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

alone at the

table. Someone is sitting opposite him. He glances up incuriously and

freezes inside.

 

“Morning, Manfred. How does it feel to owe the government twelve

million, three hundred and sixty-two thousand, nine hundred and

sixteen dollars and fifty-one cents?” She smiles a Mona Lisa smile, at

once affectionate and challenging.

 

Manfred puts everything in his sensorium on indefinite hold and stares

at her. She’s immaculately turned out in a formal gray business suit:

brown hair tightly drawn back, blue eyes quizzical. And as beautiful

as ever: tall, ash blonde, with features that speak of an unexplored

modeling career. The chaperone badge clipped to her lapel - a due

diligence guarantee of businesslike conduct - is switched off. He’s

feeling ripped because of the dead kitten and residual jet lag, and

more than a little messy, so he snarls back at her; “That’s a bogus

estimate! Did they send you here because they think I’ll listen to

you?” He bites and swallows a slice of cheese-laden crispbread: “Or

did you decide to deliver the message in person just so you could ruin

my breakfast?”

 

“Manny.” She frowns, pained. “If you’re going to be confrontational, I

might as well go now.” She pauses, and after a moment he nods

apologetically. “I didn’t come all this way just because of an overdue

tax estimate.”

 

“So.” He puts his coffee cup down warily and thinks for a moment,

trying to conceal his unease and turmoil. “Then what brings you here?

Help yourself to coffee. Don’t tell me you came all this way just to

tell me you can’t live without me.”

 

She fixes him with a riding-crop stare: “Don’t flatter yourself. There

are many leaves in the forest, there are ten thousand hopeful subs in

the chat room, et cetera. If I choose a man to contribute to my family

tree, the one thing you can be certain of is he won’t be a cheapskate

when it comes to providing for his children.”

 

“Last I heard, you were spending a lot of time with Brian,” he says

carefully. Brian: a name without a face. Too much money, too little

sense. Something to do with a blue-chip accountancy partnership.

 

“Brian?” She snorts. “That ended ages ago. He turned weird on me -

burned my favorite corset, called me a slut for going clubbing, wanted

to fuck me. Saw himself as a family man: one of those promise-keeper

types. I crashed him hard, but I think he stole a copy of my address

book - got a couple of friends say he keeps sending them harassing

mail.”

 

“There’s a lot of it about these days.” Manfred nods, almost

sympathetically, although an edgy little corner of his mind is

gloating. “Good riddance, then. I suppose this means you’re still

playing the scene? But looking around for the, er -”

 

“Traditional family thing? Yes. Your trouble, Manny? You were born

forty years too late: You still believe in rutting before marriage but

find the idea of coping with the after-effects disturbing.”

 

Manfred drinks the rest of his coffee, unable to reply effectively to

her non sequitur. It’s a generational thing. This generation is happy

with latex and leather, whips and butt plugs and electrostim, but find

the idea of exchanging bodily fluids shocking: a social side effect of

the last century’s antibiotic abuse. Despite being engaged for two

years, he and Pamela never had intromissive intercourse.

 

“I just don’t feel positive about having children,” he says

eventually. “And I’m not planning on changing my mind anytime soon.

Things are changing so fast that even a twenty-year commitment is too

far to plan - you might as well be talking about the next ice age. As

for the money thing, I am reproductively fit - just not within the

parameters of the outgoing paradigm. Would you be happy about the

future if it was 1901 and you’d just married a buggy-whip mogul?”

 

Her fingers twitch, and his ears flush red; but she doesn’t follow up

the double entendre. “You don’t feel any responsibility, do you? Not

to your country, not to me. That’s what this is about: None of your

relationships count, all this nonsense about giving intellectual

property away notwithstanding. You’re actively harming people you

know. That twelve mil isn’t just some figure I pulled out of a hat,

Manfred; they don’t actually expect you to pay it. But it’s almost

exactly how much you’d owe in income tax if you’d only come home,

start up a corporation, and be a self-made -”

 

“I don’t agree. You’re confusing two wholly different issues and

calling them both ‘responsibility.’ And I refuse to start charging

now, just to balance the IRS’s spreadsheet. It’s their fucking fault,

and they know it. If they hadn’t gone after me under suspicion of

running a massively ramified microbilling fraud when I was sixteen -”

 

“Bygones.” She waves a hand dismissively. Her fingers are long and

slim, sheathed in black glossy gloves - electrically earthed to

prevent embarrassing emissions. “With a bit of the right advice we can

get all that set aside. You’ll have to stop bumming around the world

sooner or later, anyway. Grow up, get responsible, and do the right

thing. This is hurting Joe and Sue; they don’t understand what you’re

about.”

 

Manfred bites his tongue to stifle his first response, then refills

his coffee cup and takes another mouthful. His heart does a flip-flop:

She’s challenging him again, always trying to own him. “I work for the

betterment of everybody, not just some narrowly defined national

interest, Pam. It’s the agalmic future. You’re still locked into a

presingularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity.

