Why does aineko need a copy of manfred

Amber, his daughter, has been defrosted, fertilized, born, and is being brought up by Pamela. Aineko begins its own study—and decoding—of the alien signals. Amber Macx, now in her early teens, finally breaks free from her domineering mother by utilizing a complex plot, thought up by Manfred and Annette, in which she indentures herself to a Franklin Collective-owned, youth-crewed spacecraft, mining materials from Amalthea , Jupiter 's fourth moon.

Pamela hires Sadeq to issue a legal challenge against Amber, which she thwarts by setting up her own empire on a small asteroid. The alien signals have been decoded, and a physical long-range journey to a mentioned " router " is planned.

Amber and 62 others have uploaded themselves to become the virtualized crew. They are contacted by a group of aliens called "The Wunch" who occupy virtual bodies based on Lobster patterns "borrowed" from transmissions—these turn out to be mere third-rate "barbarians" who, after a struggle, are thwarted.

Amber and a few others make the decision to travel deep into the router network. The router explorers find themselves trapped by yet more malign aliens in a variety of virtual spaces, but are eventually set free by Aineko's machinations.

They discover that they are being hosted in a Matrioshka brain , the builders of which seem to have disappeared or destroyed by its own creations , leaving an anarchy ruled by sentient, viral corporations and scavengers who attempt to use newcomers as currency.

The crew finally escape by offering passage to a "rogue alien corporation" a " pyramid scheme crossed with a scam " , virtualized as a giant slug, who opens a powered route out, after which they begin the journey back home. The crew upload their virtual states into new bodies, and find that they are all now bankrupt, unable to compete with the new Economics 2. Manfred, Pamela, and Annette are present. Bailiffs —sentient constructs—arrive to "repossess" Amber and Aineko, but a scheme is hatched whereby the Slug is introduced to Economics 2.

In the increasingly populated Saturnian floating cities, Amber, Annette, Gianni and Manfred begin a political campaign to finance a scheme to escape the predations of the "Vile Offspring" by journeying once more to the router network, with Amber as the leader of the "Accelerationista" party. She loses the election to the stay-at-home "conservationista" faction , but once more the Lobsters step in to help, by offering passage to uploads on their large ships if the humans agree to act as explorers and mappers.

The router has, once again, been reached. Learning from it, the refugees have created their own network, enabling them to explore vast distances. See wikipedia:Quantum key distribution. The news report from Los Alamos Los Alamos paves the way for better cement was reported in New Scientist and elsewhere. Accelerando's author Charles Stross edits a personal wiki dedicated to the Singularity: " Singularity!

A Tough Guide to the Rapture of the Nerds. Slashdotting : A large influx of visitors to a web server, due to a link from the front page of slashdot. The influx can be quite taxing on server processing power and bandwidth, and can often incapacitate a site.

For more information see wikipedia:Slashdot effect. See wikipedia:small-world network , wikipedia:Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon , and [2].

For the set to be an attractor, trajectories that get close enough to the attractor must remain close even if slightly disturbed. Geometrically, a strange attractor is a complicated set with fractal structures.

For more information see wikipedia:strange attractor. Golgi believed incorrectly that all neurons are connected by fibers which intermingle and mesh, and syncitium is the name he gave to the whole. The hyphae strands of many fungi are syncitial: long open cellular tubes with multiple nuclei but no internal cell walls, as opposed to one cell-controlling nucleus per partitioned-off cell. This seems to be the sense in which Stross uses the term. Thompson hack : a type of back door security hole in a computer program which is undetectable even by examining the source code because it is introduced by the compiler, which itself contains this type of back door.

See wikipedia:Backdoor computing , reference 9, "Reflections on Trusting Trust". Tipler, Frank J. For more information see wikipedia:Frank J. Tipler and wikipedia:Omega point.

Turing Oracle : A method for determining whether a given program ever halts. There is no algorithm to do this. Access to a Turing Oracle is near-godlike computing power.

It would also factor large integers, fold proteins, etc. Turing Test : Proposal for a way to judge whether a computer is intelligent, proposed by Alan Turing in See wikipedia:Turing Test. For more information see wikipedia:mind transfer. See wikipedia:van Eck radiation , wikipedia:Cryptonomicon. Variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket : The variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket VASIMR is a hypothetical form of spacecraft propulsion that uses radio waves and magnetic fields to accelerate a propellant.

See wikipedia:Variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket. Wunch one of the minor villains of the book, are described as the elements of a run-amok financial institution, roughly termed "economics 2. It is likely that the Wunch are so named as a wikipedia:spoonerism play on "wunch of bankers.

Since measuring time in units like days, months, and years are of limited usefulness in regions not on the planet Earth, one often sees the usage of time measures based on the second , such as megaseconds or gigaseconds.

As most people aren't used to thinking in these units, conversions are listed here to and from the more conventional units. See also wikipedia:Orders of magnitude time. Chapter 1 introduces two similar, but clearly separate, concepts that apply to various characters throughout the remainder of the book: metacortices and exocortices.

Though etymologically similar, the two are quite different—the former, in effect, being composed in various ways of the latter. An EXOcortex can best be described as the portion of a trans- or posthuman entity's brain or cortex which exists outside of that entity's primary computing structure, usually the brain inhabiting a person's "meatbody. A simple metaphor taken from contemporary IT describes this distinction nicely.

Agalmics is a form of economics concerning the "study and practice of the production and allocation of non-scarce goods," primarily via free-market trading, open-source initiatives, and flexible standards for intellectual property. Manny refers to his robot pet cat as "his aineko. The name is also an apparent reference to the Sony Aibo a name that can be read several ways, but means "pet robot".

Annette, when she is first introduced, works for Arainespace, a European launch service provider. As he arrives at the Luton airport at the beginning of the chapter, Manny makes an offhand reference to President Santorum's America, most likely referring to a future in which a decadent U.

The limbic system is a group of brain structures involved in various emotions such as aggression, fear, pleasure and also in the formation of memory.

Presumably limbic spam would be unwanted signals which delivers a stimulus directly to this area for advertising purposes. A clear reference to the Pointy-Haired Boss of Dilbert comics. Vernor Vinge is credited with popularizing the idea of a transhumanist technological Singularity in fiction, and explores it in his novels Marooned in Realtime and indirectly A Fire Upon the Deep. The router is a wormhole in a galactic network. See Wikipedia:Fork operating system , and the attack itself is called a Wikipedia:Fork bomb.

Forward being a class of human-built space exploration probes; the name is intended to suggest the relative size small and mass low—generally of the order of grams, or at most, a few kilograms when compared to such fictional behemoths as the USS Enterprise. This timer must be serviced periodically by the main program, or else it will force a reset of the system. The ghost of a triumphant feline laugh hangs over their innerspeech ears for a moment, then fades.

Manni cowers, then begins to cry, a safe reflex for a little boy who doesn't quite understand the nature of the threat to his parents. Manfred feels Pamela's shoulders shaking. It feels like she's about to laugh.

At least, this version of me thinks he's here. Up to and including giving us good reasons to hate it and provoking Manni into disposing of its avatar. Aineko wanted to check out of our lives and figured a sense of cathartic closure would help. Not to mention playing the deus ex machina in the narrative of our family life. Fucking classical comedian.

Because we won't be hearing from him again? You think you've been used? Aineko has probably killed me by now. Unless he was lying about disposing of the spare copy , too.

She shudders in his arms. I found myself here. With you. Or maybe a second chance. What are you going to do with yours?