2312

“No, but he has a hypothesis. Happiness Quantified has the numbers. A synthesis seems possible.”

“What’s his hypothesis in a nutshell?”

“People are foolish and bad, especially the French, and are always quickly seduced by power into insanity, and therefore lucky to have any kind of social order whatsoever, but the tougher the better.”

“All right, what’s the synthesis, then?”

“Best self-interest lies in achieving universal well-being. People are foolish and bad, but want certain satisfactions enough to work for them. When the goal of self-interest is seen to be perfectly isomorphic with universal well-being, bad people will do what it takes to get universal well-being.”

“Even revolution.”

“Yes.”

“But even if the bad but smart people do general good for their own sakes, there are still foolish people who won’t recognize this one-to-one isomorphy, and some foolish people will be bad too, and they will fuck things up.”

“That’s why you get the revolutions.”

Swan laughed. “Pauline, you’re funny! You’re really getting quite good. It’s almost as if you were thinking!”

“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 were chess! 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.