Accelerando Part 27

A fraction of a second later, the floor of the penthouse bucks and quakes wildly and fire alarms begin to shriek as time comes to an end and the frozen airliner completes its journey. But Manni isn't there anymore. And if a skysc.r.a.per falls in a simulation with n.o.body to see it, has anything actually happened?

"I've come for the boy," says the cat. It sits on the hand woven rug in the middle of the hardwood floor with one hind leg sticking out at an odd angle, as if it's forgotten about it. Sirhan teeters on the edge of hysteria for a moment as he apprehends the sheer size of the ent.i.ty before him, the whimsical posthuman creation of his ancestors. Originally a robotic toy companion, Aineko was progressively upgraded and patched. By the eighties, when Sirhan first met the cat in the flesh, he was already a terrifyingly alien intelligence, subtle and ironic. And now ...

Sirhan knows Aineko manipulated his eigenmother, bending her natural affections away from his real father and toward another man. In moments of black introspection, he sometimes wonders if the cat wasn't also responsible in some way for his own broken upbringing, the failure to relate to his real parents. After all, it was a p.a.w.n in the vicious divorce battle between Manfred and Pamela - decades before his birth - and there might be long-term instructions buried in its preconscious drives. What if the p.a.w.n is actually a hidden king, scheming in the darkness?

"I've come for Manny."

"You're not having him." Sirhan maintains an outer facade of calm, even though his first inclination is to snap at Aineko. "Haven't you done enough damage already?"

"You're not going to make this easy, are you?" The cat stretches his head forward and begins to lick obsessively between the splayed toes of his raised foot. "I'm not making a demand, kid, I said I've come for him, and you're not really in the frame at all. In fact, I'm going out of my way to warn you."

"And I say -" Sirhan stops. "s.h.i.+t!" Sirhan doesn't approve of swearing: The curse is an outward demonstration of his inner turmoil. "Forget what I was about to say, I'm sure you already know it. Let me begin again, please."

"Sure. Let's play this your way." The cat chews on a loose nail sheath but his innerspeech is perfectly clear, a casual intimacy that keeps Sirhan on edge. "You've got some idea of what I am, clearly. You know - I ascribe intentionality to you - that my theory of mind is intrinsically stronger than yours, that my cognitive model of human consciousness is complete. You might well suspect that I use a Turing Oracle to think my way around your halting states." The cat isn't worrying at a loose claw now, he's grinning, pointy teeth gleaming in the light from Sirhan's study window. The window looks out onto the inner s.p.a.ce of the habitat cylinder, up at a sky with hillsides and lakes and forests plastered across it: It's like an Escher landscape, modeled with complete perfection. "You've realized that I can think my way around the outside of your box while you're flailing away inside it, and I'm always one jump ahead of you. What else do you know I know?"

Sirhan s.h.i.+vers. Aineko is staring up at him, unblinking. For a moment, he feels at gut level that he is in the presence of an alien G.o.d: It's the simple truth, isn't it? But - "Okay, I concede the point," Sirhan says after a moment in which he sp.a.w.ns a blizzard of panicky cognitive ghosts, fractional personalities each tasked with the examination of a different facet of the same problem. "You're smarter than I am. I'm just a boringly augmented human being, but you've got a flashy new theory of mind that lets you work around creatures like me the way I can think my way around a real cat." He crosses his arms defensively. "You do not normally rub this in. It's not in your interests to do so, is it? You prefer to hide your manipulative capabilities under an affable exterior, to play with us. So you're revealing all this for a reason." There's a note of bitterness in his voice now. Glancing round, Sirhan summons up a chair - and, as an afterthought, a cat basket. "Have a seat. Why now, Aineko? What makes you think you can take my eigenson?"

"I didn't say I was going to take him, I said I'd come for him." Aineko's tail lashes from side to side in agitation. "I don't deal in primate politics, Sirhan: I'm not a monkey-boy. But I knew you'd react badly because the way your species socializes" - a dozen metaghosts reconverge in Sirhan's mind, drowning Aineko's voice in an inner cacophony - "would enter into the situation, and it seemed preferable to trigger your territorial/reproductive threat display early, rather than risk it exploding in my face during a more delicate situation."

