A novel by Charles Stross Copyright ? Charles Stross, 2005

Chapter 9: Survivor

This time, more than a double handful of years passes between successive visits to the Macx dynasty.

Somewhere in the gas-sprinkled darkness beyond the local void, carbon-based life stirs. A cylinder of diamond fifty kilometers long spins in the darkness, its surface etched with strange quantum wells that emulate exotic atoms not found in any periodic table that Mendeleyev would have recognized. Within it, walls hold kilotonnes of oxygen and nitrogen gas, megatonnes of life-infested soil. A hundred trillion kilometers from the wreckage of Earth, the cylinder glitters like a gem in the darkness.

Welcome to New Japan: one of the places between the stars where human beings hang out, now that the solar system is off-limits to meatbodies.

I wonder who we'll find here?

* * *

There's an open plaza in one of the terraform sectors of the habitat cylinder. A huge gong hangs from a beautifully painted wooden frame at one side of the square, which is paved with weathered limestone slabs made of atoms ripped from a planet that has never seen molten ice. Houses stand around, and open-fronted huts where a variety of humanoid waitrons attend to food and beverages for the passing realfolk. A group of prepubescent children are playing hunt-and-seek with their big-eyed pet companions, brandishing makeshift spears and automatic rifles ? there's no pain here, for bodies are fungible, rebuilt in a minute by the assembler/disassembler gates in every room. There are few adults hereabouts, for Red Plaza is unfashionable at present, and the kids have claimed it for their own as a playground. They're all genuinely young, symptoms of a demographic demiurge, not a single wendypan among them.

A skinny boy with nut brown skin, a mop of black hair, and three arms is patiently stalking a worried-looking blue eeyore around the corner of the square. He's passing a stand stacked with fresh sushi rolls when the strange beast squirms out from beneath a wheelbarrow and arches its back, stretching luxuriously.

The boy, Manni, freezes, hands tensing around his spear as he focuses on the new target. (The blue eeyore flicks its tail at him and darts for safety across a lichen-encrusted slab.) "City, what's that?" he asks without moving his lips.

"What are you looking at?" replies City, which puzzles him somewhat, but not as much as it should.

The beast finishes stretching one front leg and extends another. It looks a bit like a pussycat to Manni, but there's something subtly wrong with it. Its head is a little too small, the eyes likewise ? and those paws ? "You're sharp," he accuses the beast, forehead wrinkling in disapproval.

"Yeah, whatever." The creature yawns, and Manni points his spear at it, clenching the shaft in both right hands. It's got sharp teeth, too, but it spoke to him via his inner hearing, not his ears. Innerspeech is for people, not toys.

"Who are you?" he demands.

The beast looks at him insolently. "I know your parents," it says, still using innerspeech. "You're Manni Macx, aren't you? Thought so. I want you to take me to your father."

"No!" Manni jumps up and waves his arms at it. "I don't like you! Go away!" He pokes his spear in the direction of the beast's nose.

"I'll go away when you take me to your father," says the beast. It raises its tail like a pussycat, and the fur bushes out, but then it pauses. "If you take me to your father I'll tell you a story afterward, how about that?"

"Don't care!" Manni is only about two hundred megaseconds old ? seven old Earth-years ? but he can tell when he's being manipulated and gets truculent.

"Kids." The cat-thing's tail lashes from side to side. "Okay, Manni, how about you take me to your father, or I rip your face off? I've got claws, you know." A brief eyeblink later, it's wrapping itself around his ankles sinuously, purring to give the lie to its unreliable threat ? but he can see that it's got sharp nails all right. It's a wild pussycat-thing, and nothing in his artificially preserved orthohuman upbringing has prepared him for dealing with a real wild pussycat-thing that talks.

"Get away!" Manni is worried. "Mom!" he hollers, unintentionally triggering the broadcast flag in his innerspeech. "There's this thing ?"

"Mom will do." The cat-thing sounds resigned. It stops rubbing against Manni's legs and looks up at him. "There's no need to panic. I won't hurt you."

Manni stops hollering. "Who're you?" he asks at last, staring at the beast. Somewhere light-years away, an adult has heard his cry; his mother is coming fast, bouncing between switches and glancing off folded dimensions in a headlong rush toward him.

"I'm Aineko." The beast sits down and begins to wash behind one hind leg. "And you're Manni, right?"

