Accelerando

form, a translucent reflection of her own body. 'It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you sure you have defeated the monster?'

'It'll do as I say,' Amber replies, forcing herself to sound more confident than she feels – sometimes that damned transhuman cyborg cat is no more predictable than a real feline. 'Now, the matter of payment arises.'

'Payment.' The ghost sounds amused. But Pierre's filled her in on what to look for, and Amber can now see the translation membranes around it. Their color shift maps to a huge semantic distance; the creature on the other side, even though it looks like a ghost-image of herself, is very far from human. 'How can we-us be expected to pay our own money for rendering services to us?'

Amber smiles. 'We want an open channel back to the router we arrived through.'

'Impossible,' says the ghost.

'We want an open channel, and for it to stay open for six hundred million seconds after we clear it.'

'Impossible,' the ghost repeats.

'We can trade you a whole civilization,' Amber says blandly. 'A whole human nation, millions of individuals. Just let us go, and we'll see to it.'

'You – please wait.' The ghost shimmers slightly, fuzzing at the edges.

Amber opens a private channel to Pierre while the ghost confers with its other nodes. Are the Wunch in place yet? she sends.

They're moving in. This bunch don't remember what happened on the Field Circus, memories of those events never made it back to them. So the Slug's got them to cooperate. It's kinda scary to watch – like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers , you know?

I don't care if it's scary to watch, Amber replies, I need to know if we're ready yet.

Sadeq says yes, the universe is ready.

Right, pack yourself down. We'll be moving soon.

The ghost is firming up in front of her. 'A whole civilization?' it asks. 'That is not possible. Your arrival -

' It pauses, fuzzing a little. Hah, Gotcha! thinks Amber. Liar, liar, pants on fire! 'You cannot possibly have found a human civilization in the archives?'

'The monster you complain about that came through with us is a predator,' she asserts blandly. 'It swallowed an entire nation before we heroically attracted its attention and induced it to follow us into the router. It's an archivore – everything was inside it, still frozen until we expanded it again. This civilization will already have been restored from hot shadows in our own solar system: There is nothing to gain by taking it home with us. But we need to return to ensure that no more predators of this type discover the router – or the high-bandwidth hub we linked to it.'

'You are sure you have killed this monster?' asks the ghost. 'It would be inconvenient if it were to emerge from hiding in its digest archives.'

'I can guarantee it won't trouble you again if you let us go,' says Amber, mentally crossing her fingers. The ghost doesn't seem to have noticed the huge wedge of fractally compressed data that bloats her personal scope by an order of magnitude. She can still feel Aineko's goodbye smile inside her head, an echo of ivory teeth trusting her to revive it if the escape plan succeeds.

'We-us agree.' The ghost twists weirdly, morphs into a five-dimensional hypersphere. It bubbles violently for a moment, then spits out a smaller token – a warped distortion in the air, like a gravityless black hole. 'Here is your passage. Show us the civilization.'

'Okay ' – Now! – 'catch.' Amber twitches an imaginary muscle, and one wall of the room dissolves, forming a doorway into Sadeq's existential hell, now redecorated as a fair facsimile of a twenty-first-century industrial city in Iran, and populated by a Wunch of parasites who can't believe what they've lucked into – an entire continent of zombies waiting to host their flesh-hungry consciousness.

The ghost drifts toward the open window. Amber grabs the hole and yanks it open, gets a grip on her own thoughts, and sends Open wide! on the channel everybody is listening in on. For a moment time stands still, and then -

* * *

A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through the cold vacuum, in high orbit around a brown dwarf. But the vacuum is anything but dark. A sapphire glare as bright as the noonday sun on Mars shines on the crazy diamond, billowing and cascading off sails as fine as soap bubbles that slowly drift and tense away from the can. The runaway Slug-corporation's proxy has hacked the router's firmware, and the open wormhole gate that feeds power to it is shining with the brilliance of a nuclear fireball, laser light channeled from a star many light-years away to power the Field Circus on its return trip to the once-human solar system.

Amber has retreated, with Pierre, into a simulation of her home aboard the Ring Imperium. One wall of her bedroom is a solid slab of diamond, looking out across the boiling Jovian ionosphere from an orbit low enough to make the horizon appear flat. They're curled together in her bed, a slightly more comfortable copy of the royal bed of King Henry VIII of England. It appears to be carved from thousand-year-old oak beams. As with so much else about the Ring Imperium, appearances are deceptive; and this is even more true of the cramped simulation spaces aboard the Field Circus, as it limps toward a tenth the speed of light, the highest velocity it's likely to achieve on a fraction of its original sail area.

'Let me get this straight. You convinced. The locals. That a simulation of Iran, with zombie bodies that had been taken over by members of the Wunch. Was a human civilization?'

'Yeah.' Amber stretches lazily and smirks at him. 'It's their damn fault; if the corporate collective entities didn't use conscious viewpoints as money, they wouldn't have fallen for a trick like that, would they?'

'People. Money.'

'Well.' She yawns, then sits up and snaps her finger imperiously: Down-stuffed pillows appear behind her back, and a silver salver bearing two full glasses of wine materializes between them. 'Corporations are life-forms back home, too, aren't they? And we trade them. We give our AIs corporations to make them legal entities, but the analogy goes deeper. Look at any company headquarters, fitted out with works of art and expensive furniture and staff bowing and scraping everywhere -'

' – They're the new aristocracy. Right?'

'Wrong. When they take over, what you get is more like the new biosphere. Hell, the new primordial soup: prokaryotes, bacteria, and algae, mindlessly swarming, trading money for plasmids.' The Queen passes her consort a wineglass. When he drinks from it, it refills miraculously. 'Basically, sufficiently complex resource-allocation algorithms reallocate scarce resources… and if you don't jump to get out of their way, they'll reallocate you. I think that's what happened inside the Matrioshka brain we ended up in: Judging by the Slug it happens elsewhere, too.

You've got to wonder where the builders of that structure came from. And where they went. And whether they realized that the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments.'

'Maybe they tried to dismantle the companies before the companies spent them.' Pierre looks worried.

'Running up a national debt, importing luxurious viewpoint extensions, munching exotic dreams. Once they plugged into the Net, a primitive Matrioshka civilization would be like, um.' He pauses. 'Tribal. A primitive postsingularity civilization meeting the galactic net for the first time. Overawed. Wanting all the luxuries. Spending their capital, their human – or alien – capital, the meme machines that built them. Until there's nothing left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking for someone to own.'

'Speculation.'

'Idle speculation,' he agrees.

'But we can't ignore it.' She nods. 'Maybe some early corporate predator built the machines that spread the wormholes around brown dwarfs and ran the router network on top of them in an attempt to make money fast. By not putting them in the actual planetary systems likely to host tool-using life, they'd ensure that only near-