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

>“Very good.” Annette glances aside. “Manny, I have a surprise call for

you.”

 

Daddy appears on screen. She can see all of his face, and he looks

younger than last time: he must have stopped using those clunky old

glasses. “Hi - Amber! Where are you? Does your mother know you’re

calling me?” He looks slightly worried.

 

“No,” she says confidently, “the phone came in a box of Grahams.”

 

“Phew. Listen, sweet, you must remember never, ever to call me where

your mom may find out. Otherwise, she’ll get her lawyers to come after

me with thumbscrews and hot pincers, because she’ll say I made you

call me. And not even Uncle Gianni will be able to sort that out.

Understand?”

 

“Yes, Daddy.” She sighs. “Even though that’s not true, I know. Don’t

you want to know why I called?”

 

“Um.” For a moment, he looks taken aback. Then he nods, thoughtfully.

Amber likes Daddy because he takes her seriously most times when she

talks to him. It’s a phreaking nuisance having to borrow her

classmate’s phones or tunnel past Mom’s pit-bull firewall, but Dad

doesn’t assume that she can’t know anything just because she’s only a

kid. “Go ahead. There’s something you need to get off your chest?

How’ve things been, anyway?”

 

She’s going to have to be brief: The disposaphone comes prepaid, the

international tariff it’s using is lousy, and the break bell is going

to ring any minute. “I want out, Daddy. I mean it. Mom’s getting

loopier every week - she’s dragging me round all these churches now,

and yesterday, she threw a fit over me talking to my terminal. She

wants me to see the school shrink, I mean, what for? I can’t do what

she wants - I’m not her little girl! Every time I tunnel out, she

tries to put a content-bot on me, and it’s making my head hurt - I

can’t even think straight anymore!” To her surprise, Amber feels tears

starting. “Get me out of here!”

 

The view of her father shakes, pans round to show her Tante Annette

looking worried. “You know, your father, he cannot do anything? The

divorce lawyers, they will tie him up.”

 

Amber sniffs. “Can you help?” she asks.

 

“I’ll see what I can do,” her father’s fancy bitch promises as the

break bell rings.

 

*

 

An instrument package peels away from the Sanger’s claim jumper drone

and drops toward the potato-shaped rock, fifty kilometers below.

Jupiter hangs huge and gibbous in the background, impressionist

wallpaper for a mad cosmologist: Pierre bites his lower lip as he

concentrates on steering it.

 

Amber, wearing a black sleeping sack, hovers over his head like a

giant bat, enjoying her freedom for a shift. She looks down on

Pierre’s bowl-cut hair, wiry arms gripping either side of the viewing

table, and wonders what to have him do next. A slave for a day is an

interesting experience: Life aboard the Sanger is busy enough that

nobody gets much slack time (at least not until the big habitats have

been assembled and the high-bandwidth dish is pointing back at Earth).

They’re unrolling everything to a hugely intricate plan generated by

the backers’ critical path team, and there isn’t much room for idling:

The expedition relies on shamelessly exploiting child labor - they’re

lighter on the life-support consumables than adults - working the kids

twelve hour days to assemble a toe hold on the shore of the future.

(When they’re older and their options vest fully, they’ll all be rich,

but that hasn’t stopped the outraged herdnews propaganda chorus from

sounding off back home.) For Amber, the chance to let somebody else

work for her is novel, and she’s trying to make every minute count.

 

“Hey, slave,” she calls idly; “how you doing?”

 

Pierre sniffs. “It’s going okay.” He refuses to glance up at her,

Amber notices. He’s thirteen. Isn’t he supposed to be obsessed with

girls by that age? She notices his quiet, intense focus, runs a

stealthy probe along his outer boundary; he shows no sign of noticing

it, but it bounces off, unable to chink his mental armor. “Got cruise

speed,” he says, taciturn, as two tonnes of metal, ceramics and

diamond-phase weirdness hurtle toward the surface of Barney at three

hundred kilometers per hour. “Stop shoving me, there’s a three-second

lag, and I don’t want to get into a feedback control loop with it.”

 

“I’ll shove if I want, slave.” She sticks her tongue out at him.

 

“And if you make me drop it?” he asks. Looking up at her, his face

serious - “Are we supposed to be doing this?”

 

“You cover your ass, and I’ll cover mine,” she says, then turns bright

red. “You know what I mean.”

 

“I do, do I?” Pierre grins widely, then turns back to the console:

“Aww, that’s no fun. And you want to tune whatever bit-bucket you’ve

given control of your speech centers to - they’re putting out way too

much double entendre, somebody might mistake you for a grown-up.”

 

“You stick to your business, and I’ll stick to mine,” she says,

emphatically. “And you can start by telling me what’s happening.”

 

“Nothing.” He leans back and crosses his arms, grimacing at the

screen. “It’s going to drift for five hundred seconds, now, then

there’s the midcourse correction and a deceleration burn before touch

down. And then it’s going to be an hour while it unwraps itself and

starts unwinding the cable spool. What do you want, minute noodles

with that?”

