Accelerando

'Aineko,' Manni says uncertainly. 'Do you know Lis or Bill?'

Aineko the cat-thing pauses in his washing routine and looks at Manni, head cocked to one side. Manni is too young, too inexperienced to know that Aineko's proportions are those of a domestic cat, Felis catus, a naturally evolved animal rather than the toys and palimpsests and companionables he's used to. Reality may be fashionable with his parents' generation, but there are limits, after all. Orange-and-brown stripes and whorls decorate Aineko's fur, and he sprouts a white fluffy bib beneath his chin. 'Who are Lis and Bill?'

'Them,' says Manni, as big, sullen-faced Bill creeps up behind Aineko and tries to grab his tail while Lis floats behind his shoulder like a pint-sized UFO, buzzing excitedly. But Aineko is too fast for the kids and scampers round Manni's feet like a hairy missile. Manni whoops and tries to spear the pussycat-thing, but his spear turns to blue glass, crackles, and shards of brilliant snow rain down, burning his hands.

'Now that wasn't very friendly, was it?' says Aineko, a menacing note in his voice. 'Didn't your mother teach you not to -'

The door in the side of the sushi stall opens as Rita arrives, breathless and angry: 'Manni! What have I told you about playing -'

She stops, seeing Aineko. ' You.' She recoils in barely concealed fright. Unlike Manni, she recognizes it as the avatar of a posthuman demiurge, a body incarnated solely to provide a point of personal interaction for people to focus on.

The cat grins back at her. 'Me,' he agrees. 'Ready to talk?'

She looks stricken. 'We've got nothing to talk about.'

Aineko lashes his tail. 'Oh, but we do.' The cat turns and looks pointedly at Manni. 'Don't we?'

* * *

It has been a long time since Aineko passed this way, and in the

meantime the space around Hyundai +4904/-56 has changed out of all

recognition. Back when the great lobster-built starships swept out of Sol's

Oort cloud, archiving the raw frozen data of the unoccupied brown dwarf

halo systems and seeding their structured excrement with programmable

matter, there was nothing but random dead atoms hereabouts (and an

alien router). But that was a long time ago; and since then, the brown

dwarf system has succumbed to an anthropic infestation.

An unoptimized instance of H. sapiens maintains state coherency for only

two to three gigaseconds before it succumbs to necrosis. But in only

about ten gigaseconds, the infestation has turned the dead brown dwarf

system upside down. They strip-mined the chilly planets to make

environments suitable for their own variety of carbon life. They rearranged

moons, building massive structures the size of asteroids. They ripped

wormhole endpoints free of the routers and turned them into their own

crude point-to-point network, learned how to generate new wormholes,

then ran their own packet-switched polities over them. Wormhole traffic

now supports an ever-expanding mesh of interstellar human commerce,

but always in the darkness between the lit stars and the strange, metal-depleted dwarfs with the suspiciously low-entropy radiation. The sheer

temerity of the project is mind-boggling: notwithstanding that canned apes

are simply not suited to life in the interstellar void, especially in orbit around a brown dwarf whose planets make Pluto seem like a tropical

paradise, they've taken over the whole damn system.

New Japan is one of the newer human polities in this system, a bunch of

nodes physically collocated in the humaniformed spaces of the colony

cylinders. Its designers evidently only knew about old Nippon from

recordings made back before Earth was dismantled, and worked from a

combination of nostalgia-trip videos, Miyazaki movies, and anime culture.

Nevertheless, it's the home of numerous human beings – even if they

are about as similar to their historical antecedents as New Japan is to its

long-gone namesake.

Humanity?

Their grandparents would recognize them, mostly. The ones who are truly

beyond the ken of twentieth-century survivors stayed back home in the

red-hot clouds of nanocomputers that have replaced the planets that once

orbited Earth's sun in stately Copernican harmony. The fast-thinking

Matrioshka brains are as incomprehensible to their merely posthuman

ancestors as an ICBM to an amoeba – and about as inhabitable. Space

is dusted with the corpses of Matrioshka brains that have long since

burned out, informational collapse taking down entire civilizations that

stayed in close orbit around their home stars. Farther away, galaxy-sized

intelligences beat incomprehensible rhythms against the darkness of the

vacuum, trying to hack the Planck substrate into doing their bidding.

Posthumans, and the few other semitranscended species to have

discovered the router network, live furtively in the darkness between

these islands of brilliance. There are, it would seem, advantages to not

being too intelligent.

Humanity. Monadic intelligences, mostly trapped within their own skulls,

living in small family groups within larger tribal networks, adaptable to

territorial or migratory lifestyles. Those were the options on offer before

the great acceleration. Now that dumb matter thinks, with every kilogram

of wallpaper potentially hosting hundreds of uploaded ancestors, now that

every door is potentially a wormhole to a hab half a parsec away, the

humans can stay in the same place while the landscape migrates and

mutates past them, streaming into the luxurious void of their personal

history. Life is rich here, endlessly varied and sometimes confusing. So it

is that tribal groups remain, their associations mediated across teraklicks

and gigaseconds by exotic agencies. And sometimes the agencies will

vanish for a while, reappearing later like an unexpected jape upon the

infinite.

* * *

Ancestor worship takes on a whole new meaning when the state vectors of all the filial entities' precursors are archived and indexed for recall. At just the moment that the tiny capillaries in Rita's face are constricting in response to a surge of adrenaline, causing her to turn pale and her pupils to dilate as she focuses on the pussycat- thing, Sirhan is kneeling before a small shrine, lighting a stick of incense, and preparing to respectfully address his grandfather's ghost.

The ritual is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. Sirhan can speak to his grandfather's ghost wherever and whenever he wants, without any formality, and the ghost will reply at interminable length, cracking puns in dead languages and asking about people who died before the temple of history was established. But Sirhan is a sucker for rituals, and anyway, it helps him structure an otherwise-stressful encounter.

If it were up to Sirhan, he'd probably skip chatting to grandfather every ten megaseconds. Sirhan's mother and her partner aren't available, having opted to join one of the long-distance exploration missions through the