Resource allocation isn’t a problem anymore - it’s going to be over

within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can

borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of

entropy! They even found signs of smart matter - MACHOs, big brown

dwarfs in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared -

suspiciously high entropy leakage. The latest figures say something

like seventy percent of the baryonic mass of the M31 galaxy was in

computronium, two-point-nine million years ago, when the photons we’re

seeing now set out. The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is

a probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a

nematode worm. Do you have any idea what that means?”

 

Pamela nibbles at a slice of crispbread, then graces him with a slow,

carnivorous stare. “I don’t care: It’s too far away to have any

influence on us, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter whether I believe in that

singularity you keep chasing, or your aliens a thousand light-years

away. It’s a chimera, like Y2K, and while you’re running after it, you

aren’t helping reduce the budget deficit or sire a family, and that’s

what I care about. And before you say I only care about it because

that’s the way I’m programmed, I want you to ask just how dumb you

think I am. Bayes’ Theorem says I’m right, and you know it.”

 

“What you -” He stops dead, baffled, the mad flow of his enthusiasm

running up against the coffer dam of her certainty. “Why? I mean, why?

Why on earth should what I do matter to you?” Since you canceled our

engagement, he doesn’t add.

 

She sighs. “Manny, the Internal Revenue cares about far more than you

can possibly imagine. Every tax dollar raised east of the Mississippi

goes on servicing the debt, did you know that? We’ve got the biggest

generation in history hitting retirement and the cupboard is bare. We

- our generation - isn’t producing enough skilled workers to replace

the taxpayer base, either, not since our parents screwed the public

education system and outsourced the white-collar jobs. In ten years,

something like thirty percent of our population are going to be

retirees or silicon rust belt victims. You want to see seventy year

olds freezing on street corners in New Jersey? That’s what your

attitude says to me: You’re not helping to support them, you’re

running away from your responsibilities right now, when we’ve got huge

problems to face. If we can just defuse the debt bomb, we could do so

much - fight the aging problem, fix the environment, heal society’s

ills. Instead you just piss away your talents handing no-hoper

Eurotrash get-rich-quick schemes that work, telling Vietnamese

zaibatsus what to build next to take jobs away from our taxpayers. I

mean, why? Why do you keep doing this? Why can’t you simply come home

and help take responsibility for your share of it?”

 

They share a long look of mutual incomprehension.

 

“Look,” she says awkwardly, “I’m around for a couple of days. I really

came here for a meeting with a rich neurodynamics tax exile who’s just

been designated a national asset - Jim Bezier. Don’t know if you’ve

heard of him, but I’ve got a meeting this morning to sign his tax

jubilee, then after that I’ve got two days’ vacation coming up and not

much to do but some shopping. And, you know, I’d rather spend my money

where it’ll do some good, not just pumping it into the EU. But if you

want to show a girl a good time and can avoid dissing capitalism for

about five minutes at a stretch -”

 

She extends a fingertip. After a moment’s hesitation, Manfred extends

a fingertip of his own. They touch, exchanging vCards and

instant-messaging handles. She stands and stalks from the breakfast

room, and Manfred’s breath catches at a flash of ankle through the

slit in her skirt, which is long enough to comply with workplace

sexual harassment codes back home. Her presence conjures up memories

of her tethered passion, the red afterglow of a sound thrashing. She’s

trying to drag him into her orbit again, he thinks dizzily. She knows

she can have this effect on him any time she wants: She’s got the

private keys to his hypothalamus, and sod the metacortex. Three

billion years of reproductive determinism have given her

twenty-first-century ideology teeth: If she’s finally decided to

conscript his gametes into the war against impending population crash,

he’ll find it hard to fight back. The only question: Is it business or

pleasure? And does it make any difference, anyway?

 

*

 

Manfred’s mood of dynamic optimism is gone, broken by the knowledge

that his vivisectionist stalker has followed him to Amsterdam - to say

nothing of Pamela, his dominatrix, source of so much yearning and so

many morning-after weals. He slips his glasses on, takes the universe

off hold, and tells it to take him for a long walk while he catches up

on the latest on the tensor-mode gravitational waves in the cosmic

background radiation (which, it is theorized, may be waste heat

generated by irreversible computational processes back during the

inflationary epoch; the present-day universe being merely the data

left behind by a really huge calculation). And then there’s the

weirdness beyond M31: According to the more conservative cosmologists,

an alien superpower - maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three

galaxy-spanning civilizations - is running a timing channel attack on

the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break

through to whatever’s underneath. The tofu-Alzheimer’s link can wait.

 

The Centraal Station is almost obscured by smart, self-extensible

scaffolding and warning placards; it bounces up and down slowly,

victim of an overnight hit-and-run rubberization. His glasses direct

him toward one of the tour boats that lurk in the canal. He’s about to

purchase a ticket when a messenger window blinks open. “Manfred Macx?”

 

“Ack?”

 

“Am sorry about yesterday. Analysis dictat incomprehension

mutualized.”

 

“Are you the same KGB AI that phoned me yesterday?”

 

“Da. However, believe you