Accelerando

Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich.

The windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style.

You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right?

In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.

The divested Microsoft divisions have automated their legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries, IPOing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange.

Her face is much more expressive than her voice as she mimes boredom and disbelief at appropriate moments – an out-of-band signal invisible to her corporate earrings.

Dismantle the moon!

Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!

His brain is still fuzzy, like a scalpel blade clogged with too much blood: He needs stimulus, excitement, the burn of the new.

This generation is happy with latex and leather, whips and butt plugs and electrostim, but find the idea of exchanging bodily fluids shocking: a social side effect of the last century's antibiotic abuse.

The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is a probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a nematode worm.

She's got the private keys to his hypothalamus, and sod the metacortex.

This is lousy preparation for dealing with a world full of future-shocked talking anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible small animals.

She reaches out and grabs his wrist, surprising him with a shock of skin on skin: 'Of course I'm still interested in you. You're the biggest, baddest bull geek I know.'

It's hard for an upload to stay subsentient these days, even if it's just a crustacean.

How would you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer's target of the hour is your heart's desire?

She controls all his senses, only his ears unstoppered. The glasses give her a high-bandwidth channel right into his brain, a fake metacortex to whisper lies at her command.

She rolls off his hips and carefully uses the last of the superglue to gum her labia together.

Bodies hang limply overhead every few meters, feet occasionally twitching in animatronic death, like a war crime perpetrated in a toy shop.

The suitcase is full of noise.

The metacortex – a distributed cloud of software agents that surrounds him in netspace, borrowing CPU cycles from convenient processors – is as much a part of Manfred as the society of mind that occupies his skull.

Something like making himself a temporary billionaire so he can blow off his divorce settlement in an instant, like a wily accountancy octopus escaping a predator by vanishing in a cloud of his own black ink.

Eldritch ersatz insects buzz menacingly along the shining empty meat counters without fear of electrocution.

As a demonstration that they mean business, two "software engineers" in California have been kneecapped, tarred, feathered, and left for dead under placards accusing them of reverse-engineering movie plot lines using avatars of dead and out-of-copyright stars.

You know your marriage is in a bad way when you send your spouse messages via the CIA, and she communicates using the IRS.

Sometimes he isn't certain he's still human; too many threads of his consciousness seem to live outside his head, reporting back whenever they find something interesting.

While she showers, he sits on the toilet seat lid and rants about Turing-completeness as an attribute of company law, about cellular automata and the blind knapsack problem.

Reputations only of use to those alive to own them.

Each of these companies – and there are currently more than sixteen thousand of them, although the herd is growing day by day – has three directors and is the director of three other companies.

One action alleging that the defendant (in conspiracy with the prime minister of Japan, the government of Canada, and the Emir of Kuwait) is using orbital mind-control lasers to make the plaintiff's pet chihuahua bark at all hours of day and night.

Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from the Chicago School.

'It's about the economy,' Manfred says carefully. 'I'm here to make it obsolete.'

Manfred looks at the ancient, low-density medium and sneezes, momentarily bemused by the sight of data density measured in kilograms per megabyte rather than vice versa.

If they do, you have just enslaved people to an abstract machine, as dictators have throughout history.

Could it be that his peculiar brand of creativity is an outlet, that he needs the pressure of being lovingly enslaved to make him burst out into a great flowering of imaginative brilliance?

A hissing, burbling noise like a sackful of large lizards being drowned in mud emanates from the kitchen, suggesting that Annette's percolator is nearly ready.

"You're making a big mistake, lady," Pam says, her voice steady and cold enough to liquefy helium.

The door slams shut on a chaos of impending recursive lawsuits, and Manfred breathes a huge wheeze of relief.

Spring-Heeled Jack runs blind, blue fumes crackling from his heels. His right hand, outstretched for balance, clutches a mark's stolen memories.

First-generation uploads, Californian spiny lobsters in wobbly symbiosis with elderly expert systems, thrive aboard an asteroid mining project established by the Franklin Trust.

In a very real sense, the glasses are Manfred, regardless of the identity of the soft machine with its eyeballs behind the lenses.

