Accelerando

Sirhan and Rita settled in this charming human-friendly backwater in order to raise a family, study xenoarchaeology, and avoid the turmoil and turbulence that have characterized his family's history across the last couple of generations. Life has been comfortable for the most part, and if the stipend of an academic nucleofamilial is not large, it is sufficient in this place and age to provide all the necessary comforts of civilization. And this suits Sirhan (and Rita) fine; the turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to someone else.

Only …

Aineko is back. Aineko, who after negotiating the establishment of the earliest of the refugee habs in orbit around Hyundai +4904 /–56 , vanished into the router network with Manfred's other instance – and the partial copies of Sirhan and Rita who had forked, seeking adventure rather than cozy domesticity. Sirhan made a devil's bargain with Aineko, all those gigaseconds ago, and now he is deathly afraid that Aineko is going to call the payment due.

Manfred walks down a hall of mirrors. At the far end, he emerges in a public space modeled on a Menger sponge – a cube diced subtractively into ever-smaller cubic volumes until its surface area tends toward infinity. This being meatspace, or a reasonable simulation thereof, it isn't a real Menger sponge; but it looks good at a distance, going down at least four levels.

He pauses behind a waist-high diamond barrier and looks down into the almost-tesseract-shaped depths of the cube's interior, at a verdant garden landscape with charming footbridges that cross streams laid out with careful attention to the requirements of feng shui. He looks up: Some of the cube-shaped subtractive openings within the pseudofractal structure are occupied by windows belonging to dwellings or shared buildings that overlook the public space. High above, butterfly-shaped beings with exotic colored wings circle in the ventilation currents. It's hard to tell from down here, but the central cuboid opening looks to be at least half a kilometer on a side, and they might very well be posthumans with low-gee wings – angels.

Angels, or rats in the walls ? he asks himself, and sighs. Half his extensions are off-line, so hopelessly obsolete that the temple's assembler systems didn't bother replicating them, or even creating emulation environments for them to run in. The rest … well, at least he's still physically orthohuman, he realizes. Fully functional, fully male. Not everything has changed – only the important stuff. It's a scary-fu

The incongruity of it amuses him, but only for a moment. He has, after all, electively reincarnated for a reason: Sirhan's throwaway comment about the cat caught his attention. "City, where can I find some clothes?" he asks. "Something socially appropriate, that is. And some, uh, brains. I need to be able to off-load …"

Citymind chuckles inside the back of his head, and Manfred realizes that there's a public assembler on the other side of the ornamental wall he's leaning on. "Oh," he mutters, as he finds himself imagining something not unlike his clunky old direct neural interface, candy-colored icons and overlays and all. It's curiously mutable, and with a weird sense of detachment, he realizes that it's not his imagination at all, but an infinitely customizable interface to the pervasive information spaces of the polity, currently ru

Clothed and more or less conscious – at least at a human level – Manfred takes stock. "Where do Sirhan and Rita live?" he asks. A dotted route makes itself apparent to him, snaking improbably through a solid wall that he understands to be an instantaneous wormhole gate co

Sirhan gets home, anticipating trouble. He finds it, but not in any way he'd expected. Home is a split-level manifold, rooms co

" – The cat, he gets them worked up." She wrings her hands and begins to turn as Sirhan comes into view. "At last!"

"I came fast." He nods respectfully at Eloise, then frowns. "The children —" Something small and fast runs headfirst into him, grabs his legs, and tries to head-butt him in the crotch. "Oof!" He bends down and lifts Ma

"Not his fault," Rita says hurriedly. "He's excited because —"

"I really don't think —" Eloise begins to gather steam, looking around uncertainly.

"Mrreeow?" something asks in a conversational tone of voice from down around Sirhan's ankles.

"Eek!" Sirhan jumps backward, flailing for balance under the weight of an excited toddler. There's a gigantic disturbance in the polity thoughtspace – like a stellar-mass black hole – and it appears to be stropping itself furrily against his left leg. "What are you doing here?" He demands.