Half a year passes on Saturn - more than a decade on Earth - and a lot
of things have changed in that time. The great terraforming project is
nearly complete, the festival planet dressed for a jubilee that will
last almost twenty of its years - four presingularity lifetimes -
before the Demolition. The lily-pad habitats have proliferated,
joining edge to edge in continent-sized slabs, drifting in the
Saturnine cloud tops: and the refugees have begun to move in.

There's a market specializing in clothing and fashion accessories
about fifty kilometers away from the transplanted museum where
Sirhan's mother lives, at a transportation nexus between three
lily-pad habitats where tube trains intersect in a huge maglev
cloverleaf. The market is crowded with strange and spectacular
visuals, algorithms unfolding in faster-than-real time before the
candy-striped awnings of tents. Domed yurts belch aromatic smoke from
crude fireplaces - what is it about hairless primates and their
tendency toward pyromania? - around the feet of diamond-walled
groundscrapers that pace carefully across the smart roads of the city.
The crowds are variegated and wildly mixed, immigrants from every
continent shopping and haggling, and in a few cases, getting out of
their skulls on strange substances on the pavements in front of giant
snail-shelled shebeens and squat bunkers made of thin layers of
concrete sprayed over soap-bubble aerogel. There are no automobiles,
but a bewildering range of personal transport gadgets, from
gyro-stabilized pogo sticks and segways to kettenkrads and
spiderpalanquins, jostle for space with pedestrians and animals.

Two women stop outside what in a previous century might have been the
store window of a fashion boutique: The younger one (blonde, with her
hair bound up in elaborate cornrows, wearing black leggings and a long
black leather jacket over a camouflage T) points to an elaborately
retro dress. "Wouldn't my bum look big in that?" she asks, doubtfully.

"Ma chérie, you have but to try it -" The other woman (tall, wearing a
pin-striped man's business suit from a previous century) flicks a
thought at the window, and the mannequin morphs, sprouting the younger
woman's head, aping her posture and expression.

"I missed out on the authentic retail experience, you know? It still
feels weird to be back somewhere with shops. 'S what comes of living
off libraries of public domain designs for too long." Amber twists her
hips, experimenting. "You get out of the habit of foraging. I don't
know about this retro thing at all. The Victorian vote isn't critical,
is it ..." She trails off.

"You are a twenty-first-century platform selling, to electors
resimulated and incarnated from the Gilded Age. And yes, a bustle your
derriere does enhance. But -" Annette looks thoughtful.

"Hmm." Amber frowns, and the shop window dummy turns and waggles its
hips at her, sending tiers of skirts swishing across the floor. Her
frown deepens. "If we're really going to go through with this election
shit, it's not just the resimulant voters I need to convince but the
contemporaries, and that's a matter of substance, not image. They've
lived through too much media warfare. They're immune to any semiotic
payload short of an active cognitive attack. If I send out partials to
canvass them that look as if I'm trying to push buttons -"

"- They will listen to your message, and nothing you wear or say will
sway them. Don't worry about them, ma chérie. The naive resimulated
are another matter, and perhaps might be swayed. This your first
venture into democracy is, in how many years? Your privacy, she is an
illusion now. The question is what image will you project? People will
listen to you only once you gain their attention. Also, the swing
voters you must reach, they are future-shocked, timid. Your platform
is radical. Should you not project a comfortably conservative image?"

Amber pulls a face, an expression of mild distaste for the whole
populist program. "Yes, I suppose I must, if necessary. But on second
thoughts, that" - Amber snaps her fingers, and the mannequin turns
around once more before morphing back into neutrality, aureoles
perfect puckered disks above the top of its bodice - "is just too
much."

She doesn't need to merge in the opinions of several different
fractional personalities, fashion critics and psephologists both, to
figure out that adopting Victorian/Cretan fusion fashion - a
breast-and-ass fetishist's fantasy - isn't the way to sell herself as
a serious politician to the nineteenth-century postsingularity fringe.
"I'm not running for election as the mother of the nation, I'm running
because I figure we've got about a billion seconds, at most, to get
out of this rat trap of a gravity well before the Vile Offspring get
seriously medieval on our CPU cycles, and if we don't convince them to
come with us, they're doomed. Let's look for something more practical
that we can overload with the right signifiers."

"Like your coronation robe?"

Amber winces. "Touché." The Ring Imperium is dead, along with whatever
was left over from its early orbital legal framework, and Amber is
lucky to be alive as a private citizen in this cold new age at the
edge of the halo. "But that was just scenery setting. I didn't fully
understand what I was doing, back then."

"Welcome to maturity and experience." Annette smiles distantly at some
faint memory: "You don't feel older, you just know what you're doing
this time. I wonder, sometimes, what Manny would make of it if he was
here."

"That birdbrain," Amber says dismissively, stung by the idea that her
father might have something to contribute. She follows Annette past a
gaggle of mendicant street evangelists preaching some new religion and
in through the door of a real department store, one with actual human
sales staff and fitting rooms to cut the clothing to shape. "If I'm
sending out fractional mes tailored for different demographics, isn't
it a bit self-defeating to go for a single image? I mean, we could
drill down and tailor a partial for each individual elector -"

"Per-haps." The door re-forms behind them. "But you need a core
identity." Annette looks around, hunting for eye contact with the
sales consultant. "To start with a core design, a style, then to work
outward, tailoring you for your audience. And besides, there is
tonight's - ah, bonjour!"

"Hello. How can we help you?" The two female and one male shop
assistants who appear from around the displays - cycling through a
history of the couture industry, catwalk models mixing and matching
centuries of fashion - are clearly chips off a common primary
personality, instances united by their enhanced sartorial obsession.
If they're not actually a fashion borganism, they're not far from it,
dressed head to foot in the highest quality Chanel and Armani
replicas, making a classical twentieth-century statement. This isn't
simply a shop, it's a temple to a very peculiar art form, its staff
trained as guardians of the esoteric secrets of good taste.

"Mais oui. We are looking for a wardrobe for my niece here." Annette
reaches through the manifold of fashion ideas mapped within the shop's
location cache and flips a requirement spec one of her ghosts has just
completed at the lead assistant: "She is into politics going, and the
question of her image is important."

