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

After a few seconds, Annette nods to herself and wiggles her

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