"It doesn't need to be a complete replica of the Earth. It just has to be a convincing advertis.e.m.e.nt for a presingularity civilization full of humans. You've got two-and-seventy zombies to dissect for their brains; bolt together a bunch of variables you can apply to them, and you can permutate them to look a bit more varied."

Amber turns her attention to the snoozing cat. "Hey, furball. How long have we been here really, in real time? Can you grab Sadeq some more resources for his personal paradise garden?"

Aineko stretches and yawns, totally feline, then looks up at Amber with narrowed eyes and raised tail. "'Bout eighteen minutes, wall-clock time." The cat stretches again and sits, front paws drawn together primly, tail curled around them. "The ghosts are pushing, you know? I don't think I can sustain this for too much longer. They're not good at hacking people, but I think it won't be too long before they instantiate a new copy of you, one that'll be predisposed to their side."

"I don't get why they didn't a.s.similate you along with the rest of us."

"Blame your mother again - she's the one who kept updating the digital rights management code on my personality. 'Illegal consciousness is copyright theft' sucks until an alien tries to rewire your hindbrain with a deb.u.g.g.e.r; then it's a lifesaver." Aineko glances down and begins washing one paw. "I can give your mullah-man about six days, subjective time. After that, all bets are off."

"I will take it, then." Sadeq stands. "Thank you." He smiles at the cat, a smile that fades to translucency, hanging in the simulated air like an echo as the priest returns to his tower - this time with a blueprint and a plan in mind.

"That leaves just us." Su Ang glances at Pierre, back to Amber. "Who are you going to sell this crazy scheme to?"

Amber leans back and smiles. Behind her, Donna - her avatar an archaic movie camera suspended below a model helicopter - is filming everything for posterity. She nods lazily at the reporter. "She's the one who gave me the idea. Who do we know who's dumb enough to buy into a scam like this?"

Pierre looks at her suspiciously. "I think we've been here before," he says slowly. "You aren't going to make me kill anyone, are you?"

"I don't think that'll be necessary, unless the corporate ghosts think we're going to get away from them and are greedy enough to want to kill us."

"You see, she learned from last time," Ang comments, and Amber nods. "No more misunderstandings, right?" She beams at Amber.

Amber beams back at her. "Right. And that's why you -" she points at Pierre - "are going to go find out if any relics of the Wunch are hanging about here. I want you to make them an offer they won't refuse."

"How much for just the civilization?" asks the Slug.

Pierre looks down at it thoughtfully. It's not really a terrestrial mollusk: Slugs on Earth aren't two meters long and don't have lacy white exoskeletons to hold their chocolate-colored flesh in shape. But then, it isn't really the alien it appears to be. It's a defaulting corporate instrument that has disguised itself as a long-extinct alien upload, in the hope that its creditors won't recognize it if it looks like a randomly evolved sentient. One of the stranded members of Amber's expedition made contact with it a couple of subjective years ago, while exploring the ruined city at the center of the firewall. Now Pierre's here because it seems to be one of their most promising leads. Emphasis on the word promising - because it promises much, but there is some question over whether it can indeed deliver.

"The civilization isn't for sale," Pierre says slowly. The translation interface shimmers, storing up his words and transforming them into a different deep grammar, not merely translating his syntax but mapping equivalent meanings where necessary. "But we can give you privileged observer status if that's what you want. And we know what you are. If you're interested in finding a new exchange to be traded on, your existing intellectual property a.s.sets will be worth rather more there than here."

The rogue corporation rears up slightly and bunches into a fatter lump. Its skin blushes red in patches. "Must think about this. Is your mandatory accounting time cycle fixed or variable term? Are self-owned corporate ent.i.ties able to enter contracts?"

"I could ask my patron," Pierre says casually. He suppresses a stab of angst. He's still not sure where he and Amber stand, but theirs is far more than just a business relationship, and he worries about the risks she's taking. "My patron has a jurisdiction within which she can modify corporate law to accommodate your requirements. Your activities on a wider scale might require sh.e.l.l companies -" the latter concept echoes back in translation to him as host organisms - "but that can be taken care of."

The translation membrane wibbles for a while, apparently reformulating some more abstract concepts in a manner that the corporation can absorb. Pierre is reasonably confident that it'll take the offer, however. When it first met them, it boasted about its control over router hardware at the lowest levels. But it also b.i.t.c.hed and moaned about the firewall protocols that were blocking it from leaving (before rather rudely trying to eat its conversationalist). He waits patiently, looking around at the swampy landscape, mudflats punctuated by clumps of spiky violet ferns. The corporation has to be desperate, to be thinking of the bizarre proposition Amber has dreamed up for him to pitch to it.

"Sounds interesting," the Slug declares after a brief confirmatory debate with the membrane. "If I supply a suitable genome, can you customize a container for it?"