"We would be delighted to help you," purrs the proprietor, taking a
delicate step forward: "Perhaps you could tell us what you've got in
mind?"

"Oh. Well." Amber takes a deep breath, glances sidelong at Annette;
Annette stares back, unblinking. It's your head, she sends. "I'm
involved in the accelerationista administrative program. Are you
familiar with it?"

The head coutureborg frowns slightly, twin furrows rippling her brow
between perfectly symmetrical eyebrows, plucked to match her classic
New Look suit. "I have heard reference to it, but a lady of fashion
like myself does not concern herself with politics," she says, a touch
self-deprecatingly. "Especially the politics of her clients. Your, ah,
aunt said it was a question of image?"

"Yes." Amber shrugs, momentarily self-conscious about her casual rags.
"She's my election agent. My problem, as she says, is there's a
certain voter demographic that mistakes image for substance and is
afraid of the unknown, and I need to acquire a wardrobe that triggers
associations of probity, of respect and deliberation. One suitable for
a representative with a radical political agenda but a strong track
record. I'm afraid I'm in a hurry to start with - I've got a big
fund-raising party tonight. I know it's short notice, but I need
something off the shelf for it."

"What exactly is it you're hoping to achieve?" asks the male
couturier, his voice hoarse and his r's rolling with some half-shed
Mediterranean accent. He sounds fascinated. "If you think it might
influence your choice of wardrobe ..."

"I'm running for the assembly," Amber says bluntly. "On a platform
calling for a state of emergency and an immediate total effort to
assemble a starship. This solar system isn't going to be habitable for
much longer, and we need to emigrate. All of us, you included, before
the Vile Offspring decide to reprocess us into computronium. I'm going
to be doorstepping the entire electorate in parallel, and the
experience needs to be personalized." She manages to smile. "That
means, I think, perhaps eight outfits and four different independent
variables for each, accessories, and two or three hats - enough that
each is seen by no more than a few thousand voters. Both physical
fabric and virtual. In addition, I'll want to see your range of
historical formalwear, but that's of secondary interest for now." She
grins. "Do you have any facilities for response-testing the
combinations against different personality types from different
periods? If we could run up some models, that would be useful."

"I think we can do better than that." The manager nods approvingly,
perhaps contemplating her gold-backed deposit account. "Hansel, please
divert any further visitors until we have dealt with Madam ...?"

"Macx. Amber Macx."

"- Macx's requirements." She shows no sign of familiarity with the
name. Amber winces slightly; it's a sign of how hugely fractured the
children of Saturn have become, and of how vast the population of the
halo, that only a generation has passed and already barely anyone
remembers the Queen of the Ring Imperium. "If you'd come this way,
please, we can begin to research an eigenstyle combination that
matches your requirements -"

* * *

Sirhan walks, shrouded in isolation, through the crowds gathered for
the festival. The only people who see him are the chattering ghosts of
dead politicians and writers, deported from the inner system by order
of the Vile Offspring. The green and pleasant plain stretches toward a
horizon a thousand kilometers away, beneath a lemon-yellow sky. The
air smells faintly of ammonia, and the big spaces are full of small
ideas; but Sirhan doesn't care because, for now, he's alone.

Except that he isn't, really.

"Excuse me, are you real?" someone asks him in American-accented
English.

It takes a moment or two for Sirhan to disengage from his
introspection and realize that he's being spoken to. "What?" he asks,
slightly puzzled. Wiry and pale, Sirhan wears the robes of a Berber
goatherd on his body and the numinous halo of a utility fogbank above
his head: In his abstraction, he vaguely resembles a saintly shepherd
in a post-singularity nativity play. "I say, what?" Outrage simmers at
the back of his mind - Is nowhere private? - but as he turns, he sees
that one of the ghost pods has split lengthwise across its white
mushroomlike crown, spilling a trickle of leftover construction fluid
and a completely hairless, slightly bemused-looking Anglo male who
wears an expression of profound surprise.

"I can't find my implants," the Anglo male says, shaking his head.
"But I'm really here, aren't I? Incarnate?" He glances round at the
other pods. "This isn't a sim."

Sirhan sighs - another exile - and sends forth a daemon to interrogate
the ghost pod's abstract interface. It doesn't tell him much - unlike
most of the resurrectees, this one seems to be undocumented. "You've
been dead. Now you're alive. I suppose that means you're now almost as
real as I am. What else do you need to know?"

"When is -" The newcomer stops. "Can you direct me to the processing
center?" he asks carefully. "I'm disoriented."

Sirhan is surprised - most immigrants take a lot longer to figure that
out. "Did you die recently?" he asks.

"I'm not sure I died at all." The newcomer rubs his bald head, looking
puzzled. "Hey, no jacks!" He shrugs, exasperated. "Look, the
processing center ..?"

"Over there." Sirhan gestures at the monumental mass of the Boston
Museum of Science (shipped all the way from Earth a couple of decades
ago to save it from the demolition of the inner system). "My mother
runs it." He smiles thinly.

"Your mother -" the newly resurrected immigrant stares at him
intensely, then blinks. "Holy shit." He takes a step toward Sirhan.
"It is you -"

Sirhan recoils and snaps his fingers. The thin trail of vaporous cloud
that has been following him all this time, shielding his shaven pate
from the diffuse red glow of the swarming shells of orbital
nanocomputers that have replaced the inner planets, extrudes a staff
of hazy blue mist that stretches down from the air and slams together
in his hand like a quarterstaff spun from bubbles. "Are you
threatening me, sir?" he asks, deceptively mildly.

"I -" The newcomer stops dead. Then he throws back his head and
laughs. "Don't be silly, son. We're related!"

"Son?" Sirhan bristles. "Who do you think you are -" A horrible
thought occurs to him. "Oh. Oh dear." A wash of adrenaline drenches
him in warm sweat. "I do believe we've met, in a manner of speaking
..." Oh boy, this is going to upset so many applecarts, he realizes,
spinning off a ghost to think about the matter. The implications are
enormous.

The naked newcomer nods, grinning at some private joke. "You look
different from ground level. And now I'm human again." He runs his
hands down his ribs, pauses, and glances at Sirhan owlishly. "Um. I
didn't mean to frighten you. But I don't suppose you could find your
aged grandfather something to wear?"

