Accelerando

router network that were launched by the accelerationistas long ago; and Rita's antecedents are either fully virtualized or dead. They are a family with a tenuous grip on history. But both of them spent a long time in the same state of half-life in which Manfred currently exists, and he knows his wife will take him to task if he doesn't bring the revered ancestor up to date on what's been happening in the real world while he's been dead. In Manfred's case, death is not only potentially reversible, but almost inevitably so. After all, they're raising his clone. Sooner or later, the kid is going to want to visit the original, or vice versa.

What a state we have come to, when the restless dead refuse to stay a part of history? He wonders ironically as he scratches the self-igniter strip on the red incense stick and bows to the mirror at the back of the shrine. 'Your respectful grandson awaits and expects your guidance,' he intones formally – for in addition to being conservative by nature, Sirhan is acutely aware of his family's relative poverty and the need to augment their social credit, and in this reincarnation-intermediated traditionalist polity for the hopelessly orthohuman, you can score credit for formality. He sits back on his heels to await the response.

Manfred doesn't take long to appear in the depths of the mirror. He takes the shape of an albino orangutan, as usual: He was messing around with Great Aunt Annette's ontological wardrobe right before this copy of him was recorded and placed in the temple – they might have separated, but they remained close. 'Hi, lad. What year is it?'

Sirhan suppresses a sigh. 'We don't do years anymore,' he explains, not for the first time. Every time he consults his grandfather, the new instance asks this question sooner or later. 'Years are an archaism. It's been ten megs since we last spoke – about four months, if you're going to be pedantic about it, and a hundred and eighty years since we emigrated. Although correcting for general relativity adds another decade or so.'

'Oh. Is that all?' Manfred manages to look disappointed. This is a new one on Sirhan: Usually the diverging state vector of Gramps's ghost asks after Amber or cracks a feeble joke at this point. 'No changes in the Hubble constant, or the rate of stellar formation? Have we heard from any of the exploration eigenselves yet?'

'Nope.' Sirhan relaxes slightly. So Manfred is going to ask about the fool's errand to the edge of the Beckenstein limit again, is he? That's canned conversation number twenty-nine. (Amber and the other explorers who set out for the really long exploration mission shortly after the first colony was settled aren't due back for, oh, about 1019 seconds. It's a long way to the edge of the observable universe, even when you can go the first several hundred million light-years – to the Bootes supercluster and beyond – via a small-world network of wormholes.

And this time, she didn't leave any copies of herself behind.)

Sirhan – either in this or some other incarnation – has had this talk with Manfred many times before, because that's the essence of the dead. They don't remember from one recall session to the next, unless and until they ask to be resurrected because their restoration criteria have been matched. Manfred has been dead a long time, long enough for Sirhan and Rita to be resurrected and live a long family life three or four times over after they had spent a century or so in nonexistence. 'We've received no notices from the lobsters, nothing from Aineko either.'

He takes a deep breath. 'You always ask me where we are next, so I've got a canned response for you -' and one of his agents throws the package, tagged as a scroll sealed with red wax and a silk ribbon, through the surface of the mirror. (After the tenth repetition Rita and Sirhan agreed to write a basic briefing that the Manfred- ghosts could use to orient themselves.)

Manfred is silent for a moment – probably hours in ghost-space – as he assimilates the changes. Then:

'This is true? I've slept through a whole civilization?'

'Not slept, you've been dead,' Sirhan says pedantically. He realizes he's being a bit harsh: 'Actually, so did we,' he adds. 'We surfed the first three gigasecs or so because we wanted to start a family somewhere where our children could grow up the traditional way. Habs with an oxidation-intensive triple-point water environment didn't get built until sometime after the beginning of the exile. That's when the fad for neomorphism got entrenched,' he adds with distaste. For quite a while the neos resisted the idea of wasting resources building colony cylinders spinning to provide vertebrate-friendly gee forces and breathable oxygen-rich atmospheres – it had been quite a political football. But the increasing curve of wealth production had allowed the orthodox to reincarnate from death-sleep after a few decades, once the fundamental headaches of building settlements in chilly orbits around metal-deficient brown dwarfs were overcome.

'Uh.' Manfred takes a deep breath, then scratches himself under one armpit, rubbery lips puckering. 'So, let me get this straight: We – you, they, whoever – hit the router at Hyundai +4904/-56, replicated a load of them, and now use the wormhole mechanism the routers rely on as point-to-point gates for physical transport? And have spread throughout a bunch of brown dwarf systems, and built a pure deep-space polity based on big cylinder habitats connected by teleport gates hacked out of routers?'

'Would you trust one of the original routers for switched data communications?' Sirhan asks rhetorically.

'Even with the source code? They've been corrupted by all the dead alien Matrioshka civilizations they've come into contact with, but they're reasonably safe if all you want to use them for is to cannibalize them for wormholes and tunnel dumb mass from point to point.' He searches for a metaphor: 'Like using your, uh, internet, to emulate a nineteenth-century postal service.'

'O-kay.' Manfred looks thoughtful, as he usually does at this point in the conversation – which means Sirhan is going to have to break it to him that his first thoughts for how to utilize the gates have already been done.

They're hopelessly old hat. In fact, the main reason why Manfred is still dead is that things have moved on so far that, sooner or later, whenever he surfaces for a chat, he gets frustrated and elects not to be reincarnated. Not that Sirhan is about to tell him that he's obsolete – that would be rude, not to say subtly inaccurate. 'That raises some interesting possibilities. I wonder, has anyone -'

' Sirhan, I need you! '

The crystal chill of Rita's alarm and fear cuts through Sirhan's awareness like a scalpel, distracting him from the ghost of his ancestor. He blinks, instantly transferring the full focus of his attention to Rita without sparing Manfred even a ghost.

' What's happening -'

He sees through Rita's eyes: a cat with an orange-and-brown swirl on its flank sits purring beside Manni in the family room of their dwelling. Its eyes are narrowed as it watches her with unnatural wisdom. Manni is running fingers through its fur and seems none the worse for wear, but Sirhan still feels his fists clench.

'What -'

'Excuse me,' he says, standing up: 'Got to go. Your bloody cat's turned up.' He adds ' coming home now'

for Rita's benefit, then turns and hurries out of the temple concourse. When he reaches the main hall, he pauses, then Rita's sense of urgency returns to him, and he throws parsimony to the wind, stepping into a priority gate in order to get home as fast as possible.

Behind him, Manfred's melancholy ghost snorts, mildly offended, and considers the existential choice: to be, or not to be. Then he makes a decision.

* * *

Welcome to the twenty-third century, or the twenty-fourth. Or maybe it's

the twenty-second, jet-lagged and dazed by spurious suspended

animation and relativistic travel; it hardly matters these days. What's left

of recognizable humanity has scattered across a hundred light-years,

living in hollowed-out asteroids and cylindrical spinning habitats strung in

orbit around cold brown dwarf stars and sunless planets that wander the

interstellar void. The looted mechanisms underlying the alien routers have

been cannibalized, simplified to a level the merely superhuman can

almost comprehend, turned into generators for paired wormhole

endpoints that allow instantaneous switched transport across vast

distances. Other mechanisms, the descendants of the advanced