Swan put her hands on her hips and stared at them. “Pretty interesting,” she said. “But I don’t like being fooled.” She slogged through the water toward her clothes.

She walked back around the cylinder, looking up at a herd of wild horses and kissing her sore knuckles, thinking it over. She wasn’t sure what kind of things she had spent the day with. That was strange.

When she got back to their hilltop yurts, she waited until Genette and she were again the last two up, and then she said, “I ran into a trio of people today who claimed to be artificial people. Androids with qube brains.”

Genette stared at her. “You did?”

“I did.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, I beat the shit out of them.”

“You did?”

“A little bit, one of them, yes. But she had it coming.”

“Because?”

“Because they were fooling with me.”

“Isn’t that kind of like what you do in your abramovics?”

“Not at all. I never fool people, that would be theater. An abramovic is not theater.”

“Well, maybe they weren’t either,” Genette said, frowning. “This has to be looked into. There have been reports on Venus and Mars of various incidents like this. Rumors of qube humanoids, sometimes acting oddly. We’ve started keeping an eye out. Some of these people have been tagged and are being tracked.”

“So there really are such things?”

“I think so, yes. We’ve scanned some, and then of course it’s obvious. But we don’t know much more at this point.”

“But why would anyone do it?”

“Don’t know. But if there were qubes that were mobile, and moving around without being noticed, it would explain quite a few things that have happened. So I’ll have my team take a look at these people you met.”

“I think they were people,” Swan said. “They were putting on an act.”

“You think they were real people, pretending to be simulacra? As some kind of theater?”

“Yes.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know. Why would a person get in a box and pretend to be a mechanical chess player? It’s an old dream. A kind of theater.”

“Maybe. But I’m going to look into it anyway, because of these odd things happening.”

“Fine,” Swan said. “But I think they were people. Anyway, say they weren’t. What’s the problem with these things, if things they are?”

“The problem is qubes getting out in the world, moving around and doing things. What are they doing? What are they supposed to be doing? Who’s making them? And since there is a qube component to the attacks we’ve seen, we have to wonder, do these things have anything to do with that? Are some of them involved?”

“Hmm,” Swan said.

“Maybe they all come to one question,” the inspector said. “Why are the qubes changing?”

Lists (7)

inadvertent fracking—failed seal—bad lock—bad luck—hyperbaric spark fire—carbon monoxide buildup—carbon dioxide buildup—design flaw—engine housing crack—sudden air loss—solar flare—fuel impurity—metal fatigue—mental fatigue—lightning strike—meteorite strike—accidental critical mass—brake failure—dropped tool—tripped and fell—coolant loss—manufacturing flaw—programming error—human error—containment failure—battery fire—distraction—AI malfeasance—sabotage—bad decision—crossed wires—recreational mental impairment—cosmic ray impact—

(from The Journal of Space Accidentsvol. 297, 2308)

Extracts (8)

Charlotte Shortback’s periodizing system was very influential. Of course, the idea of periodization itself is controversial and even suspect, as it seems often to be a matter of squinting hard and waving one’s hands in belletristic fashion to make sock puppet myths out of the dense “buzzing and blooming confusion” of the documented past. Nevertheless, there do seem to be differences in human life between, for instance, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment and the Postmodern; and whether these differences were caused by changes in modes of production, structures of feeling, scientific paradigms, dynastic succession, technological progress, or cultural metamorphosis, it almost doesn’t matter. The shapes invoked make a pattern, they tell a story that people can follow.

Thus for a long time there was a widely agreed-upon periodization schema that included the feudal period and the Renaissance, followed by the Early Modern (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), the Modern (nineteen and twentieth), and the Postmodern (twentieth and twenty-first)—after which a new name was most definitely needed. For a long time this need generated competing new systems, and that competition, along with the generally microfine narratology of the historians of the time, combined to foil the invention of any new system that was as universally agreed-upon as the old one had been. It was only in the last years of the twenty-third century that Charlotte Shortback offered to the historical community her own periodization scheme, for what was by now the “long postmodern” so endlessly bemoaned at conferences. Hers was partly a joke, she later claimed, but it has become influential since then despite that, or even perhaps because of it.

For Shortback, the long postmodern was to be divided like this:

The Dithering: 2005 to 2060. From the end of the postmodern (Charlotte’s date derived from the UN announcement of climate change) to the fall into crisis. These were wasted years.

The Crisis: 2060 to 2130. Disappearance of Arctic summer ice, irreversible permafrost melt and methane release, and unavoidable commitment to major sea rise. In these years all the bad trends converged in “perfect storm” fashion, leading to a rise in average global temperature of five K, and sea level rise of five meters—and as a result, in the 2120s, food shortages, mass riots, catastrophic death on all continents, and an immense spike in the extinction rate of other species. Early lunar bases, scientific stations on Mars.

The Turnaround: 2130 to 2160. Verteswandel(Shortback’s famous “mutation of values”), followed by revolutions; strong AI; self-replicating factories; terraforming of Mars begun; fusion power; strong synthetic biology; climate modification efforts, including the disastrous Little Ice Age of 2142–54; space elevators on Earth and Mars; fast space propulsion; the space diaspora begun; the Mondragon Accord signed. And thus:

The Accelerando: 2160 to 2220. Full application of all the new technological powers, including human longevity increases; terraforming of Mars and subsequent Martian revolution; full diaspora into solar system; hollowing of the terraria; start of the terraforming of Venus; the construction of Terminator; and Mars joining the Mondragon Accord.

The Ritard: 2220 to 2270. Reasons for the slowing of the Accelerando are debated, but historians have pointed to the completion of Mars’s terraforming, its withdrawal from the Mondragon and increasing isolationism, the occupation of all the best terrarium candidates, and the nearly total human entrainment of the solar system’s easily available helium, nitrogen, rare earths, fossil fuels, and photosynthesis. It was also becoming clear that the longevity project was encountering problems, and was not completely distributed in any case. Recently some historians have pointed out that this was also the time when quantum computers reached thirty qubits and were combined with petaflop classical computers to make qubes—their point being that qubes have not yet been demonstrated to improve the function of already fast AIs, while the decoherence problems inherent in quantum computing may have helped create conditions for the next period: