Accelerando, Charles Stross [classic novels for teens .TXT] 📗

She

kisses him and slides his glasses and earpieces off his head so that

he’s really naked, sits on his lap, and fucks his brains out again,

and whispers in his ear that she loves him and wants to be his

manager. Then she leads him into her bedroom and tells him exactly

what she wants him to wear, and she puts on her own clothes, and she

gives him a mirror with some white powder on it to sniff. When she’s

got him dolled up they go out for a night of really serious clubbing,

Annette in a tuxedo and Manfred in a blond wig, red silk

off-the-shoulder gown, and high heels. Sometime in the early hours,

exhausted and resting his head on her shoulder during the last tango

in a BDSM club in the Rue Ste-Anne, he realizes that it really is

possible to be in lust with someone other than Pamela.

 

*

 

Aineko wakes Manfred by repeatedly head-butting him above the left

eye. He groans, and as he tries to open his eyes, he finds that his

mouth tastes like a dead trout, his skin feels greasy with make-up,

and his head is pounding. There’s a banging noise somewhere. Aineko

meows urgently. He sits up, feeling unaccustomed silk underwear

rubbing against incredibly sore skin - he’s fully dressed, just

sprawled out on the sofa. Snores emanate from the bedroom; the banging

is coming from the front door. Someone wants to come in. Shit. He rubs

his head, stands up, and nearly falls flat on his face: He hasn’t even

taken those ridiculous high heels off. How much did I drink last

night? he wonders. His glasses are on the breakfast bar; he pulls them

on and is besieged by an urgent flurry of ideas demanding attention.

He straightens his wig, picks up his skirts, and trips across to the

door with a sinking feeling. Luckily his publicly traded reputation is

strictly technical.

 

He unlocks the door. “Who is it?” he asks in English. By way of reply

somebody shoves the door in, hard. Manfred falls back against the

wall, winded. His glasses stop working, sidelook displays filling with

multicolored static.

 

Two men charge in, identically dressed in jeans and leather jackets.

They’re wearing gloves and occlusive face masks, and one of them

points a small and very menacing ID card at Manfred. A self-propelled

gun hovers in the doorway, watching everything. “Where is he?”

 

“Who?” gasps Manfred, breathless and terrified.

 

“Macx.” The other intruder steps into the living room quickly, pans

around, ducks through the bathroom door. Aineko flops as limp as a

dishrag in front of the sofa. The intruder checks out the bedroom:

There’s a brief scream, cut off short.

 

“I don’t know - who?” Manfred is choking with fear.

 

The other intruder ducks out of the bedroom, waves a hand

dismissively.

 

“We are sorry to have bothered you,” the man with the card says

stiffly. He replaced it in his jacket pocket. “If you should see

Manfred Macx, tell him that the Copyright Control Association of

America advises him to cease and desist from his attempt to assist

music thieves and other degenerate mongrel secondhander enemies of

Objectivism. Reputations only of use to those alive to own them.

Goodbye.”

 

The two copyright gangsters disappear through the door, leaving

Manfred to shake his head dizzily while his glasses reboot. It takes

him a moment to register the scream from the bedroom. “Fuck -

Annette!”

 

She appears in the open doorway, holding a sheet around her waist,

looking angry and confused. “Annette!” he calls. She looks around,

sees him, and begins to laugh shakily. “Annette!” He crosses over to

her. “You’re okay,” he says. “You’re okay.”

 

“You too.” She hugs him, and she’s shaking. Then she holds him at

arm’s length. “My, what a pretty picture!”

 

“They wanted me,” he says, and his teeth are chattering. “Why?”

 

She looks up at him seriously. “You must bathe. Then have coffee. We

are not at home, oui?”

 

“Ah, oui.” He looks down. Aineko is sitting up, looking dazed.

“Shower. Then that dispatch for CIA news.”

 

“The dispatch?” She looks puzzled. “I filed that last night. When I

was in the shower. The microphone, he is waterproof.”

 

*

 

By the time Arianespace’s security contractors show up, Manfred has

stripped off Annette’s evening gown and showered; he’s sitting in the

living room wearing a bathrobe, drinking a half-liter mug of espresso

and swearing under his breath.

 

While he was dancing the night away in Annette’s arms, the global

reputation market has gone nonlinear: People are putting their trust

in the Christian Coalition and the Eurocommunist Alliance - always a

sign that the times are bad - while perfectly sound trading

enterprises have gone into free fall, as if a major bribery scandal

has broken out.

 

Manfred trades ideas for kudos via the Free Intellect Foundation,

bastard child of George Soros and Richard Stallman. His reputation is

cemented by donations to the public good that don’t backfire. So he’s

offended and startled to discover that he’s dropped twenty points in

the past two hours - and frightened to see that this is by no means

unusual. He was expecting a ten-point drop mediated via an options

trade - payment for the use of the anonymous luggage remixer that

routed his old suitcase to Mombasa and in return sent this new one to

him via the left-luggage office in Luton - but this is more serious.

The entire reputation market seems to have been hit by the confidence

flu.

 

Annette bustles around busily, pointing out angles and timings to the

forensics team her head office sent in answer to her call for back-up.

She seems more angry and shaken than worried by the intrusion. It’s

probably an occupational hazard for any upwardly mobile executive in

the old, grasping network of greed that Manfred’s agalmic future aims

to supplant. The forensics dude and dudette, a pair of cute, tanned

Lebanese youngsters, point the yellow snout of their mass spectroscope

into various corners and agree that there’s something not unlike gun

oil in the air. But, so sorry, the intruders wore masks to trap the

skin particles and left behind a spray of dust vacuumed from the seat

of a city bus, so there’s no way of getting a genotype match.

Presently they agree to log it as a suspected corporate intrusion

(origin: unclassified; severity: worrying) and increase the logging

level on her kitchen telemetry. And remember to wear your earrings at

all times, please. They leave, and Annette locks the door, leans

against it, and curses for a whole long minute.

 

“They gave me a message from the copyright control agency,” Manfred

says unevenly when she winds down. “Russian gangsters from New York

bought the recording cartels a few years ago, you know? After the

rights stitch-up fell apart, and the artists all went on-line while

they focused on copy prevention technologies, the Mafiya were the only

people who would buy the old business model. These guys add a whole

new meaning to copy protection: This was just a polite cease and

desist notice by their standards. They run the record shops, and they

try to block any music distribution channel they don’t own. Not very

successfully, though - most gangsters are living in the past, more

conservative than any normal businessman can afford to be. What was it

that you put on the wire?”

 

Annette closes her eyes. “I don’t remember. No.” She holds up a hand.

“Open mike. I streamed you into a file and cut, cut out the bits about

me.” She opens her eyes and shakes her head. “What was I on?”

 

“You don’t know either?”

 

He stands up, and she walks over and throws her arms around him. “I

was on you,” she murmurs.

 

“Bullshit.” He pulls away, then sees how this upsets her. Something is

blinking for attention in his glasses; he’s been off-line for the best

part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the

idea of not being in touch with everything that’s happened in the last

twenty kiloseconds. “I need to know more. Something in that report

rattled the wrong cages. Or someone ratted on the suitcase exchange -

I meant the dispatch to be a heads-up for whoever needs a working

state planning system, not an invitation to shoot me!”

 

“Well, then.” She lets go of him. “Do your work.” Coolly: “I’ll be

around.”

 

He realizes that he’s hurt her, but he doesn’t see any way of

explaining that he didn’t mean to - at least, not without digging

himself in deeper. He finishes his croissant and plunges into one of

those unavoidable fits of deep interaction, fingers twitching on

invisible keypads and eyeballs jiggling as his glasses funnel deep

media straight into his skull through the highest bandwidth channel

currently available.

 

One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic

messages, companies with names like agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0

screaming for the attention of their transitive director. Each of

these companies - and there are currently more than sixteen thousand

of them, although the herd is growing day by day - has three directors

and is the director of three other companies. Each of them executes a

script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors tell

the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass

instructions on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of

cellular automata, like the cells in Conway’s Game of Life, only far

more complex and powerful.

 

Manfred’s companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed

with capital in the form of patents Manfred filed, then delegated

rather than passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them

are effectively nontrading, but occupy directorial roles. Their

corporate functions (such as filing of accounts and voting in new

directors) are all handled centrally through his company-operating

framework, and their trading is carried out via several of the more

popular B2B enabler dot-coms. Internally, the companies do other, more

obscure load-balancing computations, processing resource-allocation

problems like a classic state central planning system. None of which

explains why fully half of them have been hit by lawsuits in the past

twenty-two hours.

 

The lawsuits are … random. That’s the only pattern Manfred can

detect. Some of them allege patent infringements; these he might take

seriously, except that about a third of the targets are director

companies that don’t actually do anything visible to the public. A few

lawsuits allege mismanagement, but then there’s a whole bizarre raft

of spurious nonsense: suits for wrongful dismissal or age

discrimination - against companies with no employees - complaints

about reckless trading, and one action alleging that the defendant (in

conspiracy with the prime minister of Japan, the government of Canada,

and the Emir of Kuwait) is using orbital mind-control lasers to make

the plaintiff’s pet chihuahua bark at all hours of day and night.

 

Manfred groans and does a quick calculation. At the current rate,

lawsuits are hitting his corporate grid at a rate of one every sixteen

seconds - up from none in the preceding six months. In another day,

this is going to saturate him. If it keeps up for a week, it’ll

saturate every court in the United States. Someone has found a means

to do for lawsuits what he’s doing for companies - and they’ve chosen

him as their target.

 

To say that Manfred is unamused is an understatement. If he wasn’t

already preoccupied with Annette’s emotional state and edgy from the

intrusion, he’d be livid - but he’s still human enough that he

responds to human stimuli first. So he determines to do something

about it,