Oh man I had forgotten two important additional exposition-sections – chapter 5 (the middle chapter of the book, in middle of the act called “Point of Inflection”) has three expositions that summarize the rising, peak and falling action of the acceleration.
These were actually some of the most important moments I was looking for. I added them to the post above but listing here for people who missed it the first time:
The second (middle) new bulletin is:
Outside the light cone of the Field Circus, on the other side of the spacelike separation between Amber’s little kingdom in motion and the depths of empire time that grip the solar system’s entangled quantum networks, a singular new reality is taking shape.
Welcome to the moment of maximum change.
About ten billion humans are alive in the solar system, each mind surrounded by an exocortex of distributed agents, threads of personality spun right out of their heads to run on the clouds of utility fog—infinitely flexible computing resources as thin as aerogel—in which they live. The foggy depths are alive with high-bandwidth sparkles; most of Earth’s biosphere has been wrapped in cotton wool and preserved for future examination. For every living human, a thousand million software agents carry information into the farthest corners of the consciousness address space.
The sun, for so long an unremarkable mildly variable G2 dwarf, has vanished within a gray cloud that englobes it except for a narrow belt around the plane of the ecliptic. Sunlight falls, unchanged, on the inner planets: except for Mercury, which is no longer present, having been dismantled completely and turned into solar-powered high-temperature nanocomputers. A much fiercer light falls on Venus, now surrounded by glittering ferns of carbon crystals that pump angular momentum into the barely spinning planet via huge superconducting loops wound around its equator. This planet, too, is due to be dismantled. Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus—all sprout rings as impressive as Saturn’s. But the task of cannibalizing the gas giants will take many times longer than the small rocky bodies of the inner system.
The ten billion inhabitants of this radically changed star system remember being human; almost half of them predate the millennium. Some of them still are human, untouched by the drive of metaevolution that has replaced blind Darwinian change with a goal-directed teleological progress. They cower in gated communities and hill forts, mumbling prayers and cursing the ungodly meddlers with the natural order of things. But eight out of every ten living humans are included in the phase-change. It’s the most inclusive revolution in the human condition since the discovery of speech.
A million outbreaks of gray goo—runaway nanoreplicator excursions—threaten to raise the temperature of the biosphere dramatically. They’re all contained by the planetary-scale immune system fashioned from what was once the World Health Organization. Weirder catastrophes threaten the boson factories in the Oort cloud. Antimatter factories hover over the solar poles. Sol system shows all the symptoms of a runaway intelligence excursion, exuberant blemishes as normal for a technological civilization as skin problems on a human adolescent.
The economic map of the planet has changed beyond recognition. Both capitalism and communism, bickering ideological children of a protoindustrial outlook, are as obsolete as the divine right of kings. Companies are alive, and dead people may live again, too. Globalism and tribalism have run to completion, diverging respectively into homogeneous interoperability and the Schwarzschild radius of insularity. Beings that remember being human plan the deconstruction of Jupiter, the creation of a great simulation space that will expand the habitat available within the solar system. By converting all the nonstellar mass of the solar system into processors, they can accommodate as many human-equivalent minds as a civilization with a planet hosting ten billion humans in orbit around every star in the galaxy.
A more mature version of Amber lives down in the surging chaos of near-Jupiter space; there’s an instance of Pierre, too, although he has relocated light-hours away, near Neptune. Whether she still sometimes thinks of her relativistic twin, nobody can tell. In a way, it doesn’t matter, because by the time the Field Circus returns to Jupiter orbit, as much subjective time will have elapsed for the fast-thinkers back home as will flash by in the real universe between this moment and the end of the era of star formation, many billions of years hence.
And finally:
Welcome to the downslope on the far side of the curve of accelerating progress.
Back in the solar system, Earth orbits through a dusty tunnel in space. Sunlight still reaches the birth world, but much of the rest of the star’s output has been trapped by the growing concentric shells of computronium built from the wreckage of the innermost planets.
Two billion or so mostly unmodified humans scramble in the wreckage of the phase transition, not understanding why the vasty superculture they so resented has fallen quiet. Little information leaks through their fundamentalist firewalls, but what there is shows a disquieting picture of a society where there are no bodies anymore. Utility foglets blown on the wind form aerogel towers larger than cyclones, removing the last traces of physical human civilization from most of Europe and the North American coastlines. Enclaves huddle behind their walls and wonder at the monsters and portents roaming the desert of postindustrial civilization, mistaking acceleration for collapse.
The hazy shells of computronium that ring the sun—concentric clouds of nanocomputers the size of rice grains, powered by sunlight, orbiting in shells like the packed layers of a Matrioshka doll—are still immature, holding barely a thousandth of the physical planetary mass of the system, but they already support a classical computational density of 1042 MIPS; enough to support a billion civilizations as complex as the one that existed immediately before the great disassembly. The conversion hasn’t yet reached the gas giants, and some scant outer-system enclaves remain independent—Amber’s Ring Imperium still exists as a separate entity, and will do so for some years to come—but the inner solar system planets, with the exception of Earth, have been colonized more thoroughly than any dusty NASA proposal from the dawn of the space age could have envisaged.
From outside the Accelerated civilization, it isn’t really possible to know what’s going on inside. The problem is bandwidth: While it’s possible to send data in and get data out, the sheer amount of computation going on in the virtual spaces of the Acceleration dwarfs any external observer. Inside that swarm, minds a trillion or more times as complex as humanity think thoughts as far beyond human imagination as a microprocessor is beyond a nematode worm. A million random human civilizations flourish in worldscapes tucked in the corner of this world-mind. Death is abolished, life is triumphant. A thousand ideologies flower, human nature adapted where necessary to make this possible. Ecologies of thought are forming in a Cambrian explosion of ideas, for the solar system is finally rising to consciousness, and mind is no longer restricted to the mere kilotons of gray fatty meat harbored in fragile human skulls.
Somewhere in the Acceleration, colorless green ideas adrift in furious sleep remember a tiny starship launched years ago, and pay attention. Soon, they realize, the starship will be in position to act as their proxy in an ages-long conversation. Negotiations for access to Amber’s extrasolar asset commence; the Ring Imperium prospers, at least for a while. But first, the operating software on the human side of the network link will require an upgrade.
Oh man I had forgotten two important additional exposition-sections – chapter 5 (the middle chapter of the book, in middle of the act called “Point of Inflection”) has three expositions that summarize the rising, peak and falling action of the acceleration.
These were actually some of the most important moments I was looking for. I added them to the post above but listing here for people who missed it the first time:
The second (middle) new bulletin is:
And finally: