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

>with telling nobody in advance. But I don’t like this. He should have

to told one of us first.” Ever since that first meeting in Rome, when

Gianni offered him a job, Manfred has been a core member of Gianni’s

team, the fixer who goes out and meets people and solves their

problems. Losing him at this point could be more than embarrassing.

Besides, he’s a friend.

 

“I do not like this either.” She stands up. “If he doesn’t call back

soon -”

 

“You’ll go and fetch him.”

 

“Oui.” A smile flashes across her face, rapidly replaced by worry

lines. “What can have happened?”

 

“Anything. Nothing.” Gianni shrugs. “But we cannot do without him.” He

casts her a warning glance. “Or you. Don’t let the borg get you.

Either of you.”

 

“Not to worry, I will just bring him back, whatever has happened.” She

stands up, surprising a vacuum cleaner that skulks behind her desk.

“Au revoir!”

 

“Ciao.”

 

As she vacates her office, the minister flickers off behind her,

leaving the far wall the dull gray of a cold display panel. Gianni is

in Rome, she’s in Paris, Markus is in D�sseldorf, and Eva’s in

Wroclaw. There are others, trapped in digital cells scattered halfway

across an elderly continent, but as long as they don’t try to shake

hands, they’re free to shout across the office at each other. Their

confidences and dirty jokes tunnel through multiple layers of

anonymized communication.

 

Gianni is trying to make his break out of regional politics and into

European national affairs: Their job - his election team - is to get

him a seat on the Confederacy Commission, as Representative for

Intelligence Oversight, and push the boundaries of posthumanistic

action outward, into deep space and deeper time. Which makes the loss

of a key team player, the house futurologist and fixer, profoundly

interesting to certain people: The walls have ears, and not all the

brains they feed into are human.

 

Annette is more worried than she’s letting on to Gianni. It’s unlike

Manfred to be out of contact for long and even odder for his

receptionist to stonewall her, given that her apartment is the nearest

thing to a home he’s had for the past couple of years. But something

smells fishy. He sneaked out last night, saying it would be an

overnight trip, and now he’s not answering. Could it be his ex-wife?

she wonders, despite Gianni’s hints about a special mission. But

there’s been no word from Pamela other than the sarcastic cards she

dispatches every year without fail, timed to arrive on the birthday of

the daughter Manfred has never met. The music Mafiya? A letter bomb

from the Copyright Control Association of America? But no, his medical

monitor would have been screaming its head off if anything like that

had happened.

 

Annette has organized things so that he’s safe from the intellectual

property thieves. She’s lent him the support he needs, and he’s helped

her find her own path. She gets a warm sense of happiness whenever she

considers how much they’ve achieved together. But that’s exactly why

she’s worried now. The watchdog hasn’t barked …

 

Annette summons a taxi to Charles de Gaulle. By the time she arrives,

she’s already used her parliamentary carte to bump an executive-class

seat on the next A320 to Turnhouse, Edinburgh’s airport, and scheduled

accommodation and transport for her arrival. The plane is climbing out

over la Manche before the significance of Gianni’s last comment hits

her: Might he think the Franklin Collective could be dangerous to

Manfred?

 

*

 

The hospital emergency suite has a waiting room with green plastic

bucket seats and subtractive volume renderings by preteens stuck to

the walls like surreal Lego sculptures. It’s deeply silent, the

available bandwidth all sequestrated for medical monitors - there are

children crying, periodic sirens wailing as ambulances draw up, and

people chattering all around him, but to Manfred, it’s like being at

the bottom of a deep blue pool of quiet. He feels stoned, except this

particular drug brings no euphoria or sense of well-being.

Corridor-corner vendors hawk kebab-spitted pigeons next to the chained

and rusted voluntary service booth; video cameras watch the blue bivvy

bags of the chronic cases lined up next to the nursing station. Alone

in his own head, Manfred is frightened and confused.

 

“I can’t check you in ‘less you sign the confidentiality agreement,”

says the triage nurse, pushing an antique tablet at Manfred’s face.

Service in the NHS is still free, but steps have been taken to reduce

the incidence of scandals: “Sign the nondisclosure clause here and

here, or the house officer won’t see you.”

 

Manfred stares blearily up at the nurse’s nose, which is red and

slightly inflamed from a nosocomial infection. His phones are

bickering again, and he can’t remember why; they don’t normally behave

like this, something must be missing, but thinking about it is hard.

“Why am I here?” he asks for the third time.

 

“Sign it.” A pen is thrust into his hand. He focuses on the page,

jerks upright as deeply canalized reflexes kick in.

 

“This is theft of human rights! It says here that the party of the

second part is enjoined from disclosing information relating to the

operations management triage procedures and processes of the said

health-giving institution, that’s you, to any third party - that’s the

public media - on pain of forfeiture of health benefits pursuant to

section two of the Health Service Reform Act. I can’t sign this! You

could repossess my left kidney if I post on the Net about how long

I’ve been in hospital!”

 

“So don’t sign, then.” The Hijra nurse shrugs, hitches up his sari,

and walks away. “Enjoy your wait!”

 

Manfred pulls out his backup phone and stares at its display.