The walls have ears, and not all the brains they feed into are human.

His brain is like an ancient car engine with damp spark plugs, turning over and over without catching fire.

He feels a weird yearning, a tropism for information. It's almost all that's left of him – his voracious will to know.

The door opens, and Macx finds himself confronted by a tall, slightly cadaverous man wearing a tweed suit that has seen better days and a clerical collar cut from a translucent circuit board.

Some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death – with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights – will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.

It's like being drunk, except much less pleasant: He can't seem to wrap his head around an idea from all angles at once, anymore.

An elephantine semantic network sits down on his spectacles as soon as he asks for the site, crushing his surroundings into blocky pixilated monochrome that jerks as he looks around.

This place is a wall-to-wall tourist trap, a many-bladed carnivorous plant that digests easy credit and spits out the drained husks of foreigners.

Now it occupies an unnaturally prolonged, chilly existence as the sort of recycled imitation Irish pub that has neon four-leafed clovers hanging from the artificially blackened pine beams above the log tables – in other words, the burned-out black dwarf afterlife of a once-serious drinking establishment.

He's frozen in front of her, mesmerized, and she can see the light from inside the lenses spilling over onto his half-starved adolescent cheekbones, flickering like cold lightning, like he's plugged his brain into a grid bearer.

Annette watches the fight and shudders; it's like a flashover vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment – with its redefinition of personhood – is rejected by the house of deputies: a universe where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to slavery.

The Franklin Collective believes that you can't get into the future unless it's digitized your neural state vector, or at least acquired as complete a snapshot of your sensory inputs and genome as current technology permits.

The hairs on the back of her neck rise as a thin chattering fills the ether around them: his eyes are glowing a luminous blue behind his shades, as if a high-tension spark is flying between his ears.

The proposals in the Equal Rights Act are deeply flawed, based on a cult of individuality that takes no account of the true complexity of posthumanism.

So nobody really knows how long it'll take to figure out whether it's a ping from the galactic root domain servers or a pulsar that's taken to grinding out the eighteen-quadrillionth digits of pi, or what.

An invisible soup of radiation connects both humans to items of clothing scattered across the room – clothing that seethes with unsleeping sentience.

The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle.

In the darkness, Aineko bares teeth in a silent grin.

These kids are mutant youth, burning bright: Not quite incomprehensible to their parents, but profoundly alien – the generation gap is as wide as the 1960s and as deep as the solar system.

Suddenly Lilly's avatar, hitherto clad in a shimmering metallic swimsuit, turns to the texture of baked meat and waggles sausage fingers up at them in warning.

Which orbits one hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above Jupiter, has no atmosphere, and where you can pick up a whole body radiation dose of ten Grays in half an hour on the surface.

Mom's voice is breathy, laden with an emotional undertow as strong and stifling as the eau-de-Cologne she wears to the office to cover up the scent of her client's fear.

The Prophet, peace be unto him, may have condemned usury; but it might well have given him pause to see these engines of capital formation demonstrate their power above the Great Red Spot.

I'm not her little girl! Every time I tunnel out, she tries to put a content-bot on me, and it's making my head hurt – I can't even think straight anymore!

Jupiter hangs huge and gibbous in the background, impressionist wallpaper for a mad cosmologist: Pierre bites his lower lip as he concentrates on steering it.

'No, I’m from the fucking tooth fairy.' It leans over and head-butts her knee, strops the scent glands between its ears all over her skirt.

Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards – a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari'a and the global legislatosaurus.

Amber looks around the living room and sees it for a moment as a capsule, a small wooden cell locked deep in a vision of a middle America that never was – the one her mom wants to bring her up in, like a misshapen Skinner box designed to train her to be normal.

He doesn't take the child into his own household or make any attempt to raise her, either in accordance with his own customs or the precepts of shari'a.

They lend bits of their brains to the task of running what science has been able to resurrect of the dead dot-com billionaire's mind, making him the first bodhisattva of the uploading age.

Stringy mucous ropes full of squiggling comma-shaped tadpoles explode all over the compartment and bounce off the walls in a shower of amphibian confetti.