Sirhan waves a hand vaguely at the cat: "Please wait." He's trying to integrate his false memories - the output from the ghosts, their thinking finished - and his eyes narrow suspiciously. "It must be bad. You don't normally get confrontational - you script your interactions with humans ahead of time, so that you maneuver them into doing what you want them to do and thinking it was their idea all along." He tenses. "What is it about Manni that brought you here? What do you want with him? He's just a kid."

"You're confusing Manni with Manfred." Aineko sends a glyph of a smile to Sirhan: "That's your first mistake, even though they're clones in different subjective states. Think what he's like when he's grown up."

"But he isn't grown-up!" Sirhan complains. "He hasn't been grown-up for -"

"- Years, Sirhan. That's the problem. I need to talk to your grandfather, really, not your son, and not the G.o.dd.a.m.n stateless ghost in the temple of history, I need a Manfred with a sense of continuity. He's got something that I need, and I promise you I'm not going away until I get it. Do you understand?"

"Yes." Sirhan wonders if his voice sounds as hollow as the feeling in his chest. "But he's our kid, Aineko. We're human. You know what that means to us?"

"Second childhood." Aineko stands up, stretches, then curls up in the cat basket. "That's the trouble with hacking you naked apes for long life, you keep needing a flush and reset job - and then you lose continuity. That's not my problem, Sirhan. I got a signal from the far edge of the router network, a ghost that claims to be family. Says they finally made it out to the big beyond, out past the Bootes supercl.u.s.ter, found something concrete and important that's worth my while to visit. But I want to make sure it's not like the Wunch before I answer. I'm not letting that into my mind, even with a sandbox. Do you understand that? I need to instantiate a real-live adult Manfred with all his memories, one who hasn't been a part of me, and get him to vouch for the sapient data packet. It takes a conscious being to authenticate that kind of messenger. Unfortunately, the history temple is annoyingly resistant to unauthorized extraction - I can't just go in and steal a copy of him - and I don't want to use my own model of Manfred: It knows too much. So -"

"What's it promising?" Sirhan asks tensely.

Aineko looks at him through slitted eyes, a purring buzz at the base of his throat: "Everything."

"There are different kinds of death," the woman called Pamela tells Manni, her bone-dry voice a whisper in the darkness. Manni tries to move, but he seems to be trapped in a confined s.p.a.ce; for a moment, he begins to panic, but then he works it out. "First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life - oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not just the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness." The darkness is close and disorienting and Manni isn't sure which way up he is - nothing seems to work. Even Pamela's voice is a directionless ambiance, coming from all around him.

"Simple old-fas.h.i.+oned death, the kind that predated the singularity, used to be the inevitable halting state for all life-forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding." A dry chuckle: "I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal's wager was right - exploring the phase-s.p.a.ce of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states."

Manni tries to say, I'm not dead, but his throat doesn't seem to be working. And now that he thinks about it, he doesn't seem to be breathing, either.

"Now, consciousness. That's a fun thing, isn't it? Product of an arms race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a mouse, you'll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the cat having a theory of mind concerning the mouse - an internal simulation of the mouse's likely behavior when it notices the predator. Which way to run, for example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile, prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a defensive advantage if they can antic.i.p.ate a predator's actions. Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling - so the tribe could work collectively - and then reflexively, to simulate the individual's own inner states. Put the two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, and you've got human-level consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus - signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals such as 'predator here' or 'food there.'"

Get me out of this! Manny feels panic biting into him with liquid-helium-lubricated teeth. "G-e-t -" For a miracle the words actually come out, although he can't tell quite how he's uttering them, his throat being quite as frozen as his innerspeech. Everything's off-lined, all systems down.

