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

>Amber drains her coffee cup. “Have you ever entered into economic

interactions with me, or humans like me, before?” she asks. “If not,

why should I trust you? If so, why have you revived me? Are there any

more experienced instances of myself running around here?” She raises

a skeptical eyebrow at the ghost. “This looks like the start of an

abusive relationship.”

 

The ghost continues to sidestep her attempts to work out where she

stands. It flickers into transparency, grows into a hazy window on a

landscape of impossible shapes. Clouds sprouting trees drift above a

landscape of green, egg-curved hills and cheesecake castles. “Nature

of excursion: alien intelligence is loose in the DMZ,” it asserts.

“Alien is applying invalid semiotics to complex structures designed to

sustain trade. You know this alien, Amber. We require solution. Slay

the monster, we will give you line of credit. Your own reality to

control, insight into trade arrangements, augmented senses, ability to

travel. Can even upgrade you to you-we consensus, if desired.”

 

“This monster.” Amber leans forward, staring into the window eagerly.

She’s half-minded to ignore what she feels is a spurious offer; it

doesn’t sound too appetizing. Upgrade me to a ghost fragment of an

alien group mind? she wonders dismissively. “What is this alien?” She

feels blind and unsure, stripped of her ability to spawn threads of

herself to pursue complex inferences. “Is it part of the Wunch?”

 

“Datum unknown. It-them came with you,” says the ghost. “Accidentally

reactivated some seconds since now. It runs amok in the demilitarized

zone. Help us, Amber. Save our hub, or we will be cut off from the

network. If that happens, you will die with we-us. Save us …”

 

*

 

A single memory belonging to someone else unwinds, faster than a

guided missile and far more deadly.

 

Amber, aged eleven, is a gawky, long-limbed child loose on the

streets of Hong Kong, a yokel tourist viewing the hot core of the

Middle Kingdom. This is her first and final vacation before the

Franklin Trust straps her inside the payload pod of a Shenzhou

spaceplane and blasts her into orbit from Xinkiang. She’s free for

the time being, albeit mortgaged to the tune of several million

euros; she’s a little taikonaut to be, ready to work for the long

years in Jupiter orbit it will take her to pay off the

self-propelled options web that owns her. It’s not exactly slavery:

Thanks to Dad’s corporate shell game she doesn’t have to worry

about Mom chasing her, trying to return her to the posthuman prison

of growing up just like an old-fashioned little girl. And now she’s

got a bit of pocket money, and a room in the Hilton, and her own

personal Franklin remote to keep her company, she’s decided she’s

gonna do that eighteenth-century-enlightenment tourist shit and do

it right.

 

Because this is her last day at liberty in the randomly evolved

biosphere.

 

China is where things are at in this decade, hot and dense and full

of draconian punishments for the obsolescent. Nationalist fervor to

catch up with the west has been replaced by consumerist fervor to

own the latest fad gadgets; the most picturesque tourist souvenirs

from the quaintly old-fashioned streets of America; the fastest,

hottest, smartest, upgrades for body and soul. Hong Kong is hotter

and faster than just about anywhere else in China, or in the whole

damn world for that matter. This is a place where tourists from

Tokyo gawp, cowed and future-shocked by the glamour of

high-technology living.

 

Walking along Jardine’s Bazaar - More like Jardine’s bizarre, she

thinks - exposes Amber to a blast of humid noise. Geodesic domes

sprout like skeletal mushrooms from the glass-and-chrome roofs of

the expensive shopping malls and luxury hotels, threatening to

float away on the hot sea breeze. There are no airliners roaring in

and out of Kai Tak anymore, no burnished aluminum storm clouds to

rain round-eyed passengers on the shopping malls and fish markets

of Kowloon and the New Territories. In these tense later days of

the War Against Unreason, impossible new shapes move in the sky;

Amber gapes upward as a Shenyang F-30 climbs at a near-vertical

angle, a mess of incomprehensibly curved flight surfaces vanishing

to a perspective point that defies radar as well as eyeballs. The

Chinese - fighter? missile platform? supercomputer? - is heading

out over the South China Sea to join the endless patrol that

reassures the capitalist world that it is being guarded from the

Hosts of Denial, the Trouble out of Wa’hab.

 

For the moment, she’s merely a precocious human child. Amber’s

subconscious is off-lined by the presence of forceful infowar

daemons, the Chinese government censorbots suppressing her

cognition of their deadliest weapons. And in the seconds while her

mind is as empty as a sucked egg, a thin-faced man with blue hair

shoves her in the small of her back and snatches at her shoulder

bag.

 

“Hey!” she yells, stumbling. Her mind’s a blur, optics refusing to

respond and grab a biometric model of her assailant. It’s the

frozen moment, the dead zone when on-line coverage fails, and the

thief is running away before she can catch her balance or try to

give chase. Plus, with her extensions off-line she doesn’t know how

to yell “stop, thief!” in Cantonese.

 

Seconds later, the fighter is out of visual range and the state

censorship field lets up. “Get him, you bastards!” she screams, but

the curious shoppers simply stare at the rude foreign child: An

elderly woman brandishes a disposable phonecam at her and screeches

something back. Amber picks up her feet and runs. Already she can

feel the subsonics from her luggage growling at her guts - it’s

going to make a scene if she doesn’t catch up in time. Shoppers

scatter, a woman with a baby carriage almost running her down in

her panic to get away from it.

 

By the time Amber reaches her terrified shoulder bag, the thief has

disappeared: She has to spend almost a minute petting the scared

luggage before it stops screeching and retracts its spines enough

for her to pick it up. And by that time there’s a robocop in

attendance. “Identify yourself,” it rasps in synthetic English.

 

Amber stares at her bag in horror: There’s a huge gash in the side,

and it’s far too light. It’s gone, she thinks, despairingly. He

stole it. “Help,” she says faintly, holding up her bag for the

distant policeman looking through the robot’s eyes. “Been stolen.”

 

“What item missing?” asks the robot.

 

“My Hello Kitty,” she says, batting her eyelashes, mendacity

full-on at maximum utilization, prodding her conscience into

submission, warning of dire consequences should the police discover

the true nature of her pet cat. “My kitten’s been stolen! Can you

help me?”

 

“Certainly,” says the cop, resting a reassuring hand on her

shoulder - a hand that turns into a steel armband, as it pushes her

into a van and notifies her in formally stilted language that she

is under arrest on suspicion of shoplifting and will be required to

produce certificates of authenticity and a fully compliant

ownership audit for all items in her possession if she wants to

prove her innocence.

 

By the time Amber’s meatbrain realizes that she is being politely

arrested, some of her external threads have already started yelling

for help and her m-commerce trackers have identified the station

she’s being taken to by way of click-thru trails and an obliging

software license manager. They spawn agents to go notify the

Franklin trustees, Amnesty International, the Space and Freedom

Party, and her father’s lawyers. As she’s being booked into a

cerise-and-turquoise juvenile offenders holding room by a

middle-aged policewoman, the phones on the front desk are already

ringing with inquiries from attorneys, fast-food vendors, and a

particularly on-the-ball celebrity magazine that’s been tracking

her father’s connections. “Can you help me get my cat back?” she

asks the policewoman earnestly.

 

“Name,” the officer reads, eyes flickering from the simultaneous

translation. “To please wax your identity stiffly.”

 

“My cat has been stolen,” Amber insists.

 

“Your cat?” The cop looks perplexed, then exasperated. Dealing with

foreign teenagers who answer questions with gibberish isn’t in her

repertoire. “We are asking your name?”

 

“No,” says Amber. “It’s my cat. It has been stolen. My cat has been

stolen.”

 

“Aha! Your papers, please?”

 

“Papers?” Amber is growing increasingly worried. She can’t feel the

outside world; there’s a Faraday cage wrapped around the holding

cell, and it’s claustrophobically quiet inside. “I want my cat!

Now!”

 

The cop snaps her fingers, then reaches into her own pocket and

produces an ID card, which she points to insistently. “Papers,” she

repeats. “Or else.”

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Amber wails.

 

The cop stares at her oddly. “Wait.” She rises and leaves, and a

minute later, returns with a thin-faced man in a business suit and

wire-rimmed glasses that glow faintly.

 

“You are making a scene,” he says, rudely and abruptly. “What is

your name? Tell me truthfully, or you’ll spend the night here.”

 

Amber bursts into tears. “My cat’s been stolen,” she chokes out.

 

The detective and the cop obviously don’t know how to deal with

this scene; it’s freaking them out, with its overtones of emotional

messiness and sinister diplomatic entanglement. “You wait here,”

they say, and back out of the cell, leaving her alone with a

plastic animatronic koala and a cheap Lebanese coffee machine.

 

The implications of her loss - of Aineko’s abduction - are sinking

in, finally, and Amber is weeping loudly and hopelessly. It’s hard

to deal with bereavement and betrayal at any age, and the cat has

been her wisecracking companion and consolation for a year, the

rock of certainty that gave her the strength to break free from her

crazy mother. To lose her cat to a body shop in Hong Kong, where

she will probably be cut up for spare circuitry or turned into soup

is too horrible to contemplate. Filled with despair and hopeless

anguish, Amber howls at the interrogation room walls while outside,

trapped threads of her consciousness search for backups to

synchronize with.

 

But after an hour, just as she’s quieting down into a slough of raw

despair, there’s a knock - a knock! - at the door. An inquisitive

head pops in. “Please to come with us?” It’s the female cop with

the bad translationware. She takes in Amber’s sobbing and tuts

under her breath, but as Amber stands up and shambles toward her,

she pulls back.

 

At the front desk of a cubicle farm full of police bureaucrats in

various states of telepresence, the detective is waiting with a

damp cardboard box wrapped in twine. “Please identify,” he asks,

snipping the string.

 

Amber shakes her head, dizzy with the flow of threads homing in to

synchronize their memories with her. “Is it -” she begins to ask as

the lid comes apart, wet pulp disintegrating. A triangular head

pops up, curiously, sniffing the air. Bubbles blow from

brown-furred nostrils. “What took you so long?” asks the cat, as

she reaches into the box and picks her up, fur wet and matted with

seawater.

 

*

 

“If you want me to go fix your alien, for starters I want you to give

me reality alteration privileges,” says Amber. “Then I want you to

find the latest instances of everyone who came here with me - round up

the usual suspects - and give them root privileges, too. Then we’ll

want access to the other embedded universes in the DMZ. Finally, I

want guns. Lots of guns.”

 

“That may be difficult,” says the ghost. “Many other humans reached

halting state long since. Is at