"Aineko," Manni says uncertainly. "Do you know Lis or Bill?"

Aineko the cat-thing pauses in his washing routine and looks at Manni, head cocked to one side. Manni is too young, too inexperienced to know that Aineko's proportions are those of a domestic cat, Feliscatus, a naturally evolved animal rather than the toys and palimpsests and companionables he's used to. Reality may be fashionable with his parents' generation, but there are limits, after all. Orange-and-brown stripes and whorls decorate Aineko's fur, and he sprouts a white fluffy bib beneath his chin. "Who are Lis and Bill?"

"Them," says Manni, as big, sullen-faced Bill creeps up behind Aineko and tries to grab his tail while Lis floats behind his shoulder like a pint-sized UFO, buzzing excitedly. But Aineko is too fast for the kids and scampers round Manni's feet like a hairy missile. Manni whoops and tries to spear the pussycat-thing, but his spear turns to blue glass, crackles, and shards of brilliant snow rain down, burning his hands.

"Now that wasn't very friendly, was it?" says Aineko, a menacing note in his voice. "Didn't your mother teach you not to ?"

The door in the side of the sushi stall opens as Rita arrives, breathless and angry: "Manni! What have I told you about playing ?"

She stops, seeing Aineko. "You." She recoils in barely concealed fright. Unlike Manni, she recognizes it as the avatar of a posthuman demiurge, a body incarnated solely to provide a point of personal interaction for people to focus on.

The cat grins back at her. "Me," he agrees. "Ready to talk?"

She looks stricken. "We've got nothing to talk about."

Aineko lashes his tail. "Oh, but we do." The cat turns and looks pointedly at Manni. "Don't we?"

* * *

It has been a long time since Aineko passed this way, and in the meantime the space around Hyundai ⁺⁴⁹⁰⁴/ _-56 has changed out of all recognition. Back when the great lobster-built starships swept out of Sol's Oort cloud, archiving the raw frozen data of the unoccupied brown dwarf halo systems and seeding their structured excrement with programmable matter, there was nothing but random dead atoms hereabouts (and an alien router). But that was a long time ago; and since then, the brown dwarf system has succumbed to an anthropic infestation.

An unoptimized instance of H. sapiens maintains state coherency for only two to three gigaseconds before it succumbs to necrosis. But in only about ten gigaseconds, the infestation has turned the dead brown dwarf system upside down. They strip-mined the chilly planets to make environments suitable for their own variety of carbon life. They rearranged moons, building massive structures the size of asteroids. They ripped wormhole endpoints free of the routers and turned them into their own crude point-to-point network, learned how to generate new wormholes, then ran their own packet-switched polities over them. Wormhole traffic now supports an ever-expanding mesh of interstellar human commerce, but always in the darkness between the lit stars and the strange, metal-depleted dwarfs with the suspiciously low-entropy radiation. The sheer temerity of the project is mind-boggling: notwithstanding that canned apes are simply notsuited to life in the interstellar void, especially in orbit around a brown dwarf whose planets make Pluto seem like a tropical paradise, they've taken over the whole damn system.

New Japan is one of the newer human polities in this system, a bunch of nodes physically collocated in the humaniformed spaces of the colony cylinders. Its designers evidently only knew about old Nippon from recordings made back before Earth was dismantled, and worked from a combination of nostalgia-trip videos, Miyazaki movies, and anime culture. Nevertheless, it's the home of numerous human beings ? even if they are about as similar to their historical antecedents as New Japan is to its long-gone namesake.

Humanity?

Their grandparents would recognize them, mostly. The ones who are truly beyond the ken of twentieth-century survivors stayed back home in the red-hot clouds of nanocomputers that have replaced the planets that once orbited Earth's sun in stately Copernican harmony. The fast-thinking Matrioshka brains are as incomprehensible to their merely posthuman ancestors as an ICBM to an amoeba ? and about as inhabitable. Space is dusted with the corpses of Matrioshka brains that have long since burned out, informational collapse taking down entire civilizations that stayed in close orbit around their home stars. Farther away, galaxy-sized intelligences beat incomprehensible rhythms against the darkness of the vacuum, trying to hack the Planck substrate into doing their bidding. Posthumans, and the few other semitranscended species to have discovered the router network, live furtively in the darkness between these islands of brilliance. There are, it would seem, advantages to not being too intelligent.

