Part 17 (2/2)
Amber confronts the mendacious ghost in the windowless room stolen from 2001.
”You have confined the monster,” the ghost states.
”Yes.” Amber waits for a subjective moment, feeling delicate fronds tickle at the edges of her awareness in what seems to be a timing channel attack. She feels a momentary urge to sneeze, and a hot flash of anger that pa.s.ses almost immediately.
”And you have modified yourself to lock out external control,” the ghost adds. ”What is it that you want, Autonome Amber?”
”Don't you have any concept of individuality?” she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states.
”Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer,” says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. ”It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you sure you have defeated the monster?”
”It'll do as I say,” Amber replies, forcing herself to sound more confident than she feels - sometimes that d.a.m.ned transhuman cyborg cat is no more predictable than a real feline. ”Now, the matter of payment arises.”
”Payment.” The ghost sounds amused. But Pierre's filled her in on what to look for, and Amber can now see the translation membranes around it. Their color s.h.i.+ft maps to a huge semantic distance; the creature on the other side, even though it looks like a ghost-image of herself, is very far from human. ”How can we-us be expected to pay our own money for rendering services to us?”
Amber smiles. ”We want an open channel back to the router we arrived through.”
”Impossible,” says the ghost.
”We want an open channel, and for it to stay open for six hundred million seconds after we clear it.”
”Impossible,” the ghost repeats.
”We can trade you a whole civilization,” Amber says blandly. ”A whole human nation, millions of individuals. Just let us go, and we'll see to it.”
”You - please wait.” The ghost s.h.i.+mmers slightly, fuzzing at the edges.
Amber opens a private channel to Pierre while the ghost confers with its other nodes. Are the Wunch in place yet? she sends.
They're moving in. This bunch don't remember what happened on the Field Circus, memories of those events never made it back to them. So the Slug's got them to cooperate. It's kinda scary to watch - like the Invasion of the Body s.n.a.t.c.hers, you know?
I don't care if it's scary to watch, Amber replies, I need to know if we're ready yet.
Sadeq says yes, the universe is ready.
Right, pack yourself down. We'll be moving soon.
The ghost is firming up in front of her. ”A whole civilization?” it asks. ”That is not possible. Your arrival -” It pauses, fuzzing a little. Hah, Gotcha! thinks Amber. Liar, liar, pants on fire! ”You cannot possibly have found a human civilization in the archives?”
”The monster you complain about that came through with us is a predator,” she a.s.serts blandly. ”It swallowed an entire nation before we heroically attracted its attention and induced it to follow us into the router. It's an archivore - everything was inside it, still frozen until we expanded it again. This civilization will already have been restored from hot shadows in our own solar system: There is nothing to gain by taking it home with us. But we need to return to ensure that no more predators of this type discover the router - or the high-bandwidth hub we linked to it.”
”You are sure you have killed this monster?” asks the ghost. ”It would be inconvenient if it were to emerge from hiding in its digest archives.”
”I can guarantee it won't trouble you again if you let us go,” says Amber, mentally crossing her fingers. The ghost doesn't seem to have noticed the huge wedge of fractally compressed data that bloats her personal scope by an order of magnitude. She can still feel Aineko's goodbye smile inside her head, an echo of ivory teeth trusting her to revive it if the escape plan succeeds.
”We-us agree.” The ghost twists weirdly, morphs into a five-dimensional hypersphere. It bubbles violently for a moment, then spits out a smaller token - a warped distortion in the air, like a gravityless black hole. ”Here is your pa.s.sage. Show us the civilization.”
”Okay ” - Now! - ”catch.” Amber twitches an imaginary muscle, and one wall of the room dissolves, forming a doorway into Sadeq's existential h.e.l.l, now redecorated as a fair facsimile of a twenty-first-century industrial city in Iran, and populated by a Wunch of parasites who can't believe what they've lucked into - an entire continent of zombies waiting to host their flesh-hungry consciousness.
The ghost drifts toward the open window. Amber grabs the hole and yanks it open, gets a grip on her own thoughts, and sends Open wide! on the channel everybody is listening in on. For a moment time stands still, and then - * * *
A synthetic gemstone the size of a c.o.ke can falls through the cold vacuum, in high orbit around a brown dwarf. But the vacuum is anything but dark. A sapphire glare as bright as the noonday sun on Mars s.h.i.+nes on the crazy diamond, billowing and cascading off sails as fine as soap bubbles that slowly drift and tense away from the can. The runaway Slug-corporation's proxy has hacked the router's firmware, and the open wormhole gate that feeds power to it is s.h.i.+ning with the brilliance of a nuclear fireball, laser light channeled from a star many light-years away to power the Field Circus on its return trip to the once-human solar system.
