He stares. "Is that a question?" He's silent for a moment. Then: "Throwing that wanton at me last night -"

Annette stares at him. "Who? What are you talking about?"

"That, that loose woman!" Sirhan is reduced to spluttering. "False pretenses! If this is one of Father's matchmaking ideas, it is so very wrong that -"

Annette is shaking her head. "Are you crazy? Your mother simply wanted you to meet her campaign team, to join in planning the policy. Your father is not on this planet! But you stormed out, you really upset Rita, did you know that? Rita, she is the best belief maintenance and story construction operative I have! Yet you to tears reduce her. What is wrong with you?"

"I -" Sirhan swallows. "She's what?" he asks again, his mouth dry. "I thought ..." He trails off. He doesn't want to say what he thought. The hussy, that brazen trollop, is part of his mother's campaign party? Not some plot to lure him into corruption? What if it was all a horrible misunderstanding?

"I think you need to apologize to someone," Annette says coolly, standing up. Sirhan's head is spinning between a dozen dialogues of actors and ghosts, a journal of the party replaying before his ghast-stricken inner gaze. Even the walls have begun to flicker, responding to his intense unease. Annette skewers him with a disgusted look: "When you can a woman behave toward as a person, not a threat, we can again talk. Until then." And she stands up and walks out of the room, leaving him to contemplate the shattered stump of his anger, so startled he can barely concentrate on his project, thinking, Is that really me? Is that what I look like to her? as the cladistic graph slowly rotates before him, denuded branches spread wide, waiting to be filled with the nodes of the alien interstellar network just as soon as he can convince Aineko to stake him the price of the depth-first tour of darkness.

Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons - literally, his exocortex dispersed among a pa.s.sel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, s.h.i.tting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd, even without the added distractions of his s.e.x drive, which he has switched off until he gets used to being unitary again. Not only does he get shooting pains in his neck whenever he tries to look over his left shoulder with his right eye, but he's lost the habit of sp.a.w.ning exocortical agents to go interrogate a database or bush robot or something, then report back to him. Instead he keeps trying to fly off in all directions at once, which usually ends with him falling over.

But at present, that's not a problem. He's sitting comfortably at a weathered wooden table in a beer garden behind a hall lifted from somewhere like Frankfurt, a liter gla.s.s of straw-colored liquid at his elbow and a comforting multiple whispering of knowledge streams tickling the back of his head. Most of his attention is focused on Annette, who frowns at him with mingled concern and affection. They may have lived separate lives for almost a third of a century, since she declined to upload with him, but he's still deeply attuned to her.

"You are going to have to do something about that boy," she says sympathetically. "He is close enough to upset Amber. And without Amber, there will be a problem."

"I'm going to have to do something about Amber, too," Manfred retorts. "What was the idea, not warning her I was coming?"

"It was meant to be a surprise." Annette comes as close to pouting as Manfred's seen her recently. It brings back warm memories; he reaches out to hold her hand across the table.

"You know I can't handle the human niceties properly when I'm a flock." He strokes the back of her wrist. She pulls back after a while, but slowly. "I expected you to manage all that stuff."

"That stuff." Annette shakes her head. "She's your daughter, you know? Did you have no curiosity left?"

"As a bird?" Manfred c.o.c.ks his head to one side so abruptly that he hurts his neck and winces. "Nope. Now I do, but I think I p.i.s.sed her off -"

"Which brings us back to point one."

"I'd send her an apology, but she'd think I was trying to manipulate her" - Manfred takes a mouthful of beer - "and she'd be right." He sounds slightly depressed. "All my relationships are screwy this decade. And it's lonely."

"So? Don't brood." Annette pulls her hand back. "Something will sort itself out eventually. And in the short term, there is the work, the electoral problem becomes acute." When she's around him the remains of her once-strong French accent almost vanish in a transatlantic drawl, he realizes with a pang. He's been abhuman for too long - people who meant a lot to him have changed while he's been away.

"I'll brood if I want to," he says. "I didn't ever really get a chance to say goodbye to Pam, did I? Not after that time in Paris when the gangsters ..." He shrugs. "I'm getting nostalgic in my old age." He snorts.

"You're not the only one," Annette says tactfully. "Social occasions here are a minefield, one must tiptoe around so many issues, people have too much, too much history. And n.o.body knows everything that is going on."