“Something’s wrong here.” The keypad beeps as he laboriously inputs

opcodes. This gets him into an arcane and ancient X.25 PAD, and he has

a vague, disturbing memory that hints about where he can go from here

- mostly into the long-since-decommissioned bowels of NHSNet - but the

memories spring a page fault and die somewhere between fingertips and

the moment when understanding dawns. It’s a frustrating feeling: His

brain is like an ancient car engine with damp spark plugs, turning

over and over without catching fire.

 

The kebab vendor next to Manfred’s seating rail chucks a stock cube on

his grill; it begins to smoke, aromatic and blue and herbal -

cannabinoids to induce tranquillity and appetite. Manfred sniffs

twice, then staggers to his feet and heads off in search of the

toilet, his head spinning. He’s mumbling at his wrist watch: “Hello,

Guatemala? Get me posology please. Click down my meme tree, I’m

confused. Oh shit. Who was I? What happened? Why is everything blurry?

I can’t find my glasses …”

 

A gaggle of day-trippers are leaving the leprosy ward, men and women

dressed in anachronistic garb: men in dark suits, women in long

dresses. All of them wear electric blue disposable gloves and face

masks. There’s a hum and crackle of encrypted bandwidth emanating from

them, and Manfred instinctively turns to follow. They leave the A&E

unit through the wheelchair exit, two ladies escorted by three

gentlemen, with a deranged distressed refugee from the twenty-first

century shuffling dizzily after. They’re all young, Manfred realizes

vaguely. Where’s my cat? Aineko might be able to make sense of this,

if Aineko was interested.

 

“I rather fancy we should retire to the club house,” says one young

beau. “Oh yes! please!” his short blond companion chirps, clapping her

hands together, then irritably stripping off the anachronistic plastic

gloves to reveal wired-lace positional-sensor mitts underneath. “This

trip has obviously been unproductive. If our contact is here, I see no

easy way of locating of him without breach of medical confidence or a

hefty gratuity.”

 

“The poor things,” murmurs the other woman, glancing back at the

leprosarium. “Such a humiliating way to die.”

 

“Their own fault; If they hadn’t participated in antibiotic abuse they

wouldn’t be in the isolation ward,” harrumphs a twentysomething with

mutton-chops and the manner of a precocious paterfamilias. He raps his

walking stick on the pavement for punctuation, and they pause for a

flock of cyclists and a rickshaw before they cross the road onto the

Meadows. “Degenerate medication compliance, degenerate immune

systems.”

 

Manfred pauses to survey the grass, brain spinning as he ponders the

fractal dimensionality of leaves. Then he lurches after them, nearly

getting himself run down by a flywheel-powered tourist bus. Club. His

feet hit the pavement, cross it, thud down onto three billion years of

vegetative evolution. Something about those people. He feels a weird

yearning, a tropism for information. It’s almost all that’s left of

him - his voracious will to know. The tall, dark-haired woman hitches

up her long skirts to keep them out of the mud. he sees a flash of

iridescent petticoats that ripple like oil on water, worn over

old-fashioned combat boots. Not Victorian, then: something else. I

came here to see - the name is on the tip of his tongue. Almost. He

feels that it has something to do with these people.

 

The squad cross The Meadows by way of a tree-lined path, and come to a

nineteenth-century frontage with wide steps and a polished brass

doorbell. They enter, and the man with the mutton-chops pauses on the

threshold and turns to face Manfred. “You’ve followed us this far,” he

says. “Do you want to come in? You might find what you’re looking

for.”

 

Manfred follows with knocking knees, desperately afraid of whatever

he’s forgotten.

 

*

 

Meanwhile, Annette is busy interrogating Manfred’s cat.

 

“When did you last see your father?”

 

Aineko turns its head away from her and concentrates on washing the

inside of its left leg. Its fur is lifelike and thick, pleasingly

patterned except for a manufacturer’s URL emblazoned on its flanks;

but the mouth produces no saliva, the throat opens on no stomach or

lungs. “Go away,” it says: “I’m busy.”

 

“When did you last see Manfred?” she repeats intently. “I don’t have

time for this. The polis don’t know. The medical services don’t know.

He’s off net and not responding. So what can you tell me?”

 

It took her precisely eighteen minutes to locate his hotel once she

hit the airport arrivals area and checked the hotel booking front end

in the terminal: She knows his preferences. It took her slightly

longer to convince the concierge to let her into his room. But Aineko

is proving more recalcitrant than she’d expected.

 

“AI Neko mod two alpha requires maintenance downtime on a regular

basis,” the cat says pompously: “You knew that when you bought me this

body. What were you expecting, five-nines uptime from a lump of meat?

Go away, I’m thinking.” The tongue rasps out, then pauses while

microprobes in its underside replace the hairs that fell out earlier

in the day.

 

Annette sighs. Manfred’s been upgrading this robot cat for years, and

his ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its neural configuration too:

This is its third body, and it’s getting more realistically

uncooperative with every hardware upgrade. Sooner or later it’s going

to demand a litter tray and start throwing up on the carpet. “Command

override,” she says. “Dump event log to my Cartesian theatre, minus

eight hours to present.”

 

The cat shudders and looks round at her. “Human bitch!” it hisses.

Then it freezes in place as the air fills with a bright and silent

tsunami of data. Both Annette and Aineko are wired for extremely

high-bandwidth spread-spectrum optical networking; an observer would

see the cat’s eyes and a ring on her left hand glow blue-white at each

other.