I'm trapped because of the jurisdiction she's cornered me in.

The drone is a long-legged crane fly look-alike, bouncing very slowly from toe tip to toe tip in the microgravity.

I sold myself into slavery to get away from her, do you understand?

I'm not built like little girls were in their day, and they don't understand.

If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine's memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem?

It's Chernobyl weather outside, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons storming through the void, and she really needs the extra protection.

A red glow suffuses the flank of the capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring blue laser line of the Sanger's drive torch powering up.

Her Majesty's domain stretches out before the battered module like a rust-stained snowflake half a kilometer in diameter.

The queen's lips twitch. Then they curl into a wide, carnivorous grin.

'This stupid girl wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting with something so smart it might as well be a god,' it says.

His hand tightens around his glass reflexively, but the physics model in force in the bar refuses to let him break it.

The cat stalks toward the edge of the bar, tail held high with tip bent over in a feline question mark.

I was supposed to fork repeatedly and gang-rape his web of trust. But I didn't.

The biosphere has become surreal: small dragons have been sighted nesting in the Scottish highlands, and in the American midwest, raccoons have been caught programming microwave ovens.

Rather than a big, self-propelled ship with canned primates for passengers, as previous generations had envisaged, the starship is a Coke-can-sized slab of nanocomputers, running a neural simulation of the uploaded brain states of some tens of humans at merely normal speed.

But her interstellar venture burns through money about the way you would if you heaped up the green pieces of paper and shoveled them onto a conveyor belt leading to the business end of a running rocket motor.

Formerly physical humans, their neural software (and a map of the intracranial wetware it runs on) has been transferred into a virtual machine environment executing on a honking great computer, where the universe they experience is merely a dream within a dream.

Pierre freezes the scene, decoupling them from reality, and she faces him.

Gigayears ago, a chance stellar near miss sent it careening off into the galaxy on its own, condemned to drift in eternal darkness along with a cluster of frozen moons that dance attendance upon it.

Clusters of pearly beads that form helical chains, disks and whorls of color that interlace and knot through one another, hang in space above a darkling planet.

Then his heart is in his mouth, and there's a sensation like the universe pushing into his private parts, so inside out it takes his breath away.

Among these are beings whom nobody from a previous century would recognize as human – human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels and devils of software, slyly self-aware financial instruments.

The stinging in his palate is sharp but fades rapidly, producing an intimate burn when the alcohol hits the mild welts that are all this universe will permit the lethal medusa to inflict on him.

The singularity is a bit like that old-time American Christian rapture nonsense, isn't it? When we all go a-flying up to heaven, leaving our bodies behind.

We've been migrated – while still awake – right out of our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and electron spin resonance mapping, and we're now running as software in an operating system designed to virtualize multiple physics models.

Trial by combat, for civil suits in this day and age! And she appointed me her champion.

Strings of nacreous spheres curl in strange loops around a hidden core, expanding and turning inside out in systolic pulses that spawn waves of recomplication through the structure.

This is wrong, so wrong that it signifies either a major systems crash or the application of frightening privilege levels to his realm.

You'll make mincemeat of them. Profit-to-earnings ratio through the roof, blood on the stock exchange floor.

The lobsters are as large as wolves, black and spiny and ominous.

The implication is that this Wunch wants us to view them as gods.

The sun, for so long an unremarkable mildly variable G2 dwarf, has vanished within a gray cloud that englobes it except for a narrow belt around the plane of the ecliptic.

Companies are alive, and dead people may live again, too.

Build propaganda into your translation software if you want to establish a favorable trading relationship.

I left her in my apartment freezer. Figured it'd be a while before anybody noticed. It's not murder – I'm still here, right?

Transcendents don't go traveling because they can't get enough bandwidth – trying to migrate through one of these wormholes would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly.

It's a deliberately corrupted grammar, and they're actually making threats.

We have the unbearable yearning to be not-what-we-are. Novelty, surprise! Flesh rots and wood decays. We seek the new being-ness of aliens.

This instance of me could die forever.

