Rita looks vacant for a moment. "Is that a question?" she asks. Amber nods, and she shakes her head. "Then I'd have to say that I don't know. The evidence is inconclusive, so far. But I'm not really happy. The Offspring won't tell us what they want, but there's no reason to believe they don't know what we want. I mean, they can think rings round us, can't they?"
Amber shrugs, then pauses to unlatch a hedge gate that gives admission to a maze of sweet-smelling shrubs. "I really don't know. They may not care about us, or even remember we exist – the resimulants may be being generated by some autonomic mechanism, not really part of the higher consciousness of the Offspring. Or it may be some whacked-out post-Tiplerite meme that's gotten hold of more processing resources than the entire presingularity Net, some kind of MetaMormon project directed at ensuring that everyone who can possibly ever have lived lives in the right way to fit some weird quasi-religious requirement we don't know about. Or it might be a message we're simply not smart enough to decode. That's the trouble, we don't know."
She vanishes around the curve of the maze. Rita hurries to catch up, sees her about to turn into another alleyway, and leaps after her. "What else?" she pants.
"Could be" – left turn – "anything, really." Six steps lead down into a shadowy tunnel; fork right, five meters forward, then six steps up lead back to the surface. "Question is, why don't they" – left turn – "just tell us what they want?"
"Speaking to tapeworms." Rita nearly manages to catch up with Amber, who is trotting through the maze as if she's memorized it perfectly. "That's how much the nascent Matrioshka brain can outthink us by, as humans to segmented worms. Would we do. What they told us?"
"Maybe." Amber stops dead, and Rita glances around. They're in an open cell near the heart of the maze, five meters square, hedged in on all sides. There are three entrances and a slate altar, waist high, lichen-stained with age. "I think you know the answer to that question."
"I —" Rita stares at her.
Amber stares back, eyes dark and intense. "You're from one of the Ganymede orbitals by way of Titan. You knew my eigensister while I was out of the solar system flying a diamond the size of a Coke can. That's what you told me. You've got a skill set that's a perfect match for the campaign research group, and you asked me to introduce you to Sirhan, then you pushed his buttons like a pro. Just what are you trying to pull? Why should I trust you?"
"I —" Rita's face crumples. "I didn't push his buttons! He thought I was trying to drag him into bed." She looks up defiantly. "I wasn't, I want to learn, what makes you – him – work —" Huge, dark, structured information queries batter at her exocortex, triggering warnings. Someone is churning through distributed time-series databases all over the outer system, measuring her past with a micrometer. She stares at Amber, mortified and angry. It's the ultimate denial of trust, the need to check her statements against the public record for truth. "What are you doing?"
"I have a suspicion." Amber stands poised, as if ready to run. Run away from me? Rita thinks, startled. "You said, what if the resimulants came from a subconscious function of the Offspring? And funnily enough, I've been discussing that possibility with Dad. He's still got the spark when you show him a problem, you know."
"I don't understand!"
"No, I don't think you do," says Amber, and Rita can feel vast stresses in the space around her: The whole ubicomp environment, dust-sized chips and utility fog and hazy clouds of diamond-bright optical processors in the soil and the air and her skin, is growing blotchy and sluggish, thrashing under the load of whatever Amber – with her management-grade ackles – is ordering it to do. For a moment, Rita can't feel half her mind, and she gets the panicky claustrophobic sense of being trapped inside her own head: Then it stops.
"Tell me!" Rita insists. "What are you trying to prove? It's some mistake —" And Amber is nodding, much to her surprise, looking weary and morose. "What do you think I've done?"
"Nothing. You're coherent. Sorry about that."
"Coherent?" Rita hears her voice rising with her indignation as she feels bits of herself, cut off from her for whole seconds, shivering with relief. "I'll give you coherent! Assaulting my exocortex —"
"Shut up." Amber rubs her face and simultaneously throws Rita one end of an encrypted channel.
"Why should I?" Rita demands, not accepting the handshake.
"Because." Amber glances round. She's scared! Rita suddenly realizes. "Just do it," she hisses.
Rita accepts the endpoint and a huge lump of undigested expository data slides down it, structured and tagged with entry points and metainformation directories pointing to —
"Holy shit !" she whispers, as she realizes what it is.
"Yes." Amber grins humorlessly. She continues, over the open channeclass="underline" It looks like they're cognitive antibodies, generated by thedevil's own semioticimmune system. That's what Sirhan isfocusing on, how to avoid triggeringthem and bringingeverything down at once. Forget the election, we're going tobe in deep shit sooner rather than later, and we're stilltrying to work out how to survive. Now are you sure youstill wantin?
"Want in on what ?" Rita asks, shakily.
The lifeboat Dad's trying to get us all into under cover of theaccelerationista/conservationista split, before the VileOffspring's immune system figures out how to leverus apartinto factionsand make us kill each other …
Welcome to the afterglow of the intelligence supernova, little tapeworm.
Tapeworms have on the order of a thousand neurons, pulsing furiously to keep their little bodies twitching. Human beings have on the order of a hundred billion neurons. What is happening in the inner solar system as the Vile Offspring churn and reconfigure the fast-thinking structured dust clouds that were once planets is as far beyond the ken of merely human consciousness as the thoughts of a Gödel are beyond the twitching tropisms of a worm. Personality modules bounded by the speed of light, sucking down billions of times the processing power of a human brain, form and re-form in the halo of glowing nanoprocessors that shrouds the sun in a ruddy glowing cloud.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Ceres and the asteroids – all gone. Luna is a silvery iridescent sphere, planed smooth down to micrometer heights, luminous with diffraction patterns. Only Earth, the cradle of human civilization, remains untransformed; and Earth, too, will be dismantled soon enough, for already a trellis of space elevators webs the planet around its equator, lifting refugee dumb matter into orbit and flinging it at the wildlife preserves of the outer system.
The intelligence bloom that gnaws at Jupiter's moons with claws of molecular machinery won't stop until it runs out of dumb matter to convert into computronium. By the time it does, it will have as much brainpower as you'd get if you placed a planet with a population of six billion future-shocked primates in orbit around every star in the Milky Way galaxy. But right now, it's still stupid, having converted barely a percentage point of the mass of the solar system – it's a mere Magellanic Cloud civilization, infantile and unsubtle and still perilously close to its carbon-chemistry roots.
It's hard for tapeworms living in warm intestinal mulch to wrap their thousand-neuron brains around whatever it is that the vastly more complex entities who host them are discussing, but one thing's sure – the owners have a lot of things going on, not all of them under conscious control. The churning of gastric secretions and the steady ventilation of lungs are incomprehensible to the simple brains of tapeworms, but they serve the purpose of keeping the humans alive and provide the environment the worms live in. And other more esoteric functions that contribute to survival – the intricate dance of specialized cloned lymphocytes in their bone marrow and lymph nodes, the random permutations of antibodies constantly churning for possible matches to intruder molecules warning of the presence of pollution – are all going on beneath the level of conscious control.