swarming up a translucent ladder in the air.
'Tell Manfred!' calls her aunt through the body of an ape: 'Trust no one else!' She throws another packet of compressed, encrypted memories down the tunnel to Amber; then, a moment later, the orange skull touches the ceiling and dissolves, a liquid flow of dissociating utility foglets letting go of one another and dispersing into the greater mass of the building that spawned the fake ape.
* * *
Amber, wearing a brocade gown and a crown encrusted with
diamond processors and external neural taps, her royal party gathered
around her, attends the pan-Jovian constitutional conference with the
majesty of a confirmed head of state and ruler of a small inner moon. She
smiles knowingly at the camera viewpoint, with the professional shine that
comes from a good public relations video filter. 'We are very happy to be
here,' she says, 'and we are pleased that the commission has agreed to
lend its weight to the continued progress of the Ring Imperium's deep-space program.'
*
A piece of dumb paper, crudely stained with letters written in a faded
brown substance – possibly blood – says 'I'm checking out, don't delta
me.' This version of Pierre didn't go to the router: He stayed at home,
deleted all his backups, and slit his wrists, his epitaph sharp and self-
inflicted. It comes as a cold shock, the first chill gust of winter's gale
blowing through the outer system's political elite. And it's the start of a
regime of censorship directed toward the already speeding starwhisp:
Amber, in her grief, makes an executive decision not to tell her embassy
to the stars that one of them is dead and, therefore, unique.
*
Manfred – fifty, with the fashionably pale complexion of the digerati,
healthy-looking for his age, standing beside a transmigration bush with a
stupid grin on his face. He's decided to take the final step, not simply to
spawn external mental processes running in an exocortex of distributed
processors, but to move his entire persona right out of meatspace, into
wherever it is that the uploads aboard the Field Circus have gone.
Annette, skinny, elegant, and very Parisian, stands beside him, looking as
uncertain as the wife of a condemned man.
*
A wedding, shi'ite, Mut'ah – of limited duration. It's scandalous to
many, but the mamtu'ah isn't moslem, she wears a crown instead of a
veil, and her groom is already spoken of in outraged terms by most other
members of the trans-Martian Islamic clergy. Besides which, in addition to
being in love, the happy couple have more strategic firepower than a late-
twentieth-century superpower. Their cat, curled at their feet, looks smug:
She's the custodian of the permissive action locks on the big lasers.
*
A speck of ruby light against the darkness – red-shifted almost into
the infrared, it's the return signal from the Field Circus's light sail as the
starwhisp passes the one-light-year mark, almost twelve trillion kilometers
out beyond Pluto. (Although how can you call it a starwhisp when it
masses almost a hundred kilograms, including propulsion module?
Starwhisps are meant to be tiny!)
*
Collapse of the trans-Lunar economy: Deep in the hot thinking
depths of the solar system, vast new intellects come up with a new theory
of wealth that optimizes resource allocation better than the previously
pervasive Free Market 1.0. With no local minima to hamper them, and no
need to spawn and reap startups Darwin-style, the companies, group
minds, and organizations that adopt the so-called Accelerated Salesman
Infrastructure of Economics 2.0 trade optimally with each other. The
phase change accelerates as more and more entities join in, leveraging
network externalities to overtake the traditional ecosystem. Amber and
Sadeq are late on the train, Sadeq obsessing about how to reconcile ASI
with murabaha and mudaraba while the postmodern economy of the mid-
twenty-first century disintegrates around them. Being late has punitive
consequences – the Ring Imperium has always been a net importer of
brainpower and a net exporter of gravitational potential energy. Now it's a
tired backwater, the bit rate from the red-shifted relativisitic probe
insufficiently delightful to obsess the daemons of industrial routing. In
other words, they're poor.
*
A message from beyond the grave: The travelers aboard the
starship have reached their destination, an alien artifact drifting in chilly
orbit around a frozen brown dwarf. Recklessly they upload themselves
into it, locking the starwhisp down for years of sleep. Amber and her
husband have few funds with which to pay for the propulsion lasers: what
they have left of the kinetic energy of the Ring Imperium – based on the
orbital momentum of a small Jovian inner moon – is being sapped, fast,
at a near-loss, by the crude requirements of the exobionts and
metanthropes who fork and spawn in the datasphere of the outer Jovians.
The cost of importing brains to the Ring Imperium is steep: In near-
despair Amber and Sadeq produce a child, Generation 3.0, to populate
their dwindling kingdom. Picture the cat, offended, lashing its tail beside
the zero-gee crib.