"I believe so," Pierre says carefully. "For your part, can you deliver the energy we need?"

"From a gate?" For a moment the translation membrane hallucinates a stick-human, shrugging. "Easy. Gates are all entangled: Dump coherent radiation in at one, get it out at another. Just get me out of this firewall first."

"But the lightspeed lag -"

"No problem. You go first, then a dumb instrument I leave behind buys up power and sends it after. Router network is synchronous, within framework of state machines that run Universe 1.0; messages propagate at same speed, speed of light in vacuum, except use wormholes to shorten distances between nodes. Whole point of the network is that it is nonlossy. Who would trust their mind to a communications channel that might partially randomize them in transit?"

Pierre goes cross-eyed, trying to understand the implications of the Slug's cosmology. But there isn't really time, here and now: They've got on the order of a minute of wall-clock time left to get everything sorted out, if Aineko is right. One minute to go before the angry ghosts start trying to break into the DMZ by other means. "If you are willing to try this, we'd be happy to accommodate you," he says, thinking of crossed fingers and rabbits' feet and firewalls.

"It's a deal," the membrane translates the Slug's response back at him. "Now we exchange shares/plasmids/ownership? Then merger complete?"

Pierre stares at the Slug: "But this is a business arrangement!" he protests. "What's s.e.x got to do with it?"

"Apologies offered. I am thinking we have a translation error. You said this was to be a merging of businesses?"

"Not that way. It's a contract. We agree to take you with us. In return, you help lure the Wunch into the domain we're setting up for them and configure the router at the other end ..."

And so on.

Steeling herself, Amber recalls the address the ghost gave her for Sadeq's afterlife universe. In her own subjective time it's been about half an hour since he left. "Coming?" she asks her cat.

"Don't think I will," says Aineko. It looks away, blissfully unconcerned.

"Bah." Amber tenses, then opens the port to Sadeq's pocket universe.

As usual she finds herself indoors, standing on an ornate mosaic floor in a room with whitewashed walls and peaked windows. But there's something different about it, and after a moment, she realizes what it is. The sound of vehicle traffic from outside, the cooing of pigeons on the rooftops, someone shouting across the street: There are people here.

She walks over to the nearest window and looks out, then recoils. It's hot outside. 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. Looking down she sees motor scooters, cars - filthy, fossil-fueled behemoths, a tonne of steel and explosives in motion to carry only one human, a ma.s.s ratio worse than an archaic ICBM - brightly dressed people walking to and fro. A news helicam buzzes overhead, lenses darting and glinting at the traffic.

"Just like home, isn't it?" says Sadeq, behind her.

Amber starts. "This is where you grew up? This is Yazd?"

"It doesn't exist anymore, in real s.p.a.ce." Sadeq looks thoughtful, but far more animated than the barely conscious parody of himself that she'd rescued from this building - back when it was a mediaeval vision of the afterlife - scant subjective hours ago. He cracks a smile: "Probably a good thing. We were dismantling it even while we were preparing to leave, you know?"

"It's detailed." Amber throws her eyes at the scene out the window, multiplexes them, and tells them to send little virtual ghosts dancing through the streets of the Iranian industrial 'burb. Overhead, big Airbuses ply the skyways, bearing pilgrims on the hajj, tourists to the coastal resorts on the Persian Gulf, produce to the foreign markets.

"It's the best time I could recall," Sadeq says. "I didn't spend many days here then - I was in Qom, studying, and Kazakhstan, for cosmonaut training - but it's meant to be the early twenties. After the troubles, after the fall of the guardians; a young, energetic, liberal country full of optimism and faith in democracy. Values that weren't doing well elsewhere."

"I thought democracy was a new thing there?"

"No." Sadeq shakes his head. "There were prodemocracy riots in Tehran in the nineteenth century, did you know that? That's why the first revolution - no." He makes a cutting gesture. "Politics and faith are a combustible combination." He frowns. "But look. Is this what you wanted?"

Amber recalls her scattered eyes - some of which have flown as much as a thousand kilometers from her locus - and concentrates on reintegrating their visions of Sadeq's re-creation. "It looks convincing. But not too convincing."

"That was the idea."

"Well, then." She smiles. "Is it just Iran? Or did you take any liberties around the edges?"

"Who, me?" He raises an eyebrow. "I have enough doubts about the morality of this - project - without trying to trespa.s.s on Allah's territory, peace be unto him. I promise you, there are no sapients in this world but us. The people are the hollow sh.e.l.ls of my dreaming, storefront dummies. The animals are crude bitmaps. This is what you asked for, and no more."

