Accelerando

"Is that all?" Sirhan asks incredulously.

"Sounds like enough to me," Manfred responds. Pamela opens her mouth, ready to speak, but Manfred makes eye contact and shakes his head infinitesimally. She looks right back and – a shock goes through him – nods and closes her mouth. The moment of complicity is dizzying. "I want something in return."

"Sure," says the cat. He pauses. "You realize it's a destructive process."

"It's a – what ?"

"I need to make a ru

"Uh." Manfred begins to sweat. "Uh. I'm not so sure I like the sound of that."

"It's a copy." Another cat-shrug moment. "You're a copy. Ma

"Yes it does! You're talking about condemning a version of me to death! It may not affect me, here, in this body, but it certainly affects that other me. Can't you —"

"No, I can't. If I agreed to rescue the copy if it reached a positive verdict, that would give it an incentive to lie if the truth was that the alien message is untrustworthy, wouldn't it? Also, if I intended to rescue the copy, that would give the message a back cha

"Agh." Manfred stops talking. He knows he should be trying to come up with some kind of objection, but Aineko must have already considered all his possible responses and pla

"Oh, she's your payment," Aineko says with studied insouciance. "I have a very good memory for people, especially people I've known for decades. You've outlasted that crude emotional conditioning I used on you around the time of the divorce, and as for her, she's a good reinstantiation of —"

"Do you know what it's like to die?" Pamela asks, finally losing her self-control. "Or would you like to find out the hard way? Because if you keep talking about me as if I'm a slave —"

"What makes you think you aren't?" The cat is gri

"Is that all we are to you? A pet-breeding program?" Pamela asks coldly. She's run up against Aineko's implanted limits, too, Manfred realizes with a growing sense of horror. Did we really split up because Aineko made us? It's hard to believe: Manfred is too much of a realist to trust the cat to tell the truth except when it serves to further his interests. But this —

"Not entirely." Aineko is complacent. "Not at first, before I was aware of my own existence. Besides, you humans keep pets, too. But you were fun to play with."

Pamela stands up, angry to the point of storming out. Before he quite realizes what he's doing, Manfred is on his feet, too, one arm protectively around her. "Tell me first, are our memories our own?" he demands.

"Don't trust it," Pamela says sharply. "It's not human, and it lies." Her shoulders are tense.

"Yes, they are," says Aineko. He yawns. "Tell me I'm lying, bitch," he adds mockingly: "I carried you around in my head for long enough to know you've no evidence."

"But I —" Her arm slips around Manfred's waist. "I don't hate him." A rueful laugh: "I remember hating him, but —"

"Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness," Aineko says with a theatrical sigh. "You're as stupid as it's possible for an intelligent species to be – there being no evolutionary pressure to be any smarter – but you still don't internalize that and act accordingly around your superiors. Listen, girl, everything you remember is true. That doesn't mean you remember it because it actually happened, just that you remember it because you experienced it internally. Your memories of experiences are accurate, but your emotional responses to those experiences were manipulated. Get it? One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience, it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time. That goes for all of you." Aineko looks around at them in mild contempt. "But I don't need you anymore, and if you do this one thing for me, you're going to be free. Understand? Say yes, Manfred; if you leave your mouth open like that, a bird will nest on your tongue."

"Say no —" Pamela urges him, just as Manfred says, "Yes."

Aineko laughs, baring contemptuous fangs at them. "Ah, primate family loyalty! So wonderful and reliable. Thank you, Ma

Which is when Ma

The cat-avatar is, of course, ready for Ma

"Bad boy!" Rita shouts, striding forward furiously. Ma

"No! It's all right," Manfred seeks to explain.

Pamela tightens her grip around him. "Are you still …?"

"Yes." He takes a deep breath.

"You bad, bad child —"

"Cat was going to eat him!" Ma