Accelerando

They were married for a while, and divorced for a whole lot longer, allegedly because they were both strong-willed people with philosophies of life that were irreconcilable short of death or transcendence. Ma

Now, here's the rub: Aineko wasn't a cat. Aineko was an incarnate intelligence, confined within a succession of catlike bodies that became increasingly realistic over time, and equipped with processing power to support a neural simulation that grew rapidly with each upgrade.

Did anyone in the Macx family ever think to ask what Aineko wanted?

And if an answer had come, would they have liked it?

Adult-Manfred, still disoriented from finding himself awake and reinstantiated a couple of centuries downstream from his hurried exile from Saturn system, is hesitantly navigating his way toward Sirhan and Rita's home when big-Ma

It's a classic oh-shit moment. Between one foot touching the ground and the next, Manfred stumbles hard, nearly twisting an ankle, and gasps. He remembers. At third hand he remembers being reincarnated as Ma

Manfred shakes his head and looks about. Now he remembers being big-Ma

It's an acute moment of déjà vu. He's standing on a familiar doorstep he's never seen before. The door opens and a serious-faced child with three arms – he can't help staring, the extra one is a viciously barbed scythe of bone from the elbow down – looks up at him. "Hello, me," says the kid.

"Hello, you." Manfred stares. "You don't look the way I remember." But Ma

The door opens wider. "You can come in," the kid says gravely. Then he hops backward and ducks shyly into a side room – or as if expecting to be gu

Inside the dwelling – calling it a house seems wrong to Manfred, not when bits of it are separated by trillions of kilometers of empty vacuum – things feel a bit crowded. He can hear voices from the dayroom, so he goes there, brushing through the archway of thornless roses that Rita has trained around the T-gate frame. His body feels lighter, but his heart is heavy as he looks around. "Rita?" he asks. "And —"

"Hello, Manfred." Pamela nods at him guardedly.

Rita raises an eyebrow at him. "The cat asked if he could borrow the household assembler. I wasn't expecting a family reunion."

"Neither was I." Manfred rubs his forehead ruefully. "Pamela, this is Rita. She's married to Sirhan. They're my – I guess eigenparents is as good as term as any? I mean, they're bringing up my reincarnation."

"Please, have a seat," Rita offers, waving at the empty floor between the patio and the stone fountain in the shape of a section through a glass hypersphere. A futon of spun diamondoid congeals out of the utility fog floating in the air, glittering in the artificial sunlight. "Sirhan's just taking care of Ma

Manfred sits gingerly at one side of the futon. Pamela sits stiffly at the opposite edge, not meeting his eye. Last time they met in the flesh – an awesome gulf of years previously – they'd parted cursing each other, on opposite sides of a fractious divorce as well as an ideological barrier as high as a continental divide. But many subjective decades have passed, and both ideology and divorce have dwindled in significance – if indeed they ever happened. Now that there's common cause to draw them together, Manfred can barely look at her. "How is Ma

"He's fine," Rita says, in a brittle voice. "Just the usual preadolescent turbulence, if it wasn't for …" She trails off. A door appears in mid air and Sirhan steps through it, followed by a small deity wearing a fur coat.

"Look what the cat dragged in," Aineko remarks.

"You're a fine one to talk," Pamela says icily. "Don't you think you'd —"

"I tried to keep him away from you," Sirhan tells Manfred, "but he wouldn't —"

"That's okay." Manfred waves it off. "Pamela, would you mind starting?"

"Yes, I would." She glances at him sidelong. "You go first."

"Right. You wanted me here." Manfred hunkers down to stare at the cat. "What do you want?"

"If I was your traditional middle-European devil, I'd say I'd come to steal your soul," says Aineko, looking up at Manfred and twitching his tail. "Luckily I'm not a dualist, I just want to borrow it for a while. Won't even get it dirty."

"Uh-huh." Manfred raises an eyebrow. "Why?"

"I'm not omniscient." Aineko sits down, one leg sticking out sideways, but continues to stare at Manfred. "I had a … a telegram, I guess, claiming to be from you. From the other copy of you, that is, the one that went off through the router network with another copy of me, and with Amber, and everyone else who isn't here. It says it found the answer and it wants to give me a shortcut route out to the deep thinkers at the edge of the observable universe. It knows who made the wormhole network and why, and —" Aineko pauses. If he was human, he'd shrug, but being a cat, he absent mindedly scritches behind his left ear with a hind leg. "Trouble is, I'm not sure I can trust it. So I need you to authenticate the message. I don't dare use my own memory of you because it knows too much about me; if the package is a Trojan, it might find out things I don't want it to learn. I can't even redact its memories of me – that, too, would convey useful information to the packet if it is hostile. So I want a copy of you from the museum, fresh and uncontaminated."