Accelerando

"All right," Pierre says slowly. "I think we've seen something like that ourselves. At the router."

Sirhan nods, not sure whether he's referring to anything important. "So you see, there are limits to human progress – but not to progress itself! The uploads found their labor to be a permanently deflating commodity once they hit their point of diminishing utility. Capitalism doesn't have a lot to say about workers whose skills are obsolete, other than that they should invest wisely while they're earning and maybe retrain: but just knowing how to invest in Economics 2.0 is beyond an unaugmented human. You can't retrain as a seagull, can you, and it's quite as hard to retool for Economics 2.0. Earth is —" He shudders.

"There's a phrase I used to hear in the old days," Pamela says calmly, "ethnic cleansing. Do you know what that means, darling idiot daughter? You take people who you define as being of little worth, and first you herd them into a crowded ghetto with limited resources, then you decide those resources aren't worth spending on them, and bullets are cheaper than bread. 'Mind children' the extropians called the posthumans, but they were more like Vile Offspring. There was a lot of that, during the fast sigmoid phase. Starving among plenty, compulsory conversions, the very antithesis of everything your father said he wanted …"

"I don't believe it," Amber says hotly. "That's crazy! We can't go the way of —"

"Since when has human history been anything else?" asks the woman with the camera on her shoulder – Do

"The DMZ?" Sirhan asks, momentarily confused.

"After we went through the router," Pierre says grimly. "You tell him, love." He looks at Amber.

Sirhan, watching him, feels it fall into place at that moment, a sense that he's stepped into an alternate universe, one where the woman who might have been his mother isn't, where black is white, his kindly grandmother is the wicked witch of the west, and his feckless grandfather is a farsighted visionary.

"We uploaded via the router," Amber says, and looks confused for a moment. "There's a network on the other side of it. We were told it was FTL, instantaneous, but I'm not so sure now. I think it's something more complicated, like a lightspeed network, parts of which are threaded through wormholes that make it look FTL from our perspective. Anyway, Matrioshka brains, the end product of a technological singularity – they're bandwidth-limited. Sooner or later the posthuman descendants evolve Economics 2.0, or 3.0, or something else and it, uh, eats the original conscious instigators. Or uses them as currency or something. The end result we found is a howling wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious processes ru

"That sounds plausible," Sirhan says slowly. He puts his glass down and chews distractedly on one knuckle. "I thought it was a low-probability outcome, but …"

"I've been saying all along, your grandfather's ideas would backfire in the end," Pamela says pointedly.

"But —" Amber shakes her head. "There's more to it than that, isn't there?"

"Probably," Sirhan says, then shuts up.

"So are you going to tell us?" asks Pierre, looking a

"An archive store," Sirhan says, deciding that this is the right time for his pitch. "At the lowest level, you can store back-ups of yourself here. So far so good, eh? But there's a bit more to it than that. I'm pla

"Is not sounding good to me," Boris comments. He spares a worried glance for an oriental-looking woman who is watching their debate silently from the fringe.

"Has it really gone that far?" asks Amber.

"There are bailiffs hunting you in the i

She grins, frighteningly. "Which is why I suggested to your son that he make you an offer you can't refuse."

"What's that?" asks a voice from below knee level.

Pamela looks down, an expression of deep distaste on her face. "Why should I tell you ?" she asks, leaning on her cane: "After the disgraceful way you repaid my hospitality! All you've got coming from me is a good kicking. If only my knee was up to the job."

The cat arches its back: Its tail fluffs out with fear as its hair stands on end, and it takes Amber a moment to realize that it isn't responding to Pamela, but to something behind the old woman. "Through the domain wall. Outside this biome. So cold. What's that ?"

Amber turns to follow the cat's gaze, and her jaw drops. "Were you expecting visitors?" she asks Sirhan, shakily.

"Visit —" He looks round to see what everybody's gaping at and freezes. The horizon is brightening with a false dawn: the fusion spark of a de-orbiting spacecraft.

"It's bailiffs," says Pamela, head cocked to one side as if listening to an antique bone-conduction earpiece. "They've come for your memories, dear," she explains, frowning. "They say we've got five kiloseconds to surrender everything. Otherwise, they're going to blow us apart …"

"You're all in big trouble," says the orang-utan, sliding gracefully down one enormous rib to land in an ungainly heap in front of Sirhan.