Accelerando

"Bob must have been one of the first borganisms. Humans, I mean. After Jim Bezier." A

"The monitoring equipment cost millions, then," says the woman – Monica? – "and it didn't do a very good job. One of the conditions for our keeping access to his research funding is that we regularly run his partials. He wanted to build up a kind of aggregate state vector – patched together out of bits and pieces of other people to supplement the partials that were all I – he – could record with the then state of the art."

"Eh, right." A

Monica sniffs, evidently amused. "What is it like to see red? What's it like to be a bat? I can't tell you – I can only show you. We're all free to leave at any time, you know."

"But somehow you don't." A

Monica shrugs. "That's his loss: He won't live forever in the singularity, along with other followers of our gentle teacher. Anyway, we have more converts than we know what to do with."

A thought occurs to A

"It can be." The words come simultaneously from Monica and the other body, Alan, who is standing in the doorway with a boxy thing that looks like an improvised diagnostician. "What do you have in mind?" adds the Alan body.

Manfred, lying on the bed, groans: There's an audible hiss of pink noise as his glasses whisper in his ears, bone conduction providing a serial highway to his wetware.

"Manfred was sent to find out why you're opposing the ERA," A

"Indeed." Alan sits down on the chair beside the bed and clears his throat, puffing his chest out pompously. "A very important theological issue. I feel —"

"I, or we?" A

"We feel," Monica snaps. Then she glances at Alan. "Soo-rrry."

The evidence of individuality within the group mind is disturbing to A

"One person, one vote, is obsolete," says Alan. "The broader issue of how we value identity needs to be revisited, the franchise reconsidered. Do you get one vote for each warm body? Or one vote for each sapient individual? What about distributed intelligences? The proposals in the Equal Rights Act are deeply flawed, based on a cult of individuality that takes no account of the true complexity of posthumanism."

"Like the proposals for a feminine franchise in the nineteenth century that would grant the vote to married wives of land-owning men," Monica adds slyly: "It misses the point."

"Ah, oui." A

"It misses more than that." Heads turn to face an unexpected direction: Manfred's eyes are open again, and as he glances around the room A

A

A

Manfred is watching Alan, who seems to be the most deeply integrated of the dead venture billionaire's executors: Even his expression reminds A

"Gia

"Er." Alan's eyes glaze over for a moment; A

"The first one was." A

Manfred fiddles with the bed control system. "It's not a practical joke," he adds. "But they only captured about sixteen megabits of data from the first one, maybe double that in the second. There's quite a bit of noise, the signals don't repeat, their length doesn't appear to be a prime, there's no obvious metainformation that describes the internal format, so there's no easy way of getting a handle on them. To make matters worse, pointy-haired management at Arianespace" – he glances at A

"But," Monica glances around, "you can't be sure."

"I think it may be sapient," says Manfred. He finds the right button at last, and the bed begins to fold itself back into a lounger. Then he finds the wrong button; the duvet dissolves into viscous turquoise slime that slurps and gurgles away through a multitude of tiny nozzles in the headboard. "Bloody aerogel. Um, where was I?" He sits up.