"So," Pamela continues remorselessly, "we come to the posthuman. Not just our own neural wetware, mapped out to the subcellular level and executed in an emulation environment on a honking great big computer, like this: That's not posthuman, that's a travesty. I'm talking about beings who are fundamentally better consciousness engines than us merely human types, augmented or otherwise. They're not just better at cooperation - witness Economics 2.0 for a cla.s.sic demonstration of that - but better at simulation. A posthuman can build an internal model of a human-level intelligence that is, well, as cognitively strong as the original. You or I may think we know what makes other people tick, but we're quite often wrong, whereas real posthumans can actually simulate us, inner states and all, and get it right. And this is especially true of a posthuman that's been given full access to our memory prostheses for a period of years, back before we realized they were going to transcend on us. Isn't that the case, Manni?"

Manni would be screaming at her right now, if he had a mouth - but instead the panic is giving way to an enormous sense of deja vu. There's something about Pamela, something ominous that he knows ... he's met her before, he's sure of it. And while most of his systems are off-line, one of them is very much active: There's a personality ghost flagging its intention of merging back in with him, and the memory delta it carries is enormous, years and years of divergent experiences to absorb. He shoves it away with a t.i.tanic effort - it's a very insistent ghost - and concentrates on imagining the feel of lips moving on teeth, a sly tongue obstructing his epiglottis, words forming in his throat - "m-e ..."

"We should have known better than to keep upgrading the cat, Manny. It knows us too well. I may have died in the flesh, but Aineko remembered me, as hideously accurately as the Vile Offspring remembered the random resimulated. And you can run away - like this, this second childhood - but you can't hide. Your cat wants you. And there's more." Her voice sends chills up and down his spine, for without him giving it permission, the ghost has begun to merge its stupendous load of memories with his neural map, and her voice is freighted with erotic/repulsive significance, the result of conditioning feedback he subjected himself to a lifetime - lifetimes? - ago: "He's been playing with us, Manny, possibly from before we realized he was conscious."

"Out -" Manfred stops. He can see again, and move, and feel his mouth. He's himself again, physically back as he was in his late twenties all those decades ago when he'd lived a peripatetic life in presingularity Europe. He's sitting on the edge of a bed in a charmingly themed Amsterdam hotel with a recurrent motif of philosophers, wearing jeans and collarless s.h.i.+rt and a vest of pockets crammed with the detritus of a long-obsolete personal area network, his crazily clunky projection specs sitting on the bedside table. Pamela stands stiffly in front of the door, watching him. She's not the withered travesty he remembers seeing on Saturn, a half-blind Fate leaning on the shoulder of his grandson. Nor is she the vengeful Fury of Paris, or the scheming fundamentalist devil of the Belt. Wearing a sharply tailored suit over a red-and-gold brocade corset, blonde hair drawn back like fine wire in a tight chignon, she's the focused, driven force of nature he first fell in love with: repression, domination, his very own strict machine.

"We're dead," she says, then gives voice to a tense half laugh: "We don't have to live through the bad times again if we don't want to."

"What is this?" he asks, his mouth dry.

"It's the reproductive imperative." She sniffs. "Come on, stand up. Come here."

He stands up obediently, but makes no move toward her. "Whose imperative?"

"Not ours." Her cheek twitches. "You find things out when you're dead. That f.u.c.king cat has got a lot of questions to answer."

"You're telling me that -"

She shrugs. "Can you think of any other explanation for all this?" Then she steps forward and takes his hand. "Division and recombination. Part.i.tioning of memetic replicators into different groups, then careful cross-fertilization. Aineko wasn't just breeding a better Macx when he arranged all those odd marriages and divorces and eigenparents and forked uploads - Aineko is trying to breed our minds." Her fingers are slim and cool in his hand. He feels a momentary revulsion, as of the grave, and he shudders before he realizes it's his conditioning cutting in. Crudely implanted reflexes that shouldn't still be active after all this time. "Even our divorce. If -"

"Surely not." Manny remembers that much already. "Aineko wasn't even conscious back then!"

Pamela raises one sharply sculpted eyebrow: "Are you sure?"

"You want an answer," he says.

She breathes deeply, and he feels it on his cheek - it raises the fine hairs on the back of his neck. Then she nods stiffly. "I want to know how much of our history was scripted by the cat. Back when we thought we were upgrading his firmware, were we? Or was he letting us think that we were?" A sharp hiss of breath: "The divorce. Was that us? Or were we being manipulated?"

