SiSU: - Accelerando

Accelerando
it nearly as much as Pamela, his fiancée, loved him, and
she knew it. Pamela, being a whole lot smarter than Manfred
gave her credit for, realized that the quickest way to a
man's heart was through whatever he loved. And Pamela,
being a whole lot more of a control freak than Manfred realized,
was damn well ready to use any restraint that came
to hand. Theirs was a very twenty-first-century kind of relationship,
which is to say one that would have been illegal a
hundred years earlier and fashionably scandalous a century
before that. And whenever Manfred upgraded his pet robot
- transplanting its trainable neural network into a new body
with new and exciting expansion ports - Pamela would hack
it.
They were married for a while, and divorced for a whole lot 2792
longer, allegedly because they were both strong-willed people
with philosophies of life that were irreconcilable short of
death or transcendence. Manny, being wildly creative and
outward-directed and having the attention span of a weasel
on crack, had other lovers. Pamela ... who knows? If on
some evenings she put on a disguise and hung out at encounter
areas in fetish clubs, she wasn't telling anyone: She
lived in uptight America, staidly straitlaced, and had a reputation
to uphold. But they both stayed in touch with the cat, and
although Manfred retained custody for some reason never
articulated, Aineko kept returning Pamela's calls - until it was
time to go hang out with their daughter Amber, tagging along
on her rush into relativistic exile, then keeping a proprietorial
eye on her eigenson Sirhan, and his wife and child (a clone
off the old family tree, Manfred 2.0) ...
Now, here's the rub: Aineko wasn't a cat. Aineko was an 2793
incarnate intelligence, confined within a succession of catlike
bodies that became increasingly realistic over time, and
equipped with processing power to support a neural simula-
SiSU www.accelerando.org 464