"That's the trouble with this d.a.m.ned polity." Manfred takes another gulp of hefeweisen. "We've already got six million people living on this planet, and it's growing like the first-generation Internet. Everyone who is anyone knows everyone, but there are so many incomers diluting the mix and not knowing that there is a small world network here that everything is up for grabs again after only a couple of megaseconds. New networks form, and we don't even know they exist until they sprout a political agenda and surface under us. We're acting under time pressure. If we don't get things rolling now, we'll never be able to ..." He shakes his head. "It wasn't like this for you in Brussels, was it?"

"No. Brussels was a mature system. And I had Gianni to look after in his dotage after you left. It will only get worse from here on in, I think."

"Democracy 2.0." He shudders briefly. "I'm not sure about the validity of voting projects at all, these days. The a.s.sumption that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent. Do you think we can make this fly?"

"I don't see why not. If Amber's willing to play the People's Princess for us ..." Annette picks up a slice of liverwurst and chews on it meditatively.

"I'm not sure it's workable, however we play it." Manfred looks thoughtful. "The whole democratic partic.i.p.ation thing looks questionable to me under these circ.u.mstances. We're under direct threat, for all that it's a long-term one, and this whole culture is in danger of turning into a cla.s.sical nation-state. Or worse, several of them layered on top of one another with complete geographical collocation but no social interpenetration. I'm not certain it's a good idea to try to steer something like that - pieces might break off, you'd get the most unpleasant side-effects. Although, on the other hand, if we can mobilize enough broad support to become the first visible planetwide polity ..."

"We need you to stay focused," Annette adds unexpectedly.

"Focused? Me?" He laughs, briefly. "I used to have an idea a second. Now it's maybe one a year. I'm just a melancholy old birdbrain, me."

"Yes, but you know the old saying? The fox has many ideas - the hedgehog has only one, but it's a big idea."

"So tell me, what is my big idea?" Manfred leans forward, one elbow on the table, one eye focused on inner s.p.a.ce as a hot-burning thread of consciousness barks psephological performance metrics at him, a.n.a.lysing the game ahead. "Where do you think I'm going?"

"I think -" Annette breaks off suddenly, staring past his shoulder. Privacy slips, and for a frozen moment Manfred glances round in mild horror and sees thirty or forty other guests in the crowded garden, elbows rubbing, voices raised above the background chatter: "Gianni!" She beams widely as she stands up. "What a surprise! When did you arrive?"

Manfred blinks. A slim young guy, moving with adolescent grace, but none of the awkward movements and sullen lack of poise - he's much older than he looks, chickenhawk genetics. Gianni? He feels a huge surge of memories paging through his exocortex. He remembers ringing a doorbell in dusty, hot Rome: white toweling bathrobe, the economics of scarcity, autograph signed by the dead hand of von Neumann - "Gianni?" he asks, disbelieving. "It's been a long time!"

The gilded youth, incarnated in the image of a metropolitan toy-boy from the noughties, grins widely and embraces Manfred with a friendly bear hug. Then he slides down onto the bench next to Annette, whom he kisses with easy familiarity. "Ah, to be among friends again! It's been too long!" He glances round curiously. "Hmm, how very Bavarian." He snaps his fingers. "Mine will be a, what do you recommend? It's been too long since my last beer." His grin widens. "Not in this body."

"You're resimulated?" Manfred asks, unable to stop himself.

Annette frowns at him disapprovingly: "No, silly! He came through the teleport gate -"

"Oh." Manfred shakes his head. "I'm sorry -"

"It's okay." Gianni Vittoria clearly doesn't mind being mistaken for a historical newbie, rather than someone who's traveled through the decades the hard way. He must be over a hundred by now, Manfred notes, not bothering to sp.a.w.n a search thread to find out.

"It was time to move and, well, the old body didn't want to move with me, so why not go gracefully and accept the inevitable?"

"I didn't take you for a dualist," Manfred says ruefully.

"Ah, I'm not - but neither am I reckless." Gianni drops his grin for a moment. The sometime minister for transhuman affairs, economic theoretician, then retired tribal elder of the polycognitive liberals is serious. "I have never uploaded before, or switched bodies, or teleported. Even when my old one was seriously - tcha! Maybe I left it too long. But here I am, one planet is as good as another to be cloned and downloaded onto, don't you think?"

"You invited him?" Manfred asks Annette.

"Why wouldn't I?" There's a wicked gleam in her eye. "Did you expect me to live like a nun while you were a flock of pigeons? We may have campaigned against the legal death of the transubstantiated, Manfred, but there are limits."

