Accelerando

It's hard for tapeworms living in warm intestinal mulch to wrap their

thousand-neuron brains around whatever it is that the vastly more

complex entities who host them are discussing, but one thing's sure -

the owners have a lot of things going on, not all of them under conscious

control. The churning of gastric secretions and the steady ventilation of

lungs are incomprehensible to the simple brains of tapeworms, but they

serve the purpose of keeping the humans alive and provide the

environment the worms live in. And other more esoteric functions that

contribute to survival – the intricate dance of specialized cloned

lymphocytes in their bone marrow and lymph nodes, the random

permutations of antibodies constantly churning for possible matches to

intruder molecules warning of the presence of pollution – are all going on

beneath the level of conscious control.

Autonomic defenses. Antibodies. Intelligence bloom gnawing at the edges

of the outer system. And humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch

wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that

among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to

run, but over how far and how fast?

* * *

There's a team meeting early the next morning. It's still dark outside, and most of the attendees who are present in vivo have the faintly haggard look that comes from abusing melatonin antagonists. Rita stifles a yawn as she glances around the conference room – the walls expanded into huge virtual spaces to accommodate thirty or so exocortical ghosts from sleeping partners who will wake with memories of a particularly vivid lucid dream – and sees Amber talking to her famous father and a younger-looking man who one of her partials recognizes as a last- century EU politician. There seems to be some tension between them.

Now that Amber has granted Rita her conditional trust, a whole new tier of campaigning information has opened up to her inner eye – stuff steganographically concealed in a hidden layer of the project's collective memory space. There's stuff in here she hadn't suspected, frightening studies of resimulant demographics, surveys of emigration rates from the inner system, cladistic trees dissecting different forms of crude tampering that have been found skulking in the wetware of refugees. The reason why Amber and Manfred and – reluctantly – Sirhan are fighting for one radical faction in a planetwide election, despite their various misgivings over the validity of the entire concept of democracy in this posthuman era. She blinks it aside, slightly bewildered, forking a couple of dozen personality subthreads to chew on it at the edges. 'Need coffee,' she mutters to the table, as it offers her a chair.

'Everyone on-line?' asked Manfred. 'Then I'll begin.' He looks tired and worried, physically youthful but showing the full weight of his age. 'We've got a crisis coming, folks. About a hundred kiloseconds ago, the bit rate on the resimulation stream jumped. We're now fielding about one resimulated state vector a second, on top of the legitimate immigration we're dealing with. If it jumps again by the same factor, it's going to swamp our ability to check the immigrants for zimboes in vivo – we'd have to move to running them in secure storage or just resurrecting them blind, and if there are any jokers in the pack, that's about the riskiest thing we could do.'

'Why do you not spool them to memory diamond?' asks the handsome young ex-politician to his left, looking almost amused – as if he already knows the answer.

'Politics.' Manfred shrugs.

'It would blow a hole in our social contract,' says Amber, looking as if she's just swallowed something unpleasant, and Rita feels a flicker of admiration for the way they're stage-managing the meeting. Amber's even talking to her father, as if she feels comfortable with him around, although he's a walking reminder of her own lack of success. Nobody else has gotten a word in yet. 'If we don't instantiate them, the next logical step is to deny resimulated minds the franchise. Which in turn puts us on the road to institutional inequality. And that's a very big step to take, even if you have misgivings about the idea of settling complex policy issues on the basis of a popular vote, because our whole polity is based on the idea that less competent intelligences – us – deserve consideration.'

'Hrmph.' Someone clears their throat. Rita glances round and freezes, because it's Amber's screwed-up eigenchild, and he's just about materialized in the chair next to her. So he adopted Superplonk after all? she observes cynically. He doggedly avoids looking at her. 'That was my analysis,' he says reluctantly. 'We need them alive. For the ark option, at least, and if not, even the accelerationista platform will need them on hand later.'

Concentration camps, thinks Rita, trying to ignore Sirhan's presence near her, for it's a constant irritant, where most of the inmates are confused, frightened human beings – and the ones who aren't think they are. It's an eerie thought, and she spawns a couple of full ghosts to dream it through for her, gaming the possible angles.

'How are your negotiations over the lifeboat designs going?' Amber asks her father. 'We need to get a portfolio of design schemata out before we go into the election -'

'Change of plan.' Manfred hunches forward. 'This doesn't need to go any further, but Sirhan and Aineko have come up with something interesting.' He looks worried.

Sirhan is staring at his eigenmother with narrowed eyes, and Rita has to resist the urge to elbow him savagely in the ribs. She knows enough about him now to realize it wouldn't get his attention – at least, not the way she'd want it, not for the right reasons – and in any case, he's more wrapped up in himself than her ghost ever saw him as likely to be. (How anyone could be party to such a detailed exchange of simulated lives and still reject the opportunity to do it in real life is beyond her; unless it's an artifact of his youth, when his parents pushed him through a dozen simulated childhoods in search of knowledge and ended up with a stubborn oyster-head of a son…)

'We still need to look as if we're planning on using a lifeboat,' he says aloud. 'There's the small matter of the price they're asking in return for the alternative.'

'What? What are you talking about?' Amber sounds confused. 'I thought you were working on some kind of cladistic map. What's this about a price?'

Sirhan smiles coolly. 'I am working on a cladistic map, in a manner of speaking. You wasted much of your opportunity when you journeyed to the router, you know. I've been talking to Aineko.'

'You -' Amber flushes. 'What about?' She's visibly angry, Rita notices. Sirhan is needling his eigenmother. Why?

'About the topology of some rather interesting types of small-world network.' Sirhan leans back in his chair, watching the cloud above her head. 'And the router. You went through it, then you came back with your tail between your legs as fast as you could, didn't you? Not even checking your passenger to see if it was a hostile parasite.'

'I don't have to take this,' Amber says tightly. 'You weren't there, and you have no idea what constraints we were working under.'

'Really?' Sirhan raises an eyebrow. 'Anyway, you missed an opportunity. We know that the routers – for whatever reason – are self-replicating. They spread from brown dwarf to brown dwarf, hatch, tap the protostar for energy and material, and send a bunch of children out. Von Neumann machines, in other words. We also know that they provide high-bandwidth communications to other routers. When you went through the one at Hyundai +4904/-56, you ended up in an unmaintained DMZ attached to an alien Matrioshka brain that had degenerated, somehow. It follows that someone had collected a router and carried it home, to link into the MB. So why didn't you bring one home with you?'

Amber glares at him. 'Total payload on board the Field Circus was about ten grams. How large do you think a router seed is?'

'So you brought the Slug home instead, occupying maybe half your storage capacity and ready to wreak