Pierre jacks his emotional damper up to a dangerously high setting, suppressing natural aversion reflexes and temporarily turning himself into a sociopathic killer.

Inside that swarm, minds a trillion or more times as complex as humanity think thoughts as far beyond human imagination as a microprocessor is beyond a nematode worm.

Well then. Will the nay sayers please leave the universe?

Her lips move in silence, but she's locked into place in this universe, unable to split or conjoin nested realities just by calling subroutines that have been spliced into the corners of her mind since she was a teenager.

Sadeq's captors have stolen his soul and locked it – him – in a very strange prison, a temple with a tower that rises all the way to Paradise.

Every false night (for there is no way to know how fast time is passing, outside this cyberspace pocket), Sadeq sits and thinks, grappling with Descartes's demon in the solitude of his own mind.

We-us banked you upon arrival against future options trades in human species futures.

And in the seconds while her mind is as empty as a sucked egg, a thin-faced man with blue hair shoves her in the small of her back and snatches at her shoulder bag.

She can't feel the outside world; there's a Faraday cage wrapped around the holding cell, and it's claustrophobically quiet inside.

The ghost folds the air in the room into a glowing ball of plasma, shaped like a Klein bottle.

Amber pauses for a few seconds, nerving herself to confront a sleeper so wrapped in solipsism that he's built this sex-fantasy castle around himself.

The sky is a black vastness overhead, wheeling slowly around a central axis lined up on Jupiter.

Take all the planets in a star system and dismantle them. Turn them into dust – structured nanocomp, powered by heat exchangers, spread in concentric orbits around the central star.

Dad and his drinking buddies, singing, 'Dismantle the Moon! Melt down Mars!' in a castle outside Prague as they waited for the results of a shamelessly gerrymandered election.

The main life-form is an incredibly ornate corporate ecosphere, legal instruments breeding and replicating.

The phrase 'smart money' has taken on a whole new meaning, for the collision between international business law and neurocomputing technology has given rise to a whole new family of species – fast-moving corporate carnivores in the Net.

We came in through the coin slot, is it any wonder we ended up in the bank?

Worms and parasites squirming through the body after nightfall on the battlefield.

'Illegal consciousness is copyright theft' sucks until an alien tries to rewire your hindbrain with a debugger; then it's a lifesaver.

Who would trust their mind to a communications channel that might partially randomize them in transit?

Dust and fumes hang in air the color of cement over rough-finished concrete apartment buildings, their roofs covered in satellite uplinks and cheap, garish LED advertising panels.

Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer. It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy.

When they take over, what you get is more like the new biosphere. Hell, the new primordial soup: prokaryotes, bacteria, and algae, mindlessly swarming, trading money for plasmids.

Until there's nothing left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking for someone to own.

The flying city, despite being the product of an advanced technology almost unimaginable two decades before, is full of bugs – software complexity and scaling laws ensured that the preceding decades of change acted as a kind of cosmological inflationary period for design glitches.

Am telling you from beginning, though, turning entire solar system into computronium is real bad idea, long-term.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Luna are all well on the way to disintegration, mass pumped into orbit with energy stolen from the haze of free-flying thermoelectrics that cluster so thickly around the solar poles that the sun resembles a fuzzy red ball of wool the size of a young red giant.

The informational density of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro's number of bits per mole, one bit per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter of the inner planets is converted into computronium.

When your mother ran away, it uploaded itself to her starwisp and deleted its body.

Any artificial entity that's willing to upload its neural state vector into a one-kilogram interstellar probe three-quarters of the way to Alpha Centauri without backup or some clear way of returning home has got to be more than a few methods short in the object factory.

Especially not the bit about being declared liable for debts run up by a renegade splinter of herself, her own un-uploaded identity that had stayed home to face the music, aged in the flesh, married, gone bankrupt, died – incurred child support payments?

Normally, accusing Amber of any resemblance to her mother, however slight and passing, would be enough to trigger a reality quake within the upload environment.

Between them, they were like two neutron stars locked in an unstable death spiral of gravity.

I lived from two to seventeen years several hundred times over before my eighteenth birthday. It was that reset switch, you know.

The ape farts thunderously, then lets rip a stream of excrement across the dining table.

The Slug itself is one such self-aware scam, probably a pyramid scheme or even an entire compressed junk bond market in heavy recession, trying to hide from its creditors by masquerading as a life-form.

The environmental interface is transparent and infinitely thin, a discontinuity in the physics model of the simulation space, mapping signals between the human-friendly environment on one side and the crushing, roasting hell on the other.

Newly formed, slowly unskeletonizing corpses – like a time-lapse process of decay with a finger angrily twisting the dial into high-speed reverse – is both distasteful and aesthetically displeasing to watch.

Probably this is but a simulation in some ancient history engine's panopticon, rerunning the sum of all possible origins of sentience, a billion trillion megayears down the line.

Everything around her is so solid and immutable that, for a moment, she feels a stab of claustrophobic panic: Help! I'm trapped in the real universe!

The orang-utan leads Amber through a service passage and out into the temperate night, naked by ringlight.

He has never met an adult walking backward toward a cliff before.

Their cat, curled at their feet, looks smug: She's the custodian of the permissive action locks on the big lasers.

Without Queen and consort, the Ring Imperium – now unmanned, leaking breathing gases, running on autonomic control – slowly deorbits into the Jovian murk.

Only a light-year delay line and the fact that as a running instance you're technically a different person saved you.

He's moved his magnificent dining table outside, along with the Argentinosaurus skeleton. In fact, he's built a dining room within the dinosaur's rib cage.

A rippling cloud of utility foglets, constantly connecting and disconnecting in the hazy outline of a 1910-vintage Rolls Royce Silver Ghost, bears Sirhan silently away from his wing of the museum.

Sirhan glances round at Pamela, then back at Amber, suddenly feeling very much like a rat trapped between a pair of angry cobras.

Take a human being and bolt on extensions that let them take full advantage of Economics 2.0, and you essentially break their narrative chain of consciousness, replacing it with a journal file of bid/request transactions between various agents.

The end result we found is a howling wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for processing power.

The horizon is brightening with a false dawn: the fusion spark of a de-orbiting spacecraft.

Because humans always underestimate anything that's small, furry, and cute.

They've absorbed a lot of what it is to be human, but their corporate roots show... at root they're not human: They're limited liability companies.

There's a chatter of avian laughter from above, and a light rain of birdshit splatters the path around him.

Someone has infiltrated the Argentinosaurus skeleton with motors and nanofibers, animating the huge sauropod with a simulation of undead life.

I fucked up my life, don't try to talk me into fucking up my death.

Tell Manfred he's still my bitch; always has been, always will –

Somewhere out there we will find the transcendent intelligences, the ones that survived their own economic engines of redistribution – engines that redistribute entropy if their economic efficiency outstrips their imaginative power, their ability to invent new wealth.

They've lived through too much media warfare. They're immune to any semiotic payload short of an active cognitive attack.

This isn't simply a shop, it's a temple to a very peculiar art form, its staff trained as guardians of the esoteric secrets of good taste.

Wiry and pale, Sirhan wears the robes of a Berber goatherd on his body and the numinous halo of a utility fogbank above his head: In his abstraction, he vaguely resembles a saintly shepherd in a post-singularity nativity play.

There's something positively indecent about meeting your own grandfather in the full flush of his youth.

If you have reason to believe that you may be a fictional character, you must contact the city immediately.

Thus, in absolute terms, although this society is richer than any you have ever heard of, it is also a poverty-stricken backwater compared to its neighbors.

All the remaining human-equivalent intelligences with half a clue to rub together are trying to emigrate before the Vile Offspring decide to recycle Earth to fill in a gap in the concentric shells of nanocomputers they're running on.

The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused, except that they're not really resurrectees – they're simulations based on their originals' recorded histories, blocky and missing chunks of their memories, as bewildered as baby ducklings as they're herded into the wood-chipper of the future.

What's left of him exhibits about as much social presence as a pickled cabbage.

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.

