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

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“I’m sorry, but the borg is attempting to assimilate a lawsuit,” says

the receptionist. “Will you hold?”

 

“Crud.” Amber blinks the Binary Betty answerphone sprite out of her

eye and glances round at the cabin. “That is so last century,” she

grumbles. “Who do they think they are?”

 

“Dr. Robert H. Franklin,” volunteers the cat. “It’s a losing

proposition if you ask me. Bob was so fond of his dope there’s this

whole hippy group mind that’s grown up using his state vector as a

bong -”

 

“Shut the fuck up!” Amber shouts at him. Instantly contrite (for

yelling in an inflatable spacecraft is a major faux pas): “Sorry.” She

spawns an autonomic thread with full parasympathetic nervous control,

tells it to calm her down, then spawns a couple more to go forth and

become fuqaha, expert on shari’a law. She realizes she’s buying up way

too much of the orphanage’s scarce bandwidth - time that will have to

be paid for in chores, later - but it’s necessary. “Mom’s gone too

far. This time it’s war.”

 

She slams out of her cabin and spins right round in the central axis

of the hab, a rogue missile pinging for a target to vent her rage on.

A tantrum would be good -

 

But her body is telling her to chill out, take ten, and there’s a

drone of scriptural lore dribbling away in the back of her head, and

she’s feeling frustrated and angry and not in control, but not really

mad anymore. It was like this three years ago when Mom noticed her

getting on too well with Jenny Morgan and moved her to a new school

district - she said it was a work assignment, but Amber knows better,

Mom asked for it - just to keep her dependent and helpless. Mom is a

control-freak with fixed ideas about how to bring up a child, and ever

since she lost Dad, she’s been working her claws into Amber, making

her upbringing a life’s work - which is tough, because Amber is not

good victim material, and is smart and well networked to boot. But

now, Mom’s found a way to fuck Amber over completely, even in Jupiter

orbit, and if not for her skullware keeping a lid on things, Amber

would be totally out of control.

 

Instead of shouting at her cat or trying to message the Franklins,

Amber goes to hunt down the borg in their meatspace den.

 

There are sixteen borg aboard the Sanger - adults, members of the

Franklin Collective, squatters in the ruins of Bob Franklin’s

posthumous vision. They lend bits of their brains to the task of

running what science has been able to resurrect of the dead dot-com

billionaire’s mind, making him the first bodhisattva of the uploading

age - apart from the lobster colony, of course. Their den mother is a

woman called Monica: a willowy, brown-eyed hive queen with

raster-burned corneal implants and a dry, sardonic delivery that can

corrode egos like a desert wind. She’s better than any of the others

at running Bob, except for the creepy one called Jack, and she’s no

slouch when she’s being herself (unlike Jack, who is never himself in

public). Which probably explains why they elected her Maximum Leader

of the expedition.

 

Amber finds Monica in the number four kitchen garden, performing

surgery on a filter that’s been blocked by toad spawn. She’s almost

buried beneath a large pipe, her Velcro-taped tool kit waving in the

breeze like strange blue air-kelp. “Monica? You got a minute?”

 

“Sure, I have lots of minutes. Make yourself helpful? Pass me the

antitorque wrench and a number six hex head.”

 

“Um.” Amber captures the blue flag and fiddles around with its

contents. Something that has batteries, motors, a flywheel

counterweight, and laser gyros assembles itself - Amber passes it

under the pipe. “Here. Listen, your phone is engaged.”

 

“I know. You’ve come to see me about your conversion, haven’t you?”

 

“Yes!”

 

There’s a clanking noise from under the pressure sump. “Take this.” A

plastic bag floats out, bulging with stray fasteners. “I got a bit of

hoovering to do. Get yourself a mask if you don’t already have one.”

 

A minute later, Amber is back beside Monica’s legs, her face veiled by

a filter mask. “I don’t want this to go through,” she says. “I don’t

care what Mom says, I’m not Moslem! This judge, he can’t touch me. He

can’t,” she adds, vehemence warring with uncertainty.

 

“Maybe he doesn’t want to?” Another bag: “Here, catch.”

 

Amber grabs the bag, a fraction of a second too late. She discovers

the hard way that it’s full of water and toadspawn. Stringy mucous

ropes full of squiggling comma-shaped tadpoles explode all over the

compartment and bounce off the walls in a shower of amphibian

confetti. “Eew!”

 

Monica squirms out from behind the pipe. “Oh, you didn’t.” She kicks

off the consensus-defined floor and grabs a wad of absorbent paper

from the spinner, whacks it across the ventilator shroud above the

sump. Together they go after the toad spawn with rubbish bags and

paper - by the time they’ve got the stringy mess mopped up, the

spinner has begun to click and whir, processing cellulose from the

algae tanks into fresh wipes. “That was not good,” Monica says

emphatically as the disposal bin sucks down her final bag. “You

wouldn’t happen to know how the toad got in here?”

 

“No, but I ran into one that was loose in the commons, one shift

before last cycle-end. Gave it a ride back to Oscar.”

 

“I’ll have a word with him, then.” Monica glares blackly at the pipe.

“I’m going to have to go back and refit the filter in a minute. Do you

want me to be Bob?”

 

“Uh.” Amber thinks. “Not sure. Your call.”

