The ability to request citizenship rights is one of the legal tests for sapience, and failure to comply may place you in legal jeopardy. You can renounce your citizenship whenever you wish: This may be desirable if you emigrate to another polity.
While many things are free, it is highly likely that you posses no employable skills, and therefore, no way of earning money with which to purchase unfree items. The pace of change in the past century has rendered almost all skills you may have learned obsolete [see:
Your ability to learn depends on your ability to take information in the format in which it is offered.
Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may be provided – for a fee. (In event of your murder, you will be furnished with a new body at the expense of your killer.) If you have any preexisting medical conditions or handicaps, consult the city.
The city is an agoric-annealing participatory democracy with a limited liability constitution. Its current executive agency is a weakly godlike intelligence that chooses to associate with human-equivalent intelligences: This agency is colloquially known as 'Hello Kitty,' 'Beautiful Cat,' or 'Aineko,' and may manifest itself in a variety of physical avatars if corporeal interaction is desired. (Prior to the arrival of 'Hello Kitty,' the city used a variety of human-designed expert systems that provided suboptimal performance.)
The city's mission statement is to provide a mediatory environment for human-equivalent intelligences and to preserve same in the face of external aggression. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the ongoing political processes of determining such responses. Citizens also have a duty to serve on a jury if called (including senatorial service), and to defend the city.
Where to go for further information:
Until you have registered as a citizen and obtained basic implants, all further questions should be directed to the city. Once you have learned to use your implants, you will not need to ask this question.
* * *
Welcome to decade the ninth, singularity plus one gigasecond (or maybe
more – nobody's quite sure when, or indeed if, a singularity has been
created). The human population of the solar system is either six billion, or
sixty billion, depending on whether you class the forked state vectors of
posthumans and the simulations of dead phenotypes running in the Vile
Offspring's Schrodinger boxes as people. Most of the physically incarnate
still live on Earth, but the lily-pads floating beneath continent-sized hot-hydrogen balloons in Saturn's upper atmosphere already house a few
million, and the writing is on the wall for the rocky inner planets. All the
remaining human-equivalent intelligences with half a clue to rub together
are trying to emigrate before the Vile Offspring decide to recycle Earth to
fill in a gap in the concentric shells of nanocomputers they're running on.
The half-constructed Matrioshka brain already darkens the skies of Earth
and has caused a massive crash in the planet's photosynthetic biomass,
as plants starve for short-wavelength light.
Since decade the seventh, the computational density of the solar system
has soared. Within the asteroid belt, more than half the available
planetary mass has been turned into nanoprocessors, tied together by
quantum entanglement into a web so dense that each gram of matter can
simulate all the possible life experiences of an individual human being in
a scant handful of minutes. Economics 2.0 is itself obsolescent, forced to
mutate in a furious survivalist arms race by the arrival of the Slug. Only
the name remains as a vague shorthand for merely human-equivalent
intelligences to use when describing interactions they don't understand.
The latest generation of posthuman entities is less overtly hostile to
humans, but much more alien than the generations of the fifties and
seventies. Among their less comprehensible activities, the Vile Offspring
are engaged in exploring the phase-space of all possible human
experiences from the inside out. Perhaps they caught a dose of the
Tiplerite heresy along the way, for now a steady stream of resimulant
uploads is pouring through the downsystem relays in Titan orbit. The
Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the
Extremely Confused, except that they're not really resurrectees – they're
simulations based on their originals' recorded histories, blocky and
missing chunks of their memories, as bewildered as baby ducklings as
they're herded into the wood-chipper of the future.
Sirhan al-Khurasani despises them with the abstract contempt of an
antiquarian for a cunning but ultimately transparent forgery. But Sirhan is
young, and he's got more contempt than he knows what to do with. It's a
handy outlet for his frustration. He has a lot to be frustrated at, starting
with his intermittently dysfunctional family, the elderly stars around whom
his planet whizzes in chaotic trajectories of enthusiasm and distaste.
Sirhan fancies himself a philosopher-historian of the singular age, a
chronicler of the incomprehensible, which would be a fine thing to be
except that his greatest insights are all derived from Aineko. He
alternately fawns over and rages against his mother, who is currently a
leading light in the refugee community, and honors (when not attempting
to evade the will of) his father, who is lately a rising philosophical
patriarch within the Conservationist faction. He's secretly in awe (not to
mention slightly resentful) of his grandfather Manfred. In fact, the latter's
abrupt reincarnation in the flesh has quite disconcerted him. And he
sometimes listens to his stepgrandmother Annette, who has reincarnated
in more or less her original 2020s body after spending some years as a
great ape, and who seems to view him as some sort of personal project.
OnlyAnnette isn't being very helpful right now. His mother is campaigning
on an electoral platform calling for a vote to blow up the world, Annette is
helping run her campaign, his grandfather is trying to convince him to
entrust everything he holds dear to a rogue lobster, and the cat is being
typically feline and evasive.
Talk about families with problems…
* * *
They've transplanted imperial Brussels to Saturn in its entirety, mapped tens of megatonnes of buildings right down to nanoscale and beamed them into the outer darkness to be reinstantiated downwell on the lily-pad colonies that dot the stratosphere of the gas giant. (Eventually the entire surface of the Earth will follow – after which the Vile Offspring will core the planet like an apple, dismantle it into a cloud of newly formed quantum nanocomputers to add to their burgeoning Matrioshka brain.) Due to a resource contention problem in the festival committee's planning algorithm – or maybe it's simply an elaborate joke – Brussels now begins just on the other