"Well, then." Amber pauses. She recalls the expression on the dirt-smudged face of a little boy, bouncing a ball at his companions by the boarded-up front of a gas station on a desert road; remembers the animated chatter of two synthetic housewives, one in traditional black and the other in some imported Eurotrash fashion. "Are you sure they aren't real?" she asks.

"Quite sure." But for a moment, she sees Sadeq looking uncertain. "Shall we go? Do you have the occupiers ready to move in yet?"

"Yes to the first, and Pierre's working on the second. Come on, we don't want to get trampled by the squatters." She waves and opens a door back onto the piazza where her robot cat - the alien's nightmare intruder in the DMZ - sleeps, chasing superintelligent dream mice through multidimensional realities. "Sometimes I wonder if I'm conscious. Thinking these thoughts gives me the creeps. Let's go and sell some aliens a bridge in Brooklyn."

Amber confronts the mendacious ghost in the windowless room stolen from 2001.

"You have confined the monster," the ghost states.

"Yes." Amber waits for a subjective moment, feeling delicate fronds tickle at the edges of her awareness in what seems to be a timing channel attack. She feels a momentary urge to sneeze, and a hot flash of anger that pa.s.ses almost immediately.

"And you have modified yourself to lock out external control," the ghost adds. "What is it that you want, Autonome Amber?"

"Don't you have any concept of individuality?" she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states.

"Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer," says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. "It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you sure you have defeated the monster?"

"It'll do as I say," Amber replies, forcing herself to sound more confident than she feels - sometimes that d.a.m.ned transhuman cyborg cat is no more predictable than a real feline. "Now, the matter of payment arises."

"Payment." The ghost sounds amused. But Pierre's filled her in on what to look for, and Amber can now see the translation membranes around it. Their color shift maps to a huge semantic distance; the creature on the other side, even though it looks like a ghost-image of herself, is very far from human. "How can we-us be expected to pay our own money for rendering services to us?"

Amber smiles. "We want an open channel back to the router we arrived through."

"Impossible," says the ghost.

"We want an open channel, and for it to stay open for six hundred million seconds after we clear it."

"Impossible," the ghost repeats.

"We can trade you a whole civilization," Amber says blandly. "A whole human nation, millions of individuals. Just let us go, and we'll see to it."

"You - please wait." The ghost shimmers slightly, fuzzing at the edges.

Amber opens a private channel to Pierre while the ghost confers with its other nodes. Are the Wunch in place yet? she sends.

They're moving in. This bunch don't remember what happened on the Field Circus, memories of those events never made it back to them. So the Slug's got them to cooperate. It's kinda scary to watch - like the Invasion of the Body s.n.a.t.c.hers, you know?

I don't care if it's scary to watch, Amber replies, I need to know if we're ready yet.

Sadeq says yes, the universe is ready.

Right, pack yourself down. We'll be moving soon.

The ghost is firming up in front of her. "A whole civilization?" it asks. "That is not possible. Your arrival -" It pauses, fuzzing a little. Hah, Gotcha! thinks Amber. Liar, liar, pants on fire! "You cannot possibly have found a human civilization in the archives?"

"The monster you complain about that came through with us is a predator," she a.s.serts blandly. "It swallowed an entire nation before we heroically attracted its attention and induced it to follow us into the router. It's an archivore - everything was inside it, still frozen until we expanded it again. This civilization will already have been restored from hot shadows in our own solar system: There is nothing to gain by taking it home with us. But we need to return to ensure that no more predators of this type discover the router - or the high-bandwidth hub we linked to it."

"You are sure you have killed this monster?" asks the ghost. "It would be inconvenient if it were to emerge from hiding in its digest archives."

"I can guarantee it won't trouble you again if you let us go," says Amber, mentally crossing her fingers. The ghost doesn't seem to have noticed the huge wedge of fractally compressed data that bloats her personal scope by an order of magnitude. She can still feel Aineko's goodbye smile inside her head, an echo of ivory teeth trusting her to revive it if the escape plan succeeds.

"We-us agree." The ghost twists weirdly, morphs into a five-dimensional hypersphere. It bubbles violently for a moment, then spits out a smaller token - a warped distortion in the air, like a gravityless black hole. "Here is your pa.s.sage. Show us the civilization."

"Okay " - Now! - "catch." Amber twitches an imaginary muscle, and one wall of the room dissolves, forming a doorway into Sadeq's existential h.e.l.l, now redecorated as a fair facsimile of a twenty-first-century industrial city in Iran, and populated by a Wunch of parasites who can't believe what they've lucked into - an entire continent of zombies waiting to host their flesh-hungry consciousness.

