Accelerando (19 page)

Someone prods her. “Hey, Amber, what are you up to?”

She opens her eyes. “Doing my homework.” It's Su Ang. “Look, we're going to Amalthea, aren't we? But we file our accounts in Reno, so we have to do all this paperwork. Monica asked me to help. It's insane.”

Ang leans over and reads, upside down. “Environmental Protection Agency?”

“Yeah. Estimated Environmental Impact Forward Analysis 204.6b, Page Two. They want me to ‘list any bodies of standing water within five kilometers of the designated mining area. If excavating below the water table, list any wellsprings, reservoirs, and streams within depth of excavation in meters multiplied by five hundred meters up to a maximum distance of ten kilometers downstream of direction of bedding plane flow. For each body of water, itemize any endangered or listed species of bird, fish, mammal, reptile, invertebrate, or plant living within ten kilometers—' ”

“—of a mine on Amalthea. Which orbits one hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above Jupiter, has no atmosphere, and where you can pick up a whole body radiation dose of ten Grays in half an hour on the surface.” Ang shakes her head, then spoils it by giggling. Amber glances up.

On the wall in front of her someone—Nicky or Boris, probably—has pasted a caricature of her own avatar into the virch fight. She's being hugged from behind by a giant cartoon dog with floppy ears and an improbably large erection, who's singing anatomically improbable
suggestions while fondling himself suggestively. “Fuck that!” Shocked out of her distraction—and angry—Amber drops her stack of paperwork and throws a new avatar at the screen, one an agent of hers dreamed up overnight. It's called Spike, and it's not friendly. Spike rips off the dog's head and pisses down its trachea, which is anatomically correct for a human being. Meanwhile she looks around, trying to work out which of the laughing idiot children and lost geeks around her could have sent such an unpleasant message.

“Children! Chill out.” She glances round—one of the Franklins (this is the twentysomething dark-skinned female one) is frowning at them. “Can't we leave you alone for half a K without a fight?”

Amber pouts. “It's not a fight, it's a forceful exchange of opinions.”

“Hah.” The Franklin leans back in midair, arms crossed, an expression of supercilious smugness pasted across her-their face. “Heard that one before. Anyway”—she-they gesture, and the screen goes blank—“I've got news for you pesky kids. We got a claim verified! Factory starts work as soon as we shut down the stinger and finish filing all the paperwork via our lawyers. Now's our chance to earn our upkeep . . .”

Amber is flashing on ancient history, five years back along her time line. In her replay, she's in some kind of split-level ranch house out West. It's a temporary posting while her mother audits an obsolescent fab line enterprise that grinds out dead chips of VLSI silicon for Pentagon projects that have slipped behind the cutting edge. Her mom leans over her, menacingly adult in her dark suit and chaperone earrings. “You're going to school, and that's that.”

Her mother is a blond ice maiden madonna, one of the IRS's most productive bounty hunters—she can make grown CEOs panic just by blinking at them. Amber, a towheaded eight-year-old tearaway with a confusing mix of identities, inexperience blurring the boundary between self and grid, is not yet able to fight back effectively. After a couple of seconds, she verbalizes a rather feeble protest. “Don't want to!” One of her stance daemons whispers that this is the wrong approach to take, so she modifies it. “They'll beat up on me, Mom. I'm too different. ‘Sides, I know you want me socialized up with my grade metrics, but isn't that what sideband's for? I can socialize
real
good at home.”

Mom does something unexpected: She kneels, putting herself on eye level with Amber. They're on the living room carpet, all seventies-retro brown corduroy and acid-orange Paisley wallpaper, and for once they're alone. The domestic robots are in hiding while the humans hold court. “Listen to me, sweetie.” Mom's voice is breathy, laden with an emotional undertow as strong and stifling as the eau de cologne she wears to the office to cover up the scent of her client's fear. “I know that's what your father's writing to you, but it isn't true. You need the company—physical company—of children your own age. You're
natural,
not some kind of engineered freak, even with your skullset. Natural children like you need company or they grow up all weird. Socialization isn't just about texting your own kind, Amber. You need to know how to deal with people who're different, too. I want you to grow up happy, and that won't happen if you don't learn to get on with children your own age. You're not going to be some kind of cyborg
otaku
freak, Amber. But to get healthy, you've got to go to school, build up a mental immune system. Anyway, that which does not destroy us makes us stronger, right?”

It's crude moral blackmail, transparent as glass and manipulative as hell, but Amber's
corpus logica
flags it with a heavy emotional sprite miming the likelihood of physical discipline if she rises to the bait. Mom is agitated, nostrils slightly flared, ventilation rate up, some vasodilatation visible in her cheeks. Amber—in combination with her skullset and the metacortex of distributed agents it supports—is mature enough at eight years to model, anticipate, and avoid corporal punishment. But her stature and lack of physical maturity conspire to put her at a disadvantage when negotiating with adults who matured in a simpler age. She sighs, then puts on a pout to let Mom know she's still reluctant, but obedient. “O-kay. If you say so.”

