Accelerando

Now that Amber has granted Rita her conditional trust, a whole new tier of campaigning information has opened up to her i

"Everyone on-line?" asked Manfred. "Then I'll begin." He looks tired and worried, physically youthful but showing the full weight of his age. "We've got a crisis coming, folks. About a hundred kiloseconds ago, the bit rate on the resimulation stream jumped. We're now fielding about one resimulated state vector a second, on top of the legitimate immigration we're dealing with. If it jumps again by the same factor, it's going to swamp our ability to check the immigrants for zimboes in vivo – we'd have to move to ru

"Why do you not spool them to memory diamond?" asks the handsome young ex-politician to his left, looking almost amused – as if he already knows the answer.

"Politics." Manfred shrugs.

"It would blow a hole in our social contract," says Amber, looking as if she's just swallowed something unpleasant, and Rita feels a flicker of admiration for the way they're stage-managing the meeting. Amber's even talking to her father, as if she feels comfortable with him around, although he's a walking reminder of her own lack of success. Nobody else has gotten a word in yet. "If we don't instantiate them, the next logical step is to deny resimulated minds the franchise. Which in turn puts us on the road to institutional inequality. And that's a very big step to take, even if you have misgivings about the idea of settling complex policy issues on the basis of a popular vote, because our whole polity is based on the idea that less competent intelligences – us – deserve consideration."

"Hrmph." Someone clears their throat. Rita glances round and freezes, because it's Amber's screwed-up eigenchild, and he's just about materialized in the chair next to her. So he adopted Superplonk after all? she observes cynically. He doggedly avoids looking at her. "That was my analysis," he says reluctantly. "We need them alive. For the ark option, at least, and if not, even the accelerationista platform will need them on hand later."

Concentration camps , thinks Rita, trying to ignore Sirhan's presence near her, for it's a constant irritant, where most of the inmates are confused, frightened human beings – and the ones who aren't think they are. It's an eerie thought, and she spawns a couple of full ghosts to dream it through for her, gaming the possible angles.

"How are your negotiations over the lifeboat designs going?" Amber asks her father. "We need to get a portfolio of design schemata out before we go into the election —"

"Change of plan." Manfred hunches forward. "This doesn't need to go any further, but Sirhan and Aineko have come up with something interesting." He looks worried.

Sirhan is staring at his eigenmother with narrowed eyes, and Rita has to resist the urge to elbow him savagely in the ribs. She knows enough about him now to realize it wouldn't get his attention – at least, not the way she'd want it, not for the right reasons – and in any case, he's more wrapped up in himself than her ghost ever saw him as likely to be. (How anyone could be party to such a detailed exchange of simulated lives and still reject the opportunity to do it in real life is beyond her; unless it's an artifact of his youth, when his parents pushed him through a dozen simulated childhoods in search of knowledge and ended up with a stubborn oyster-head of a son …) "We still need to look as if we're pla

"What? What are you talking about?" Amber sounds confused. "I thought you were working on some kind of cladistic map. What's this about a price?"

Sirhan smiles coolly. "I am working on a cladistic map, in a ma

"You —" Amber flushes. "What about?" She's visibly angry, Rita notices. Sirhan is needling his eigenmother. Why ?

"About the topology of some rather interesting types of small-world network." Sirhan leans back in his chair, watching the cloud above her head. "And the router. You went through it, then you came back with your tail between your legs as fast as you could, didn't you? Not even checking your passenger to see if it was a hostile parasite."

"I don't have to take this," Amber says tightly. "You weren't there, and you have no idea what constraints we were working under."

"Really?" Sirhan raises an eyebrow. "Anyway, you missed an opportunity. We know that the routers – for whatever reason – are self-replicating. They spread from brown dwarf to brown dwarf, hatch, tap the protostar for energy and material, and send a bunch of children out. Von Neuma

Amber glares at him. "Total payload on board the FieldCircus was about ten grams. How large do you think a router seed is?"

"So you brought the Slug home instead, occupying maybe half your storage capacity and ready to wreak seven shades of havoc on —"

"Children!" They both look round automatically. It's A

"This charming family reunion was your idea, I believe?" Manfred smiles at her, then nods coolly at the retread EU politician in the next seat.

"Please." It's Amber. "Dad, can you save this for later?" Rita sits up. For a moment, Amber looks ancient, far older than her subjective gigasecond of age. "She's right. She didn't mean to screw up. Let's leave the family history for some time when we can work it out in private. Okay?"

Manfred looks abashed. He blinks rapidly. "All right." He takes a breath. "Amber, I brought some old acquaintances into the loop. If we win the election, then to get out of here as fast as possible, we'll have to use a combination of the two main ideas we've been discussing: spool as many people as possible into high-density storage until we get somewhere with space and mass and energy to reincarnate them, and get our hands on a router. The entire planetary polity can't afford to pay the energy budget of a relativistic starship big enough to hold everyone, even as uploads, and a subrelativistic ship would be too damn vulnerable to the Vile Offspring. And it follows that, instead of taking potluck on the destination, we should learn about the network protocols the routers use, figure out some kind of transferable currency we can use to pay for our reinstantiation at the other end, and also how to make some kind of map so we know where we're going. The two hard parts are getting at or to a router, and paying – that's going to mean traveling with someone who understands Economics 2.0 but doesn't want to hang around the Vile Offspring.