Manfred looks between them, then shrugs, embarra.s.sed. "I'm still getting used to being human again," he admits. "Give me time to catch up? At an emotional level, at least." The realization that Gianni and Annette have a history together doesn't come as a surprise to him: It's one of the things you must adapt to if you opt out of the human species, after all. At least the libido suppression is helping here, he realizes: He's not about to embarra.s.s anyone by suggesting a menage. He focuses on Gianni. "I have a feeling I'm here for a purpose, and it isn't mine," he says slowly. "Why don't you tell me what you've got in mind?"

Gianni shrugs. "You have the big picture already. We are human, metahuman, and augmented human. But the posthumans are things that were never really human to begin with. The Vile Offspring have reached their adolescence and want the place to themselves so they can throw a party. The writing is on the wall, don't you think?"

Manfred gives him a long stare. "The whole idea of running away in meats.p.a.ce is fraught with peril," he says slowly. He picks up his mug of beer and swirls it around slowly. "Look, we know, now, that a singularity doesn't turn into a voracious predator that eats all the dumb matter in its path, triggering a phase change in the structure of s.p.a.ce - at least, not unless they've done something very stupid to the structure of the false vacuum, somewhere outside our current light cone.

"But if we run away, we are still going to be there. Sooner or later, we'll have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that's what happened out past the Bootes void - not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence. 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? So ... maybe you can tell me what you think we should do. Hmm?"

"It's a dilemma." A waitron inserts itself into their privacy-screened field of view. It plants a spun-diamond gla.s.s in front of Gianni, then pukes beer into it. Manfred declines a refill, waiting for Gianni to drink. "Ah, the simple pleasures of the flesh! I've been corresponding with your daughter, Manny. She loaned me her experiential digest of the journey to Hyundai +4904/[-56]. I found it quite alarming. n.o.body's casting aspersions on her observations, not after that self-propelled stock market bubble or 419 scam or whatever it was got loose in the Economics 2.0 sphere, but the implications - the Vile Offspring will eat the solar system, Manny. Then they'll slow down. But where does that leave us, I ask you? What is there for orthohumans like us to do?"

Manfred nods thoughtfully. "You've heard the argument between the accelerationistas and the time-binder faction, I a.s.sume?" he asks.

"Of course." Gianni takes a long pull on his beer. "What do you think of our options?"

"The accelerationistas want to upload everyone onto a fleet of starwhisps and charge off to colonize an uninhabited brown dwarf planetary system. Or maybe steal a Matrioshka brain that's succ.u.mbed to senile dementia and turn it back into planetary biomes with cores of diamond-phase computronium to fulfil some kind of demented pastoralist nostalgia trip. Rousseau's universal robots. I gather Amber thinks this is a good idea because she's done it before - at least, the charging off aboard a starwhisp part. 'To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony fleet has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?" Manfred nods to himself. "Like I say, it won't work. We'd be right back to iteration one of the waterfall model of singularity formation within a couple of gigaseconds of arriving. That's why I came back: to warn her."

"So?" Gianni prods, pretending to ignore the frowns that Annette is casting his way.

"And as for the time-binders," Manfred nods again, "they're like Sirhan. Deeply conservative, deeply suspicious. Holding out for staying here as long as possible, until the Vile Offspring come for Saturn - then moving out bit by bit, into the Kuiper belt. Colony habitats on s...o...b..a.l.l.s half a light-year from anywhere." He shudders. "Spam in a f.u.c.king can with a light-hour walk to the nearest civilized company if your fellow inmates decide to reinvent Stalinism or Objectivism. No thanks! I know they've been muttering about quantum teleportation and stealing toys from the routers, but I'll believe it when I see it."

"Which leaves what?" Annette demands. "It is all very well, this dismissal of both the accelerationista and time-binder programs, Manny, but what can you propose in their place?" She looks distressed. "Fifty years ago, you would have had six new ideas before breakfast! And an erection."

Manfred leers at her unconvincingly. "Who says I can't still have both?"

She glares. "Drop it!"

"Okay." Manfred chugs back a quarter of a liter of beer, draining his gla.s.s, and puts it down on the table with a bang. "As it happens, I do have an alternative idea." He looks serious. "I've been discussing it with Aineko for some time, and Aineko has been seeding Sirhan with it - if it's to work optimally, we'll need to get a rump const.i.tuency of both the accelerationistas and the conservatives on board. Which is why I'm conditionally going along with this whole election nonsense. So, what's it worth to you for me to explain it?"