Sirhan sighs and points his staff straight up at the sky. The rings
are edge on, for the lily pad continent floats above an ocean of cold
gas along Saturn's equator, and they glitter like a ruby laser beam
slashed across the sky. "Let there be aerogel."

A cloud of wispy soap bubble congeals in a cone shape above the newly
resurrected ancient and drops over him, forming a caftan. "Thanks," he
says. He looks round, twisting his neck, then winces. "Damn, that
hurt. Ouch. I need to get myself a set of implants."

"They can sort you out in the processing center. It's in the basement
in the west wing. They'll give you something more permanent to wear,
too." Sirhan peers at him. "Your face -" He pages through rarely used
memories. Yes, it's Manfred as he looked in the early years of the
last century. As he looked around the time Mother-not was born.
There's something positively indecent about meeting your own
grandfather in the full flush of his youth. "Are you sure you haven't
been messing with your phenotype?" he asks suspiciously.

"No, this is what I used to look like. I think. Back in the naked ape
again, after all these years as an emergent function of a flock of
passenger pigeons." His grandfather smirks. "What's your mother going
to say?"

"I really don't know -" Sirhan shakes his head. "Come on, let's get
you to immigrant processing. You're sure you're not just an historical
simulation?"

The place is already heaving with the resimulated. Just why the Vile
Offspring seem to feel it's necessary to apply valuable exaquops to
the job of deriving accurate simulations of dead humans - outrageously
accurate simulations of long-dead lives, annealed until their written
corpus matches that inherited from the presingularity era in the form
of chicken scratchings on mashed tree pulp - much less beaming them at
the refugee camps on Saturn - is beyond Sirhan's ken: But he wishes
they'd stop.

"Just a couple of days ago I crapped on your lawn. Hope you don't
mind." Manfred cocks his head to one side and stares at Sirhan with
beady eyes. "Actually, I'm here because of the upcoming election. It's
got the potential to turn into a major crisis point, and I figured
Amber would need me around."

"Well you'd better come on in, then," Sirhan says resignedly as he
climbs the steps, enters the foyer, and leads his turbulent
grandfather into the foggy haze of utility nanomachines that fill the
building.

He can't wait to see what his mother will do when she meets her father
in the flesh, after all this time.

* * *

Welcome to Saturn, your new home world. This FAQ (Frequently Asked
Questions) memeplex is designed to orient you and explain the
following:
* How you got here
* Where "here" is
* Things you should avoid doing
* Things you might want to do as soon as possible
* Where to go for more information

If you are remembering this presentation, you are probably
resimulated. This is not the same as being resurrected. You may
remember dying. Do not worry: Like all your other memories, it is a
fabrication. In fact, this is the first time you have ever been alive.
(Exception: If you died after the singularity, you may be a genuine
resurrectee. In which case, why are you reading this FAQ?)

How you got here: 

The center of the solar system - Mercury, Venus, Earth's Moon, Mars,
the asteroid belt, and Jupiter - have been dismantled, or are being
dismantled, by weakly godlike intelligences. [NB: Monotheistic clergy
and Europeans who remember living prior to 1600, see alternative
memeplex "in the beginning."] A weakly godlike intelligence is not a
supernatural agency, but the product of a highly advanced society that
learned how to artificially create souls [late 20th century: software]
and translate human minds into souls and vice versa. [Core concepts:
Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is
not immortal.]

Some of the weakly godlike intelligences appear to cultivate an
interest in their human antecedents - for whatever reason is not
known. (Possibilities include the study of history through
horticulture, entertainment through live-action role-playing, revenge,
and economic forgery.) While no definitive analysis is possible, all
the resimulated persons to date exhibit certain common
characteristics: They are all based on well-documented historical
persons, their memories show suspicious gaps [see: smoke and mirrors],
and they are ignorant of or predate the singularity [see: Turing
Oracle, Vinge catastrophe].

It is believed that the weakly godlike agencies have created you as a
vehicle for the introspective study of your historical antecedent by
backward-chaining from your corpus of documented works, and the
back-projected genome derived from your collateral descendants, to
generate an abstract description of your computational state vector.
This technique is extremely intensive [see: expTime-complete
algorithms, Turing Oracle, time travel, industrial magic] but
marginally plausible in the absence of supernatural explanations.

After experiencing your life, the weakly godlike agencies have
expelled you. For reasons unknown, they chose to do this by
transmitting your upload state and genome/proteome complex to
receivers owned and operated by a consortium of charities based on
Saturn. These charities have provided for your basic needs, including
the body you now occupy.

In summary: You are a reconstruction of someone who lived and died a
long time ago, not a reincarnation. You have no intrinsic moral right
to the identity you believe to be your own, and an extensive body of
case law states that you do not inherit your antecedent's possessions.
Other than that, you are a free individual.

Note that fictional resimulation is strictly forbidden. If you have
reason to believe that you may be a fictional character, you must
contact the city immediately. [ See: James Bond, Spider Jerusalem.]
Failure to comply is a felony.

Where you are:

You are on Saturn. Saturn is a gas giant planet 120,500 kilometers in
diameter, located 1.5 billion kilometers from Earth's sun. [NB:
Europeans who remember living prior to 1580, see alternative memeplex
"the flat Earth - not".] Saturn has been partially terraformed by
posthuman emigrants from Earth and Jupiter orbit: The ground beneath
your feet is, in reality, the floor of a hydrogen balloon the size of
a continent, floating in Saturn's upper atmosphere. [NB: Europeans who
remember living prior to 1790, internalize the supplementary memeplex:
"the Brothers Montgolfier."] The balloon is very safe, but mining
activities and the use of ballistic weapons are strongly deprecated
because the air outside is unbreathable and extremely cold.

The society you have been instantiated in is extremely wealthy within
the scope of Economics 1.0, the value transfer system developed by
human beings during and after your own time. Money exists, and is used
for the usual range of goods and services, but the basics - food,
water, air, power, off-the-shelf clothing, housing, historical
entertainment, and monster trucks - are free. An implicit social
contract dictates that, in return for access to these facilities, you
obey certain laws.