Humanity. Monadic intelligences, mostly trapped within their own skulls, living in small family groups within larger tribal networks, adaptable to territorial or migratory lifestyles. Those were the options on offer before the great acceleration. Now that dumb matter thinks, with every kilogram of wallpaper potentially hosting hundreds of uploaded ancestors, now that every door is potentially a wormhole to a hab half a parsec away, the humans can stay in the same place while the landscape migrates and mutates past them, streaming into the luxurious void of their personal history. Life is rich here, endlessly varied and sometimes confusing. So it is that tribal groups remain, their associations mediated across teraklicks and gigaseconds by exotic agencies. And sometimes the agencies will vanish for a while, reappearing later like an unexpected jape upon the infinite.

* * *

Ancestor worship takes on a whole new meaning when the state vectors of all the filial entities' precursors are archived and indexed for recall. At just the moment that the tiny capillaries in Rita's face are constricting in response to a surge of adrenaline, causing her to turn pale and her pupils to dilate as she focuses on the pussycat-thing, Sirhan is kneeling before a small shrine, lighting a stick of incense, and preparing to respectfully address his grandfather's ghost.

The ritual is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. Sirhan can speak to his grandfather's ghost wherever and whenever he wants, without any formality, and the ghost will reply at interminable length, cracking puns in dead languages and asking about people who died before the temple of history was established. But Sirhan is a sucker for rituals, and anyway, it helps him structure an otherwise-stressful encounter.

If it were up to Sirhan, he'd probably skip chatting to grandfather every ten megaseconds. Sirhan's mother and her partner aren't available, having opted to join one of the long-distance exploration missions through the router network that were launched by the accelerationistas long ago; and Rita's antecedents are either fully virtualized or dead. They are a family with a tenuous grip on history. But both of them spent a long time in the same state of half-life in which Manfred currently exists, and he knows his wife will take him to task if he doesn't bring the revered ancestor up to date on what's been happening in the real world while he's been dead. In Manfred's case, death is not only potentially reversible, but almost inevitably so. After all, they're raising his clone. Sooner or later, the kid is going to want to visit the original, or vice versa.

What a state we have come to,whentherestlessdeadrefusetostayapartofhistory? He wonders ironically as he scratches the self-igniter strip on the red incense stick and bows to the mirror at the back of the shrine. "Your respectful grandson awaits and expects your guidance," he intones formally ? for in addition to being conservative by nature, Sirhan is acutely aware of his family's relative poverty and the need to augment their social credit, and in this reincarnation-intermediated traditionalist polity for the hopelessly orthohuman, you can score credit for formality. He sits back on his heels to await the response.

Manfred doesn't take long to appear in the depths of the mirror. He takes the shape of an albino orang-utan, as usual: He was messing around with Great Aunt Annette's ontological wardrobe right before this copy of him was recorded and placed in the temple - they might have separated, but they remained close. "Hi, lad. What year is it?"

Sirhan suppresses a sigh. "We don't do years anymore," he explains, not for the first time. Every time he consults his grandfather, the new instance asks this question sooner or later. "Years are an archaism. It's been ten megs since we last spoke ? about four months, if you're going to be pedantic about it, and a hundred and eighty years since we emigrated. Although correcting for general relativity adds another decade or so."

"Oh. Is that all?" Manfred manages to look disappointed. This is a new one on Sirhan: Usually the diverging state vector of Gramps's ghost asks after Amber or cracks a feeble joke at this point. "No changes in the Hubble constant, or the rate of stellar formation? Have we heard from any of the exploration eigenselves yet?"

"Nope." Sirhan relaxes slightly. So Manfred is goingto ask about the fool's errand to the edge of the Beckensteinlimit again, is he? That's canned conversation numbertwenty-nine. (Amber and the other explorers who set out for thereally long exploration mission shortly after the first colonywas settled aren't due back for, oh, about 10¹⁹ seconds. It's a long way to the edge of the observable universe, even when you can go the first several hundred million light-years ? to the B?otes supercluster and beyond ? via a small-world network of wormholes. And this time, she didn't leave any copies of herself behind.)

