Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [305]
Assuming the message was true in its own terms, it was obvious that Reid was not addressing me personally. To him, I must be lost in the swarm. (And how many of those swarming robots ran copies of me? There was something infinitely depressing in the thought; of the soul’s cheapening as its supply curve went up and its production costs dropped.)
He’d said nothing about Earth, either: an omission which I suspected was deliberate. Forty-seven years had passed since my presumed death. ‘And in strange aeons death may die.’ There was no reason – now that the strange aeons were at last upon us – to assume Annette’s, or anyone’s, death in that time.
But Reid’s silence, on a question which was bound to occur to anyone finding themselves here, was ominous.
I returned to the bedroom. As the man on the box had said, the computer now worked. I slipped my fingertip around on the datapad, searching among the screen icons. It felt strange to be using such a basic interface; but it made sense: having a virtual reality within a virtual reality would have included a risk of recursion in which the already strained link between the mind and its surroundings might snap. I found one icon that was a tiny, turning image of Earth, and tapped it.
It was another orientation package, showing rather than telling what had brought this Jovian celestial city into being.
Myra’s fears had all come true.
Spy-sat pictures, obviously edited, were described as real-time. They showed cities masked, for the first time in decades, under smog. A few zooms exposed the pollution’s source: chimneys and cooking-fires. Plenty of trees in the streets, though; the Greens would be happy. In Trafalfgar Square a horse, cropping by a fallen Nelson, looked up and shook its mane as if aware it was being watched. Spring had come late to Europe: snow lurked in shadows.
Pulling out now – the settlements at Lagrange dim, haloed in leaked gases and space-junk; Luna dark, Mars silent; encrypted chatter from the Asteroid Belt that made my heart leap for a moment.
And then, in sweeping contrast, Project Jove. Its history was told in glossy multi-media, an advertising package or propaganda spiel that reminded me of the sort of stuff the nuclear-power companies used to put out. The space movement coup, told as a heroic last stand against barbarian mobs and repressive governments; the exponential surge of long-suppressed deep technologies, that had delivered all they’d ever promised: cheap spaceflight, total control of matter down to the molecular level, the extinction of ageing and death, and ultimately the copying of minds from brains to machines. All available only to a minority, unfortunately – as it would have been at first in any case, but worsened by the majority’s understandable fear of the most dangerous technology ever developed, and by the encroaching chaos whose beginnings I’d seen myself. The desperate flight from Earth’s collapsing civilisation, fuelled by the labour of tens of thousands of prisoners – each promised, and given, a copied self that survived whatever fate they’d faced – and organised by thousands of space-movement volunteers and cadres.
Next – an issue skated over so fast I knew something was being hidden – came a split between the Inner System and the Outer. Most of the existing space settlements, in Earth orbit, on the moon and Mars and in the Belt, had apparently succumbed to some sinister ideology of consolidation and reconstruction, striving to aid the stricken population of Earth. The Earth-Tenders, as they were called, were depicted as small-minded, spiteful, envious and backward-looking.
The Outwarders had gone their separate way – outward. Out to the solar system’s real prize, the greatest planet of them all. Here were the resources for the wildest dreams, the boldest projects.
The project they’d embarked on, those men and women and uploaded minds and artificial intelligences, was bold indeed. They’d shattered Ganymede,