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

hugged from behind by a giant cartoon dog with floppy ears and

an improbably large erection, who’s singing anatomically improbable

suggestions while fondling himself suggestively. “Fuck that!” Shocked

out of her distraction - and angry - Amber drops her stack of

paperwork and throws a new avatar at the screen, one an agent of hers

dreamed up overnight. It’s called Spike, and it’s not friendly. Spike

rips off the dog’s head and pisses down its trachea, which is

anatomically correct for a human being: Meanwhile she looks around,

trying to work out which of the laughing idiot children and lost geeks

around her could have sent such an unpleasant message.

 

“Children! Chill out.” She glances round - one of the Franklins (this

is the twentysomething dark-skinned female one) is frowning at them.

“Can’t we leave you alone for half a K without a fight?”

 

Amber pouts. “It’s not a fight; it’s a forceful exchange of opinions.”

 

“Hah.” The Franklin leans back in midair, arms crossed, an expression

of supercilious smugness pasted across her-their face. “Heard that one

before. Anyway” - she-they gesture, and the screen goes blank - “I’ve

got news for you pesky kids. We got a claim verified! Factory starts

work as soon as we shut down the stinger and finish filing all the

paperwork via our lawyers. Now’s our chance to earn our upkeep …”

 

*

 

Amber is flashing on ancient history, five years back along her time

line. In her replay, she’s in some kind of split-level ranch house out

West. It’s a temporary posting while her mother audits an obsolescent

fab line enterprise that grinds out dead chips of VLSI silicon for

Pentagon projects that have slipped behind the cutting edge. Her Mom

leans over her, menacingly adult in her dark suit and chaperone

earrings: “You’re going to school, and that’s that.”

 

Her mother is a blonde ice maiden madonna, one of the IRS’s most

productive bounty hunters - she can make grown CEOs panic just by

blinking at them. Amber, a towheaded-eight-year old tearaway with a

confusing mix of identities, inexperience blurring the boundary

between self and grid, is not yet able to fight back effectively.

After a couple of seconds, she verbalizes a rather feeble protest:

“Don’t want to!” One of her stance daemons whispers that this is the

wrong approach to take, so she modifies it: “They’ll beat up on me,

Mom. I’m too different. Sides, I know you want me socialized up with

my grade metrics, but isn’t that what sideband’s for? I can socialize

real good at home.”

 

Mom does something unexpected: She kneels, putting herself on

eye-level with Amber. They’re on the living room carpet, all

seventies-retro brown corduroy and acid-orange Paisley wallpaper, and

for once, they’re alone: The domestic robots are in hiding while the

humans hold court. “Listen to me, sweetie.” Mom’s voice is breathy,

laden with an emotional undertow as strong and stifling as the

eau-de-Cologne she wears to the office to cover up the scent of her

client’s fear. “I know that’s what your father’s writing to you, but

it isn’t true. You need the company - physical company - of children

your own age. You’re natural, not some kind of engineered freak, even

with your skullset. Natural children like you need company or they

grow up all weird. Socialization isn’t just about texting your own

kind, Amber, you need to know how to deal with people who’re

different, too. I want you to grow up happy, and that won’t happen if

you don’t learn to get on with children your own age. You’re not going

to be some kind of cyborg otaku freak, Amber. But to get healthy,

you’ve got to go to school, build up a mental immune system. Anyway,

that which does not destroy us makes us stronger, right?”

 

It’s crude moral blackmail, transparent as glass and manipulative as

hell, but Amber’s corpus logica flags it with a heavy emotional sprite

miming the likelihood of physical discipline if she rises to the bait:

Mom is agitated, nostrils slightly flared, ventilation rate up, some

vasodilatation visible in her cheeks. Amber - in combination with her

skullset and the metacortex of distributed agents it supports - is

mature enough at eight years to model, anticipate, and avoid corporal

punishment. But her stature and lack of physical maturity conspire to

put her at a disadvantage when negotiating with adults who matured in

a simpler age. She sighs, then puts on a pout to let Mom know she’s

still reluctant, but obedient. “O-kay. If you say so.”

 

Mom stands up, eyes distant - probably telling Saturn to warm his

engine and open the garage doors. “I say so, punkin. Go get your shoes

on, now. I’ll pick you up on my way back from work, and I’ve got a

treat for you; we’re going to check out a new church together this

evening.” Mom smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes: Amber has already

figured out she’s going through the motions in order to give her the

simulated middle-American upbringing she believes Amber desperately

needs before she runs head first into the future. She doesn’t like the

churches any more than her daughter does, but arguing won’t work. “You

be a good little girl, now, all right?”

 

*

 

The imam is at prayer in a gyrostabilized mosque.

 

His mosque is not very big, and it has a congregation of one: He prays

on his own every seventeen thousand two hundred and eighty seconds. He

also webcasts the call to prayer, but there are no other believers in

trans-Jovian space to answer the summons. Between prayers, he splits

his attention between the exigencies of life support and scholarship.

