He does a slow dissolve into thin air, leaving Pierre alone in the bar with the cat.
"How much longer do we have to put up with this shit?" he asks aloud. Tempers are frayed, and arguments proliferate indefinitely in the pocket universe of the ship.
The cat doesn't look round. "In our current reference frame, we drop the primary reflector and start decelerating in another two million seconds," she says. "Back home, five or six megaseconds."
"That's a big gap. What's the cultural delta up to now?" Pierre asks idly. He snaps his fingers: "Waiter, another cocktail. The same, if you please."
"Oh, probably about ten to twenty times our departure reference," says the cat. "If you'd been following the news from back home, you'd have noted a significant speed-up in the deployment of switched entanglement routers. They're having another networking revolution, only this one will run to completion inside a month because they're using dark fiber that's already in the ground."
"Switched … entanglement?" Pierre shakes his head, bemused. The waiter, a faceless body in black tie and a long, starched apron, walks around the bar and offers him a glass. "That almost sounds as if it makes sense. What else?"
The cat rolls over on her flank, stretches, claws extended. "Stroke me, and I might tell you," she suggests.
"Fuck you, and the dog you rode in on," Pierre replies. He lifts his glass, removes a glacé cherry on a cocktail stick, throws it toward the spiral staircase that leads down to the toilets, and chugs back half of the drink in one go – freezing pink slush with an afterbite of caramelized hexose sugars and ethanol. The near spillage as he thumps the glass down serves to demonstrate that he's teetering on the edge of drunkenness. "Mercenary!"
"Lovesick drug-using human," the cat replies without rancor, and rolls to her feet. She arches her back and yawns, baring ivory fangs at the world. "You apes – if I cared about you, I'd have to kick sand over you." For a moment she looks faintly confused. "I mean, I would bury you." She stretches again and glances round the otherwise-empty bar. "By the way, when are you going to apologize to Amber?"
"I'm not going to fucking apologize to her!" Pierre shouts. In the ensuing silence and confusion, he raises his glass and tries to drain it, but the ice has all sunk to the bottom, and the resulting coughing fit makes him spray half of the cocktail across the table. "No way," he rasps quietly.
"Too much pride, huh?" The cat stalks toward the edge of the bar, tail held high with tip bent over in a feline question mark. "Like Boris with his adolescent woman trouble, too? You primates are so predictable. Whoever thought of sending a starship crewed by posthuman adolescents —"
"Go 'way," says Pierre: "I've got serious drinking to do."
"To the Macx, I suppose," puns the cat, turning away. But the moody youth has no answer for her, other than to conjure a refill from the vasty deeps.
Meanwhile, in another partition of the Field Circus 's reticulated reality, a different instance of the selfsame cat – Aineko by name, sarcastic by disposition – is talking to its former owner's daughter, the Queen of the Ring Imperium. Amber's avatar looks about sixteen, with disheveled blonde hair and enhanced cheekbones. It's a lie, of course, because in subjective life experience, she's in her mid-twenties, but apparent age signifies little in a simulation space populated by upload minds, or in real space, where post-humans age at different rates.
Amber wears a tattered black dress over iridescent purple leggings, and sprawls lazily across the arms of her informal throne – an ostentatious lump of nonsense manufactured from a single carbon crystal doped with semiconductors. (Unlike the real thing back home in Jupiter orbit, this one is merely a piece of furniture for a virtual environment.) The scene is very much the morning after the evening before, like a goth nightclub gone to seed: all stale smoke and crumpled velvet, wooden church pews, burned-out candles, and gloomy Polish avant-garde paintings. Any hint of a regal statement the queen might be making is spoiled by the way she's hooked one knee over the left arm of the throne and is fiddling with a six-axis pointing device. But these are her private quarters, and she's off duty: The regal person of the Queen is strictly for formal, corporate occasions.
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," she suggests.
"Nope," replies the cat. "It was more like: 'Greetings, earthlings, compile me on your leader.'"
"Well, you got me there," Amber admits. She taps her heel on the throne and fidgets with her signet ring. "No damn way I'm loading some buggy alien wetware on my sweet gray stuff. Weird semiotics, too. What does Dr. Khurasani say?"
Aineko sits down in the middle of the crimson carpet at the foot of the dais and idly twists round to sniff her crotch. "Sadeq is immersed in scriptural interpretations. He refused to be drawn."
"Huh." Amber stares at the cat. "So. You've been carrying this lump of source code since when …?"
"At the signal, for precisely two hundred and sixteen million, four hundred and twenty-nine thousand, and fifty-two seconds," Aineko supplies, then beeps smugly. "Call it just under six years."
"Right." Amber squeezes her eyes shut. Uneasy possibilities whisper in her mind's ears. "And it began talking to you —"
"– About three million seconds after I picked it up and ran it on a basic environment hosted on a neural network emulator modeled on the components found in the stomatogastric ganglion of a spiny lobster. Clear?"
Amber sighs. "I wish you'd told Dad about it. Or Annette. Things could have been so different!"
"How?" The cat stops licking her arse and looks up at the queen with a peculiarly opaque stare. "It took the specialists a decade to figure out the first message was a map of the pulsar neighborhood with directions to the nearest router on the interstellar network. Knowing how to plug into the router wouldn't help while it was three light-years away, would it? Besides, it was fun watching the idiots trying to 'crack the alien code' without ever wondering if it might be a reply in a language we already know to a message we sent out years ago. Fuckwits. And, too, Manfred pissed me off once too often. He kept treating me like a goddamn house pet."
"But you —" Amber bites her lip. But you were, when he bought you , she had been about to say. Engineered consciousness is still relatively new: It didn't exist when Manfred and Pamela first hacked on Aineko's cognitive network, and according to the flat-earth wing of the AI community, it still doesn't. Even she hadn't really believed Aineko's claims to self-awareness until a couple of years ago, finding it easier to think of the cat as a zimboe – a zombie with no self-awareness, but programmed to claim to be aware in an attempt to deceive the truly conscious beings around it. "I know you're conscious now, but Manfred didn't know back then. Did he?"
Aineko glares at her, then slowly narrows her eyes to slits – either feline affection, or a more subtle gesture. Sometimes Amber finds it hard to believe that, twenty five years ago, Aineko started out as a crude neural network driven toy from a Far Eastern amusement factory – upgradeable, but still basically a mechanical animal emulator.
"I'm sorry. Let me start again. You actually figured out what the second alien packet was, you, yourself, and nobody else. Despite the combined efforts of the entire CETI analysis team who spent Gaia knows how many human-equivalent years of processing power trying to crack its semantics. I hope you'll pardon me for saying I find that hard to believe?"
The cat yawns. "I could have told Pierre instead." Aineko glances at Amber, sees her thunderous expression, and hastily changes the subject: "The solution was intuitively obvious, just not to humans. You're so verbal." Lifting a hind paw, she scratches behind her left ear for a moment then pauses, foot waving absentmindedly. "Besides, the CETI team was searching under the street lights while I was sniffing around in the grass. They kept trying to find primes; when that didn't work, they started trying to breed a Turing machine that would run it without immediately halting." Aineko lowers her paw daintily. "None of them tried treating it as a map of a connectionist system based on the only terrestrial components anyone had ever beamed out into deep space. Except me. But then, your mother had a hand in my wetware, too."