"Our memories, are they real? Did any of that stuff actually happen to us? Or -"

She's standing about twenty centimeters away from him, and Manfred realizes that he's acutely aware of her presence, of the smell of her skin, the heave of her bosom as she breathes, the dilation of her pupils. For an endless moment he stares into her eyes and sees his own reflection - her theory of his mind - staring back. Communication. Strict machine. She steps back a pace, spike heels clicking, and smiles ironically. "You've got a host body waiting for you, freshly fabbed: Seems Sirhan was talking to your archived ghost in the temple of history, and it decided to elect for reincarnation. Quite a day for huge coincidences, isn't it? Why don't you go merge with it - I'll meet you, then we can go and ask Aineko some hard questions."

Manfred takes a deep breath and nods. "I suppose so ..."

Little Manni - a clone off the family tree, which is actually a directed cyclic graph - doesn't understand what all the fuss is about but he can tell when momma, Rita, is upset. It's something to do with the p.u.s.s.ycat-thing, that much he knows, but Momma doesn't want to tell him: "Go play with your friends, dear," she says distractedly, not even bothering to sp.a.w.n a ghost to watch over him.

Manni goes into his room and rummages around in toys.p.a.ce for a bit, but there's nothing quite as interesting as the cat. The p.u.s.s.ycat-thing smells of adventure, the illicit made explicit. Manni wonders where daddy's taken it. He tries to call big-Manni-ghost, but big-self isn't answering: He's probably sleeping or something. So after a distracted irritated fit of play - which leaves the toys.p.a.ce in total disarray, Sendak-things cowering under a big ba.s.s drum - Manni gets bored. And because he's still basically a little kid, and not fully in control of his own metaprogramming, instead of adjusting his outlook so that he isn't bored anymore, he sneaks out through his bedroom gate (which big-Manni-ghost reprogrammed for him sometime ago so that it would forward to an underused public A-gate that he'd run a man-in-the-middle hack on, so he could use it as a proxy teleport server) then down to the underside of Red Plaza, where skinless things gibber and howl at their tormentors, broken angels are crucified on the pillars that hold up the sky, and gangs of semiferal children act out their psychotic fantasies on mouthless android replicas of parents and authorities.

Lis is there, and Vipul and Kareen and Morgan. Lis has changed into a warbody, an ominous gray battlebot husk with protruding spikes and a belt of morningstars that whirl threateningly around her. "Manni! Play war?"

Morgan's got great crus.h.i.+ng pincers instead of hands, and Manni is glad he came motie-style, his third arm a bony scythe from the elbow down. He nods excitedly. "Who's the enemy?"

"Them." Lis precesses and points at a bunch of kids on the far side of a pile of artistically arranged rubble who are gathered around a gibbet, poking things that glow into the flinching flesh of whatever is incarcerated in the cast-iron cage. It's all make-believe, but the screams are convincing, all the same, and they take Manni back for an instant to the last time he died down here, the uneasy edit around a black hole of pain surrounding his disemboweling. "They've got Lucy, and they're torturing her, we've got to get her back." n.o.body really dies in these games, not permanently, but children can be very rough indeed, and the adults of New j.a.pan have found that it's best to let them have at each other and rely on City to redact the damage later. Allowing them this outlet makes it easier to stop them doing really dangerous things that threaten the structural integrity of the biosphere.

"Fun." Manni's eyes light up as Vipul yanks the a.r.s.enal doors open and starts handing out clubs, chibs, spikies, shuriken, and garrotes. "Let's go!"