If you wish to opt out of this social contract, be advised that other
worlds may run Economics 2.0 or subsequent releases. These
value-transfer systems are more efficient - hence wealthier - than
Economics 1.0, but true participation in Economics 2.0 is not possible
without dehumanizing cognitive surgery. Thus, in absolute terms,
although this society is richer than any you have ever heard of, it is
also a poverty-stricken backwater compared to its neighbors.

Things you should avoid doing:

Many activities that have been classified as crimes in other societies
are legal here. These include but are not limited to: acts of worship,
art, sex, violence, communication, or commerce between consenting
competent sapients of any species, except where such acts transgress
the list of prohibitions below. [See additional memeplex: competence
defined.]

Some activities are prohibited here and may have been legal in your
previous experience. These include willful deprivation of ability to
consent [see: slavery], interference in the absence of consent [see:
minors, legal status of], formation of limited liability companies
[see: singularity], and invasion of defended privacy [see: the Slug,
Cognitive Pyramid Schemes, Brain Hacking, Thompson Trust Exploit].

Some activities unfamiliar to you are highly illegal and should be
scrupulously avoided. These include: possession of nuclear weapons,
possession of unlimited autonomous replicators [see: gray goo],
coercive assimilationism [see: borganism, aggressive], coercive
halting of Turing-equivalent personalities [see: basilisks], and
applied theological engineering [see: God bothering].

Some activities superficially familiar to you are merely stupid and
should be avoided for your safety, although they are not illegal as
such. These include: giving your bank account details to the son of
the Nigerian Minister of Finance; buying title to bridges,
skyscrapers, spacecraft, planets, or other real assets; murder;
selling your identity; and entering into financial contracts with
entities running Economics 2.0 or higher.

Things you should do as soon as possible:

Many material artifacts you may consider essential to life are freely
available - just ask the city, and it will grow you clothes, a house,
food, or other basic essentials. Note, however, that the library of
public domain structure templates is of necessity restrictive, and
does not contain items that are highly fashionable or that remain in
copyright. Nor will the city provide you with replicators, weapons,
sexual favors, slaves, or zombies.

You are advised to register as a citizen as soon as possible. If the
individual you are a resimulation of can be confirmed dead, you may
adopt their name but not - in law - any lien or claim on their
property, contracts, or descendants. You register as a citizen by
asking the city to register you; the process is painless and typically
complete within four hours. Unless you are registered, your legal
status as a sapient organism may be challenged. The ability to request
citizenship rights is one of the legal tests for sapience, and failure
to comply may place you in legal jeopardy. You can renounce your
citizenship whenever you wish: This may be desirable if you emigrate
to another polity.

While many things are free, it is highly likely that you posses no
employable skills, and therefore, no way of earning money with which
to purchase unfree items. The pace of change in the past century has
rendered almost all skills you may have learned obsolete [see:
singularity]. However, owing to the rapid pace of change, many
cooperatives, trusts, and guilds offer on-the-job training or
educational loans.

Your ability to learn depends on your ability to take information in
the format in which it is offered. Implants are frequently used to
provide a direct link between your brain and the intelligent machines
that surround it. A basic core implant set is available on request
from the city. [See: implant security, firewall, wetware.]

Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and
is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and
in event of an incurable ailment or injury, a new body may be provided
- for a fee. (In event of your murder, you will be furnished with a
new body at the expense of your killer.) If you have any preexisting
medical conditions or handicaps, consult the city.

The city is an agoric-annealing participatory democracy with a limited
liability constitution. Its current executive agency is a weakly
godlike intelligence that chooses to associate with human-equivalent
intelligences: This agency is colloquially known as "Hello Kitty,"
"Beautiful Cat," or "Aineko," and may manifest itself in a variety of
physical avatars if corporeal interaction is desired. (Prior to the
arrival of "Hello Kitty," the city used a variety of human-designed
expert systems that provided suboptimal performance.)

The city's mission statement is to provide a mediatory environment for
human-equivalent intelligences and to preserve same in the face of
external aggression. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the
ongoing political processes of determining such responses. Citizens
also have a duty to serve on a jury if called (including senatorial
service), and to defend the city.

Where to go for further information:

Until you have registered as a citizen and obtained basic implants,
all further questions should be directed to the city. Once you have
learned to use your implants, you will not need to ask this question.

* * *

Welcome to decade the ninth, singularity plus one gigasecond (or
maybe more - nobody's quite sure when, or indeed if, a singularity
has been created). The human population of the solar system is
either six billion, or sixty billion, depending on whether you
class the forked state vectors of posthumans and the simulations of
dead phenotypes running in the Vile Offspring's Schrödinger boxes
as people. Most of the physically incarnate still live on Earth,
but the lily-pads floating beneath continent-sized hot-hydrogen
balloons in Saturn's upper atmosphere already house a few million,
and the writing is on the wall for the rocky inner planets. All the
remaining human-equivalent intelligences with half a clue to rub
together are trying to emigrate before the Vile Offspring decide to
recycle Earth to fill in a gap in the concentric shells of
nanocomputers they're running on. The half-constructed Matrioshka
brain already darkens the skies of Earth and has caused a massive
crash in the planet's photosynthetic biomass, as plants starve for
short-wavelength light.

Since decade the seventh, the computational density of the solar
system has soared. Within the asteroid belt, more than half the
available planetary mass has been turned into nanoprocessors, tied
together by quantum entanglement into a web so dense that each gram
of matter can simulate all the possible life experiences of an
individual human being in a scant handful of minutes. Economics 2.0
is itself obsolescent, forced to mutate in a furious survivalist
arms race by the arrival of the Slug. Only the name remains as a
vague shorthand for merely human-equivalent intelligences to use
when describing interactions they don't understand.

The latest generation of posthuman entities is less overtly hostile
to humans, but much more alien than the generations of the fifties
and seventies. Among their less comprehensible activities, the Vile
Offspring are engaged in exploring the phase-space of all possible
human experiences from the inside out. Perhaps they caught a dose
of the Tiplerite heresy along the way, for now a steady stream of
resimulant uploads is pouring through the downsystem relays in
Titan orbit. The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the
Resurrection of the Extremely Confused, except that they're not
really resurrectees - they're simulations based on their originals'
recorded histories, blocky and missing chunks of their memories, as
bewildered as baby ducklings as they're herded into the
wood-chipper of the future.

