"Mmph." Ang looks irritated for some reason. "Wait your turn; they’ll be out of the buffer in
another couple of days. Or more: the lawyer’s got a huge infodump packaged on his person.
Probably another semi-sapient class action lawsuit."
"I’ll bet. They never learn, do they?"
"What, about the legal system here?"
"Yup." Pierre nods. "One of Amber’s smarter ideas, reviving eleventh century Scots law and
updating it with new options on barratry, raith-law, and compurgation." He pulls a face and
detaches a couple of ghosts to go look out for the new arrivals: then he goes back to repairing
sails. The interstellar medium is abrasive, full of dust–each grain of which carries the energy of a
large bomb at this speed –and the laser sail is in a constant state of disintegration; a large chunk
of the drive-system’s mass is silvery utility flakes for patching and replacing the soap-bubble-thin
membrane as it ablates away. The skill is in knowing how best to funnel repair resources to
where they’re needed, while minimizing tension in the suspension lines and avoiding resonance
and thrust imbalance. As he trains the patch bots, he broods: about the hate mail from his elder
brother (who still blames him for their father’s accident) and about Sadeq’s religious injunctions–
superstitious nonsense, he thinks–and the fickleness of powerful women, and the endless depths
of his own nineteen-year-old soul.
While he’s brooding, Ang evidently finishes whatever she was doing and bangs out–not even
bothering to use the polished mahogany door at the rear of the bridge, just discorporating and
rematerializing somewhere else. Wondering if she’s annoyed, he glances up just as the first of the
ghosts patches into his memory map and he remembers what happened when he met the new
arrival. His eyes widen: "Oh shit!"
It’s not the film producer he’s met; it’s the lawyer who’s just uploaded into the Field Circus’s
virtual universe. Someone’s going to have to tell Amber. And although the last thing he wants to
do is talk to her, it looks like he’s going to have to, because this means trouble.
Take a brain and put it in a bottle. Better: take a map of the brain and put it in a map of a bottle–
or of a body–and feed signals to it that mimic its neurological inputs. Read its outputs and route
them to a model body in a model universe with a model of physical laws, closing the loop: René
Descartes would understand. That’s the state of the passengers of the Field Circus; formerly
physical humans, their neural software has been transparently migrated into a virtual machine
environment executing on a honking great computer, where the universe they experience is
merely a dream within a dream.
Brains in bottles–empowered ones, with total, dictatorial control over the reality they are exposed
to–sometimes stop engaging in activities that brains in bodies can’t avoid. Menstruation isn’t
mandatory; vomiting, angina, exhaustion, and cramp are all optional. So is meat-death, the
decomposition of the corpus. But some activities don’t cease: because people–even people who
have been converted into a software description, squirted through a high-bandwidth laser link,
and ported into a virtualization stack–don’t want them to stop. Breathing is wholly unnecessary,
but suppression of the breathing reflex is disturbing unless you hack your hypothalamic map, and
most homomorphic uploads don’t want to do that. Then there’s eating–not to avoid starvation,