Mom stands up, eyes distant—probably telling Saturn to warm his engine and open the garage doors. “I say so, punkin. Go get your shoes on, now. I'll pick you up on my way back from work, and I've got a treat for you. We're going to check out a new church together this evening.” Mom smiles, but it doesn't reach her eyes. Amber has already figured out she's going through the motions in order to give her the simulated middle-American upbringing she believes Amber desperately
needs before she runs headfirst into the future. She doesn't like the churches any more than her daughter does, but arguing won't work. “You be a good little girl, now, all right?”

The imam is at prayer in a gyrostabilized mosque.

His mosque is not very big, and it has a congregation of one. He prays on his own every seventeen thousand two hundred and eighty seconds. He also webcasts the call to prayer, but there are no other believers in trans-Jovian space to answer the summons. Between prayers, he splits his attention between the exigencies of life support and scholarship. A student both of the Hadith and of knowledge-based systems, Sadeq collaborates in a project with other scholars who are building a revised concordance of all the known
isnads,
to provide a basis for exploring the body of Islamic jurisprudence from a new perspective—one they'll need sorely if the looked-for breakthroughs in communication with aliens emerge. Their goal is to answer the vexatious questions that bedevil Islam in the age of accelerated consciousness; and as their representative in orbit around Jupiter, these questions fall most heavily on Sadeq's shoulders.

Sadeq is a slightly built man, with close-cropped black hair and a perpetually tired expression. Unlike the orphanage crew, he has a ship to himself. The ship started out as an Iranian knockoff of a Shenzhou-B capsule, with a Chinese type 921 space station module tacked onto its tail, but the clunky, 1960s look-alike—a glittering aluminum dragonfly mating with a Coke can—has a weirdly contoured M2P2 pod strapped to its nose. The M2P2 pod is a plasma sail, built in orbit by one of Daewoo's wake shield facilities. It dragged Sadeq and his cramped space station out to Jupiter in just four months, surfing on the solar breeze. His presence may be a triumph for the umma, but he feels acutely alone out here. When he turns his compact observatory's mirrors in the direction of the
Sanger,
he is struck by its size and purposeful appearance.
Sanger
's superior size speaks of the efficiency of the Western financial instruments, semiautonomous investment trusts with variable business-cycle accounting protocols that make possible the development of commercial space exploration. The Prophet, peace be unto him, may have
condemned usury, but it might well have given him pause to see these engines of capital formation demonstrate their power above the Great Red Spot.

After finishing his prayers, Sadeq spends a couple of precious extra minutes on his mat. He finds meditation comes hard in this environment. Kneel in silence, and you become aware of the hum of ventilation fans, the smell of old socks and sweat, the metallic taste of ozone from the Elektron oxygen generators. It is hard to approach God in this thirdhand spaceship, a hand-me-down from arrogant Russia to ambitious China, and finally to the religious trustees of Qom, who have better uses for it than any of the heathen states imagine. They've pushed it far, this little toy space station; but who's to say if it is God's intention for humans to live here, in orbit around this swollen alien giant of a planet?

Sadeq shakes his head; he rolls his mat up and stows it beside the solitary porthole with a quiet sigh. A stab of homesickness wrenches at him, for his childhood in hot, dusty Yazd and his many years as a student in Qom. He steadies himself by looking round, searching the station that is now as familiar to him as the fourth-floor concrete apartment his parents—a car factory worker and his wife—raised him in. The interior of the station is the size of a school bus, every surface cluttered with storage areas, instrument consoles, and layers of exposed pipes. A couple of globules of antifreeze jiggle like stranded jellyfish near a heat exchanger that has been giving him grief. Sadeq kicks off in search of the squeeze bottle he keeps for this purpose, then gathers up his roll of tools and instructs one of his agents to find him the relevant part of the maintenance log. It's time to fix the leaky joint for good.

An hour or so of serious plumbing and he will eat freeze-dried lamb stew, with a paste of lentils and boiled rice, and a bulb of strong tea to wash it down, then sit down to review his next flyby maneuvering sequence. Perhaps, God willing, there will be no further system alerts and he'll be able to spend an hour or two on his research between evening and final prayers. Maybe the day after tomorrow there'll even be time to relax for a couple of hours, to watch one of the old movies that he finds so fascinating for their insights into alien cultures:
Apollo Thirteen,
perhaps. It isn't easy, being the crew aboard a long-duration space mission. It's even harder for Sadeq, up here alone with nobody to talk to, for the communications lag to earth is more than half an hour each
way—and as far as he knows, he's the only believer within half a billion kilometers.