'Can't say I'm entirely pleased to meet you, under the circumstances, although I should thank you for the spread.'
'I -' His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. 'It's not like that.'
'What's it supposed to be like?' she asks sharply. jabbing a finger at him: 'You know damn well I'm not your mother. So what's it all about, huh? You know damn well I'm nearly bankrupt, too, so it's not as if you're after my pocket lint. What do you want from me?'
Her vehemence takes him aback. This sharp-edged aggressive woman isn't his mother, and the introverted cleric – believer – on the other side isn't his father, either. 'I ha-ha-had to stop you heading for the inner system,'
he says, speech center hitting deadlock before his antistutter mod can cut in. 'They'll eat you alive down there. Your other half left behind substantial debts, and they've been bought up by the most predatory – '
'Runaway corporate instruments,' she states, calmly enough. 'Fully sentient and self-directed.'
'How did you know?' he asks, worried.
She looks grim. 'I've met them before.' It's a very familiar grim expression, one he knows intimately, and that feels wrong coming from this near stranger. 'We visited some weird places, while we were away.' She glances past him, focuses on someone else, and breathes in sharply as her face goes blank. 'Quickly, tell me what your scheme is. Before Mom gets here.'
'Mind archiving and history mergers. Back yourself up, pick different life courses, see which ones work and which don't – no need to be a failure, just hit the 'reload game' icon and resume. That and a long-term angle on the history futures market. I need your help,' he babbles. 'It won't work without family, and I'm trying to stop her killing herself -'
'Family.' She nods, guardedly, and Sirhan notices her companion, this Pierre – not the weak link that broke back before he was born, but a tough-eyed explorer newly returned from the wilderness – sizing him up.
Sirhan's got one or two tricks up his exocortex, and he can see the haze of ghost-shapes around Pierre; his data-mining technique is crude and out-of-date, but enthusiastic and not without a certain flair. 'Family,' Amber repeats, and it's like a curse. Louder: 'Hello, Mom. Should have guessed he'd have invited you here, too.'
'Guess again.' Sirhan glances round at Pamela, then back at Amber, suddenly feeling very much like a rat trapped between a pair of angry cobras. Leaning on her cane, wearing discreet cosmetics and with her medical supports concealed beneath an old-fashioned dress, Pamela could be a badly preserved sixtysomething from the old days instead of the ghastly slow suicide case that her condition amounts to today. She smiles politely at Amber.
'You may remember me telling you that a lady never unintentionally causes offense. I didn't want to offend Sirhan by turning up in spite of his wishes, so I didn't give him a chance to say no.'
'And this is supposed to earn you a sympathy fuck?' Amber drawls. 'I'd expected better of you.'
'Why, you -' The fire in her eyes dies suddenly, subjected to the freezing pressure of a control that only comes with age. 'I'd hoped getting away from it all would have improved your disposition, if not your manners, but evidently not.' Pamela jabs her cane at the table: 'Let me repeat, this is your son's idea. Why don't you eat something?'
'Poison tester goes first.' Amber smiles slyly.
'For fuck's sake!' It's the first thing Pierre has said so far, and crude or not, it comes as a profound relief when he steps forward, picks up a plate of water biscuits loaded with salmon caviar, and puts one in his mouth.
'Can't you guys leave the back stabbing until the rest of us have filled our stomachs? 'S not as if I can turn down the biophysics model in here.' He shoves the plate at Sirhan. 'Go on, it's yours.'
The spell is broken. 'Thank you,' Sirhan says gravely, taking a cracker and feeling the tension fall as Amber and her mother stop preparing to nuke each other and focus on the issue at hand – which is that food comes before fighting at any social event, not vice versa.
'You might enjoy the egg mayonnaise, too,' Sirhan hears himself saying: 'It goes a long way to explaining why the dodo became extinct first time around.'
'Dodoes.' Amber keeps one eye warily on her mother as she accepts a plate from a silently gliding silver bush-shaped waitron. 'What was that about the family investment project?' she asks.
'Just that without your cooperation your family will likely go the way of the bird,' her mother cuts in before Sirhan can muster a reply. 'Not that I expect you to care.'
Boris butts in. 'Core worlds are teeming with corporates. Is bad business for us, good business for them. If you are seeing what we are seen -'
'Don't remember you being there,' Pierre says grumpily.
'In any event,' Sirhan says smoothly, 'the core isn't healthy for us one-time fleshbodies anymore. There are still lots of people there, but the ones who uploaded expecting a boom economy were sadly disappointed.
Originality is at a premium, and the human neural architecture isn't optimized for it – we are, by disposition, a conservative species, because in a static ecosystem, that provides the best return on sunk reproductive investment costs. Yes, we change over time – we're more flexible than almost any other animal species to arise on Earth -
but we're like granite statues compared to organisms adapted to life under Economics 2.0.'
'You tell 'em, boy,' Pamela chirps, almost mockingly. 'It wasn't that bloodless when I lived through it.'
Amber casts her a cool stare.
'Where was I?' Sirhan snaps his fingers, and a glass of fizzy grape juice appears between them. 'Early upload entrepreneurs forked repeatedly, discovered they could scale linearly to occupy processor capacity proportional to the mass of computronium available, and that computationally trivial tasks became tractable. They could also run faster, or slower, than real time. But they were still human, and unable to operate effectively outside human constraints. Take a human being and bolt on extensions that let them take full advantage of Economics 2.0, and you essentially break their narrative chain of consciousness, replacing it with a journal file of bid/request transactions between various agents; it's incredibly efficient and flexible, but it isn't a conscious human being in any recognizable sense of the word.'
'All right,' Pierre says slowly. 'I think we've seen something like that ourselves. At the router.'
Sirhan nods, not sure whether he's referring to anything important. 'So you see, there are limits to human progress – but not to progress itself! The uploads found their labor to be a permanently deflating commodity once they hit their point of diminishing utility. Capitalism doesn't have a lot to say about workers whose skills are obsolete, other than that they should invest wisely while they're earning and maybe retrain: but just knowing how to invest in Economics 2.0 is beyond an unaugmented human. You can't retrain as a seagull, can you, and it's quite as hard to retool for Economics 2.0. Earth is -' He shudders.
'There's a phrase I used to hear in the old days,' Pamela says calmly, 'ethnic cleansing. Do you know what that means, darling idiot daughter? You take people who you define as being of little worth, and first you herd them into a crowded ghetto with limited resources, then you decide those resources aren't worth spending on them, and bullets are cheaper than bread. 'Mind children' the extropians called the posthumans, but they were more like Vile Offspring. There was a lot of that, during the fast sigmoid phase. Starving among plenty, compulsory conversions, the very antithesis of everything your father said he wanted…'
'I don't believe it,' Amber says hotly. 'That's crazy! We can't go the way of -'
'Since when has human history been anything else?' asks the woman with the camera on her shoulder -
Donna, being some sort of public archivist, is in Sirhan's estimate likely to be of use to him. 'Remember what we found in the DMZ?'
'The DMZ?' Sirhan asks, momentarily confused.
'After we went through the router,' Pierre says grimly. 'You tell him, love.' He looks at Amber.
Sirhan, watching him, feels it fall into place at that moment, a sense that he's stepped into an alternate universe, one where the woman who might have been his mother isn't, where black is white, his kindly grandmother is the wicked witch of the west, and his feckless grandfather is a farsighted visionary.
'We uploaded via the router,' Amber says, and looks confused for a moment. 'There's a network on the other side of it. We were told it was FTL, instantaneous, but I'm not so sure now. I think it's something more complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from