"So, who was the deadhead you were busy with today?" asks Amber.

Rita shrugs. "Some boringly prolix pulp author from the early twentieth, with a body phobia of extropian proportions - I kept expecting him to start drooling and rolling his eyes if I crossed my legs. Funny thing is, he was also close to bolting from fear once I mentioned implants. We really need to nail down how to deal with these mind/body dualists, don't we?" She watches Amber with something approaching admiration; she's new to the inner circle of the accelerationista study faction, and Amber's social credit is sky-high. Rita's got a lot to learn from her, if she can get close enough. And right now, following her along a path through the landscaped garden behind the museum seems like a golden moment of opportunity.

Amber smiles. "I'm glad I'm not processing immigrants these days; most of them are so stupid it drives you up the wall after a bit. Personally I blame the Flynn effect - in reverse. They come from a background of sensory deprivation. It's nothing that a course of neural growth enhancers can't fix in a year or two, but after the first few you skullf.u.c.k, they're all the same. So dull. Unless you're unlucky enough to get one of the doc.u.mentees from a puritan religious period. I'm no fluffragette, but I swear if I get one more superst.i.tious, woman-hating clergyman, I'm going to consider prescribing forcible gender rea.s.signment surgery. At least the Victorian English are mostly just open-minded lechers, when you get past their social reserve. And they like new technology."

Rita nods. Woman-hating et cetera ... The echoes of patriarchy are still with them today, it seems, and not just in the form of resimulated ayatollahs and archbishops from the Dark Ages. "My author sounds like the worst of both. Some guy called Howard, from Rhode Island. Kept looking at me as if he was afraid I was going to sprout bat wings and tentacles or something." Like your son, she doesn't add. Just what was he thinking, anyway? she wonders. To be that screwed up takes serious dedication ... "What are you working on, if you don't mind me asking?" she asks, trying to change the direction of her attention.

"Oh, pressing the flesh, I guess. Auntie 'Nette wanted me to meet some old political hack contact of hers who she figures can help with the program, but he was holed up with her and Dad all day." She pulls a face. "I had another fitting session with the image merchants, they're trying to turn me into a political catwalk clotheshorse. Then there's the program demographics again. We're getting about a thousand new immigrants a day, planetwide, but it's accelerating rapidly, and we should be up to eighty an hour by the time of the election. Which is going to be a huge problem, because if we start campaigning too early, a quarter of the electorate won't know what they're meant to be voting about."

"Maybe it's deliberate," Rita suggests. "The Vile Offspring are trying to rig the outcome by injecting voters." She pings a smiley emoticon off Wednesday's open channel, raising a flickering grin in return. "The party of f.u.c.kwits will win, no question about it."

"Uh-huh." Amber snaps her fingers and pulls an impatient face as she waits for a pa.s.sing cloud to solidify above her head and lower a gla.s.s of cranberry juice to her. "Dad said one thing that's spot-on, we're framing this entire debate in terms of what we should do to avoid conflict with the Offspring. The main bone of contention is how to run away and how far to go and which program to put resources into, not whether or when to run, let alone what else we could do. Maybe we should have given it some more thought. Are we being manipulated?"

Rita looks vacant for a moment. "Is that a question?" she asks. Amber nods, and she shakes her head. "Then I'd have to say that I don't know. The evidence is inconclusive, so far. But I'm not really happy. The Offspring won't tell us what they want, but there's no reason to believe they don't know what we want. I mean, they can think rings round us, can't they?"

Amber shrugs, then pauses to unlatch a hedge gate that gives admission to a maze of sweet-smelling shrubs. "I really don't know. They may not care about us, or even remember we exist - the resimulants may be being generated by some autonomic mechanism, not really part of the higher consciousness of the Offspring. Or it may be some whacked-out post-Tiplerite meme that's gotten hold of more processing resources than the entire presingularity Net, some kind of MetaMormon project directed at ensuring that everyone who can possibly ever have lived lives in the right way to fit some weird quasi-religious requirement we don't know about. Or it might be a message we're simply not smart enough to decode. That's the trouble, we don't know."

She vanishes around the curve of the maze. Rita hurries to catch up, sees her about to turn into another alleyway, and leaps after her. "What else?" she pants.

"Could be" - left turn - "anything, really." Six steps lead down into a shadowy tunnel; fork right, five meters forward, then six steps up lead back to the surface. "Question is, why don't they" - left turn - "just tell us what they want?"

