"Hmm." Amber frowns, and the shop window dummy turns and waggles its hips at her, sending tiers of skirts swishing across the floor. Her frown deepens. "If we're really going to go through with this election shit, it's not just the resimulant voters I need to convince but the contemporaries, and that's a matter of substance, not image. They've lived through too much media warfare. They're immune to any semiotic payload short of an active cognitive attack. If I send out partials to canvass them that look as if I'm trying to push buttons —"
"– They will listen to your message, and nothing you wear or say will sway them. Don't worry about them, ma chérie. The naive resimulated are another matter, and perhaps might be swayed. This your first venture into democracy is, in how many years? Your privacy, she is an illusion now. The question is what image will you project? People will listen to you only once you gain their attention. Also, the swing voters you must reach, they are future-shocked, timid. Your platform is radical. Should you not project a comfortably conservative image?"
Amber pulls a face, an expression of mild distaste for the whole populist program. "Yes, I suppose I must, if necessary. But on second thoughts, that" – Amber snaps her fingers, and the mannequin turns around once more before morphing back into neutrality, aureoles perfect puckered disks above the top of its bodice – "is just too much."
She doesn't need to merge in the opinions of several different fractional personalities, fashion critics and psephologists both, to figure out that adopting Victorian/Cretan fusion fashion – a breast-and-ass fetishist's fantasy – isn't the way to sell herself as a serious politician to the nineteenth-century postsingularity fringe. "I'm not running for election as the mother of the nation, I'm running because I figure we've got about a billion seconds, at most, to get out of this rat trap of a gravity well before the Vile Offspring get seriously medieval on our CPU cycles, and if we don't convince them to come with us, they're doomed. Let's look for something more practical that we can overload with the right signifiers."
"Like your coronation robe?"
Amber winces. "Touché." The Ring Imperium is dead, along with whatever was left over from its early orbital legal framework, and Amber is lucky to be alive as a private citizen in this cold new age at the edge of the halo. "But that was just scenery setting. I didn't fully understand what I was doing, back then."
"Welcome to maturity and experience." Annette smiles distantly at some faint memory: "You don't feel older, you just know what you're doing this time. I wonder, sometimes, what Manny would make of it if he was here."
"That birdbrain," Amber says dismissively, stung by the idea that her father might have something to contribute. She follows Annette past a gaggle of mendicant street evangelists preaching some new religion and in through the door of a real department store, one with actual human sales staff and fitting rooms to cut the clothing to shape. "If I'm sending out fractional mes tailored for different demographics, isn't it a bit self-defeating to go for a single image? I mean, we could drill down and tailor a partial for each individual elector —"
"Per-haps." The door re-forms behind them. "But you need a core identity." Annette looks around, hunting for eye contact with the sales consultant. "To start with a core design, a style, then to work outward, tailoring you for your audience. And besides, there is tonight's – ah, bonjour!"
"Hello. How can we help you?" The two female and one male shop assistants who appear from around the displays – cycling through a history of the couture industry, catwalk models mixing and matching centuries of fashion – are clearly chips off a common primary personality, instances united by their enhanced sartorial obsession. If they're not actually a fashion borganism, they're not far from it, dressed head to foot in the highest quality Chanel and Armani replicas, making a classical twentieth-century statement. This isn't simply a shop, it's a temple to a very peculiar art form, its staff trained as guardians of the esoteric secrets of good taste.
"Mais oui. We are looking for a wardrobe for my niece here." Annette reaches through the manifold of fashion ideas mapped within the shop's location cache and flips a requirement spec one of her ghosts has just completed at the lead assistant: "She is into politics going, and the question of her image is important."
"We would be delighted to help you," purrs the proprietor, taking a delicate step forward: "Perhaps you could tell us what you've got in mind?"
"Oh. Well." Amber takes a deep breath, glances sidelong at Annette; Annette stares back, unblinking. It's your head , she sends. "I'm involved in the accelerationista administrative program. Are you familiar with it?"