Amber has retreated, with Pierre, into a simulation of her home aboard the Ring Imperium. One wall of her bedroom is a solid slab of diamond, looking out across the boiling Jovian ionosphere from an orbit low enough to make the horizon appear flat. They're curled together in her bed, a slightly more comfortable copy of the royal bed of King Henry VIII of England. It appears to be carved from thousand-year-old oak beams. As with so much else about the Ring Imperium, appearances are deceptive; and this is even more true of the cramped simulation s.p.a.ces aboard the Field Circus, as it limps toward a tenth the speed of light, the highest velocity it's likely to achieve on a fraction of its original sail area.
”Let me get this straight. You convinced. The locals. That a simulation of Iran, with zombie bodies that had been taken over by members of the Wunch. Was a human civilization?”
”Yeah.” Amber stretches lazily and smirks at him. ”It's their d.a.m.n fault; if the corporate collective ent.i.ties didn't use conscious viewpoints as money, they wouldn't have fallen for a trick like that, would they?”
”People. Money.”
”Well.” She yawns, then sits up and snaps her finger imperiously: Down-stuffed pillows appear behind her back, and a silver salver bearing two full gla.s.ses of wine materializes between them. ”Corporations are life-forms back home, too, aren't they? And we trade them. We give our AIs corporations to make them legal ent.i.ties, but the a.n.a.logy goes deeper. Look at any company headquarters, fitted out with works of art and expensive furniture and staff bowing and sc.r.a.ping everywhere -”
” - They're the new aristocracy. Right?”
”Wrong. When they take over, what you get is more like the new biosphere. h.e.l.l, the new primordial soup: prokaryotes, bacteria, and algae, mindlessly swarming, trading money for plasmids.” The Queen pa.s.ses her consort a winegla.s.s. When he drinks from it, it refills miraculously. ”Basically, sufficiently complex resource-allocation algorithms reallocate scarce resources ... and if you don't jump to get out of their way, they'll reallocate you. I think that's what happened inside the Matrioshka brain we ended up in: Judging by the Slug it happens elsewhere, too. You've got to wonder where the builders of that structure came from. And where they went. And whether they realized that the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments.”
”Maybe they tried to dismantle the companies before the companies spent them.” Pierre looks worried. ”Running up a national debt, importing luxurious viewpoint extensions, munching exotic dreams. Once they plugged into the Net, a primitive Matrioshka civilization would be like, um.” He pauses. ”Tribal. A primitive postsingularity civilization meeting the galactic net for the first time. Overawed. Wanting all the luxuries. Spending their capital, their human - or alien - capital, the meme machines that built them. Until there's nothing left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking for someone to own.”
”Speculation.”
”Idle speculation,” he agrees.
”But we can't ignore it.” She nods. ”Maybe some early corporate predator built the machines that spread the wormholes around brown dwarfs and ran the router network on top of them in an attempt to make money fast. By not putting them in the actual planetary systems likely to host tool-using life, they'd ensure that only near-singularity civilizations would stumble over them. Civilizations that had gone too far to be easy prey probably wouldn't send a s.h.i.+p out to look ... so the network would ensure a steady stream of yokels new to the big city to fleece. Only they set the mechanism in motion billions of years ago and went extinct, leaving the network to propagate, and now there's nothing out there but burned-out Matrioshka civilizations and howling parasites like the angry ghosts and the Wunch. And victims like us.” She shudders and changes the subject: ”Speaking of aliens, is the Slug happy?”
”Last time I checked on him, yeah.” Pierre blows on his winegla.s.s and it dissolves into a million splinters of light. He looks dubious at the mention of the rogue corporate instrument they're taking with them. ”I don't trust him out in the unrestricted sim-s.p.a.ces yet, but he delivered on the fine control for the router's laser. I just hope you don't ever have to actually use him, if you follow my drift. I'm a bit worried that Aineko is spending so much time in there.”
”So that's where she is? I'd been worrying.”
”Cats never come when you call them, do they?”
”There is that,” she agrees. Then, with a worried glance at the vision of Jupiter's cloudscape: ”I wonder what we'll find when we get there?”
Outside the window, the imaginary Jovian terminator is sweeping toward them with eerie rapidity, sucking them toward an uncertain nightfall.
PART 3: Singularity.
There's a sucker born every minute.
- P. T. Barnum.
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