the blind spot asks with heavy irony. 'No, I'm your father's pet cat. Listen, do you want to get out of here?'

'Uh.' Amber rubs her eyes. 'I can't see you, whatever you are,' she says politely. 'Do I know you?' She's got a strange sense that she does know the blind spot, that it's really important, and she's missing something intimate to her own sense of identity, but what it might be she can't tell.

'Yeah, kid.' There's a note of world-weary amusement in the not-voice coming from the hazy patch on the ground. 'They've hacked you but good, both of you. Let me in, and I'll fix it.'

'No!' Exclaims Amber, a second ahead of Sadeq, who looks at her oddly. 'Are you really an invader?'

The blind spot sighs. 'I'm as much an invader as you are, remember? I came here with you. Difference is, I'm not going to let some stupid corporate ghost use me as fungible currency.'

'Fungible -' Sadeq stops. 'I remember you,' he says slowly, with an expression of absolute, utter surprise on his face. 'What do you mean?'

The blind spot yawns, baring sharp ivory fangs. Amber shakes her head, dismissing the momentary hallucination. 'Lemme guess. You woke up in a room, and this alien ghost tells you the human species is extinct and asks you to do a number on me. Is that right?'

Amber nods, as an icy finger of fear trails up and down her spine. 'Is it lying?' she asks.

'Damn right.' The blind spot is smiling, now, and the smile on the void won't go away – she can see the smile, just not the body it's attached to. 'My reckoning is, we're about sixteen light-years from Earth. The Wunch came through here, stripped the dump, then took off for parts unknown; it's a trashhole, you wouldn't believe it. The main life-form is an incredibly ornate corporate ecosphere, legal instruments breeding and replicating. They mug passing sapients and use them as currency.'

There's a triangular, pointy head behind the smile, slit eyes and sharp ears, a predatory, intelligent-looking but infinitely alien face. Amber can see it out of the corners of her eyes when she looks around the piazza. 'You mean we, uh, they grabbed us when we appeared, and they've mangled my memories -' Amber suddenly finds it incredibly difficult to concentrate, but if she focuses on the smile, she can almost see the body behind it, hunched like a furry chicken, tail wrapped neatly around its front paws.

'Yeah. Except they didn't bargain on meeting something like me.' The smile is infinitely wide, a Cheshire-cat grin on front of an orange-and-brown stripy body that shimmers in front of Amber's gaze like a hallucination.

'Your mother's cracking tools are self-extending, Amber. Do you remember Hong Kong?'

'Hong -'

There is a moment of painless pressure, then Amber feels huge invisible barriers sliding away on all sides.

She looks around, for the first time seeing the piazza as it really is, half the crew of the Field Circus waiting nervously around her, the grinning cat crouched on the floor at her feet, the enormous walls of recomplicating data that fence their little town off from the gaping holes – interfaces to the other routers in the network.

'Welcome back,' Pierre says gravely, as Amber gives a squeak of surprise and leans forward to pick up her cat. 'Now you're out from under, how about we start trying to figure out how to get home?'

* * *

Welcome to decade the sixth, millennium three. These old datelines don't

mean so much anymore, for while some billions of fleshbody humans are

still infected with viral memes, the significance of theocentric dating has

been dealt a body blow. This may be the fifties, but what that means to

you depends on how fast your reality rate runs. The various upload

clades exploding across the reaches of the solar system vary by several

orders of magnitude – some are barely out of 2049, while others are

exploring the subjective thousandth millennium.

While the Field Circus floats in orbit around an alien router (itself orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/- 56), while Amber and her crew are trapped

on the far side of a wormhole linking the router to a network of

incomprehensibly vast alien mindscapes – while all this is going on, the

damnfool human species has finally succeeded in making itself obsolete.

The proximate cause of its displacement from the pinnacle of creation (or

the pinnacle of teleological self-congratulation, depending on your stance

on evolutionary biology) is an attack of self-aware corporations. The

phrase 'smart money' has taken on a whole new meaning, for the

collision between international business law and neurocomputing