A student both of the Hadith and of knowledge-based systems, Sadeq

collaborates in a project with other scholars who are building a

revised concordance of all the known isnads, to provide a basis for

exploring the body of Islamic jurisprudence from a new perspective -

one they’ll need sorely if the looked-for breakthroughs in

communication with aliens emerge. Their goal is to answer the

vexatious questions that bedevil Islam in the age of accelerated

consciousness; and as their representative in orbit around Jupiter,

these questions fall most heavily on Sadeq’s shoulders.

 

Sadeq is a slightly built man, with close-cropped black hair and a

perpetually tired expression: Unlike the orphanage crew he has a ship

to himself. The ship started out as an Iranian knock off of a

Shenzhou-B capsule, with a Chinese type 921 space-station module

tacked onto its tail; but the clunky, 1960s look-alike - a glittering

aluminum dragonfly mating with a Coke can - has a weirdly contoured

M2P2 pod strapped to its nose. The M2P2 pod is a plasma sail, built in

orbit by one of Daewoo’s wake shield facilities. It dragged Sadeq and

his cramped space station out to Jupiter in just four months, surfing

on the solar breeze. His presence may be a triumph for the umma, but

he feels acutely alone out here: When he turns his compact

observatory’s mirrors in the direction of the Sanger, he is struck by

its size and purposeful appearance. Sanger’s superior size speaks of

the efficiency of the Western financial instruments, semiautonomous

investment trusts with variable business-cycle accounting protocols

that make possible the development of commercial space exploration.

The Prophet, peace be unto him, may have condemned usury; but it might

well have given him pause to see these engines of capital formation

demonstrate their power above the Great Red Spot.

 

After finishing his prayers, Sadeq spends a couple of precious extra

minutes on his mat. He finds meditation comes hard in this

environment: Kneel in silence, and you become aware of the hum of

ventilation fans, the smell of old socks and sweat, the metallic taste

of ozone from the Elektron oxygen generators. It is hard to approach

God in this third hand spaceship, a hand-me-down from arrogant Russia

to ambitious China, and finally to the religious trustees of Qom, who

have better uses for it than any of the heathen states imagine.

They’ve pushed it far, this little toy space station; but who’s to say

if it is God’s intention for humans to live here, in orbit around this

swollen alien giant of a planet?

 

Sadeq shakes his head; he rolls his mat up and stows it beside the

solitary porthole with a quiet sigh. A stab of homesickness wrenches

at him, for his childhood in hot, dusty Yazd and his many years as a

student in Qom: He steadies himself by looking round, searching the

station that is now as familiar to him as the fourth-floor concrete

apartment his parents - a car factory worker and his wife - raised him

in. The interior of the station is the size of a school bus, every

surface cluttered with storage areas, instrument consoles, and layers

of exposed pipes. A couple of globules of antifreeze jiggle like

stranded jellyfish near a heat exchanger that has been giving him

grief. Sadeq kicks off in search of the squeeze bottle he keeps for

this purpose, then gathers up his roll of tools and instructs one of

his agents to find him the relevant part of the maintenance log: it’s

time to fix the leaky joint for good.

 

An hour or so of serious plumbing and he will eat freeze-dried lamb

stew, with a paste of lentils and boiled rice, and a bulb of strong

tea to wash it down, then sit down to review his next fly-by

maneuvering sequence. Perhaps, God willing, there will be no further

system alerts and he’ll be able to spend an hour or two on his

research between evening and final prayers. Maybe the day after

tomorrow there’ll even be time to relax for a couple of hours, to

watch one of the old movies that he finds so fascinating for their

insights into alien cultures: Apollo Thirteen, perhaps. It isn’t easy,

being the crew aboard a long-duration space mission. It’s even harder

for Sadeq, up here alone with nobody to talk to, for the

communications lag to earth is more than half an hour each way - and

as far as he knows, he’s the only believer within half a billion

kilometers.

 

*

 

Amber dials a number in Paris and waits until someone answers the

phone. She knows the strange woman on the phone’s tiny screen: Mom

calls her “your father’s fancy bitch” with a peculiar tight smile.

(The one time Amber asked what a fancy bitch was, Mom slapped her -

not hard, just a warning.) “Is Daddy there?” she asks.

 

The strange woman looks slightly bemused. (Her hair is blonde, like

Mom’s, but the color clearly came out of a bleach bottle, and it’s cut

really short, and her skin is dark.) “Oui. Ah, yes.” She smiles

tentatively. “I am sorry, it is a disposable phone you are using? You

want to talk to ‘im?”

 

It comes out in a rush: “I want to see him.” Amber clutches the phone

like a lifesaver: It’s a cheap disposable cereal-packet item, and the

cardboard is already softening in her sweaty grip. “Momma won’t let

me, Auntie ‘Nette -”

 

“Hush.” Annette, who has lived with Amber’s father for more than twice

as long as her mother, smiles. “You are sure that telephone, your

mother does not know of it?”

 

Amber looks around. She’s the only child in the restroom because it

isn’t break time, and she told teacher she had to go ‘right now’: “I’m

sure, P20 confidence factor greater than 0.9.” Her Bayesian head tells

her that she can’t reason accurately about this because Momma has

never caught her with an illicit phone before, but what the hell. It

can’t get Dad into trouble if he doesn’t know, can it?