Accelerando

from time to time and mapping the splenetic overspill of her memeome into his burgeoning family knowledge base.

'I wasn't always this bitter and cynical,' Pamela explains, waving her cane in the vague direction of the cloudscape beyond the edge of the world and fixing Sirhan with a beady stare. (He's brought her out here hoping that it will trigger another cascade of memories, sunsets on honeymoon island resorts and the like, but all that seems to be coming up is bile.) 'It was the successive betrayals. Manfred was the first, and the worst in some ways, but that little bitch Amber hurt me more, if anything. If you ever have children, be careful to hold something back for yourself; because if you don't, when they throw it all in your face, you'll feel like dying. And when they're gone, you've got no way of patching things up.'

'Is dying inevitable?' asks Sirhan, knowing damn well that it isn't, but more than happy to give her an excuse to pick at her scabbed-over love wound: He more than half suspects she's still in love with Manfred. This is great family history, and he's having the time of his flinty-hearted life leading her up to the threshold of the reunion he's hosting.

'Sometimes I think death is even more inevitable than taxes,' his grandmother replies bleakly. 'Humans don't live in a vacuum; we're part of a larger pattern of life.' She stares out across the troposphere of Saturn, where a thin rime of blown methane snow catches the distant sunrise in a ruby-tinted fog. 'The old gives way to the new,'

She sighs, and tugs at her cuffs. (Ever since the incident with the gate crashing ape, she's taken to wearing an antique formal pressure suit, all clinging black spidersilk woven with flexible pipes and silvery smart sensor nets.)

'There's a time to get out of the way of the new, and I think I passed it sometime ago.'

'Um,' says Sirhan, who is somewhat surprised by this new angle in her lengthy, self-justifying confession:

'but what if you're just saying this because you feel old? If it's just a physiological malfunction, we could fix it and you'd -'

' No! I've got a feeling that life prolongation is morally wrong, Sirhan. I'm not passing judgment on you, just stating that I think it's wrong for me. It's immoral because it blocks up the natural order, keeps us old cobweb strands hanging around and getting in you young things' way. And then there are the theological questions. If you try to live forever, you never get to meet your maker.'

'Your maker? Are you a theist, then?'

'I – think so.' Pamela is silent for a minute. 'Although there are so many different approaches to the subject that it's hard to know which version to believe. For a long time, I was secretly afraid your grandfather might actually have had the answers. That I might have been wrong all along. But now -' She leans on her cane. 'When he announced that he was uploading, I figured out that all he really had was a life-hating antihuman ideology he'd mistaken for a religion. The rapture of the nerds and the heaven of the AIs. Sorry, no thanks; I don't buy it.'

'Oh.' Sirhan squints out at the cloudscape. For a moment, he thinks he can see something in the distant mist, an indeterminate distance away – it's hard to distinguish centimeters from megameters, with no scale indicator and a horizon a continental distance away – but he's not sure what it is. Maybe another city, mollusk- curved and sprouting antennae, a strange tail of fabricator nodes wavering below and beneath it. Then a drift of cloud hides it for a moment, and, when it clears the object is gone. 'What's left, then? If you don't really believe in some kind of benign creator, dying must be frightening. Especially as you're doing it so slowly.'

Pamela smiles skeletally, a particularly humorless expression. 'It's perfectly natural, darling! You don't need to believe in God to believe in embedded realities. We use them every day, as mind tools. Apply anthropic reasoning and isn't it clear that our entire universe is probably a simulation? We're living in the early epoch of the universe. Probably this' – she prods at the spun-diamond inner wall of the bubble that holds in the precarious terrestrial atmosphere, holding out the howling cryogenic hydrogen and methane gales of Saturn – 'is but a simulation in some ancient history engine's panopticon, rerunning the sum of all possible origins of sentience, a billion trillion megayears down the line. Death will be like waking up as someone bigger, that's all.' Her grin slides away. 'And if not, I'll just be a silly old fool who deserves the oblivion she yearns for.'

'Oh, but -' Sirhan stops, his skin crawling. She may be mad, he realizes abruptly. Not clinically insane, just at odds with the entire universe. Locked into a pathological view of her own role in reality. 'I'd hoped for a reconciliation,' he says quietly. 'Your extended family has lived through some extraordinary times. Why spoil it with acrimony?'

'Why spoil it?' She looks at him pityingly: 'It was spoiled to begin with, dear, too much selfless sacrifice and too little skepticism. If Manfred hadn't wanted so badly not to be human, and if I'd learned to be a bit more flexible in time, we might still -' She trails off. 'That's odd.'

'What is?'

Pamela raises her cane and points out into the billowing methane thunderclouds, her expression puzzled. 'I'll swear I saw a lobster out there…'

* * *

Amber awakens in the middle of the night in darkness and choking pressure, and senses that she's drowning.

For a moment she's back in the ambiguous space on the far side of the router, a horror of crawling instruments tracing her every experience back to the nooks and crannies of her mind; then her lungs turn to glass and shatter, and she's coughing and wheezing in the cold air of the museum at midnight.

The hard stone floor beneath her, and an odd pain in her knees, tells her that she's not aboard the Field Circus anymore. Rough hands hold her shoulders up as she vomits a fine blue mist, racked by a coughing fit. More bluish liquid is oozing from the pores of the skin on her arms and breasts, evaporating in strangely purposeful streamers. 'Thank you,' she finally manages to gasp: 'I can breathe now.'

She sits back on her heels, realizes she's naked, and opens her eyes. Everything's confusingly strange, even though it shouldn't be. There's a moment of resistance as if her eyelids are sealed – then they respond. It all feels strangely familiar to her, like waking up again inside a house she grew up in and moved away from years ago. But the scene around her is hardly one to inspire confidence. Shadows lie thick and deep across ovoid tanks filled with an anatomist's dream, bodies in various nightmarish stages of assembly. And sitting in the middle of them, whence it has retreated after letting go of her shoulders, is a strangely misshapen person – also nude, but for a patchy coat of orange hair.

'Are you awake yet, ma cherie?' asks the orangutan.

'Um.' Amber shakes her head, cautiously, feeling the drag of damp hair, the faint caress of a breeze – she reaches out with another sense and tries to grab hold of reality, but it slithers away, intransigent and unembedded.

Everything around her is so solid and immutable that, for a moment, she feels a stab of claustrophobic panic: Help!

I'm trapped in the real universe! Another quick check reassures her that she's got access to something outside her own head, and the panic begins to subside: Her exocortex has migrated successfully to this world. 'I'm in a museum? On Saturn? Who are you – have we met?'

'Not in person,' the ape says carefully. 'We 'ave corresponded. Annette Dimarcos.'

'Auntie -' A flood of memories rattle Amber's fragile stream of consciousness apart, forcing her to fork repeatedly until she can drag them together. Annette, in a recorded message: Your father sends you this escape package. The legal key to her mother's gilded custodial cage. Freedom a necessity. 'Is Dad here?' she asks hopefully, even though she knows full well that here in the real world at least thirty-five years have passed in linear time: In a century where ten years of linear time is enough for several industrial revolutions, that's a lot of water under the bridge.

'I am not sure.' The orangutan blinks lazily, scratches at her left forearm, and glances round the chamber.

'He might be in one of these tanks, playing a shell game. Or he might be leaving well enough alone until the dust settles.' She turns back to stare at Amber with big, brown, soulful eyes. 'This is not to be the reunion you were hoping for.'