Accelerando (54 page)

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 twentieth 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.