Sirhan al-Khurasani despises them with the abstract contempt of an
antiquarian for a cunning but ultimately transparent forgery. But
Sirhan is young, and he's got more contempt than he knows what to
do with. It's a handy outlet for his frustration. He has a lot to
be frustrated at, starting with his intermittently dysfunctional
family, the elderly stars around whom his planet whizzes in chaotic
trajectories of enthusiasm and distaste.

Sirhan fancies himself a philosopher-historian of the singular age,
a chronicler of the incomprehensible, which would be a fine thing
to be except that his greatest insights are all derived from
Aineko. He alternately fawns over and rages against his mother, who
is currently a leading light in the refugee community, and honors
(when not attempting to evade the will of) his father, who is
lately a rising philosophical patriarch within the Conservationist
faction. He's secretly in awe (not to mention slightly resentful)
of his grandfather Manfred. In fact, the latter's abrupt
reincarnation in the flesh has quite disconcerted him. And he
sometimes listens to his stepgrandmother Annette, who has
reincarnated in more or less her original 2020s body after spending
some years as a great ape, and who seems to view him as some sort
of personal project.

OnlyAnnette isn't being very helpful right now. His mother is
campaigning on an electoral platform calling for a vote to blow up
the world, Annette is helping run her campaign, his grandfather is
trying to convince him to entrust everything he holds dear to a
rogue lobster, and the cat is being typically feline and evasive.

Talk about families with problems ...

* * *

They've transplanted imperial Brussels to Saturn in its entirety,
mapped tens of megatonnes of buildings right down to nanoscale and
beamed them into the outer darkness to be reinstantiated down-well on
the lily-pad colonies that dot the stratosphere of the gas giant.
(Eventually the entire surface of the Earth will follow - after which
the Vile Offspring will core the planet like an apple, dismantle it
into a cloud of newly formed quantum nanocomputers to add to their
burgeoning Matrioshka brain.) Due to a resource contention problem in
the festival committee's planning algorithm - or maybe it's simply an
elaborate joke - Brussels now begins just on the other side of a
diamond bubble wall from the Boston Museum of Science, less than a
kilometer away as the passenger pigeon flies. Which is why, when it's
time to celebrate a birthday or name day (meaningless though those
concepts are, out on Saturn's synthetic surface), Amber tends to drag
people over to the bright lights of the big city.

This time she's throwing a rather special party. At Annette's canny
prompting, she's borrowed the Atomium and invited a horde of guests to
a big event. It's not a family bash - although Annette's promised her
a surprise - so much as a business meeting, testing the water as a
preliminary to declaring her candidacy. It's a media coup, an attempt
to engineer Amber's re-entry into the mainstream politics of the human
system.

Sirhan doesn't really want to be here. He's got far more important
things to do, like continuing to catalogue Aineko's memories of the
voyage of the Field Circus. He's also collating a series of interviews
with resimulated logical positivists from Oxford, England (the ones
who haven't retreated into gibbering near catatonia upon realizing
that their state vectors are all members of the set of all sets that
do not contain themselves), when he isn't attempting to establish a
sound rational case for his belief that extraterrestrial
superintelligence is an oxymoron and the router network is just an
accident, one of evolution's little pranks.

But Tante Annette twisted his arm and promised he was in on the
surprise if he came to the party. And despite everything, he wouldn't
miss being a fly on the wall during the coming meeting between Manfred
and Amber for all the tea in China.

Sirhan walks up to the gleaming stainless-steel dome that contains the
entrance to the Atomium, and waits for the lift. He's in line behind a
gaggle of young-looking women, skinny and soigné in cocktail gowns and
tiaras lifted from 1920s silent movies. (Annette declared an age of
elegance theme for the party, knowing full well that it would force
Amber to focus on her public appearance.) Sirhan's attention is,
however, elsewhere. The various fragments of his mind are conducting
three simultaneous interviews with philosophers ("whereof we cannot
speak, thereof we must be silent" in spades), controlling two 'bots
that are overhauling the museum plumbing and air-recycling system, and
he's busy discussing observations of the alien artifact orbiting the
brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/[-56] with Aineko. What's left of him
exhibits about as much social presence as a pickled cabbage.

The lift arrives and accepts a load of passengers. Sirhan is crowded
into one corner by a bubble of high-society laughter and an aromatic
puff of smoke from an improbable ivory cigarette holder as the lift
surges, racing up the sixty-meter shaft toward the observation deck at
the top of the Atomium. It's a ten-meter-diameter metal globe, spiral
staircases and escalators connecting it to the seven spheres at the
corners of an octahedron that make up the former centerpiece of the
1950 World's Fair. Unlike most of the rest of Brussels, it's the
original bits and atoms, bent alloy structures from before the space
age shipped out to Saturn at enormous expense. The lift arrives with a
slight jerk. "Excuse me," squeaks one of the good-time girls as she
lurches backward, elbowing Sirhan.

He blinks, barely noticing her black bob of hair, chromatophore-tinted
shadows artfully tuned around her eyes: "Nothing to excuse." In the
background, Aineko is droning on sarcastically about the lack of
interest the crew of the Field Circus exhibited in the cat's effort to
decompile their hitchhiker, the Slug. It's distracting as hell, but
Sirhan feels a desperate urge to understand what happened out there.
It's the key to understanding his not-mother's obsessions and
weaknesses - which, he senses, will be important in the times to come.

He evades the gaggle of overdressed good-time girls and steps out onto
the lower of the two stainless-steel decks that bisect the sphere.
Accepting a fruit cocktail from a discreetly humaniform waitron, he
strolls toward a row of triangular windows that gaze out across the
arena toward the American Pavilion and the World Village. The metal
walls are braced with turquoise-painted girders, and the perspex
transparencies are fogged with age. He can barely see the
one-tenth-scale model of an atomic-powered ocean liner leaving the
pier below, or the eight-engined giant seaplane beside it. "They never
once asked me if the Slug had attempted to map itself into the
human-compatible spaces aboard the ship," Aineko bitches at him. "I
wasn't expecting them to, but really! Your mother's too trusting,
boy."