Sirhan ? either in this or some other incarnation ? has had this talk with Manfred many times before, because that's the essence of the dead. They don't remember from one recall session to the next, unless and until they ask to be resurrected because their restoration criteria have been matched. Manfred has been dead a long time, long enough for Sirhan and Rita to be resurrected and live a long family life three or four times over after they had spent a century or so in nonexistence. "We've received no notices from the lobsters, nothing from Aineko either." He takes a deep breath. "You always ask me where we are next, so I've got a canned response for you ?" and one of his agents throws the package, tagged as a scroll sealed with red wax and a silk ribbon, through the surface of the mirror. (After the tenth repetition Rita and Sirhan agreed to write a basic briefing that the Manfred-ghosts could use to orient themselves.)

Manfred is silent for a moment ? probably hours in ghost-space ? as he assimilates the changes. Then: "This is true? I've slept through a whole civilization?"

"Not slept, you've been dead," Sirhan says pedantically. He realizes he's being a bit harsh: "Actually, so did we," he adds. "We surfed the first three gigasecs or so because we wanted to start a family somewhere where our children could grow up the traditional way. Habs with an oxidation-intensive triple-point water environment didn't get built until sometime after the beginning of the exile. That's when the fad for neomorphism got entrenched," he adds with distaste. For quite a while the neos resisted the idea of wasting resources building colony cylinders spinning to provide vertebrate-friendly gee forces and breathable oxygen-rich atmospheres ? it had been quite a political football. But the increasing curve of wealth production had allowed the orthodox to reincarnate from death-sleep after a few decades, once the fundamental headaches of building settlements in chilly orbits around metal-deficient brown dwarfs were overcome.

"Uh." Manfred takes a deep breath, then scratches himself under one armpit, rubbery lips puckering. "So, let me get this straight: We ? you, they, whoever ? hit the router at Hyundai ⁺⁴⁹⁰⁴/ _-56, replicated a load of them, and now use the wormhole mechanism the routers rely on as point-to-point gates for physical transport? And have spread throughout a bunch of brown dwarf systems, and built a pure deep-space polity based on big cylinder habitats connected by teleport gates hacked out of routers?"

"Would you trust one of the original routers for switched data communications?" Sirhan asks rhetorically. "Even with the source code? They've been corrupted by all the dead alien Matrioshka civilizations they've come into contact with, but they're reasonably safe if all you want to use them for is to cannibalize them for wormholes and tunnel dumb mass from point to point." He searches for a metaphor: "Like using your, uh, internet, to emulate a nineteenth-century postal service."

"O-kay." Manfred looks thoughtful, as he usually does at this point in the conversation ? which means Sirhan is going to have to break it to him that his first thoughts for how to utilize the gates have already been done. They're hopelessly old hat. In fact, the main reason why Manfred is still dead is that things have moved on so far that, sooner or later, whenever he surfaces for a chat, he gets frustrated and elects not to be reincarnated. Not that Sirhan is about to tell him that he's obsolete ? that would be rude, not to say subtly inaccurate. "That raises some interesting possibilities. I wonder, has anyone ?"

"Sirhan,Ineedyou!"

The crystal chill of Rita's alarm and fear cuts through Sirhan's awareness like a scalpel, distracting him from the ghost of his ancestor. He blinks, instantly transferring the full focus of his attention to Rita without sparing Manfred even a ghost.

"What'shappening?"

He sees through Rita's eyes: a cat with an orange-and-brown swirl on its flank sits purring beside Manni in the family room of their dwelling. Its eyes are narrowed as it watches her with unnatural wisdom. Manni is running fingers through its fur and seems none the worse for wear, but Sirhan still feels his fists clench.

"What ?"

"Excuse me," he says, standing up: "Got to go. Your bloody cat's turned up." He adds "cominghomenow" for Rita's benefit, then turns and hurries out of the temple concourse. When he reaches the main hall, he pauses, then Rita's sense of urgency returns to him, and he throws parsimony to the wind, stepping into a priority gate in order to get home as fast as possible.

Behind him, Manfred's melancholy ghost snorts, mildly offended, and considers the existential choice: to be, or not to be. Then he makes a decision.