The head coutureborg frowns slightly, twin furrows rippling her brow between perfectly symmetrical eyebrows, plucked to match her classic New Look suit. "I have heard reference to it, but a lady of fashion like myself does not concern herself with politics," she says, a touch self-deprecatingly. "Especially the politics of her clients. Your, ah, aunt said it was a question of image?"
"Yes." Amber shrugs, momentarily self-conscious about her casual rags. "She's my election agent. My problem, as she says, is there's a certain voter demographic that mistakes image for substance and is afraid of the unknown, and I need to acquire a wardrobe that triggers associations of probity, of respect and deliberation. One suitable for a representative with a radical political agenda but a strong track record. I'm afraid I'm in a hurry to start with – I've got a big fund-raising party tonight. I know it's short notice, but I need something off the shelf for it."
"What exactly is it you're hoping to achieve?" asks the male couturier, his voice hoarse and his r's rolling with some half-shed Mediterranean accent. He sounds fascinated. "If you think it might influence your choice of wardrobe …"
"I'm running for the assembly," Amber says bluntly. "On a platform calling for a state of emergency and an immediate total effort to assemble a starship. This solar system isn't going to be habitable for much longer, and we need to emigrate. All of us, you included, before the Vile Offspring decide to reprocess us into computronium. I'm going to be doorstepping the entire electorate in parallel, and the experience needs to be personalized." She manages to smile. "That means, I think, perhaps eight outfits and four different independent variables for each, accessories, and two or three hats – enough that each is seen by no more than a few thousand voters. Both physical fabric and virtual. In addition, I'll want to see your range of historical formalwear, but that's of secondary interest for now." She grins. "Do you have any facilities for response-testing the combinations against different personality types from different periods? If we could run up some models, that would be useful."
"I think we can do better than that." The manager nods approvingly, perhaps contemplating her gold-backed deposit account. "Hansel, please divert any further visitors until we have dealt with Madam …?"
"Macx. Amber Macx."
"– Macx's requirements." She shows no sign of familiarity with the name. Amber winces slightly; it's a sign of how hugely fractured the children of Saturn have become, and of how vast the population of the halo, that only a generation has passed and already barely anyone remembers the Queen of the Ring Imperium. "If you'd come this way, please, we can begin to research an eigenstyle combination that matches your requirements —"
Sirhan walks, shrouded in isolation, through the crowds gathered for the festival. The only people who see him are the chattering ghosts of dead politicians and writers, deported from the inner system by order of the Vile Offspring. The green and pleasant plain stretches toward a horizon a thousand kilometers away, beneath a lemon-yellow sky. The air smells faintly of ammonia, and the big spaces are full of small ideas; but Sirhan doesn't care because, for now, he's alone.
Except that he isn't, really.
"Excuse me, are you real?" someone asks him in American-accented English.
It takes a moment or two for Sirhan to disengage from his introspection and realize that he's being spoken to. "What?" he asks, slightly puzzled. Wiry and pale, Sirhan wears the robes of a Berber goatherd on his body and the numinous halo of a utility fogbank above his head: In his abstraction, he vaguely resembles a saintly shepherd in a post-singularity nativity play. "I say, what?" Outrage simmers at the back of his mind – Is nowhere private? – but as he turns, he sees that one of the ghost pods has split lengthwise across its white mushroomlike crown, spilling a trickle of leftover construction fluid and a completely hairless, slightly bemused-looking Anglo male who wears an expression of profound surprise.
"I can't find my implants," the Anglo male says, shaking his head. "But I'm really here, aren't I? Incarnate?" He glances round at the other pods. "This isn't a sim."
Sirhan sighs – another exile – and sends forth a daemon to interrogate the ghost pod's abstract interface. It doesn't tell him much – unlike most of the resurrectees, this one seems to be undocumented. "You've been dead. Now you're alive. I suppose that means you're now almost as real as I am. What else do you need to know?"
"When is —" The newcomer stops. "Can you direct me to the processing center?" he asks carefully. "I'm disoriented."
Sirhan is surprised – most immigrants take a lot longer to figure that out. "Did you die recently?" he asks.
