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

Chapter 3: Tourist

Spring-Heeled Jack runs blind, blue fumes crackling from his heels.

His right hand, outstretched for balance, clutches a mark’s stolen

memories. The victim is sitting on the hard stones of the pavement

behind him. Maybe he’s wondering what’s happened; maybe he looks after

the fleeing youth. But the tourist crowds block the view effectively,

and in any case, he has no hope of catching the mugger. Hit-and-run

amnesia is what the polis call it, but to Spring-Heeled Jack it’s just

more loot to buy fuel for his Russian army-surplus motorized combat

boots.

 

*

 

The victim sits on the cobblestones clutching his aching temples. What

happened? he wonders. The universe is a brightly colored blur of

fast-moving shapes augmented by deafening noises. His ear-mounted

cameras are rebooting repeatedly: They panic every eight hundred

milliseconds, whenever they realize that they’re alone on his personal

area network without the comforting support of a hub to tell them

where to send his incoming sensory feed. Two of his mobile phones are

bickering moronically, disputing ownership of his grid bandwidth, and

his memory … is missing.

 

A tall blond clutching an electric chainsaw sheathed in pink bubble

wrap leans over him curiously: “you all right?” she asks.

 

“I -” He shakes his head, which hurts. “Who am I?” His medical monitor

is alarmed because his blood pressure has fallen: His pulse is racing,

his serum cortisol titer is up, and a host of other biometrics suggest

that he’s going into shock.

 

“I think you need an ambulance,” the woman announces. She mutters at

her lapel, “Phone, call an ambulance. ” She waves a finger vaguely at

him as if to reify a geolink, then wanders off, chainsaw clutched

under one arm. Typical southern �migr� behavior in the Athens of the

North, too embarrassed to get involved. The man shakes his head again,

eyes closed, as a flock of girls on powered blades skid around him in

elaborate loops. A siren begins to warble, over the bridge to the

north.

 

Who am I? he wonders. “I’m Manfred,” he says with a sense of stunned

wonder. He looks up at the bronze statue of a man on a horse that

looms above the crowds on this busy street corner. Someone has

plastered a Hello Cthulhu! holo on the plaque that names its rider:

Languid fluffy pink tentacles wave at him in an attack of kawaii. “I’m

Manfred - Manfred. My memory. What’s happened to my memory?” Elderly

Malaysian tourists point at him from the open top deck of a passing

bus. He burns with a sense of horrified urgency. I was going

somewhere, he recalls. What was I doing? It was amazingly important,

he thinks, but he can’t remember what exactly it was. He was going to

see someone about - it’s on the tip of his tongue -

 

*

 

Welcome to the eve of the third decade: a time of chaos

characterized by an all-out depression in the space industries.

 

Most of the thinking power on the planet is now manufactured rather

than born; there are ten microprocessors for every human being, and

the number is doubling every fourteen months. Population growth in

the developing world has stalled, the birth rate dropping below

replacement level. In the wired nations, more forward-looking

politicians are looking for ways to enfranchise their nascent AI

base.

 

Space exploration is still stalled on the cusp of the second

recession of the century. The Malaysian government has announced

the goal of placing an imam on Mars within ten years, but nobody

else cares enough to try.

 

The Space Settlers Society is still trying to interest Disney Corp.

in the media rights to their latest L5 colony plan, unaware that

there’s already a colony out there and it isn’t human:

First-generation uploads, Californian spiny lobsters in wobbly

symbiosis with elderly expert systems, thrive aboard an asteroid

mining project established by the Franklin Trust. Meanwhile,

Chinese space agency cutbacks are threatening the continued

existence of Moonbase Mao. Nobody, it seems, has figured out how to

turn a profit out beyond geosynchronous orbit.

 

Two years ago, JPL, the ESA, and the uploaded lobster colony on

comet Khrunichev-7 picked up an apparently artificial signal from

outside the solar system; most people don’t know, and of those who

do, even fewer care. After all, if humans can’t even make it to

Mars, who cares what’s going on a hundred trillion kilometers

farther out?

 

*

 

Portrait of a wasted youth:

 

Jack is seventeen years and eleven months old. He has never met his

father; he was unplanned, and Dad managed to kill himself in a

building-site accident before the Child Support could garnish his

income for the upbringing. His mother raised him in a two-bedroom

housing association flat in Hawick. She worked in a call center when

he was young, but business dried up: Humans aren’t needed on the end

of a phone anymore. Now she works in a drop-in business shop, stacking

shelves for virtual fly-by-nights that come and go like tourists in

the Festival season - but humans aren’t in demand for shelf stacking

either, these days.

