Accelerando

Nobody else in the discussion space seems to notice that Rita and Sirhan are busy ripping the shit out of each other over a private cha

"– That's right, blame your eigenmother! Has it occurred to you that she doesn't care enough about you to try a stunt like that? I think you spent too much time with that crazy grandmother of yours. You didn't even integrate that ghost, did you? Too afraid of polluting yourself! I bet you never even bothered to check what it felt like from inside —"

"– I did —" Sirhan freezes for a moment, personality modules paging in and out of his brain like a swarm of angry bees – "make a fool of myself ," he adds quietly, then slumps back in his seat. "This is so embarrassing … " He covers his face with his hands. "You're right. "

"I am? " Rita's puzzlement slowly gives way to understanding; Sirhan has finally integrated the memories from the partials they hybridized earlier. Stuck-up and proud, the cognitive dissonance must be enormous. "No, I'm not. You're just overly defensive. "

"I'm — " Embarrassed. Because Rita knows him, inside out. Has the ghost-memories of six months in a simspace with him, playing with ideas, exchanging intimacies, later confidences. She holds ghost-memories of his embrace, a smoky affair that might have happened in real space if his instant reaction to realizing that it could happen hadn't been to dump the splinter of his mind that was contaminated by impure thoughts to cold storage and deny everything.

"We have no threat profile yet," A

"You've obviously been thinking about this for some time," Sameena says with dry emphasis. "What's in it for your friend, uh, Blue? Did you squirrel away enough credit to cover the price of renting a starship from the Economics 2.0 metabubble? Or is there something you aren't telling us?"

"Um." Manfred looks like a small boy with his hand caught in the sweets jar. "Well, as a matter of fact —"

"Yes, Dad, why don't you tell us just what this is going to cost?" Amber asks.

"Ah, well." He looks embarrassed. "It's the lobsters, not Aineko. They want some payment."

Rita reaches out and grabs Sirhan's hand: He doesn't resist. "Do you know about this? " Rita queries him.

"All new to me … " A confused partial thread follows his reply down the pipe, and for a while, she joins him in introspective reverie, trying to work out the implications of knowing what they know about the possibility of a mutual relationship.

"They want a written conceptual map. A map of all the accessible meme spaces hanging off the router network, compiled by human explorers who they can use as a baseline, they say. It's quite simple – in return for a ticket out-system, some of us are going to have to go exploring. But that doesn't mean we can't leave back-ups behind."

"Do they have any particular explorers in mind?" Amber sniffs.

"No," says Manfred. "Just a team of us, to map out the router network and ensure they get some warning of threats from outside." He pauses. "You're going to want to come along, aren't you?"

The pre-election campaign takes approximately three minutes and consumes more bandwidth than the sum of all terrestrial communications cha

Ambers are not the only ghosts competing for attention in the public zeitgeist. In fact, they're in a minority. Most of the autonomous electoral agents are campaigning for a variety of platforms that range from introducing a progressive income tax – nobody is quite sure why, but it seems to be traditional – to a motion calling for the entire planet to be paved, which quite ignores the realities of element abundance in the upper atmosphere of a metal-poor gas giant, not to mention playing hell with the weather. The Faceless are campaigning for everyone to be assigned a new set of facial muscles every six months, the Livid Pranksters are demanding equal rights for subsentient entities, and a host of single-issue pressure groups are yammering about the usual lost causes.

Just how the election process a

"It could be worse," Rita rationalizes, late in the evening. She's sitting in a corner of the seventh-floor deck, in a 1950s wireframe chair, clutching a glass of synthetic single malt and watching the shadows. "We could be in an old-style contested election with seven shades of shit flying. At least this way we can be decently anonymous."

One of the blind spots detaches from her peripheral vision and approaches. It segues into view, suddenly congealing into Sirhan. He looks morose.

"What's your problem?" she demands. "Your former faction is wi

"Maybe so." He sits down beside her, carefully avoiding her gaze. "Maybe this is a good thing. And maybe not."

"So when are you going to join the syncitium?" she asks.

"Me? Join that?" He looks alarmed. "You think I want to become part of a parliamentary borg? What do you take me for?"

"Oh." She shakes her head. "I assumed you were avoiding me because —"

"No." He holds out his hand, and a passing waitron deposits a glass in it. He takes a deep breath. "I owe you an apology."

About time , she thinks, uncharitably. But he's like that. Stiff-necked and proud, slow to acknowledge a mistake, but unlikely to apologize unless he really means it. "What for?" she asks.