Accelerando, Charles Stross [classic novels for teens .TXT] 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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Book online «Accelerando, Charles Stross [classic novels for teens .TXT] 📗». Author Charles Stross
fingers in the air, navigating a time sequence only she can see.
Aineko hisses resentfully at her, then stands and stalks away, tail
held high.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Annette hums to herself. She intertwines
her fingers, pressing obscure pressure points on knuckle and wrist,
then sighs and rubs her eyes. “He left here under his own power,
looking normal,” she calls to the cat. “Who did he say he was going to
see?” The cat sits in a beam of sunlight falling in through the high
glass window, pointedly showing her its back. “Merde. If you’re not
going to help him -”
“Try the Grassmarket,” sulks the cat. “He said something about meeting
the Franklin Collective near there. Much good they’ll do him …”
*
A man wearing secondhand Chinese combat fatigues and a horribly
expensive pair of glasses bounces up a flight of damp stone steps
beneath a keystone that announces the building to be a Salvation Army
hostel. He bangs on the door, his voice almost drowned out by the pair
of Cold War Re-enactment Society MiGs that are buzzing the castle up
the road: “Open up, ye cunts! Ye’ve got a deal comin’!”
A peephole set in the door at eye level slides to one side, and a pair
of beady, black-eyed video cameras peer out at him. “Who are you and
what do you want?” the speaker crackles. They don’t belong to the
Salvation Army; Christianity has been deeply unfashionable in Scotland
for some decades, and the church that currently occupies the building
has certainly moved with the times in an effort to stay relevant.
“I’m Macx,” he says: “You’ve heard from my systems. I’m here to offer
you a deal you can’t refuse.” At least that’s what his glasses tell
him to say: What comes out of his mouth sounds a bit more like, Am
Max: Yiv hurdfrae ma system. Am here tae gie ye a deal ye cannae
refuse. The glasses haven’t had long enough to work on his accent.
Meanwhile, he’s so full of himself that he snaps his fingers and does
a little dance of impatience on the top step.
“Aye, well, hold on a minute.” The person on the other side of the
speakerphone has the kind of cut-glass Morningside accent that manages
to sound more English than the King while remaining vernacular Scots.
The door opens, and Macx finds himself confronted by a tall, slightly
cadaverous man wearing a tweed suit that has seen better days and a
clerical collar cut from a translucent circuit board. His face is
almost concealed behind a pair of recording angel goggles. “Who did ye
say you were?”
“I’m Macx! Manfred Macx! I’m here with an opportunity you wouldn’t
believe. I’ve got the answer to your church’s financial situation. I’m
going to make you rich!” The glasses prompt, and Macx speaks.
The man in the doorway tilts his head slightly, goggles scanning Macx
from head to foot. Bursts of blue combustion products spurt from
Macx’s heels as he bounces up and down enthusiastically. “Are ye sure
ye’ve got the right address?” he asks worriedly.
“Aye, Ah am that.”
The resident backs into the hostel: “Well then, come in, sit yeself
down and tell me all about it.”
Macx bounces into the room with his brain wide open to a blizzard of
pie charts and growth curves, documents spawning in the bizarre
phase-space of his corporate management software. “I’ve got a deal
you’re not going to believe,” he reads, gliding past notice boards
upon which Church circulars are staked out to die like exotic
butterflies, stepping over rolled-up carpets and a stack of laptops
left over from a jumble sale, past the devotional radio telescope that
does double duty as Mrs. Muirhouse’s back-garden bird bath. “You’ve
been here five years and your posted accounts show you aren’t making
much money - barely keeping the rent up. But you’re a shareholder in
Scottish Nuclear Electric, right? Most of the church funds are in the
form of a trust left to the church by one of your congregants when she
went to join the omega point, right?”
“Er.” The minister looks at him oddly. “I cannae comment on the church
eschatological investment trust. Why d’ye think that?”
They fetch up, somehow, in the minister’s office. A huge, framed
rendering hangs over the back of his threadbare office chair: the
collapsing cosmos of the End Times, galactic clusters rotten with the
Dyson spheres of the eschaton falling toward the big crunch. Saint
Tipler the Astrophysicist beams down from above with avuncular
approval, a ring of quasars forming a halo around his head. Posters
proclaim the new Gospel: COSMOLOGY IS BETTER THAN GUESSWORK, and LIVE
FOREVER WITHIN MY LIGHT CONE. “Can I get ye anything? Cup of tea? Fuel
cell charge point?” asks the minister.
“Crystal meth?” asks Macx, hopefully. His face falls as the minister
shakes his head apologetically. “Aw, dinnae worry, Ah wis only
joshing.” He leans forward: “Ah know a’ aboot yer plutonium futures
speculation,” he hisses. A finger taps his stolen spectacles in an
ominous gesture: “These dinnae just record, they think. An’ Ah ken
where the money’s gone.”
“What have ye got?” the minister asks coldly, any indication of good
humor flown. “I’m going to have to edit down these memories, ye
bastard. I thought I’d forgotten all about that. Bits of me aren’t
going to merge with the godhead at the end of time now, thanks to
you.”
“Keep yer shirt on. Whit’s the point o’ savin’ it a’ up if ye nae got
a life worth living? Ye reckon the big yin’s nae gonnae unnerstan’ a
knees up?”
“What do ye want?”
