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

but he’s still flashing on the floating gun, her

cross-dressing cool.

 

Transgression, sex, and networks; these are all on his mind when

Glashwiecz phones again.

 

“Hello?” Manfred answers distractedly; he’s busy pondering the lawsuit

bot that’s attacking his systems.

 

“Macx! The elusive Mr. Macx!” Glashwiecz sounds positively overjoyed

to have tracked down his target.

 

Manfred winces. “Who is this?” he asks.

 

“I called you yesterday,” says the lawyer; “You should have listened.”

He chortles horribly. “Now I have you!”

 

Manfred holds the phone away from his face, like something poisonous.

“I’m recording this,” he warns. “Who the hell are you and what do you

want?”

 

“Your wife has retained my partnership’s services to pursue her

interests in your divorce case. When I called you yesterday it was to

point out without prejudice that your options are running out. I have

an order, signed in court three days ago, to have all your assets

frozen. These ridiculous shell companies notwithstanding, she’s going

to take you for exactly what you owe her. After tax, of course. She’s

very insistent on that point.”

 

Manfred glances round, puts his phone on hold for a moment: “Where’s

my suitcase?” he asks Aineko. The cat sidles away, ignoring him.

“Shit.” He can’t see the new luggage anywhere. Quite possibly it’s on

its way to Morocco, complete with its priceless cargo of high-density

noise. He returns his attention to the phone. Glashwiecz is droning on

about equitable settlements, cumulative IRS tax demands - that seem to

have materialized out of fantasy with Pam’s imprimatur on them - and

the need to make a clean breast of things in court and confess to his

sins. “Where’s the fucking suitcase?” He takes the phone off hold.

“Shut the fuck up, please, I’m trying to think.”

 

“I’m not going to shut up! You’re on the court docket already, Macx.

You can’t evade your responsibilities forever. You’ve got a wife and a

helpless daughter to care for -”

 

“A daughter?” That cuts right through Manfred’s preoccupation with the

suitcase.

 

“Didn’t you know?” Glashwiecz sounds pleasantly surprised. “She was

decanted last Thursday. Perfectly healthy, I’m told. I thought you

knew; you have viewing rights via the clinic webcam. Anyway, I’ll just

leave you with this thought - the sooner you come to a settlement, the

sooner I can unfreeze your companies. Goodbye.”

 

The suitcase rolls into view, peeping coyly out from behind Annette’s

dressing table. Manfred breathes a sigh of relief and beckons to it;

at the moment, it’s easier to deal with his Plan B than dawn raids by

objectivist gangsters, Annette’s sulk, his wife’s incessant legal

spamming, and the news that he is a father against his will. “C’mon

over here, you stray baggage. Let’s see what I got for my reputation

derivatives …”

 

*

 

Anticlimax.

 

Annette’s communiqu� is anodyne; a giggling confession off camera

(shower-curtain rain in the background) that the famous Manfred Macx

is in Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general

hell-raising. Oh, and he’s promised to invent three new paradigm

shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about

the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state central

planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market

systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte

Carlo free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation

problem. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he

wants to hear the screams from the Chicago School.

 

Try as he may, Manfred can’t see anything in the press release that is

at all unusual. It’s just the sort of thing he does, and getting it on

the net was why he was looking for a CIA stringer in the first place.

 

He tries to explain this to her in the bath as he soaps her back. “I

don’t understand what they’re on about,” he complains. “There’s

nothing that tipped them off - except that I was in Paris, and you

filed the news. You did nothing wrong.”

 

“Mais oui.” She turns round, slippery as an eel, and slides backward

into the water. “I try to tell you this, but you are not listening.”

 

“I am now.” Water droplets cling to the outside of his glasses,

plastering his view of the room with laser speckle highlights. “I’m

sorry, Annette, I brought this mess with me. I can take it out of your

life.”

 

“No!” She rises up in front of him and leans forward, face serious. “I

said yesterday. I want to be your manager. Take me in.”

 

“I don’t need a manager; my whole thing is about being fast and out of

control!”

 

“You think you do not need a manager, but your companies do,” she

observes. “You have lawsuits, how many? You cannot the time to oversee

them spare. The Soviets, they abolish capitalists, but even they need

managers. Please, let me manage for you!”

 

Annette is so intense about the idea that she becomes visibly aroused.

He leans toward her, cups a hand around one taut nipple. “The company

matrix isn’t sold yet,” he admits.

 

“It is not?” She looks delighted. “Excellent! To who can this be sold,

to Moscow? To SLORC? To -”

 

“I was thinking of the Italian Communist Party,” he says. “It’s a

pilot project. I was working on selling it - I need the money for my

divorce, and to close the deal on the luggage - but it’s not that

simple. Someone has to run the damn thing - someone with a keen

understanding of how to interface a central planning system with a

capitalist economy. A system administrator with experience of working

for a multinational corporation would be perfect, ideally with an

interest in finding new ways and means of interfacing the centrally

planned enterprise to the outside world.” He looks at her with

suddenly dawning surmise. “Um, are you interested?”

