Accelerando

have to make sure they're put to a sensible use this time.

* * *

'I don't see why they're diverting us toward Saturn. It's not as if they can possibly have dismantled Jupiter already, is it?' asks Pierre, rolling the chilled beer bottle thoughtfully between fingers and thumb.

'Why not you ask Amber?' replies the velociraptor squatting beside the log table. (Boris's Ukrainian accent is unimpeded by the dromaeosaurid's larynx; in point of fact, it's an affectation, one he could easily fix by sideloading an English pronunciation patch if he wanted to.)

'Well.' Pierre shakes his head. 'She's spending all her time with that Slug, no multiplicity access, privacy ackles locked right down. I could get jealous.' His voice doesn't suggest any deep concern.

'What's to get jealous about? Just ask to fork instance to talk to you, make love, show boyfriend good time, whatever.'

'Hah!' Pierre chuckles grimly, then drains the last drops from the bottle into his mouth. He throws it away in the direction of a clump of cycads, then snaps his fingers; another one appears in its place.

'Are two megaseconds out from Saturn in any case,' Boris points out, then pauses to sharpen his inch-long incisors on one end of the table. Fangs crunch through timber like wet cardboard. 'Grrrrn. Am seeing most peculiar emission spectra from inner solar system. Foggy flying down bottom of gravity well. Am wondering, does ensmartening of dumb matter extend past Jovian orbit now?'

'Hmm.' Pierre takes a swig from the bottle and puts it down. 'That might explain the diversion. But why haven't they powered up the lasers on the Ring for us? You missed that, too.' For reasons unknown, the huge battery of launch lasers had shut down, some millions of seconds after the crew of the Field Circus had entered the router, leaving it adrift in the cold darkness.

'Don't know why are not talking.' Boris shrugged. 'At least are still alive there, as can tell from the 'set course for Saturn, following thus-and-such orbital elements' bit. Someone is paying attention. Am telling you from beginning, though, turning entire solar system into computronium is real bad idea, long-term. Who knows how far has gone already?'

'Hmm, again.' Pierre draws a circle in the air. 'Aineko,' he calls, 'are you listening?'

'Don't bug me.' A faint green smile appears in the circle, just the suggestion of fangs and needle-sharp whiskers. 'I had an idea I was sleeping furiously.'

Boris rolls one turreted eye and drools on the tabletop. 'Munch munch,' he growls, allowing his saurian body-brain to put in a word.

'What do you need to sleep for? This is a fucking sim, in case you hadn't noticed.'

'I enjoy sleeping,' replies the cat, irritably lashing its just-now-becoming-visible tail. 'What do you want?

Fleas?'

'No thanks,' Pierre says hastily. Last time he called Aineko's bluff the cat had filled three entire pocket universes with scurrying gray mice. One of the disadvantages of flying aboard a starship the size of a baked bean can full of smart matter was the risk that some of the passengers could get rather too creative with the reality control system. This Cretaceous kaffee klatsch was just Boris's entertainment partition; compared to some of the other simulation spaces aboard the Field Circus, it was downright conservative. 'Look, do you have any updates on what's going on downwell? We're only twenty objective days out from orbital insertion, and there's so little to see

– '

'They're not sending us power.' Aineko materializes fully now, a large orange-and-white cat with a swirl of brown fur in the shape on an @-symbol covering her ribs. For whatever reason, she plants herself on the table tauntingly close to Boris's velociraptor body's nose. 'No propulsion laser means insufficient bandwidth. They're talking in Latin-1 text at 1200 baud, if you care to know.' (Which is an insult, given the ship's multi-avabit storage capacity – one avabit is Avogadro's number of bits; about 1023 bytes, several billion times the size of the Internet in 2001 – and outrageous communications bandwidth.) 'Amber says, come and see her now. Audience chamber.

Informal, of course. I think she wants to discuss it.'

'Informal? Am all right without change bodies?'

The cat sniffs. ' I'm wearing a real fur coat,' it declares haughtily, 'but no knickers.' Then blinks out a fraction of a second ahead of the snicker-snack of Bandersnatch-like jaws.

'Come on,' says Pierre, standing up. 'Time to see what Her Majesty wants with us today.'

* * *

Welcome to decade eight, third millennium, when the effects of the

phase-change in the structure of the solar system are finally becoming

visible on a cosmological scale.

There are about eleven billion future-shocked primates in various states

of life and undeath throughout the solar system. Most of them cluster

where the interpersonal bandwidth is hottest, down in the water zone

around old Earth. Earth's biosphere has been in the intensive care ward

for decades, weird rashes of hot-burning replicators erupting across it

before the World Health Organization can fix them – gray goo,

thylacines, dragons. The last great transglobal trade empire, run from the

arcologies of Hong Kong, has collapsed along with capitalism, rendered

obsolete by a bunch of superior deterministic resource allocation

algorithms collectively known as Economics 2.0. Mercury, Venus, Mars,

and Luna are all well on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit

with energy stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster

so thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red ball

of wool the size of a young red giant.

Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary

selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the

average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts. Now the brightly

burning beacon of sapience isn't held by humans anymore – their cross-

infectious enthusiasms have spread to a myriad of other hosts, several

types of which are qualitatively better at thinking. At last count, there were

about a thousand nonhuman intelligent species in Sol space, split evenly

between posthumans on one side, naturally self-organizing AIs in the

middle, and mammalian nonhumans on the other. The common mammal

neural chassis is easily upgraded to human-style intelligence in most

species that can carry, feed and cool a half kilogram of gray matter, and

the descendants of a hundred ethics-challenged doctoral theses are now

demanding equal rights. So are the unquiet dead; the panopticon-logged

Net ghosts of people who lived recently enough to imprint their identities

on the information age, and the ambitious theological engineering

schemes of the Reformed Tiplerite Church of Latter-day Saints (who want

to emulate all possible human beings in real time, so that they can have

the opportunity to be saved).

The human memesphere is coming alive, although how long it remains

recognizably human is open to question. The informational density of the

inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro's number of bits per mole,

one bit per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter of the inner planets

(apart from Earth, preserved for now like a picturesque historic building