"I suppose you took precautions?" Sirhan's ghost murmurs to the cat.
That sets the irascible metafeline off again on a long discursive
tail-washing rant about the unreliability of Economics-2.0-compliant
financial instruments. Economics 2.0 apparently replaces the
single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the
multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of
insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the
parameterized desires and subjective experiential values of the
players, and as far as the cat is concerned, this makes all such
transactions intrinsically untrustworthy.

Which is why you're stuck here with us apes, Sirhan-prime cynically
notes as he spawns an Eliza ghost to carry on nodding at the cat while
he experiences the party.

It's uncomfortably warm in the Atomium sphere - not surprising, there
must be thirty people milling around up here, not counting the
waitrons - and several local multicast channels are playing a variety
of styles of music to synchronize the mood swings of the revelers to
hardcore techno, waltz, raga ...

"Having a good time, are we?" Sirhan breaks away from integrating one
of his timid philosophers and realizes that his glass is empty, and
his mother is grinning alarmingly at him over the rim of a cocktail
glass containing something that glows in the dark. She's wearing
spike-heeled boots and a black velvet cat suit that hugs her contours
like a second skin, and she's already getting drunk. In wall-clock
years she is younger than Sirhan; it's like having a bizarrely knowing
younger sister mysteriously injected into his life to replace the
eigenmother who stayed home and died with the Ring Imperium decades
ago. "Look at you, hiding in a corner at your grandfather's party!
Hey, your glass is empty. Want to try this caipirinha? There's someone
you've got to meet over here -"

It's at moments like this that Sirhan really wonders what in Jupiter's
orbit his father ever saw in this woman. (But then again, in the world
line this instance of her has returned from, he didn't. So what does
that signify?) "As long as there's no fermented grape juice in it," he
says resignedly, allowing himself to be led past a gaggle of
conversations and a mournful-looking gorilla slurping a long drink
through a straw. "More of your accelerationista allies?"

"Maybe not." It's the girl gang he avoided noticing in the lift, their
eyes sparkling, really getting into this early twen-cen drag party
thing, waving their cigarette holders and cocktail glasses around with
wild abandon. "Rita, I'd like you to meet Sirhan, my other fork's son.
Sirhan, this is Rita? She's an historian, too. Why don't you -"

Dark eyes, emphasized not by powder or paint, but by chromatophores
inside her skin cells: black hair, chain of enormous pearls, slim
black dress sweeping the floor, a look of mild embarrassment on her
heart-shaped face: She could be a clone of Audrey Hepburn in any other
century, "Didn't I just meet you in the elevator?" The embarrassment
shifts to her cheeks, becoming visible.

Sirhan flushes, unsure how to reply. Just then, an interloper arrives
on the scene, pushing in between them. "Are you the curator who
reorganized the Precambrian gallery along teleology lines? I've got
some things to say about that!" The interloper is tall, assertive, and
blonde. Sirhan hates her from the first sight of her wagging finger.

"Oh shut up, Marissa, this is a party, you've been being a pain all
evening." To his surprise, Rita the historian rounds on the interloper
angrily.

"It's not a problem," he manages to say. In the back of his mind,
something makes the Rogerian puppet-him that's listening to the cat
sit up and dump-merge a whole lump of fresh memories into his mind -
something important, something about the Vile Offspring sending a
starship to bring something back from the router - but the people
around him are soaking up so much attention that he has to file it for
later.

"Yes it is a problem," Rita declares. She points at the interloper,
who is saying something about the invalidity of teleological
interpretations, trying to justify herself, and says, "Plonk. Phew.
Where were we?"

Sirhan blinks. Suddenly everyone but him seems to be ignoring that
annoying Marissa person. "What just happened?" he asks cautiously.

"I killfiled her. Don't tell me, you aren't running Superplonk yet,
are you?" Rita flicks a location-cached idea at him and he takes it
cautiously, spawning a couple of specialized Turing Oracles to check
it for halting states. It seems to be some kind of optic lobe hack
that accesses a collaborative database of eigenfaces, with some sort
of side interface to Broca's region. "Share and enjoy,
confrontation-free parties."

"I've never seen -" Sirhan trails off as he loads the module
distractedly. (The cat is rambling on about god modules and metastatic
entanglement and the difficulty of arranging to have personalities
custom-grown to order somewhere in the back of his head, while his
fractional-self nods wisely whenever it pauses.) Something like an
inner eyelid descends. He looks round; there's a vague blob at one
side of the room, making an annoying buzzing sound. His mother seems
to be having an animated conversation with it. "That's rather
interesting."

"Yes, it helps no end at this sort of event." Rita startles him by
taking his left arm in hand - her cigarette holder shrivels and
condenses until it's no more than a slight thickening around the wrist
of her opera glove - and steers him toward a waitron. "I'm sorry about
your foot, earlier, I was a bit overloaded. Is Amber Macx really your
mother?"

"Not exactly, she's my eigenmother," he mumbles. "The reincarnated
download of the version who went out to Hyundai +4904/[-56] aboard the
Field Circus. She married a French-Algerian confidence-trick analyst
instead of my father, but I think they divorced a couple of years ago.
My real mother married an imam, but they died in the aftermath of
Economics 2.0." She seems to be steering him in the direction of the
window bay Amber dragged him away from earlier. "Why do you ask?"

"Because you're not very good at making small talk," Rita says
quietly, "and you don't seem very good in crowds. Is that right? Was
it you who performed that amazing dissection of Wittgenstein's
cognitive map? The one with the preverbal Gödel string in it?"

"It was -" He clears his throat. "You thought it was amazing?"
Suddenly, on impulse, he detaches a ghost to identify this Rita person
and find out who she is, what she wants. It's not normally worth the
effort to get to know someone more closely than casual small talk, but
she seems to have been digging into his background, and he wants to
know why. Along with the him that's chatting to Aineko, that makes
about three instances pulling in near-realtime resources. He'll be
running up an existential debt soon if he keeps forking ghosts like
this.

