Accelerando (62 page)

T
HIS TIME
,
MORE THAN A DOUBLE HANDFUL OF YEARS
passes between successive visits to the Macx dynasty.

Somewhere in the gas-sprinkled darkness beyond the local void, carbon-based life stirs. A cylinder of diamond fifty kilometers long spins in the darkness, its surface etched with strange quantum wells that emulate exotic atoms not found in any periodic table that Mendeleyev would have recognized. Within it, walls hold kilotons of oxygen and nitrogen gas, megatons of life-infested soil. A hundred trillion kilometers from the wreckage of Earth, the cylinder glitters like a gem in the darkness.

Welcome to New Japan: one of the places between the stars where human beings hang out, now that the solar system is off-limits to meatbodies.

I wonder who we'll find here?

There's an open plaza in one of the terraform sectors of the habitat cylinder. A huge gong hangs from a beautifully painted wooden frame at one side of the square, which is paved with weathered limestone slabs made
of atoms ripped from a planet that has never seen molten ice. Houses stand around, and open-fronted huts where a variety of humanoid waitrons attend to food and beverages for the passing realfolk. A group of prepubescent children are playing hunt-and-seek with their big-eyed pet companions, brandishing makeshift spears and automatic rifles—there's no pain here, for bodies are fungible, rebuilt in a minute by the assembler/ disassembler gates in every room. There are few adults hereabouts, for Red Plaza is unfashionable at present, and the kids have claimed it for their own as a playground. They're all genuinely young, symptoms of a demographic demiurge, not a single wendypan among them.

A skinny boy with nut brown skin, a mop of black hair, and three arms is patiently stalking a worried-looking blue eeyore around the corner of the square. He's passing a stand stacked with fresh sushi rolls when the strange beast squirms out from beneath a wheelbarrow and arches its back, stretching luxuriously.

The boy, Manni, freezes, hands tensing around his spear as he focuses on the new target. (The blue eeyore flicks its tail at him and darts for safety across a lichen-encrusted slab.) “City, what's that?” he asks without moving his lips.

“What are you looking at?” replies City, which puzzles him somewhat, but not as much as it should.

The beast finishes stretching one front leg and extends another. It looks a bit like a pussycat to Manni, but there's something subtly wrong with it. Its head is a little too small, the eyes likewise—and those paws—“You're sharp,” he accuses the beast, forehead wrinkling in disapproval.

“Yeah, whatever.” The creature yawns, and Manni points his spear at it, clenching the shaft in both right hands. It's got sharp teeth, too, but it spoke to him via his inner hearing, not his ears. Innerspeech is for people, not toys.

“Who are you?” he demands.

The beast looks at him insolently. “I know your parents,” it says, still using innerspeech. “You're Manni Macx, aren't you? Thought so. I want you to take me to your father.”

“No!” Manni jumps up and waves his arms at it. “I don't like you! Go away!” He pokes his spear in the direction of the beast's nose.

“I'll go away when you take me to your father,” says the beast. It
raises its tail like a pussycat, and the fur bushes out, but then it pauses. “If you take me to your father I'll tell you a story afterward, how about that?”

“Don't care!” Manni is only about two hundred megaseconds old—seven old Earth-years—but he can tell when he's being manipulated and gets truculent.

“Kids.” The cat-thing's tail lashes from side to side. “Okay, Manni, how about you take me to your father, or I rip your face off? I've got claws, you know.” A brief eyeblink later, it's wrapping itself around his ankles sinuously, purring to give the lie to its unreliable threat—but he can see that it's got sharp nails all right. It's a
wild
pussycat-thing, and nothing in his artificially preserved orthohuman upbringing has prepared him for dealing with a real wild pussycat-thing that talks.

“Get away!” Manni is worried. “Mom!” he hollers, unintentionally triggering the broadcast flag in his innerspeech. “There's this
thing
—”

“Mom will do.” The cat-thing sounds resigned. It stops rubbing against Manni's legs and looks up at him. “There's no need to panic. I won't hurt you.”

Manni stops hollering. “Who're you?” he asks at last, staring at the beast. Somewhere light years away, an adult has heard his cry; his mother is coming fast, bouncing between switches and glancing off folded dimensions in a headlong rush toward him.

“I'm Aineko.” The beast sits down and begins to wash behind one hind leg. “And you're Manni, right?”

“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.