 

“All right, Bob coming on-line.” Monica’s face relaxes slightly, then

her expression hardens. “Way I see it, you’ve got a choice. Your

mother kinda boxed you in, hasn’t she?”

 

“Yes.” Amber frowns.

 

“So. Pretend I’m an idiot. Talk me through it, huh?”

 

Amber drags herself alongside the hydro pipe and gets her head down,

alongside Monica/Bob, who is floating with her feet near the floor. “I

ran away from home. Mom owned me - that is, she had parental rights

and Dad had none. So Dad, via a proxy, helped me sell myself into

slavery to a company. The company was owned by a trust fund, and I’m

the main beneficiary when I reach the age of majority. As a chattel,

the company tells me what to do - legally - but the shell company is

set to take my orders. So I’m autonomous. Right?”

 

“That sounds like the sort of thing your father would do,” Monica/Bob

says neutrally. Overtaken by a sardonic middle-aged Silicon Valley

drawl, her north-of-England accent sounds peculiarly mid-Atlantic.

 

“Trouble is, most countries don’t acknowledge slavery, they just dress

it up pretty and call it in loco parentis or something. Those that do

mostly don’t have any equivalent of a limited liability company, much

less one that can be directed by another company from abroad. Dad

picked Yemen on the grounds that they’ve got this stupid brand of

shari’a law - and a crap human rights record - but they’re just about

conformant to the open legal standards protocol, able to interface to

EU norms via a Turkish legislative cut-out.”

 

“So.”

 

“Well, I guess I was technically a Janissary. Mom was doing her

Christian phase, so that made me a Christian unbeliever slave of an

Islamic company. Now the stupid bitch has gone and converted to

shi’ism. Normally Islamic descent runs through the father, but she

picked her sect carefully and chose one that’s got a progressive view

of women’s rights: They’re sort of Islamic fundamentalist liberal

constructionists, ‘what would the Prophet do if he was alive today and

had to worry about self-replicating chewing gum factories’ and that

sort of thing. They generally take a progressive view of things like

legal equality of the sexes because, for his time and place, the

Prophet was way ahead of the ball and they figure they ought to follow

his example. Anyway, that means Mom can assert that I am Moslem, and

under Yemeni law, I get to be treated as a Moslem chattel of a

company. And their legal code is very dubious about permitting slavery

of Moslems. It’s not that I have rights as such, but my pastoral

well-being becomes the responsibility of the local imam, and -” She

shrugs helplessly.

 

“Has he tried to make you run under any new rules, yet?” asks

Monica/Bob. “Has he put blocks on your freedom of agency, tried to

mess with your mind? Insisted on libido dampers or a strict dress

code?”

 

“Not yet.” Amber’s expression is grim. “But he’s no dummy. I figure he

may be using Mom - and me - as a way of getting his fingers into this

whole expedition. Staking a claim for jurisdiction, claim arbitration,

that sort of thing. It could be worse; he might order me to comply

fully with his specific implementation of shari’a. They permit

implants, but require mandatory conceptual filtering: If I run that

stuff, I’ll end up believing it.”

 

“Okay.” Monica does a slow backward somersault in midair. “Now tell me

why you can’t simply repudiate it.”

 

“Because.” Deep breath. “I can do that in two ways. I can deny Islam,

which makes me an apostate, and automatically terminates my indenture

to the shell, so Mom owns me under US or EU law. Or I can say that the

instrument has no legal standing because I was in the USA when I

signed it, and slavery is illegal there, in which case Mom owns me. Or

I can take the veil, live like a modest Moslem woman, do whatever the

imam wants, and Mom doesn’t own me - but she gets to appoint my

chaperone. Oh Bob, she has planned this so well.”

 

“Uh-huh.” Monica rotates back to the floor and looks at Amber,

suddenly very Bob. “Now you’ve told me your troubles, start thinking

like your dad. Your Dad had a dozen creative ideas before breakfast

every day - it’s how he made his name. Your mom has got you in a box.

Think your way outside it: What can you do?”

 

“Well.” Amber rolls over and hugs the fat hydroponic duct to her chest

like a life raft. “It’s a legal paradox. I’m trapped because of the

jurisdiction she’s cornered me in. I could talk to the judge, I

suppose, but she’ll have picked him carefully.” Her eyes narrow. “The

jurisdiction. Hey, Bob.” She lets go of the duct and floats free, hair

streaming out behind her like a cometary halo. “How do I go about

getting myself a new jurisdiction?”

 

Monica grins. “I seem to recall the traditional way was to grab

yourself some land and set yourself up as king; but there are other

ways. I’ve got some friends I think you should meet. They’re not good

conversationalists and there’s a two-hour lightspeed delay, but I

think you’ll find they’ve answered that question already. But why

don’t you talk to the imam first and find out what he’s like? He may

surprise you. After all, he was already out here before your mom

decided to use him to make a point.”

 

*

 

The Sanger hangs in orbit thirty kilometers up, circling the waist of

potato-shaped Amalthea. Drones swarm across the slopes of Mons Lyctos,

ten kilometers above the mean surface level. They kick up clouds of

reddish sulphate dust as they spread transparent sheets across the

barren moonscape. This close to Jupiter (a mere hundred and eighty

thousand