About ten minutes of gouging, running, fighting, and screaming later, Manni is leaning against the back of a crucifixion pillar, panting for breath. It's been a good war for him so far, and his arm aches and itches from the stabbing, but he's got a bad feeling it's going to change. Lis went in hard and got her chains tangled up around the gibbet supports - they're roasting her over a fire now, her electronically boosted screams drowning out his own hoa.r.s.e gasps. Blood drips down his arm - not his - spattering from the tip of his claw. He shakes with a crazed hunger for hurt, a cruel need to inflict pain. Something above his head makes a scritch, scritch sound, and he looks up. It's a crucified angel, wings ripped where they've thrust the spikes in between the joints that support the great, thin low-gee flight membranes. It's still breathing, n.o.body's bothered disemboweling it yet, and it wouldn't be here unless it was bad, so - Manni stands, but as he reaches out to touch the angel's thin, blue-skinned stomach with his third arm fingernail, he hears a voice: "Wait." It's innerspeech, and it bears ackles of coercion, superuser privileges that lock his elbow joint in place. He mewls frustratedly and turns round, ready to fight.

It's the cat. He sits hunched on a boulder behind him - this is the odd thing - right where he was looking a moment ago, watching him with slitty eyes. Manni feels the urge to lash out at him, but his arms won't move, and neither will his legs: This may be the Dark Side of Red Plaza, where the b.l.o.o.d.y children play and anything goes, and Manni may have a much bigger claw here than anything the cat can muster, but City still has some degree of control, and the cat's ackles effectively immunize it from the carnage to either side. "h.e.l.lo, Manni," says the p.u.s.s.y-thing. "Your Dad's worried: You're supposed to be in your room, and he's looking for you. Big-you gave you a back door, didn't he?"

Manni nods jerkily, his eyes going wide. He wants to shout and lash out at the p.u.s.s.y-thing but he can't. "What are you?"

"I'm your ... fairy G.o.dfather." The cat stares at him intently. "You know, I do believe you don't resemble your archetype very closely - not as he was at your age - but yes, I think on balance you'll do."

"Do what?" Manni lets his motie-arm drop, perplexed.

"Put me in touch with your other self. Big-you."

"I can't," Manni begins to explain. But before he can continue, the pile of rock whines slightly and rotates beneath the cat, who has to stand and do a little twirl in place, tail bus.h.i.+ng up in annoyance.

Manni's father steps out of the T-gate and glances around, his face a mask of disapproval. "Manni! What do you think you're doing here? Come home at -"

"He's with me, history-boy," interrupts the cat, nettled by Sirhan's arrival. "I was just rounding him up."

"d.a.m.n you, I don't need your help to control my son! In fact -"

"Mom said I could -" Manni begins.

"And what's that on your sword?" Sirhan's glare takes in the whole scene, the impromptu game of capture-the-gibbeted-torture-victim, the bonfires and screams. The mask of disapproval cracks, revealing a core of icy anger. "You're coming home with me!" He glances at the cat. "You too, if you want to talk to him - he's grounded."

Once upon a time there was a pet cat.

Except, it wasn't a cat.

Back when a young entrepreneur called Manfred Macx was jetting around the not-yet-disa.s.sembled structures of an old continent called Europe, making strangers rich and fixing up friends with serendipitous business plans - a desperate displacement activity, spinning his wheels in a vain attempt to outrun his own shadow - he used to travel with a robotic toy of feline form. Programmable and upgradeable, Aineko was a third-generation descendant of the original luxury j.a.panese companion robots. It was all Manfred had room for in his life, and he loved that robot, despite the alarming way decerebrated kittens kept turning up on his doorstep. He loved it nearly as much as Pamela, his fiancee, loved him, and she knew it. Pamela, being a whole lot smarter than Manfred gave her credit for, realized that the quickest way to a man's heart was through whatever he loved. And Pamela, being a whole lot more of a control freak than Manfred realized, was d.a.m.n well ready to use any restraint that came to hand. Theirs was a very twenty-first-century kind of relations.h.i.+p, which is to say one that would have been illegal a hundred years earlier and fas.h.i.+onably scandalous a century before that. And whenever Manfred upgraded his pet robot - transplanting its trainable neural network into a new body with new and exciting expansion ports - Pamela would hack it.