"Speaking to tapeworms." Rita nearly manages to catch up with Amber, who is trotting through the maze as if she's memorized it perfectly. "That's how much the nascent Matrioshka brain can outthink us by, as humans to segmented worms. Would we do. What they told us?"

"Maybe." Amber stops dead, and Rita glances around. They're in an open cell near the heart of the maze, five meters square, hedged in on all sides. There are three entrances and a slate altar, waist high, lichen-stained with age. "I think you know the answer to that question."

"I -" Rita stares at her.

Amber stares back, eyes dark and intense. "You're from one of the Ganymede orbitals by way of t.i.tan. You knew my eigensister while I was out of the solar system flying a diamond the size of a c.o.ke can. That's what you told me. You've got a skill set that's a perfect match for the campaign research group, and you asked me to introduce you to Sirhan, then you pushed his b.u.t.tons like a pro. Just what are you trying to pull? Why should I trust you?"

"I -" Rita's face crumples. "I didn't push his b.u.t.tons! He thought I was trying to drag him into bed." She looks up defiantly. "I wasn't, I want to learn, what makes you - him - work -" Huge, dark, structured information queries batter at her exocortex, triggering warnings. Someone is churning through distributed time-series databases all over the outer system, measuring her past with a micrometer. She stares at Amber, mortified and angry. It's the ultimate denial of trust, the need to check her statements against the public record for truth. "What are you doing?"

"I have a suspicion." Amber stands poised, as if ready to run. Run away from me? Rita thinks, startled. "You said, what if the resimulants came from a subconscious function of the Offspring? And funnily enough, I've been discussing that possibility with Dad. He's still got the spark when you show him a problem, you know."

"I don't understand!"

"No, I don't think you do," says Amber, and Rita can feel vast stresses in the s.p.a.ce around her: The whole ubicomp environment, dust-sized chips and utility fog and hazy clouds of diamond-bright optical processors in the soil and the air and her skin, is growing blotchy and sluggish, thrashing under the load of whatever Amber - with her management-grade ackles - is ordering it to do. For a moment, Rita can't feel half her mind, and she gets the panicky claustrophobic sense of being trapped inside her own head: Then it stops.

"Tell me!" Rita insists. "What are you trying to prove? It's some mistake -" And Amber is nodding, much to her surprise, looking weary and morose. "What do you think I've done?"

"Nothing. You're coherent. Sorry about that."

"Coherent?" Rita hears her voice rising with her indignation as she feels bits of herself, cut off from her for whole seconds, shivering with relief. "I'll give you coherent! a.s.saulting my exocortex -"

"Shut up." Amber rubs her face and simultaneously throws Rita one end of an encrypted channel.

"Why should I?" Rita demands, not accepting the handshake.

"Because." Amber glances round. She's scared! Rita suddenly realizes. "Just do it," she hisses.

Rita accepts the endpoint and a huge lump of undigested expository data slides down it, structured and tagged with entry points and metainformation directories pointing to - "Holy s.h.i.t!" she whispers, as she realizes what it is.

"Yes." Amber grins humorlessly. She continues, over the open channel: It looks like they're cognitive antibodies, generated by the devil's own semiotic immune system. That's what Sirhan is focusing on, how to avoid triggering them and bringing everything down at once. Forget the election, we're going to be in deep s.h.i.t sooner rather than later, and we're still trying to work out how to survive. Now are you sure you still want in?

"Want in on what?" Rita asks, shakily.

The lifeboat Dad's trying to get us all into under cover of the accelerationista/conservationista split, before the Vile Offspring's immune system figures out how to lever us apart into factions and make us kill each other ...

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

Tapeworms have on the order of a thousand neurons, pulsing furiously to keep their little bodies twitching. Human beings have on the order of a hundred billion neurons. What is happening in the inner solar system as the Vile Offspring churn and reconfigure the fast-thinking structured dust clouds that were once planets is as far beyond the ken of merely human consciousness as the thoughts of a G.o.del are beyond the twitching tropisms of a worm. Personality modules bounded by the speed of light, sucking down billions of times the processing power of a human brain, form and re-form in the halo of glowing nanoprocessors that shrouds the sun in a ruddy glowing cloud.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Ceres and the asteroids - all gone. Luna is a silvery iridescent sphere, planed smooth down to micrometer heights, luminous with diffraction patterns. Only Earth, the cradle of human civilization, remains untransformed; and Earth, too, will be dismantled soon enough, for already a trellis of s.p.a.ce elevators webs the planet around its equator, lifting refugee dumb matter into orbit and flinging it at the wildlife preserves of the outer system.

