"No." Sirhan crosses his arms. "Not particularly. I'm interested in saving people from the Vile Offspring, not taking a huge gamble on mystery transcendent aliens who may have built a galaxy-sized reality hacking machine a billion years ago. I'll sell you my services, and even send a ghost along, but if you expect me to bet my entire future on it …"
It's too much for Rita. Diverting her attention away from the dizzying inner-space vista, she elbows Sirhan in the ribs. He looks round blankly for a moment, then with gathering anger as he lets his killfile filter slip. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," she hisses. Then, succumbing to a secondary impulse she knows she'll regret later, she drops a private channel into his public in-tray.
"Nobody's asking you to," Manfred is saying defensively, arms crossed. "I view this as a Manhattan project kind of thing, pursue all agendas in parallel. If we win the election, we'll have the resources we need to do that. We should all go through the router, and we will all leave backups aboard Something Blue. Blue is slow , tops out at about a tenth of cee, but what he can do is get a sufficient quantity of memory diamond the hell out of circumsolar space before the Vile Offspring's autonomic defenses activate whatever kind of trust exploit they're planning in the next few megaseconds —"
"What do you want ?" Sirhan demands angrily over the channel. He's still not looking at her, and not just because he's focusing on the vision in blue that dominates the shared space of the team meeting.
"Stop lying to yourself ," Rita sends back. "You're lying about your own goals and motivations. You may not want to know the truth your own ghost worked out, but I do. And I'm not going to let you deny it happened."
"So one of your agents seduced a personality image of me — "
"Bullshit —"
"Do you mean to declare this platform openly?" asks the young-old guy near the platform, the Europol. "Because if so, you're going to undermine Amber's campaign —"
"That's all right," Amber says tiredly, "I'm used to Dad supporting me in his own inimitable way."
"Is okay," says a new voice. "I are happy wait-state grazing in ecliptic." It's the friendly lobster lifeboat, light-lagged by its trajectory outside the ring system.
"– You're happy to hide behind a hypocritical sense of moral purity when it makes you feel you can look down on other people, but underneath it you're just like everyone else —"
"– She set you up to corrupt me, didn't she? You're just bait in her scheme — "
"The idea was to store incremental backups in the Panuliran's cargo cache in case a weakly godlike agency from the inner system attempts to activate the antibodies they've already disseminated throughout the festival culture," Annette explains, stepping in on Manfred's behalf.
Nobody else in the discussion space seems to notice that Rita and Sirhan are busy ripping the shit out of each other over a private channel, throwing emotional hand grenades back and forth like seasoned divorcees. "It's not a satisfactory solution to the evacuation question, but it ought to satisfy the conservatives' baseline requirement, and as insurance —"
"– That's right, blame your eigenmother! Has it occurred to you that she doesn't care enough about you to try a stunt like that? I think you spent too much time with that crazy grandmother of yours. You didn't even integrate that ghost, did you? Too afraid of polluting yourself! I bet you never even bothered to check what it felt like from inside —"
"– I did —" Sirhan freezes for a moment, personality modules paging in and out of his brain like a swarm of angry bees – "make a fool of myself ," he adds quietly, then slumps back in his seat. "This is so embarrassing … " He covers his face with his hands. "You're right. "
"I am? " Rita's puzzlement slowly gives way to understanding; Sirhan has finally integrated the memories from the partials they hybridized earlier. Stuck-up and proud, the cognitive dissonance must be enormous. "No, I'm not. You're just overly defensive. "
"I'm — " Embarrassed. Because Rita knows him, inside out. Has the ghost-memories of six months in a simspace with him, playing with ideas, exchanging intimacies, later confidences. She holds ghost-memories of his embrace, a smoky affair that might have happened in real space if his instant reaction to realizing that it could happen hadn't been to dump the splinter of his mind that was contaminated by impure thoughts to cold storage and deny everything.
"We have no threat profile yet," Annette says, cutting right across their private conversation. "If there is a direct threat – and we don't know that for sure, yet, the Vile Offspring might be enlightened enough simply to be leaving us alone – it'll probably be some kind of subtle attack aimed directly at the foundations of our identity. Look for a credit bubble, distributed trust metrics devaluing suddenly as people catch some kind of weird religion, something like that. Maybe a perverse election outcome. And it won't be sudden. They are not stupid, to start a headlong attack without slow corruption to soften the way."
"You've obviously been thinking about this for some time," Sameena says with dry emphasis. "What's in it for your friend, uh, Blue? Did you squirrel away enough credit to cover the price of renting a starship from the Economics 2.0 metabubble? Or is there something you aren't telling us?"
"Um." Manfred looks like a small boy with his hand caught in the sweets jar. "Well, as a matter of fact —"
"Yes, Dad, why don't you tell us just what this is going to cost?" Amber asks.
"Ah, well." He looks embarrassed. "It's the lobsters, not Aineko. They want some payment."
Rita reaches out and grabs Sirhan's hand: He doesn't resist. "Do you know about this? " Rita queries him.
"All new to me … " A confused partial thread follows his reply down the pipe, and for a while, she joins him in introspective reverie, trying to work out the implications of knowing what they know about the possibility of a mutual relationship.
"They want a written conceptual map. A map of all the accessible meme spaces hanging off the router network, compiled by human explorers who they can use as a baseline, they say. It's quite simple – in return for a ticket out-system, some of us are going to have to go exploring. But that doesn't mean we can't leave back-ups behind."
"Do they have any particular explorers in mind?" Amber sniffs.
"No," says Manfred. "Just a team of us, to map out the router network and ensure they get some warning of threats from outside." He pauses. "You're going to want to come along, aren't you?"
The pre-election campaign takes approximately three minutes and consumes more bandwidth than the sum of all terrestrial communications channels from prehistory to 2008. Approximately six million ghosts of Amber, individually tailored to fit the profile of the targeted audience, fork across the dark fiber meshwork underpinning of the lily-pad colonies, then out through ultrawideband mesh networks, instantiated in implants and floating dust motes to buttonhole the voters. Many of them fail to reach their audience, and many more hold fruitless discussions; about six actually decide they've diverged so far from their original that they constitute separate people and register for independent citizenship, two defect to the other side, and one elopes with a swarm of highly empathic modified African honeybees.