"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."