Accelerando

Not vested. Pierre turns it over in his mind, slightly surprised. He'd assumed that everybody aboard the ship – except, perhaps, the lawyer, Glashwiecz – was a fully vested member of the expeditionary company.

"I am not vested," Do

"The —" Pierre turns round in a hurry. Yes, Aineko appears to be sitting silently at the table with the wicker man; but who knows what's going through that furry head right now? I'll have to bring this up with Amber , he realizes uneasily. I ought to bring this up with Amber … "but your reputation won't suffer for being on this craft, will it?" he asks aloud.

"I will be all right," Do

"Am I a singularitarian, do you mean?" asks Pierre, a fixed grin coming to his face.

"Oh, no, no, no!" Do

"Is this intended for a public interview?" asks Ang.

"Well, I ca

"Oh. Well." Ang glances warningly at Pierre and dispatches a very private memo to scroll across his vision: Don't play with her, this is serious. Boris is watching Ang with an expression of hopeless longing. Pierre tries to ignore it all, taking the journalist's question seriously. "The singularity is a bit like that old-time American Christian rapture nonsense, isn't it?" he says. "When we all go a-flying up to heaven, leaving our bodies behind." He snorts, reaches into thin air and gratuitously violates causality by summoning a jug of ice-cold sangria into existence. "The rapture of the nerds. I'll drink to that."

"But when did it take place?" asks Do

"Four years ago, when we instantiated this ship," Pierre says promptly.

"Back in the teens," says Ang. "When Amber's father liberated the uploaded lobsters."

"Is not happening yet," contributes Boris. "Singularity implies infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not happened."

"Au contraire. It happened on June 6th, 1969, at eleven hundred hours, eastern seaboard time," Pierre counters. "That was when the first network control protocol packets were sent from the data port of one IMP to another – the first ever Internet co

"It's rubbish," counters Boris. "Singularity is load of religious junk. Christian mystic rapture recycled for atheist nerds."

"Not so." Su Ang glances at him, hurt. "Here we are, sixty something human minds. We've been migrated – while still awake – right out of our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and electron spin resonance mapping, and we're now ru

"Mmph." Boris looks perplexed. "Would not put it that way. The singularity is nonsense, not uploading or —"

"Yah, right." Ang smiles wi

Do

"They're Amber's friends," Ang explains. "Years ago, Amber's father did a deal with them. They were the first uploads, you know? Hybridized spiny lobster neural tissue and a heuristic API and some random mess of backward-chaining expert systems. They got out of their lab and into the Net and Manfred brokered a deal to set them free, in return for their help ru

Pierre takes a big mouthful of sangria. "The cat," he says.

"The cat —" Do

"The family cat," explains Ang. She reaches over for Boris's pitcher of jellyfish juice, but frowns as she does so: "Aineko wasn't conscious back then, but later … when SETI@home finally received that message back, oh, however many years ago, Aineko remembered the lobsters. And cracked it wide open while all the CETI teams were still thinking in terms of von Neuma

"Ah, this is all a bit clearer now," says Do

"Well, there we have a problem," Ang says diplomatically.

"No," says Pierre. "I have a problem. And it's all Amber's fault."

"Hmm?" Do

"Because she's the one who picked the lunar month to be the reporting time period for companies in her domain, and specified trial by combat for resolving corporate conflicts," he grumbles. "And compurgation , but that's not applicable to this case because there isn't a recognized reputation server within three light-years. Trial by combat, for civil suits in this day and age! And she appointed me her champion." In the most traditional way imaginable , he remembers with a warm frisson of nostalgia. He'd been hers in body and soul before that disastrous experiment. He isn't sure whether it still applies, but – "I've got to take on this lawsuit on her behalf, in adversarial stance."

He glances over his shoulder. The wicker man sits there placidly, pouring beer down his invisible throat like a tired farm laborer.

"Trial by combat," Su Ang explains to Do