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

>listen to you only once you gain their attention. Also, the swing

voters you must reach, they are future-shocked, timid. Your platform

is radical. Should you not project a comfortably conservative image?”

 

Amber pulls a face, an expression of mild distaste for the whole

populist program. “Yes, I suppose I must, if necessary. But on second

thoughts, that” - Amber snaps her fingers, and the mannequin turns

around once more before morphing back into neutrality, aureoles

perfect puckered disks above the top of its bodice - “is just too

much.”

 

She doesn’t need to merge in the opinions of several different

fractional personalities, fashion critics and psephologists both, to

figure out that adopting Victorian/Cretan fusion fashion - a

breast-and-ass fetishist’s fantasy - isn’t the way to sell herself as

a serious politician to the nineteenth-century postsingularity fringe.

“I’m not running for election as the mother of the nation, I’m running

because I figure we’ve got about a billion seconds, at most, to get

out of this rat trap of a gravity well before the Vile Offspring get

seriously medieval on our CPU cycles, and if we don’t convince them to

come with us, they’re doomed. Let’s look for something more practical

that we can overload with the right signifiers.”

 

“Like your coronation robe?”

 

Amber winces. “Touch�.” The Ring Imperium is dead, along with whatever

was left over from its early orbital legal framework, and Amber is

lucky to be alive as a private citizen in this cold new age at the

edge of the halo. “But that was just scenery setting. I didn’t fully

understand what I was doing, back then.”

 

“Welcome to maturity and experience.” Annette smiles distantly at some

faint memory: “You don’t feel older, you just know what you’re doing

this time. I wonder, sometimes, what Manny would make of it if he was

here.”

 

“That birdbrain,” Amber says dismissively, stung by the idea that her

father might have something to contribute. She follows Annette past a

gaggle of mendicant street evangelists preaching some new religion and

in through the door of a real department store, one with actual human

sales staff and fitting rooms to cut the clothing to shape. “If I’m

sending out fractional mes tailored for different demographics, isn’t

it a bit self-defeating to go for a single image? I mean, we could

drill down and tailor a partial for each individual elector -”

 

“Perhaps.” The door reforms behind them. “But you need a core

identity.” Annette looks around, hunting for eye contact with the

sales consultant. “To start with a core design, a style, then to work

outward, tailoring you for your audience. And besides, there is

tonight’s - ah, bonjour!”

 

“Hello. How can we help you?” The two female and one male shop

assistants who appear from around the displays - cycling through a

history of the couture industry, catwalk models mixing and matching

centuries of fashion - are clearly chips off a common primary

personality, instances united by their enhanced sartorial obsession.

If they’re not actually a fashion borganism, they’re not far from it,

dressed head to foot in the highest quality Chanel and Armani

replicas, making a classical twentieth-century statement. This isn’t

simply a shop, it’s a temple to a very peculiar art form, its staff

trained as guardians of the esoteric secrets of good taste.

 

“Mais oui. We are looking for a wardrobe for my niece here.” Annette

reaches through the manifold of fashion ideas mapped within the shop’s

location cache and flips a requirement spec one of her ghosts has just

completed at the lead assistant: “She is into politics going, and the

question of her image is important.”

 

“We would be delighted to help you,” purrs the proprietor, taking a

delicate step forward: “Perhaps you could tell us what you’ve got in

mind?”

 

“Oh. Well.” Amber takes a deep breath, glances sidelong at Annette;

Annette stares back, unblinking. It’s your head, she sends. “I’m

involved in the accelerationista administrative program. Are you

familiar with it?”

 

The head coutureborg frowns slightly, twin furrows rippling her brow

between perfectly symmetrical eyebrows, plucked to match her classic

New Look suit. “I have heard reference to it, but a lady of fashion

like myself does not concern herself with politics,” she says, a touch

self-deprecatingly. “Especially the politics of her clients. Your, ah,

aunt said it was a question of image?”

 

“Yes.” Amber shrugs, momentarily self-conscious about her casual rags.

“She’s my election agent. My problem, as she says, is there’s a

certain voter demographic that mistakes image for substance and is

afraid of the unknown, and I need to acquire a wardrobe that triggers

associations of probity, of respect and deliberation. One suitable for

a representative with a radical political agenda but a strong track

record. I’m afraid I’m in a hurry to start with - I’ve got a big

fund-raising party tonight. I know it’s short notice, but I need

something off the shelf for it.”