They were married for a while, and divorced for a whole lot longer, allegedly because they were both strong-willed people with philosophies of life that were irreconcilable short of death or transcendence. Manny, being wildly creative and outward-directed and having the attention span of a weasel on crack, had other lovers. Pamela ... who knows? If on some evenings she put on a disguise and hung out at encounter areas in fetish clubs, she wasn't telling anyone: She lived in uptight America, staidly straitlaced, and had a reputation to uphold. But they both stayed in touch with the cat, and although Manfred retained custody for some reason never articulated, Aineko kept returning Pamela's calls - until it was time to go hang out with their daughter Amber, tagging along on her rush into relativistic exile, then keeping a proprietorial eye on her eigenson Sirhan, and his wife and child (a clone off the old family tree, Manfred 2.0) ...

Now, here's the rub: Aineko wasn't a cat. Aineko was an incarnate intelligence, confined within a succession of catlike bodies that became increasingly realistic over time, and equipped with processing power to support a neural simulation that grew rapidly with each upgrade.

Did anyone in the Macx family ever think to ask what Aineko wanted?

And if an answer had come, would they have liked it?

Adult-Manfred, still disoriented from finding himself awake and reinstantiated a couple of centuries downstream from his hurried exile from Saturn system, is hesitantly navigating his way toward Sirhan and Rita's home when big-Manni-with-Manfred's-memory-ghost drops into his consciousness like a ton of computronium glowing red-hot at the edges.

It's a cla.s.sic oh-s.h.i.+t moment. Between one foot touching the ground and the next, Manfred stumbles hard, nearly twisting an ankle, and gasps. He remembers. At third hand he remembers being reincarnated as Manni, a bouncing baby boy for Rita and Sirhan (and just why they want to raise an ancestor instead of creating a new child of their own is one of those cultural quirks that is so alien he can scarcely comprehend it). Then for a while he recalls living as Manni's amnesic adult accelerated ghost, watching over his original from the consensus cybers.p.a.ce of the city: the arrival of Pamela, adult Manni's reaction to her, her dump of yet another copy of Manfred's memories into Manni, and now this - How many of me are there? he wonders nervously. Then: Pamela? What's she doing here?

Manfred shakes his head and looks about. Now he remembers being big-Manni, he knows where he is implicitly, and more importantly, knows what all these next-gen City interfaces are supposed to do. The walls and ceiling are carpeted in glowing glyphs that promise him everything from instant-access local services to teleportation across interstellar distances. So they haven't quite collapsed geography yet, he realizes gratefully, fastening on to the nearest comprehensible thought of his own before old-Manni's memories explain everything for him. It's a weird sensation, seeing all this stuff for the first time - the trappings of a technosphere centuries ahead of the one he's last been awake in - but with the memories to explain it all. He finds his feet are still carrying him forward, toward a gra.s.sy square lined with doors opening onto private dwellings. Behind one of them, he's going to meet his descendants, and Pamela in all probability. The thought makes his stomach give a little queasy backflip. I'm not ready for this - It's an acute moment of deja vu. He's standing on a familiar doorstep he's never seen before. The door opens and a serious-faced child with three arms - he can't help staring, the extra one is a viciously barbed scythe of bone from the elbow down - looks up at him. "h.e.l.lo, me," says the kid.

"h.e.l.lo, you." Manfred stares. "You don't look the way I remember." But Manni's appearance is familiar from big-Manni's memories, captured by the unblinking Argus awareness of the panopticon dust floating in the air. "Are your parents home? Your" - his voice cracks - "great-grandmother?"

The door opens wider. "You can come in," the kid says gravely. Then he hops backward and ducks shyly into a side room - or as if expecting to be gunned down by a hostile sniper, Manfred realizes. It's tough being a kid when there are no rules against lethal force because you can be restored from a backup when playtime ends.

Inside the dwelling - calling it a house seems wrong to Manfred, not when bits of it are separated by trillions of kilometers of empty vacuum - things feel a bit crowded. He can hear voices from the dayroom, so he goes there, brus.h.i.+ng through the archway of thornless roses that Rita has trained around the T-gate frame. His body feels lighter, but his heart is heavy as he looks around. "Rita?" he asks. "And -"

"h.e.l.lo, Manfred." Pamela nods at him guardedly.

Rita raises an eyebrow at him. "The cat asked if he could borrow the household a.s.sembler. I wasn't expecting a family reunion."

"Neither was I." Manfred rubs his forehead ruefully. "Pamela, this is Rita. She's married to Sirhan. They're my - I guess eigenparents is as good as term as any? I mean, they're bringing up my reincarnation."

"Please, have a seat," Rita offers, waving at the empty floor between the patio and the stone fountain in the shape of a section through a gla.s.s hypersphere. A futon of spun diamondoid congeals out of the utility fog floating in the air, glittering in the artificial sunlight. "Sirhan's just taking care of Manni - our son. He'll be with us in just a minute."

Manfred sits gingerly at one side of the futon. Pamela sits stiffly at the opposite edge, not meeting his eye. Last time they met in the flesh - an awesome gulf of years previously - they'd parted cursing each other, on opposite sides of a fractious divorce as well as an ideological barrier as high as a continental divide. But many subjective decades have pa.s.sed, and both ideology and divorce have dwindled in significance - if indeed they ever happened. Now that there's common cause to draw them together, Manfred can barely look at her. "How is Manni?" he asks his hostess, desperate for small talk.

"He's fine," Rita says, in a brittle voice. "Just the usual preadolescent turbulence, if it wasn't for ..." She trails off. A door appears in mid air and Sirhan steps through it, followed by a small deity wearing a fur coat.

"Look what the cat dragged in," Aineko remarks.

"You're a fine one to talk," Pamela says icily. "Don't you think you'd -"

"I tried to keep him away from you," Sirhan tells Manfred, "but he wouldn't -"

"That's okay." Manfred waves it off. "Pamela, would you mind starting?"

"Yes, I would." She glances at him sidelong. "You go first."

"Right. You wanted me here." Manfred hunkers down to stare at the cat. "What do you want?"

"If I was your traditional middle-European devil, I'd say I'd come to steal your soul," says Aineko, looking up at Manfred and twitching his tail. "Luckily I'm not a dualist, I just want to borrow it for a while. Won't even get it dirty."

"Uh-huh." Manfred raises an eyebrow. "Why?"

"I'm not omniscient." Aineko sits down, one leg sticking out sideways, but continues to stare at Manfred. "I had a ... a telegram, I guess, claiming to be from you. From the other copy of you, that is, the one that went off through the router network with another copy of me, and with Amber, and everyone else who isn't here. It says it found the answer and it wants to give me a shortcut route out to the deep thinkers at the edge of the observable universe. It knows who made the wormhole network and why, and -" Aineko pauses. If he was human, he'd shrug, but being a cat, he absent mindedly scritches behind his left ear with a hind leg. "Trouble is, I'm not sure I can trust it. So I need you to authenticate the message. I don't dare use my own memory of you because it knows too much about me; if the package is a Trojan, it might find out things I don't want it to learn. I can't even redact its memories of me - that, too, would convey useful information to the packet if it is hostile. So I want a copy of you from the museum, fresh and uncontaminated."

"Is that all?" Sirhan asks incredulously.

"Sounds like enough to me," Manfred responds. Pamela opens her mouth, ready to speak, but Manfred makes eye contact and shakes his head infinitesimally. She looks right back and - a shock goes through him - nods and closes her mouth. The moment of complicity is dizzying. "I want something in return."

"Sure," says the cat. He pauses. "You realize it's a destructive process."

"It's a - what?"

"I need to make a running copy of you. Then I introduce it to the, uh, alien information, in a sandbox. The sandbox gets destroyed afterward - it emits just one bit of information, a yes or no to the question, can I trust the alien information?"

"Uh." Manfred begins to sweat. "Uh. I'm not so sure I like the sound of that."

"It's a copy." Another cat-shrug moment. "You're a copy. Manni is a copy. You've been copied so many times it's silly - you realize every few years every atom in your body changes? Of course, it means a copy of you gets to die after a lifetime or two of unique, unrepeatable experiences that you'll never know about, but that won't matter to you."

"Yes it does! You're talking about condemning a version of me to death! It may not affect me, here, in this body, but it certainly affects that other me. Can't you -"