"I thought so," she says. There's a bench in front of the wall, and
somehow he finds himself sitting on it next to her. There's no danger,
we're not in private or anything, he tells himself stiffly. She's
smiling at him, face tilted slightly to one side and lips parted, and
for a moment, a dizzy sense of possibility washes over him: What if
she's about to throw all propriety aside? How undignified! Sirhan
believes in self-restraint and dignity. "I was really interested in
this -" She passes him another dynamically loadable blob, encompassing
a detailed critique of his analysis of Wittgenstein's matriophobia in
the context of gendered language constructs and nineteenth century
Viennese society, along with a hypothesis that leaves Sirhan gasping
with mild indignation at the very idea that he of all people might
share Wittgenstein's skewed outlook - "What do you think?" she asks,
grinning impishly at him.

"Nnngk." Sirhan tries to unswallow his tongue. Rita crosses her legs,
her gown hissing. "I, ah, that is to say" - At which moment, his
partials re-integrate, dumping a slew of positively pornographic
images into his memories. It's a trap! they shriek, her breasts and
hips and pubes - clean-shaven, he can't help noticing - thrusting at
him in hotly passionate abandon, Mother's trying to make you loose
like her! and he remembers what it would be like to wake up in bed
next to this woman whom he barely knows after being married to her for
a year, because one of his cognitive ghosts has just spent several
seconds of network time (or several subjective months) getting hot and
sweaty with a ghost of her own, and she does have interesting research
ideas, even if she's a pushy over-westernized woman who thinks she can
run his life for him. "What is this?" he splutters, his ears growing
hot and his garments constricting.

"Just speculating about possibilities. We could get a lot done
together." She snakes an arm round his shoulders and pulls him toward
her, gently. "Don't you want to find out if we could work out?"

"But, but -" Sirhan is steaming. Is she offering casual sex? He
wonders, profoundly embarrassed by his own inability to read her
signals: "What do you want?" he asks.

"You do know that you can do more with Superplonk than just killfile
annoying idiots?" she whispers in his ear. "We can be invisible right
now, if you like. It's great for confidential meetings - other things,
too. We can work beautifully together, our ghosts annealed really well
..."

Sirhan jumps up, his face stinging, and turns away: "No thank you!" he
snaps, angry at himself. "Goodbye!" His other instances, interrupted
by his broadcast emotional overload, are distracted from their tasks
and sputtering with indignation. Her hurt expression is too much for
him: The killfile snaps down, blurring her into an indistinct black
blob on the wall, veiled by his own brain as he turns and walks away,
seething with anger at his mother for being so unfair as to make him
behold his own face in the throes of fleshy passion.

* * *

Meanwhile, in one of the lower spheres, padded with silvery blue
insulating pillows bound together with duct tape, the movers and
shakers of the accelerationista faction are discussing their bid for
world power at fractional-C velocities.

"We can't outrun everything. For example, a collapse of the false
vacuum," Manfred insists, slightly uncoordinated and slurring his
vowels under the influence of the first glass of fruit punch he's
experienced in nigh-on twenty real-time years. His body is young and
still relatively featureless, hair still growing out, and he's
abandoned his old no-implants fetish at last to adopt an array of
interfaces that let him internalize all the exocortex processes that
he formerly ran on an array of dumb Turing machines outside his body.
He's standing on his own sense of style and is the only person in the
room who isn't wearing some variation of dinner jacket or classical
evening dress. "Entangled exchange via routers is all very well, but
it won't let us escape the universe itself - any phase change will
catch up eventually, the network must have an end. And then where will
we be, Sameena?"

"I'm not disputing that." The woman he's talking to, wearing a
green-and-gold sari and a medieval maharajah's ransom in gold and
natural diamonds, nods thoughtfully. "But it hasn't happened yet, and
we've got evidence that superhuman intelligences have been loose in
this universe for gigayears, so there's a fair bet that the worst
catastrophe scenarios are unlikely. And looking closer to home, we
don't know what the routers are for, or who made them. Until then ..."
She shrugs. "Look what happened last time somebody tried to probe
them. No offense intended."

"It's already happened. If what I hear is correct, the Vile Offspring
aren't nearly as negative about the idea of using the routers as we
old-fashioned metahumans might like to believe." Manfred frowns,
trying to recall some hazy anecdote - he's experimenting with a new
memory compression algorithm, necessitated by his pack rat mnemonic
habits when younger, and sometimes the whole universe feels as if it's
nearly on the tip of his tongue. "So, we seem to be in violent
agreement about the need to know more about what's going on, and to
find out what they're doing out there. We've got cosmic background
anisotropies caused by the waste heat from computing processes
millions of light-years across - it takes a big interstellar
civilization to do that, and they don't seem to have fallen into the
same rat trap as the local Matrioshka brain civilizations. And we've
got worrying rumors about the VO messing around with the structure of
space-time in order to find a way around the Beckenstein bound. If the
VO are trying that, then the folks out near the supercluster already
know the answers. The best way to find out what's happening is to go
and talk to whoever's responsible. Can we at least agree on that?"

"Probably not." Her eyes glitter with amusement. "It all depends on
whether one believes in these civilizations in the first place. I know
your people point to deep-field camera images going all the way back
to some wonky hubble-bubble scrying mirror from the late twentieth,
but we've got no evidence except some theories about the Casimir
effect and pair production and spinning beakers of helium-3 - much
less proof that whole bunch of alien galactic civilizations are trying
to collapse the false vacuum and destroy the universe!" Her voice
dropped a notch: "At least, not enough proof to convince most people,
Manny dear. I know this comes as a shock to you, but not everyone is a
neophiliac posthuman bodysurfer whose idea of a sabbatical is to spend
twenty years as a flock of tightly networked seagulls in order to try
and to prove the Turing Oracle thesis -"

"Not everyone is concerned with the deep future," Manfred interrupts.
"It's important! If we live or die, that doesn't matter - that's not
the big picture. The big question is whether information originating
in our light cone is preserved, or whether we're stuck in a lossy
medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It's downright
embarrassing to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of
curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all
personally! I mean, if there's going to come a time when there's
nobody or nothing to remember us then what does -"

"Manfred?"

He stops in midsentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly.

It's Amber, poised in black cat suit with cocktail glass. Her
expression is open and confused, appallingly vulnerable. Blue liquid
slops, almost spilling out of her glass - the rim barely extends
itself in time to catch the drops. Behind her stands Annette, a deeply
self-satisfied smile on her face.

