SiSU: - Accelerando

Accelerando
shape in the sterile oceans of Titan. In the frigid depths beyond
Pluto, supercooled boson gases condense into impossible
dreaming structures, packaged for shipping inward to
the fast-thinking core.
There are still humans dwelling down in the hot depths, but 1169
it's getting hard to recognize them. The lot of humanity before
the twenty-first century was nasty, brutish, and short. Chronic
malnutrition, lack of education, and endemic diseases led to
crippled minds and broken bodies. Now, most people multitask:
Their meatbrains sit at the core of a haze of personality,
much of it virtualized on stacked layers of structured
reality far from their physical bodies. Wars and revolutions,
or their subtle latter-day cognates, sweep the globe as constants
become variables; many people find the death of stupidity
even harder to accept than the end of mortality. Some
have vitrified themselves to await an uncertain posthuman future.
Others have modified their core identities to better cope
with the changed demands of reality. Among these are beings
whom nobody from a previous century would recognize
as human - human/corporation half-breeds, zombie clades
dehumanized by their own optimizations, angels and devils
of software, slyly self-aware financial instruments. Even their
popular fictions are self-deconstructing these days.
None of this, other than the barest news summary, reaches 1170
the Field Circus: The starwisp is a fossil, left behind by the
broad sweep of accelerating progress. But it is aboard the
Field Circus that some of the most important events remaining
in humanity's future light cone take place.
* * * 1171
“Say hello to the jellyfish, Boris.” 1172
Boris, in human drag, for once, glares at Pierre, and grips the 1173
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