"I'm not sure I died at all." The newcomer rubs his bald head, looking puzzled. "Hey, no jacks!" He shrugs, exasperated. "Look, the processing center..?"
"Over there." Sirhan gestures at the monumental mass of the Boston Museum of Science (shipped all the way from Earth a couple of decades ago to save it from the demolition of the inner system). "My mother runs it." He smiles thinly.
"Your mother —" the newly resurrected immigrant stares at him intensely, then blinks. "Holy shit." He takes a step toward Sirhan. "It is you —"
Sirhan recoils and snaps his fingers. The thin trail of vaporous cloud that has been following him all this time, shielding his shaven pate from the diffuse red glow of the swarming shells of orbital nanocomputers that have replaced the inner planets, extrudes a staff of hazy blue mist that stretches down from the air and slams together in his hand like a quarterstaff spun from bubbles. "Are you threatening me, sir?" he asks, deceptively mildly.
"I —" The newcomer stops dead. Then he throws back his head and laughs. "Don't be silly, son. We're related!"
"Son?" Sirhan bristles. "Who do you think you are —" A horrible thought occurs to him. "Oh. Oh dear." A wash of adrenaline drenches him in warm sweat. "I do believe we've met, in a manner of speaking …" Oh boy, this is going to upset so many applecarts, he realizes, spinning off a ghost to think about the matter. The implications are enormous.
The naked newcomer nods, grinning at some private joke. "You look different from ground level. And now I'm human again." He runs his hands down his ribs, pauses, and glances at Sirhan owlishly. "Um. I didn't mean to frighten you. But I don't suppose you could find your aged grandfather something to wear?"
Sirhan sighs and points his staff straight up at the sky. The rings are edge on, for the lily pad continent floats above an ocean of cold gas along Saturn's equator, and they glitter like a ruby laser beam slashed across the sky. "Let there be aerogel."
A cloud of wispy soap bubble congeals in a cone shape above the newly resurrected ancient and drops over him, forming a caftan. "Thanks," he says. He looks round, twisting his neck, then winces. "Damn, that hurt. Ouch. I need to get myself a set of implants."
"They can sort you out in the processing center. It's in the basement in the west wing. They'll give you something more permanent to wear, too." Sirhan peers at him. "Your face —" He pages through rarely used memories. Yes, it's Manfred as he looked in the early years of the last century. As he looked around the time Mother-not was born. There's something positively indecent about meeting your own grandfather in the full flush of his youth. "Are you sure you haven't been messing with your phenotype?" he asks suspiciously.
"No, this is what I used to look like. I think. Back in the naked ape again, after all these years as an emergent function of a flock of passenger pigeons." His grandfather smirks. "What's your mother going to say?"
"I really don't know —" Sirhan shakes his head. "Come on, let's get you to immigrant processing. You're sure you're not just an historical simulation?"
The place is already heaving with the resimulated. Just why the Vile Offspring seem to feel it's necessary to apply valuable exaquops to the job of deriving accurate simulations of dead humans – outrageously accurate simulations of long-dead lives, annealed until their written corpus matches that inherited from the presingularity era in the form of chicken scratchings on mashed tree pulp – much less beaming them at the refugee camps on Saturn – is beyond Sirhan's ken: But he wishes they'd stop.
"Just a couple of days ago I crapped on your lawn. Hope you don't mind." Manfred cocks his head to one side and stares at Sirhan with beady eyes. "Actually, I'm here because of the upcoming election. It's got the potential to turn into a major crisis point, and I figured Amber would need me around."
"Well you'd better come on in, then," Sirhan says resignedly as he climbs the steps, enters the foyer, and leads his turbulent grandfather into the foggy haze of utility nanomachines that fill the building.
He can't wait to see what his mother will do when she meets her father in the flesh, after all this time.
Welcome to Saturn, your new home world. This FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) memeplex is designed to orient you and explain the following:
· How you got here
· Where "here" is
· Things you should avoid doing
· Things you might want to do as soon as possible