"You." Amber pauses, her cheek twitching as bits of her mind page in
and out of her skull, polling external information sources. "You
really are -"

A hasty cloud materializes under her hand as her fingers relax,
dropping the glass.

"Uh." Manfred stares, at a complete loss for words. "I'd, uh." After a
moment he looks down. "I'm sorry. I'll get you another drink ..?"

"Why didn't someone warn me?" Amber complains.

"We thought you could use the good advice," Annette stated into the
awkward silence. "And a family reunion. It was meant to be a
surprise."

"A surprise." Amber looks perplexed. "You could say that."

"You're taller than I was expecting," Manfred says unexpectedly.
"People look different when you're not using human eyes."

"Yeah?" She looks at him, and he turns his head slightly, facing her.
It's a historic moment, and Annette is getting it all on memory
diamond, from every angle. The family's dirty little secret is that
Amber and her father have never met, not face-to-face in physical
meat-machine proximity. She was born years after Manfred and Pamela
separated, after all, decanted prefertilized from a tank of liquid
nitrogen. This is the first time either of them have actually seen the
other's face without electronic intermediation. And while they've said
everything that needed to be said on a businesslike level, anthropoid
family politics is still very much a matter of body language and
pheromones. "How long have you been out and about?" she asks, trying
to disguise her confusion.

"About six hours." Manfred manages a rueful chuckle, trying to take
the sight of her in all at once. "Let's get you another drink and put
our heads together?"

"Okay." Amber takes a deep breath and glares at Annette. "You set this
up, you clean up the mess."

Annette just stands there smiling at the confusion of her
accomplishment.

* * *

The cold light of dawn finds Sirhan angry, sober, and ready to pick a
fight with the first person who comes through the door of his office.
The room is about ten meters across, with a floor of polished marble
and skylights in the intricately plastered ceiling. The walkthrough of
his current project sprouts in the middle of the floor like a ghostly
abstract cauliflower, fractal branches dwindling down to infolded
nodes tagged with compressed identifiers. The branches expand and
shrink as Sirhan paces around it, zooming to readability in response
to his eyeball dynamics. But he isn't paying it much attention. He's
too disturbed, uncertain, trying to work out whom to blame. Which is
why, when the door bangs open, his first response is to whirl angrily
and open his mouth - then stop. "What do you want?" he demands.

"A word, if you please?" Annette looks around distractedly. "This is
your project?"

"Yes," he says icily, and banishes the walkthrough with a wave of one
hand. "What do you want?"

"I'm not sure." Annette pauses. For a moment she looks weary, tired
beyond mortal words, and Sirhan momentarily wonders if perhaps he's
spreading the blame too far. This ninetysomething Frenchwoman who is
no blood relative, who was in years past the love of his
scatterbrained grandfather's life, seems the least likely person to be
trying to manipulate him, at least in such an unwelcome and intimate
manner. But there's no telling. Families are strange things, and even
though the current instantiations of his father and mother aren't the
ones who ran his pre-adolescent brain through a couple of dozen
alternative lifelines before he was ten, he can't be sure - or that
they wouldn't enlist Tante Annette's assistance in fucking with his
mind. "We need to talk about your mother," she continues.

"We do, do we?" Sirhan turns around and sees the vacancy of the room
for what it is, a socket, like a pulled tooth, informed as much by
what is absent as by what is present. He snaps his fingers, and an
intricate bench of translucent bluish utility fog congeals out of the
air behind him. He sits: Annette can do what she wants.

"Oui." She thrusts her hands deep into the pocket of the peasant smock
she's wearing - a major departure from her normal style - and leans
against the wall. Physically, she looks young enough to have spent her
entire life blitzing around the galaxy at three nines of lightspeed,
but her posture is world-weary and ancient. History is a foreign
country, and the old are unwilling emigrants, tired out by the
constant travel. "Your mother, she has taken on a huge job, but it's
one that needs doing. You agreed it needed doing, years ago, with the
archive store. She is now trying to get it moving, that is what the
campaign is about, to place before the electors a choice of how best
to move an entire civilization. So I ask, why do you obstruct her?"

Sirhan works his jaw; he feels like spitting. "Why?" he snaps.

"Yes. Why?" Annette gives in and magics up a chair from the swirling
fogbank beneath the ceiling. She crouches in it, staring at him. "It
is a question."

"I have nothing against her political machinations," Sirhan says
tensely. "But her uninvited interference in my personal life -"

"What interference?"

He stares. "Is that a question?" He's silent for a moment. Then:
"Throwing that wanton at me last night -"

Annette stares at him. "Who? What are you talking about?"

"That, that loose woman!" Sirhan is reduced to spluttering. "False
pretenses! If this is one of Father's matchmaking ideas, it is so very
wrong that -"

Annette is shaking her head. "Are you crazy? Your mother simply wanted
you to meet her campaign team, to join in planning the policy. Your
father is not on this planet! But you stormed out, you really upset
Rita, did you know that? Rita, she is the best belief maintenance and
story construction operative I have! Yet you to tears reduce her. What
is wrong with you?"

"I -" Sirhan swallows. "She's what?" he asks again, his mouth dry. "I
thought ..." He trails off. He doesn't want to say what he thought.
The hussy, that brazen trollop, is part of his mother's campaign
party? Not some plot to lure him into corruption? What if it was all a
horrible misunderstanding?

"I think you need to apologize to someone," Annette says coolly,
standing up. Sirhan's head is spinning between a dozen dialogues of
actors and ghosts, a journal of the party replaying before his
ghast-stricken inner gaze. Even the walls have begun to flicker,
responding to his intense unease. Annette skewers him with a disgusted
look: "When you can a woman behave toward as a person, not a threat,
we can again talk. Until then." And she stands up and walks out of the
room, leaving him to contemplate the shattered stump of his anger, so
startled he can barely concentrate on his project, thinking, Is that
really me? Is that what I look like to her? as the cladistic graph
slowly rotates before him, denuded branches spread wide, waiting to be
filled with the nodes of the alien interstellar network just as soon
as he can convince Aineko to stake him the price of the depth-first
tour of darkness.