 

His mother sent Jack to a local religious school, where he was

regularly excluded and effectively ran wild from the age of twelve. By

thirteen, he was wearing a parole cuff for shoplifting; by fourteen,

he’d broken his collarbone in a car crash while joyriding and the dour

Presbyterian sheriff sent him to the Wee Frees, who completed the

destruction of his educational prospects with high principles and an

illicit tawse.

 

Today, he’s a graduate of the hard school of avoiding public

surveillance cameras, with distinctions in steganographic alibi

construction. Mostly this entails high-density crime - if you’re going

to mug someone, do so where there are so many bystanders that they

can’t pin the blame on you. But the polis expert systems are on his

tail. If he keeps it up at this rate, in another four months they’ll

have a positive statistical correlation that will convince even a jury

of his peers that he’s guilty as fuck - and then he’ll go down to

Saughton for four years.

 

But Jack doesn’t understand the meaning of a Gaussian distribution or

the significance of a chi-square test, and the future still looks

bright to him as he pulls on the chunky spectacles he ripped off the

tourist gawking at the statue on North Bridge. And after a moment,

when they begin whispering into his ears in stereo and showing him

pictures of the tourist’s vision, it looks even brighter.

 

“Gotta make a deal, gotta close a deal,” whisper the glasses. “Meet

the borg, strike a chord.” Weird graphs in lurid colors are filling up

his peripheral vision, like the hallucinations of a drugged

marketroid.

 

“Who the fuck are ye?” asks Jack, intrigued by the bright lights and

icons.

 

“I am your Cartesian theatre and you are our focus,” murmur the

glasses. “Dow Jones down fifteen points, Federated Confidence up

three, incoming briefing on causal decoupling of social control of

skirt hem lengths, shaving pattern of beards, and emergence of

multidrug antibiotic resistance in Gram-negative bacilli: Accept?”

 

“Ah can take it,” Jack mumbles, as a torrent of images crashes down on

his eyeballs and jackhammers its way in through his ears like the

superego of a disembodied giant. Which is actually what he’s stolen:

The glasses and waist pouch he grabbed from the tourist are stuffed

with enough hardware to run the entire Internet, circa the turn of the

millennium. They’ve got bandwidth coming out the wazoo, distributed

engines running a bazillion inscrutable search tasks, and a whole slew

of high-level agents that collectively form a large chunk of the

society of mind that is their owner’s personality. Their owner is a

posthuman genius loci of the net, an agalmic entrepreneur turned

policy wonk, specializing in the politics of AI emancipation. When he

was in the biz he was the kind of guy who catalysed value wherever he

went, leaving money trees growing in his footprints. Now he’s the kind

of political backroom hitter who builds coalitions where nobody else

could see common ground. And Jack has stolen his memories. There are

microcams built into the frame of the glasses, pickups in the

earpieces; everything is spooled into the holographic cache in the

belt pack, before being distributed for remote storage. At four months

per terabyte, memory storage is cheap. What makes this bunch so

unusual is that their owner - Manfred - has cross-indexed them with

his agents. Mind uploading may not be a practical technology yet, but

Manfred has made an end run on it already.

 

In a very real sense, the glasses are Manfred, regardless of the

identity of the soft machine with its eyeballs behind the lenses. And

it is a very puzzled Manfred who picks himself up and, with a curious

vacancy in his head - except for a hesitant request for information

about accessories for Russian army boots - dusts himself off and heads

for his meeting on the other side of town.

 

*

 

Meanwhile, in another meeting, Manfred’s absence is already being

noticed. “Something, something is wrong,” says Annette. She raises her

mirrorshades and rubs her left eye, visibly worried. “Why is he not

answering his chat? He knows we are due to hold this call with him.

Don’t you think it is odd?”

 

Gianni nods and leans back, regarding her from behind his desk. He

prods at the highly polished rosewood desktop. The wood grain slips,

sliding into a strangely different conformation, generating random dot

stereoisograms - messages for his eyes only. “He was visiting Scotland

for me,” he says after a moment. “I do not know his exact whereabouts

- the privacy safeguards - but if you, as his designated next of kin,

travel in person, I am sure you will find it easier. He was going to

talk to the Franklin Collective, face-to-face, one to many …”

 

The office translator is good, but it can’t provide realtime

lip-synch morphing between French and Italian. Annette has to make an

effort to listen to his words because the shape of his mouth is all

wrong, like a badly dubbed video. Her expensive, recent implants

aren’t connected up to her Broca’s area yet, so she can’t simply

sideload a deep grammar module for Italian. Their communications are

the best that money can buy, their VR environment painstakingly

sculpted, but it still doesn’t break down the language barrier

completely. Besides, there are distractions: the way the desk switches

from black ash to rosewood halfway across its expanse, the strange air

currents that are all wrong for a room this size. “Then what could be

up with him? His voicemail is trying to cover for him. It is good, but

it does not lie convincingly.”

 

Gianni looks worried. “Manfred is prone to fits of do his own thing