 

“Uh-huh.” Amber spreads her bat wings and lies back in mid air,

staring at the window, feeling rich and idle as Pierre works his way

through her day shift. “Wake me when there’s something interesting to

see.” Maybe she should have had him feed her peeled grapes or give her

a foot massage, something more traditionally hedonistic; but right

now, just knowing he’s her own little piece of alienated labor is

doing good things for her self-esteem. Looking at those tense arms,

the curve of his neck, she thinks maybe there’s something to this

whispering and giggling he really fancies you stuff the older girls go

in for -

 

The window rings like a gong, and Pierre coughs. “You’ve got mail,” he

says drily. “You want me to read it for you?”

 

“What the -” A message is flooding across the screen, right-to-left

snaky script like the stuff on her corporate instrument (now lodged

safely in a deposit box in Zurich). It takes her a while to load in a

grammar agent that can handle Arabic, and another minute for her to

take in the meaning of the message. When she does, she starts

swearing, loudly and continuously.

 

“You bitch, Mom, why’d you have to go and do a thing like that?”

 

*

 

The corporate instrument arrived in a huge FedEx box addressed to

Amber: It happened on her birthday while Mom was at work, and she

remembers it as if it was only an hour ago.

 

She remembers reaching up and scraping her thumb over the

deliveryman’s clipboard, the rough feel of the microsequencers

sampling her DNA. She drags the package inside. When she pulls the tab

on the box, it unpacks itself automatically, regurgitating a compact

3D printer, half a ream of paper printed in old-fashioned dumb ink,

and a small calico cat with a large @-symbol on its flank. The cat

hops out of the box, stretches, shakes its head, and glares at her.

“You’re Amber?” it mrowls. It actually makes real cat noises, but the

meaning is clear - it’s able to talk directly to her linguistic

competence interface.

 

“Yeah,” she says, shyly. “Are you from Tante ‘Nette?”

 

“No, I’m from the fucking tooth fairy.” It leans over and head-butts

her knee, strops the scent glands between its ears all over her skirt.

“Listen, you got any tuna in the kitchen?”

 

“Mom doesn’t believe in seafood,” says Amber. “It’s all foreign-farmed

muck these days, she says. It’s my birthday today, did I tell you?”

 

“Happy fucking birthday, then.” The cat yawns, convincingly realistic.

“Here’s your dad’s present. Bastard put me in hibernation and sent me

along to show you how to work it. You take my advice, you’ll trash the

fucker. No good will come of it.”

 

Amber interrupts the cat’s grumbling by clapping her hands gleefully;

“So what is it?” she demands: “A new invention? Some kind of weird sex

toy from Amsterdam? A gun, so I can shoot Pastor Wallace?”

 

“Naah.” The cat yawns, yet again, and curls up on the floor next to

the 3D printer. “It’s some kinda dodgy business model to get you out

of hock to your mom. Better be careful, though - he says its legality

is narrowly scoped jurisdiction-wise. Your Mom might be able to

undermine it if she learns about how it works.”

 

“Wow. Like, how totally cool.” In truth, Amber is delighted because it

is her birthday; but Mom’s at work, and Amber’s home alone, with just

the TV in moral majority mode for company. Things have gone downhill

since Mom decided a modal average dose of old-time religion was an

essential part of her upbringing, to the point that absolutely the

best thing in the world Tante Annette could send her is some scam

programmed by Daddy to take her away. If it doesn’t work, Mom will

take her to Church tonight, and she’s certain she’ll end up making a

scene again. Amber’s tolerance of willful idiocy is diminishing

rapidly, and while building up her memetic immunity might be the real

reason Mom’s forcing this shit on her - it’s always hard to tell with

Mom - things have been tense ever since she got expelled from Sunday

school for mounting a spirited defense of the theory of evolution.

 

The cat sniffs in the direction of the printer. “Why doncha fire it

up?” Amber opens the lid on the printer, removes the packing popcorn,

and plugs it in. There’s a whir and a rush of waste heat from its rear

as it cools the imaging heads down to working temperature and

registers her ownership.

 

“What do I do now?” she asks.

 

“Pick up the page labeled READ ME and follow the instructions,” the

cat recites in a bored singsong voice. It winks at her, then fakes an

exaggerated French accent: “Le READ ME, il sont contain directions

pour executing le corporate instrument dans le boit. In event of

perplexity, consult the accompanying Aineko for clarification.” The

cat wrinkles its nose rapidly, as if it’s about to bite an invisible

insect: “Warning: Don’t rely on your father’s cat’s opinions, it is a

perverse beast and cannot be trusted. Your mother helped seed its meme

base, back when they were married. Ends.” It mumbles on for a while:

“Fucking snotty Parisian bitch, I’ll piss in her knicker drawer, I’ll

molt in her bidet …”

 

“Don’t be vile.” Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments

are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any

standards - a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the

intersection between shari’a and the global legislatosaurus.

Understanding it isn’t easy, even with a personal net full of

subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of

international trade law - the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds

the documents highly puzzling. It’s not the fact that half of them are

written in Arabic that bothers her - that’s what her grammar engine is

for - or even that they’re full of S-expressions and semidigestible

chunks of LISP: But the company seems to assert that it exists for the

sole purpose of owning chattel slaves.

 

“What’s going on?” she asks the