He looks round; there's a vague blob at one side of the room, making an annoying buzzing sound.

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!

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.

The family's dirty little secret is that Amber and her father have never met, not face-to-face in physical meat-machine proximity.

Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons – literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions.

I'm not sure about the validity of voting projects at all, these days. The assumption that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent.

The Vile Offspring have reached their adolescence and want the place to themselves so they can throw a party.

We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don't we?

Kept looking at me as if he was afraid I was going to sprout bat wings and tentacles or something.

Speaking to tapeworms. That's how much the nascent Matrioshka brain can outthink us by, as humans to segmented worms.

Welcome to the afterglow of the intelligence supernova, little tapeworm.

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.

Concentration camps, thinks Rita, trying to ignore Sirhan's presence near her, for it's a constant irritant, where most of the inmates are confused, frightened human beings – and the ones who aren't think they are.

It's a starship in the shape of a crustacean three kilometers long.

It looks like they're doing something purposeful and coordinated, something vast – a timing channel attack on the virtual machine that's running the universe, perhaps, or an embedded simulation of an entirely different universe.

Sirhan freezes for a moment, personality modules paging in and out of his brain like a swarm of angry bees.

Many of them fail to reach their audience, and many more hold fruitless discussions; about six actually decide they've diverged so far from their original that they constitute separate people and register for independent citizenship, two defect to the other side, and one elopes with a swarm of highly empathic modified African honeybees.

It will create a parliament – a merged group mind borganism that speaks as one supermind built from the beliefs of the victors.

Democracy is a bad fit for lifeboats.

Unlike Manni, she recognizes it as the avatar of a posthuman demiurge, a body incarnated solely to provide a point of personal interaction for people to focus on.

The fast-thinking Matrioshka brains are as incomprehensible to their merely posthuman ancestors as an ICBM to an amoeba – and about as inhabitable.

What a state we have come to, when the restless dead refuse to stay a part of history?

Manfred is silent for a moment – probably hours in ghost-space – as he assimilates the changes. Then: 'This is true? I've slept through a whole civilization?'

Behind him, Manfred's melancholy ghost snorts, mildly offended, and considers the existential choice: to be, or not to be.

So they fled into the darkness and built a civilization so bright it can put anything earthbound that came before the singularity into the shade ... and it's still a shanty town inhabited by the mentally handicapped.

There's a gigantic disturbance in the polity thoughtspace – like a stellar-mass black hole – and it appears to be stropping itself furrily against his left leg.

An onrushing wide-body airliner hangs motionless in the air forty meters below the picture window of Manni's penthouse apartment on the one hundred and eighth floor of the North Tower.

In the back of his mind, raw instincts alien to anyone instantiated before the midpoint of the twenty-first century tug on the fabric of pseudoreality.

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.

For a moment, he feels at gut level that he is in the presence of an alien god: It's the simple truth, isn't it?

Manny feels panic biting into him with liquid-helium-lubricated teeth.

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.

I want to know how much of our history was scripted by the cat.

He shakes with a crazed hunger for hurt, a cruel need to inflict pain.

Manny, being wildly creative and outward-directed and having the attention span of a weasel on crack, had other lovers.

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.

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?

Your memories of experiences are accurate, but your emotional responses to those experiences were manipulated.

Aineko's avatar is just a broken rag of bloody fur, guts, and blood spilled across the floor.

"This time," she grips his hand, "without adult supervision."

Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich.

You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right?

In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.

Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!

His brain is still fuzzy, like a scalpel blade clogged with too much blood: He needs stimulus, excitement, the burn of the new.

The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is a probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a nematode worm.

This is lousy preparation for dealing with a world full of future-shocked talking anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible small animals.

It's hard for an upload to stay subsentient these days, even if it's just a crustacean.

How would you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer's target of the hour is your heart's desire?

She rolls off his hips and carefully uses the last of the superglue to gum her labia together.

The metacortex – a distributed cloud of software agents that surrounds him in netspace, borrowing CPU cycles from convenient processors – is as much a part of Manfred as the society of mind that occupies his skull.

Reputations only of use to those alive to own them.

