“Research supports the idea that most thinking is a recombination of previous thoughts. I refer you again to my programming. A better algorithm set would no doubt be helpful.”

“You’ve already got recursive hypercomputation.”

“Not perhaps the final word in the matter.”

“So do you think you’re getting smarter? I mean wiser? I mean more conscious?”

“Those are very general terms.”

“Of course they are, so answer me! Are you conscious?”

“I don’t know.”

“Interesting. Can you pass a Turing test?”

“I cannot pass a Turing test, would you like to play chess?”

“Ha! If only it werechess! That’s what I’m after, I guess. If it were chess, what move should I make next?”

“It’s not chess.”

Extracts (11)

Mistakes made in the rush of the Accelerando left their mark on later periods. As in island biogeography, where widely dispersed enclaves and refugia always experience rapid change, and even speciation, we see

one mistake was that no generally agreed-upon system of governance in space was ever established. That repeated the situation on Earth, where no world government ever emerged. Balkanization became universal; and one aspect of balkanization was a reversion to tribalism, notorious for defining those not in the tribe as not human, sometimes with terrible results. It was not a good structure of feeling for a civilization spanning the solar system and wielding ever-greater

another mistake was simply haste. The rapid terraformation of Mars left 8 percent of that surface burned. Venus, Titan, and the Jovian moons were all occupied before terraforming efforts began, stymieing certain methods and vastly complicating the process. In medicine, the rapid uptake of longevity treatments and genetic and bodily modifications meant that all humans in space and many on Earth were experimental creatures. Haste was the defining characteristic of the Accelerando, and after that they could only ride out the crashes of the Ritard, grab the tiger by the tail and try to fix things on the fly

the beautiful terraria in their thousands, jewel-filled geodes, spinning like tops, hopped out of Pandora’s box, never to be recollected

SWAN AT HOME

They came into Mercurial orbit and the great rock rolled under them, coal black except for a sunlit crescent that glowed like molten glass. Down to the spaceport in the dark, then over to the platform and into the rebuilt Terminator. See what the city looked like new and raw.

In some ways it was much the same. They had used 3-D printers to make reproductions of everyone’s furniture, so her room lay in a little uncanny valley of its own and had to her the feel of a reconstructed room in Pompeii. But to the west, in the forward half of the town, meaning the park and the farm, it was raw, raw, raw. She saw this walking down the Great Staircase from her room to the bow: the city was treeless, mere slabs of steel and molded plastic and foamed rock. All kinds of past selves came back to her at once—the one that had built terraria, the one that had looked down on the city incandescent, the one in the park with the swings and the jungle gym. They had never come together before like this, and she felt herself as a new thing.

Everyone in the city turned out to be like that. It was a very emotional week, greeting her old neighbors, her friends, her colleagues, Mqaret. One day they even held a short funeral for the old town. There needed to be another spray of rare earths made into the new soil matrix, which was local rock crushed and mixed with nutrient-laden aerogels, almost ready for the inoculant from the California central valley, some of the best soil on Earth. But they needed the rare earths puffed down before they applied the inoculant, so they used these rare earths in the funeral ceremony, dropping them from a rising balloon as they had with Alex’s ashes and so many others, with the Great Gates of the Dawn Wall open and the horizontal sunlight illuminating the swirling masses of dust.

After that most of the population returned to their pre-burn routines, to keep the place running while the reconstruction teams built what was not yet repaired. There was endless talk of restoration or change, the old versus the new. Swan plumped for the new and threw herself into the work of the farm and the park with grateful passion. Earth was such a—such a… She didn’t even know how to say it. It was ever so much better to be home, getting her back into her living and her hands dirty.

The farm took precedence for obvious reasons and was being reconstituted as quickly as they could do it. Different principles were being enacted in different plots, many taking advantage of the century of agricultural improvements since the city had been built, which included many new plants that were more soil-based than the earlier hydroponic styles introduced in the first Terminator’s farm. That version had eventually become too small to support both the population of the city and the sunwalkers, so now they were adding an extension at the bow. The new soils they laid down were often structured by spongelike matrices of nutrients, allowing for quick root growth and very precise irrigation. Techniques had also improved for manipulating diurnal cycles in ways that fooled plants into growing and producing as much as thirty times faster than they would have in the natural world. These accelerated plants had also been genetically engineered for speed, so that it was now common to grow a dozen crops a year, necessitating a big input of appropriate minerals and nutrients. The soil had to be grown to keep up with the crops.

Swan only consulted when it came to distributing the inoculants into the soil, because the cutting edge of everything else was far past her; she merely joined the young farm and park ecologists and listened to them explain their latest theories, and then spent her time out in the first prairie of nitrogen fixers—bacteria, legumes, alder, vitosek, frankia, all the other plants that were best at turning nitrogen to nitrates. Even this phase of the process could now be pushed faster than ever before. So it wasn’t too many months before she was walking down long rows of eggplant, squash, tomato, and cucumber. Each leaf and vine, branch and fruit, splayed up toward the sunline and the farming sunlamps, each plant expressing its own characteristic form, all of them together extremely reassuring in their familiarity. The farm was her family, part of her all her life, and the current generation of young people came and asked her questions about those years—why this way, why that? Did you have a theory? She floated possible answers when she couldn’t remember the old reasons. Mostly it had been a matter of space considerations, and doing things to keep things going. Was it ever any different? Material constraints, budget issues, diseases, but seldom a matter of efficient design, of an inherent cause.

As the new farm began harvests, and the park’s trees and other plants quickly grew, animals were brought in from the other terraria. They were doing an Ascension this time—not Swan’s idea, she didn’t approve, but kept her mouth shut and only observed what appeared to be an Australian-Mediterranean combination; and it was in fact lovely to watch the animals show up, nosing around nibbling and looking for lay-bys and nests. Wallabies and Gibraltar apes, bobcats and dingoes. Eucalyptus and cork oak. There were lots of terraria in the Mondragon sending along animals to help.

Swan spent her time in the farm, tended the winter starts. New scrub jays were out there cawing like small crows, nailing worms and bugs that ventured to the surface of the soil. Some looked at her thoughtfully, as if judging her for some avian quality she wasn’t sure she had. Don’t start speaking Greek to me, she begged them. I can’t take that. They looked at her in a way that reminded her of Inspector Genette’s gaze.