“Aye, well,” Macx leans back, aggrieved. Ah’ve got -” He pauses. An
expression of extreme confusion flits over his head. “Ah’ve got
lobsters,” he finally announces. “Genetically engineered uploaded
lobsters tae run yer uranium reprocessing plant.” As he grows more
confused, the glasses’ control over his accent slips: “Ah wiz gonnae
help yiz oot ba showin ye how ter get yer dosh back whir it belong
…” A strategic pause: “so ye could make the council tax due date.
See, they’re neutron-resistant, the lobsters. No, that cannae be
right. Ah wiz gonnae sell ye somethin’ ye cud use fer” - his face
slumps into a frown of disgust - “free?”
Approximately thirty seconds later, as he is picking himself up off
the front steps of the First Reformed Church of Tipler,
Astrophysicist, the man who would be Macx finds himself wondering if
maybe this high finance shit isn’t as easy as it’s cracked up to be.
Some of the agents in his glasses are wondering if elocution lessons
are the answer; others aren’t so optimistic.
*
Getting back to the history lesson, the prospects for the decade
look mostly medical.
A few thousand elderly baby boomers are converging on Tehran for
Woodstock Four. Europe is desperately trying to import eastern
European nurses and home-care assistants; in Japan, whole
agricultural villages lie vacant and decaying, ghost communities
sucked dry as cities slurp people in like residential black holes.
A rumor is spreading throughout gated old-age communities in the
American Midwest, leaving havoc and riots in its wake: Senescence
is caused by a slow virus coded into the mammalian genome that
evolution hasn’t weeded out, and rich billionaires are sitting on
the rights to a vaccine. As usual, Charles Darwin gets more than
his fair share of the blame. (Less spectacular but more realistic
treatments for old age - telomere reconstruction and
hexose-denatured protein reduction - are available in private
clinics for those who are willing to surrender their pensions.)
Progress is expected to speed up shortly, as the fundamental
patents in genomic engineering begin to expire; the Free Chromosome
Foundation has already published a manifesto calling for the
creation of an intellectual-property-free genome with improved
replacements for all commonly defective exons.
Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under
emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim
that, as the technology matures, death - with its draconian
curtailment of property and voting rights - will become the biggest
civil rights issue of all.
For a small extra fee, most veterinary insurance policies now cover
cloning of pets in the event of their accidental and distressing
death. Human cloning, for reasons nobody is very clear on anymore,
is still illegal in most developed nations - but very few
judiciaries push for mandatory abortion of identical twins.
Some commodities are expensive: the price of crude oil has broken
eighty Euros a barrel and is edging inexorably up. Other
commodities are cheap: computers, for example. Hobbyists print off
weird new processor architectures on their home inkjets;
middle-aged folks wipe their backsides with diagnostic paper that
can tell how their cholesterol levels are tending.
The latest casualties of the march of technological progress are:
the high-street clothes shop, the flushing water closet, the Main
Battle Tank, and the first generation of quantum computers. New
with the decade are cheap enhanced immune systems, brain implants
that hook right into the Chomsky organ and talk to their owners
through their own speech centers, and widespread public paranoia
about limbic spam. Nanotechnology has shattered into a dozen
disjoint disciplines, and skeptics are predicting that it will all
peter out before long. Philosophers have ceded qualia to engineers,
and the current difficult problem in AI is getting software to
experience embarrassment.
Fusion power is still, of course, fifty years away.
*
The Victorians are morphing into goths before Manfred’s
culture-shocked eyes.
“You looked lost,” explains Monica, leaning over him curiously.
“What’s with your eyes?”
“I can’t see too well,” Manfred tries to explain. Everything is a
blur, and the voices that usually chatter incessantly in his head have
left nothing behind but a roaring silence. “I mean, someone mugged me.
They took -” His hand closes on air: something is missing from his
belt.
Monica, the tall woman he first saw in the hospital, enters the room.
What she’s wearing indoors is skintight, iridescent and,
disturbingly, she claims is a distributed extension of her
neuroectoderm. Stripped of costume-drama accoutrements, she’s a
twenty-first-century adult, born or decanted after the millennial baby
boom. She waves some fingers in Manfred’s face: “How many?”
“Two.” Manfred tries to concentrate. “What -”
“No concussion,” she says briskly. “‘Scuse me while I page.” Her eyes
are brown, with amber raster lines flickering across her pupils.
Contact lenses? Manfred wonders, his head turgid and unnaturally slow.
It’s like being drunk, except much less pleasant: He can’t seem to
wrap his head around an idea from all angles at once, anymore. Is this
what consciousness used to be like? It’s an ugly, slow sensation. She
turns away from him: “Medline says you’ll be all right in a while. The
main problem is the identity loss. Are you backed up anywhere?”
“Here.” Alan, still top-hatted and mutton-chopped, holds out a pair of
spectacles to Manfred. “Take these, they may do you some good.” His
topper wobbles, as if a strange A-life experiment is nesting under its
brim.
“Oh. Thank you.” Manfred reaches for them with a pathetic sense of
gratitude. As soon as he puts them on, they run through a test series,
whispering questions and watching how his eyes focus: After a minute,
the room around him clears as the specs build a synthetic image to
compensate for his myopia. There’s limited Net access, too, he
notices, a warm sense of relief stealing over him. “Do you mind if I
call somebody?” he asks: “I want to check my backups.”
“Be my guest.” Alan slips out through the
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