One action alleging that the defendant (in conspiracy with the prime minister of Japan, the government of Canada, and the Emir of Kuwait) is using orbital mind-control lasers to make the plaintiff's pet chihuahua bark at all hours of day and night.

"You're making a big mistake, lady," Pam says, her voice steady and cold enough to liquefy helium.

The door slams shut on a chaos of impending recursive lawsuits, and Manfred breathes a huge wheeze of relief.

In a very real sense, the glasses are Manfred, regardless of the identity of the soft machine with its eyeballs behind the lenses.

Some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death – with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights – will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.

The hairs on the back of her neck rise as a thin chattering fills the ether around them: his eyes are glowing a luminous blue behind his shades, as if a high-tension spark is flying between his ears.

An invisible soup of radiation connects both humans to items of clothing scattered across the room – clothing that seethes with unsleeping sentience.

These kids are mutant youth, burning bright: Not quite incomprehensible to their parents, but profoundly alien – the generation gap is as wide as the 1960s and as deep as the solar system.

'No, I’m from the fucking tooth fairy.' It leans over and head-butts her knee, strops the scent glands between its ears all over her skirt.

Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards – a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari'a and the global legislatosaurus.

Amber looks around the living room and sees it for a moment as a capsule, a small wooden cell locked deep in a vision of a middle America that never was – the one her mom wants to bring her up in, like a misshapen Skinner box designed to train her to be normal.

The drone is a long-legged crane fly look-alike, bouncing very slowly from toe tip to toe tip in the microgravity.

The queen's lips twitch. Then they curl into a wide, carnivorous grin.

I was supposed to fork repeatedly and gang-rape his web of trust. But I didn't.

Rather than a big, self-propelled ship with canned primates for passengers, as previous generations had envisaged, the starship is a Coke-can-sized slab of nanocomputers, running a neural simulation of the uploaded brain states of some tens of humans at merely normal speed.

Gigayears ago, a chance stellar near miss sent it careening off into the galaxy on its own, condemned to drift in eternal darkness along with a cluster of frozen moons that dance attendance upon it.

Strings of nacreous spheres curl in strange loops around a hidden core, expanding and turning inside out in systolic pulses that spawn waves of recomplication through the structure.

The implication is that this Wunch wants us to view them as gods.

Transcendents don't go traveling because they can't get enough bandwidth – trying to migrate through one of these wormholes would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly.

Inside that swarm, minds a trillion or more times as complex as humanity think thoughts as far beyond human imagination as a microprocessor is beyond a nematode worm.

The phrase 'smart money' has taken on a whole new meaning, for the collision between international business law and neurocomputing technology has given rise to a whole new family of species – fast-moving corporate carnivores in the Net.

Until there's nothing left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking for someone to own.

The informational density of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro's number of bits per mole, one bit per atom, as the deconstructed dumb matter of the inner planets is converted into computronium.

Everything around her is so solid and immutable that, for a moment, she feels a stab of claustrophobic panic: Help! I'm trapped in the real universe!

Their cat, curled at their feet, looks smug: She's the custodian of the permissive action locks on the big lasers.

The end result we found is a howling wilderness of degenerate data, fractally compressed, postconscious processes running slower and slower as they trade storage space for processing power.

I fucked up my life, don't try to talk me into fucking up my death.

If you have reason to believe that you may be a fictional character, you must contact the city immediately.

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!

The family's dirty little secret is that Amber and her father have never met, not face-to-face in physical meat-machine proximity.

Welcome to the afterglow of the intelligence supernova, little tapeworm.

It's a starship in the shape of a crustacean three kilometers long.

It will create a parliament – a merged group mind borganism that speaks as one supermind built from the beliefs of the victors.

Manfred is silent for a moment – probably hours in ghost-space – as he assimilates the changes. Then: 'This is true? I've slept through a whole civilization?'

In the back of his mind, raw instincts alien to anyone instantiated before the midpoint of the twenty-first century tug on the fabric of pseudoreality.

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.

Manny, being wildly creative and outward-directed and having the attention span of a weasel on crack, had other lovers.