"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.