* * *

Welcome to the twenty-third century, or the twenty-fourth. Or maybe it's the twenty-second, jet-lagged and dazed by spurious suspended animation and relativistic travel; it hardly matters these days. What's left of recognizable humanity has scattered across a hundred light-years, living in hollowed-out asteroids and cylindrical spinning habitats strung in orbit around cold brown dwarf stars and sunless planets that wander the interstellar void. The looted mechanisms underlying the alien routers have been cannibalized, simplified to a level the merely superhuman can almost comprehend, turned into generators for paired wormhole endpoints that allow instantaneous switched transport across vast distances. Other mechanisms, the descendants of the advanced nanotechnologies developed by the flowering of human techgnosis in the twenty-first century, have made the replication of dumb matter trivial; this is not a society accustomed to scarcity.

But in some respects, New Japan and the Invisible Empire and the other polities of human space are poverty-stricken backwaters. They take no part in the higher-order economies of the posthuman. They can barely comprehend the idle muttering of the Vile Offspring, whose mass/energy budget (derived from their complete restructuring of the free matter of humanity's original solar system into computronium) dwarfs that of half a hundred human-occupied brown dwarf systems. And they still know worryingly little about the deep history of intelligence in this universe, about the origins of the router network that laces so many dead civilizations into an embrace of death and decay, about the distant galaxy-scale bursts of information processing that lie at measurable red-shift distances, even about the free posthumans who live among them in some senses, collocated in the same light cone as these living fossil relics of old-fashioned humanity.

Sirhan and Rita settled in this charming human-friendly backwater in order to raise a family, study xenoarchaeology, and avoid the turmoil and turbulence that have characterized his family's history across the last couple of generations. Life has been comfortable for the most part, and if the stipend of an academic nucleofamilial is not large, it is sufficient in this place and age to provide all the necessary comforts of civilization. And this suits Sirhan (and Rita) fine; the turbulent lives of their entrepreneurial ancestors led to grief and angst and adventures, and as Sirhan is fond of observing, an adventure is something horrible that happens to someone else.

Only ...

Aineko is back. Aineko, who after negotiating the establishment of the earliest of the refugee habs in orbit around Hyundai ⁺⁴⁹⁰⁴/ _-56, vanished into the router network with Manfred's other instance ? and the partial copies of Sirhan and Rita who had forked, seeking adventure rather than cozy domesticity. Sirhan made a devil's bargain with Aineko, all those gigaseconds ago, and now he is deathly afraid that Aineko is going to call the payment due.

* * *

Manfred walks down a hall of mirrors. At the far end, he emerges in a public space modeled on a Menger sponge ? a cube diced subtractively into ever-smaller cubic volumes until its surface area tends toward infinity. This being meatspace, or a reasonable simulation thereof, it isn't a real Menger sponge; but it looks good at a distance, going down at least four levels.

He pauses behind a waist-high diamond barrier and looks down into the almost-tesseract-shaped depths of the cube's interior, at a verdant garden landscape with charming footbridges that cross streams laid out with careful attention to the requirements of feng shui. He looks up: Some of the cube-shaped subtractive openings within the pseudofractal structure are occupied by windows belonging to dwellings or shared buildings that overlook the public space. High above, butterfly-shaped beings with exotic colored wings circle in the ventilation currents. It's hard to tell from down here, but the central cuboid opening looks to be at least half a kilometer on a side, and they might very well be posthumans with low-gee wings ? angels.

Angels,orratsinthewalls? he asks himself, and sighs. Half his extensions are off-line, so hopelessly obsolete that the temple's assembler systems didn't bother replicating them, or even creating emulation environments for them to run in. The rest ... well, at least he's still physically orthohuman, he realizes. Fully functional, fully male. Noteverythinghaschanged?onlytheimportantstuff. It's a scary-funny thought, laden with irony. Here he is, naked as the day he was born ? newly re-created, in fact, released from the wake-experience-reset cycle of the temple of history ? standing on the threshold of a posthuman civilization so outrageously rich and powerful that they can build mammal-friendly habitats that resemble works of art in the cryogenic depths of space. Only he's poor, this whole polity is poor, and it can't ever be anything else, in fact, because it's a dumping ground for merely posthuman also-rans, the singularitarian equivalent of australopithecines. In the brave new world of the Vile Offspring, they can't get ahead any more than a protohominid could hack it as a rocket scientist in Werner von Braun's day. They're born to be primitive, wallowing happily in the mud-bath of their own limited cognitive bandwidth. So they fled into the darkness and built a civilization so bright it can put anything earthbound that came before the singularity into the shade ... and it's still a shanty town inhabited by the mentally handicapped.