The intelligence bloom that gnaws at Jupiter's moons with claws of molecular machinery won't stop until it runs out of dumb matter to convert into computronium. By the time it does, it will have as much brainpower as you'd get if you placed a planet with a population of six billion future-shocked primates in orbit around every star in the Milky Way galaxy. But right now, it's still stupid, having converted barely a percentage point of the ma.s.s of the solar system - it's a mere Magellanic Cloud civilization, infantile and unsubtle and still perilously close to its carbon-chemistry roots.

It's hard for tapeworms living in warm intestinal mulch to wrap their thousand-neuron brains around whatever it is that the vastly more complex ent.i.ties who host them are discussing, but one thing's sure - the owners have a lot of things going on, not all of them under conscious control. The churning of gastric secretions and the steady ventilation of lungs are incomprehensible to the simple brains of tapeworms, but they serve the purpose of keeping the humans alive and provide the environment the worms live in. And other more esoteric functions that contribute to survival - the intricate dance of specialized cloned lymphocytes in their bone marrow and lymph nodes, the random permutations of antibodies constantly churning for possible matches to intruder molecules warning of the presence of pollution - are all going on beneath the level of conscious control.

Autonomic defenses. Antibodies. Intelligence bloom gnawing at the edges of the outer system. And humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise, that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?

There's a team meeting early the next morning. It's still dark outside, and most of the attendees who are present in vivo have the faintly haggard look that comes from abusing melatonin antagonists. Rita stifles a yawn as she glances around the conference room - the walls expanded into huge virtual s.p.a.ces to accommodate thirty or so exocortical ghosts from sleeping partners who will wake with memories of a particularly vivid lucid dream - and sees Amber talking to her famous father and a younger-looking man who one of her partials recognizes as a last-century EU politician. There seems to be some tension between them.

Now that Amber has granted Rita her conditional trust, a whole new tier of campaigning information has opened up to her inner eye - stuff steganographically concealed in a hidden layer of the project's collective memory s.p.a.ce. There's stuff in here she hadn't suspected, frightening studies of resimulant demographics, surveys of emigration rates from the inner system, cladistic trees dissecting different forms of crude tampering that have been found skulking in the wetware of refugees. The reason why Amber and Manfred and - reluctantly - Sirhan are fighting for one radical faction in a planetwide election, despite their various misgivings over the validity of the entire concept of democracy in this posthuman era. She blinks it aside, slightly bewildered, forking a couple of dozen personality subthreads to chew on it at the edges. "Need coffee," she mutters to the table, as it offers her a chair.

"Everyone on-line?" asked Manfred. "Then I'll begin." He looks tired and worried, physically youthful but showing the full weight of his age. "We've got a crisis coming, folks. About a hundred kiloseconds ago, the bit rate on the resimulation stream jumped. We're now fielding about one resimulated state vector a second, on top of the legitimate immigration we're dealing with. If it jumps again by the same factor, it's going to swamp our ability to check the immigrants for zimboes in vivo - we'd have to move to running them in secure storage or just resurrecting them blind, and if there are any jokers in the pack, that's about the riskiest thing we could do."

"Why do you not spool them to memory diamond?" asks the handsome young ex-politician to his left, looking almost amused - as if he already knows the answer.

"Politics." Manfred shrugs.

"It would blow a hole in our social contract," says Amber, looking as if she's just swallowed something unpleasant, and Rita feels a flicker of admiration for the way they're stage-managing the meeting. Amber's even talking to her father, as if she feels comfortable with him around, although he's a walking reminder of her own lack of success. n.o.body else has gotten a word in yet. "If we don't instantiate them, the next logical step is to deny resimulated minds the franchise. Which in turn puts us on the road to inst.i.tutional inequality. And that's a very big step to take, even if you have misgivings about the idea of settling complex policy issues on the basis of a popular vote, because our whole polity is based on the idea that less competent intelligences - us - deserve consideration."

"Hrmph." Someone clears their throat. Rita glances round and freezes, because it's Amber's screwed-up eigenchild, and he's just about materialized in the chair next to her. So he adopted Superplonk after all? she observes cynically. He doggedly avoids looking at her. "That was my a.n.a.lysis," he says reluctantly. "We need them alive. For the ark option, at least, and if not, even the accelerationista platform will need them on hand later."