Singularity Sky by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online Page A

was 250 years old, 250 light-years from Earth. When the Eschaton had relocated nine-tenths of Earth’s population via wormhole—for reasons it hadn’t deigned to explain—it had sorted some of them on the basis of ethnic or social or psychological affinity. The New Republic had picked up a mixed bag of East-European technorejectionists and royalists, hankering for the comforting certainties of an earlier century.

    The founders of the New Republic had suffered at the hands of impersonal technological change. In the market-oriented democracies of preSingularity Earth, they’d seen people cast by their millions on the scrap heap of history. Given a new world to tame, and the tools to do it with, they had immediately established a conservative social order. A generation later, a vicious civil war broke out between those who wanted to continue using the cornucopia machines—self-replicating nano-assembler factories able to manufacture any physical goods—and those who wanted to switch to a simpler way of life where everybody knew their place and there was a place for everyone. The progressives lost: and so the New Republic remained for a century, growing into its natural shape— Europe as it might have been during the twentieth century, had physics and chemistry been finalized in 1890. The patent offices were closed; there were no homes for dreaming relativists here.

    Standing naked in the middle of the carpet, she could set it aside for a while. She could ignore the world while her implants ran through their regular self-defense practice sequence. It started with breathing exercises, then the isometric contraction of muscle groups under the direction of her battle management system, then finally a blur of motion as the embedded neural network controllers took over, whirling her body like a marionette through a series of martial arts exercises. A ten-minute cycle performed twice a week kept her as ready for personal defense as an unaugmented adept who spent an hour or more every day.

    Whirling and jerking on invisible strings she threw and dismembered intangible demons; it was no great effort to project her frustrations and anger onto them. This for the blind beggar she had passed in the street, his affliction curable in a culture that didn’t ban most advanced medical practices. That for the peasants bound to the soil they tilled by a law that saw them as part of the land, rather than as human beings. This for the women condemned to die giving birth to unwanted children. That for the priests who pandered to the prejudices of the ruling elite and offered their people the false consolation of the hereafter, when most of the horrors that besieged them had long since been banished from the civilized worlds. And this and this and that for treating her like a third-class citizen. Anger demanded many kata.

    I do not want this world. I do not like this world. I do not need this world, I do not need to feel sympathetic for this world or its inhabitants. If only they did not need me …

    There was a small bathroom next door—an expensive extra in this society.
    She used it to clean herself as efficiently as possible, sweat and grime washing away like memories. And some of the pessimism went with it.
    Things around here are going to get better, she reminded herself. That’s what I’m here for.

    Once dry, she wandered back into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed. Then she picked up her battered PA. “Get me the UN
    Consensus Ambassador,” she ordered. There was only one UN
    ambassador in the New Republic; George Cho, permanent representative of the Security Council, to which she was ultimately answerable. (The New Republic persistently refused to recognize any of Earth’s more subtle political institutions.)

    “Processing. Beep. Rachel, I’m sorry, but I’m not available right now.
    Waiting for information to become available about the incident at Rochard’s.
    If you’d like to leave a message after the