 

*

 

Rome is hotter than downtown Columbia, South Carolina, over

Thanksgiving weekend; it stinks of methane-burning Skodas with a low

undertone of cooked dog shit. The cars are brightly colored subcompact

missiles, hurtling in and out of alleyways like angry wasps:

Hot-wiring their drive-by-wire seems to be the national sport,

although Fiat’s embedded systems people have always written

notoriously wobbly software.

 

Manfred emerges from the Stazione Termini into dusty sunlight,

blinking like an owl. His glasses keep up a rolling monologue about

who lived where in the days of the late Republic. They’re stuck on a

tourist channel and won’t come unglued from that much history without

a struggle. Manfred doesn’t feel like a struggle right now. He feels

like he’s been sucked dry over the weekend: a light, hollow husk that

might blow away in a stiff breeze. He hasn’t had a patentable idea all

day. This is not a good state to be in on a Monday morning when he’s

due to meet the former Minister for Economic Affairs, in order to give

him a gift that will probably get the minister a shot at higher office

and get Pam’s lawyer off his back. But somehow he can’t bring himself

to worry too much: Annette has been good for him.

 

The ex-minister’s private persona isn’t what Manfred was expecting.

All Manfred has seen so far is a polished public avatar in a

traditionally cut suit, addressing the Chamber of Deputies in

cyberspace; which is why, when he rings the doorbell set in the

whitewashed doorframe of Gianni’s front door, he isn’t expecting a

piece of Tom of Finland beefcake, complete with breechclout and peaked

leather cap, to answer.

 

“Hello, I am here to see the minister,” Manfred says carefully.

Aineko, perched on his left shoulder, attempts to translate: It trills

something that sounds extremely urgent. Everything sounds urgent in

Italian.

 

“It’s okay, I’m from Iowa,” says the guy in the doorway. He tucks a

thumb under one leather strap and grins over his moustache: “What’s it

about?” Over his shoulder: “Gianni! Visitor!”

 

“It’s about the economy,” Manfred says carefully. “I’m here to make it

obsolete.”

 

The beefcake backs away from the door cautiously - then the minister

appears behind him. “Ah, signore Macx! It’s okay, Johnny, I have been

expecting him.” Gianni extends a rapid welcome, like a hyperactive

gnome buried in a white toweling bathrobe: “Please come in, my friend!

I’m sure you must be tired from your journey. A refreshment for the

guest if you please, Johnny. Would you prefer coffee or something

stronger?”

 

Five minutes later, Manfred is buried up to his ears in a sofa covered

in buttery white cowhide, a cup of virulently strong espresso balanced

precariously on his knee, while Gianni Vittoria himself holds forth on

the problems of implementing a postindustrial ecosystem on top of a

bureaucratic system with its roots in the bullheadedly modernist era

of the 1920s. Gianni is a visionary of the left, a strange attractor

within the chaotic phase-space of Italian politics. A former professor

of Marxist economics, his ideas are informed by a painfully honest

humanism, and everyone - even his enemies - agrees that he is one of

the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual

integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow

travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies,

accusing him of the ultimate political crime emdash valuing truth

over power.

 

Manfred had met Gianni a couple of years earlier via a hosted politics

chat room; at the beginning of last week, he sent him a paper

detailing his embeddable planned economy and a proposal for using it

to turbocharge the endless Italian attempt to re-engineer its

government systems. This is the thin end of the wedge: If Manfred is

right, it could catalyse a whole new wave of communist expansion,

driven by humanitarian ideals and demonstrably superior performance,

rather than wishful thinking and ideology.

 

“It is impossible, I fear. This is Italy, my friend. Everybody has to

have their say. Not everybody even understands what it is we are

talking about, but that won’t stop them talking about it. Since 1945,

our government requires consensus - a reaction to what came before. Do

you know, we have five different routes to putting forward a new law,

two of them added as emergency measures to break the gridlock? And

none of them work on their own unless you can get everybody to agree.

Your plan is daring and radical, but if it works, we must understand

why we work - and that digs right to the root of being human, and not

everybody will agree.”

 

At this point Manfred realizes that he’s lost. “I don’t understand,”

he says, genuinely puzzled. “What has the human condition got to do

with economics?”

 

The minister sighs abruptly. “You are very unusual. You earn no money,

do you? But you are rich, because grateful people who have benefited

from your work give you everything you need. You are like a medieval

troubadour who has found favor with the aristocracy. Your labor is not

alienated - it is given freely, and your means of production is with

you always, inside your head.” Manfred blinks; the jargon is weirdly

technical-sounding but orthogonal to his experience, offering him a

disquieting glimpse into the world of the terminally future-shocked.

He is surprised to find that not understanding itches.

 

Gianni taps his balding temple with a knuckle like a walnut. “Most

people spend little time inside their heads. They don’t understand how

you live. They’re like medieval peasants looking in puzzlement at the

troubadour. This system you invent, for running a planned economy, is

delightful and elegant: Lenin’s heirs would have been awestruck. But

it is not a system for the new century. It is not human.”

 

Manfred scratches his