The ghost drifts toward the open window. Amber grabs the hole and yanks it open, gets a grip on her own thoughts, and sends Open wide! on the channel everybody is listening in on. For a moment time stands still, and then - * * *

A synthetic gemstone the size of a c.o.ke can falls through the cold vacuum, in high orbit around a brown dwarf. But the vacuum is anything but dark. A sapphire glare as bright as the noonday sun on Mars shines on the crazy diamond, billowing and cascading off sails as fine as soap bubbles that slowly drift and tense away from the can. The runaway Slug-corporation's proxy has hacked the router's firmware, and the open wormhole gate that feeds power to it is shining with the brilliance of a nuclear fireball, laser light channeled from a star many light-years away to power the Field Circus on its return trip to the once-human solar system.

Amber has retreated, with Pierre, into a simulation of her home aboard the Ring Imperium. One wall of her bedroom is a solid slab of diamond, looking out across the boiling Jovian ionosphere from an orbit low enough to make the horizon appear flat. They're curled together in her bed, a slightly more comfortable copy of the royal bed of King Henry VIII of England. It appears to be carved from thousand-year-old oak beams. As with so much else about the Ring Imperium, appearances are deceptive; and this is even more true of the cramped simulation s.p.a.ces aboard the Field Circus, as it limps toward a tenth the speed of light, the highest velocity it's likely to achieve on a fraction of its original sail area.

"Let me get this straight. You convinced. The locals. That a simulation of Iran, with zombie bodies that had been taken over by members of the Wunch. Was a human civilization?"

"Yeah." Amber stretches lazily and smirks at him. "It's their d.a.m.n fault; if the corporate collective ent.i.ties didn't use conscious viewpoints as money, they wouldn't have fallen for a trick like that, would they?"

"People. Money."

"Well." She yawns, then sits up and snaps her finger imperiously: Down-stuffed pillows appear behind her back, and a silver salver bearing two full gla.s.ses of wine materializes between them. "Corporations are life-forms back home, too, aren't they? And we trade them. We give our AIs corporations to make them legal ent.i.ties, but the a.n.a.logy goes deeper. Look at any company headquarters, fitted out with works of art and expensive furniture and staff bowing and sc.r.a.ping everywhere -"

" - They're the new aristocracy. Right?"

"Wrong. When they take over, what you get is more like the new biosphere. h.e.l.l, the new primordial soup: prokaryotes, bacteria, and algae, mindlessly swarming, trading money for plasmids." The Queen pa.s.ses her consort a winegla.s.s. When he drinks from it, it refills miraculously. "Basically, sufficiently complex resource-allocation algorithms reallocate scarce resources ... and if you don't jump to get out of their way, they'll reallocate you. I think that's what happened inside the Matrioshka brain we ended up in: Judging by the Slug it happens elsewhere, too. You've got to wonder where the builders of that structure came from. And where they went. And whether they realized that the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments."

"Maybe they tried to dismantle the companies before the companies spent them." Pierre looks worried. "Running up a national debt, importing luxurious viewpoint extensions, munching exotic dreams. Once they plugged into the Net, a primitive Matrioshka civilization would be like, um." He pauses. "Tribal. A primitive postsingularity civilization meeting the galactic net for the first time. Overawed. Wanting all the luxuries. Spending their capital, their human - or alien - capital, the meme machines that built them. Until there's nothing left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking for someone to own."

"Speculation."

"Idle speculation," he agrees.

"But we can't ignore it." She nods. "Maybe some early corporate predator built the machines that spread the wormholes around brown dwarfs and ran the router network on top of them in an attempt to make money fast. By not putting them in the actual planetary systems likely to host tool-using life, they'd ensure that only near-singularity civilizations would stumble over them. Civilizations that had gone too far to be easy prey probably wouldn't send a ship out to look ... so the network would ensure a steady stream of yokels new to the big city to fleece. Only they set the mechanism in motion billions of years ago and went extinct, leaving the network to propagate, and now there's nothing out there but burned-out Matrioshka civilizations and howling parasites like the angry ghosts and the Wunch. And victims like us." She shudders and changes the subject: "Speaking of aliens, is the Slug happy?"

"Last time I checked on him, yeah." Pierre blows on his winegla.s.s and it dissolves into a million splinters of light. He looks dubious at the mention of the rogue corporate instrument they're taking with them. "I don't trust him out in the unrestricted sim-s.p.a.ces yet, but he delivered on the fine control for the router's laser. I just hope you don't ever have to actually use him, if you follow my drift. I'm a bit worried that Aineko is spending so much time in there."

"So that's where she is? I'd been worrying."

"Cats never come when you call them, do they?"

"There is that," she agrees. Then, with a worried glance at the vision of Jupiter's cloudscape: "I wonder what we'll find when we get there?"

Outside the window, the imaginary Jovian terminator is sweeping toward them with eerie rapidity, sucking them toward an uncertain nightfall.

PART 3: Singularity.

There's a sucker born every minute.

- P. T. Barnum.