 

“What exactly is it you’re hoping to achieve?” asks the male

couturier, his voice hoarse and his r’s rolling with some half-shed

Mediterranean accent. He sounds fascinated. “If you think it might

influence your choice of wardrobe …”

 

“I’m running for the assembly,” Amber says bluntly. “On a platform

calling for a state of emergency and an immediate total effort to

assemble a starship. This solar system isn’t going to be habitable for

much longer, and we need to emigrate. All of us, you included, before

the Vile Offspring decide to reprocess us into computronium. I’m going

to be doorstepping the entire electorate in parallel, and the

experience needs to be personalized.” She manages to smile. “That

means, I think, perhaps eight outfits and four different independent

variables for each, accessories, and two or three hats - enough that

each is seen by no more than a few thousand voters. Both physical

fabric and virtual. In addition, I’ll want to see your range of

historical formalwear, but that’s of secondary interest for now.” She

grins. “Do you have any facilities for response-testing the

combinations against different personality types from different

periods? If we could run up some models, that would be useful.”

 

“I think we can do better than that.” The manager nods approvingly,

perhaps contemplating her gold-backed deposit account. “Hansel, please

divert any further visitors until we have dealt with Madam …?”

 

“Macx. Amber Macx.”

 

“- Macx’s requirements.” She shows no sign of familiarity with the

name. Amber winces slightly; it’s a sign of how hugely fractured the

children of Saturn have become, and of how vast the population of the

halo, that only a generation has passed and already barely anyone

remembers the Queen of the Ring Imperium. “If you’d come this way,

please, we can begin to research an eigenstyle combination that

matches your requirements -”

 

*

 

Sirhan walks, shrouded in isolation, through the crowds gathered for

the festival. The only people who see him are the chattering ghosts of

dead politicians and writers, deported from the inner system by order

of the Vile Offspring. The green and pleasant plain stretches toward a

horizon a thousand kilometers away, beneath a lemon-yellow sky. The

air smells faintly of ammonia, and the big spaces are full of small

ideas; but Sirhan doesn’t care because, for now, he’s alone.

 

Except that he isn’t, really.

 

“Excuse me, are you real?” someone asks him in American-accented

English.

 

It takes a moment or two for Sirhan to disengage from his

introspection and realize that he’s being spoken to. “What?” he asks,

slightly puzzled. Wiry and pale, Sirhan wears the robes of a Berber

goatherd on his body and the numinous halo of a utility fogbank above

his head: In his abstraction, he vaguely resembles a saintly shepherd

in a postsingularity nativity play. “I say, what?” Outrage simmers at

the back of his mind - Is nowhere private? - but as he turns, he sees

that one of the ghost pods has split lengthwise across its white

mushroomlike crown, spilling a trickle of leftover construction fluid

and a completely hairless, slightly bemused-looking Anglo male who

wears an expression of profound surprise.

 

“I can’t find my implants,” the Anglo male says, shaking his head.

“But I’m really here, aren’t I? Incarnate?” He glances round at the

other pods. “This isn’t a sim.”

 

Sirhan sighs - another exile - and sends forth a daemon to interrogate

the ghost pod’s abstract interface. It doesn’t tell him much - unlike

most of the resurrectees, this one seems to be undocumented. “You’ve

been dead. Now you’re alive. I suppose that means you’re now almost as

real as I am. What else do you need to know?”

 

“When is -” The newcomer stops. “Can you direct me to the processing

center?” he asks carefully. “I’m disoriented.”

 

Sirhan is surprised - most immigrants take a lot longer to figure that

out. “Did you die recently?” he asks.

 

“I’m not sure I died at all.” The newcomer rubs his bald head, looking

puzzled. “Hey, no jacks!” He shrugs, exasperated. “Look, the

processing center ..?”

 

“Over there.” Sirhan gestures at the monumental mass of the Boston

Museum of Science (shipped all the way from Earth a couple of decades

ago to save it from the demolition of the inner system). “My mother

runs it.” He smiles thinly.

 

“Your mother -” the newly resurrected immigrant stares at him

intensely, then blinks. “Holy shit.” He takes a step toward Sirhan.

“It is you -”

 

Sirhan recoils and snaps his fingers. The thin trail of vaporous cloud

that has been following him all this time, shielding his shaven pate

from the diffuse red glow of the swarming shells of orbital

nanocomputers that have replaced the inner planets, extrudes a staff

of hazy blue mist that stretches down from the air and slams together

in his hand like a quarterstaff spun from bubbles. “Are you

threatening me, sir?” he asks, deceptively mildly.

 

“I -” The newcomer stops dead. Then he throws back his head and

laughs. “Don’t be silly, son. We’re related!”

 

“Son?” Sirhan bristles. “Who do you think you are -” A horrible

thought occurs to him. “Oh. Oh dear.” A wash of adrenaline drenches

him in warm sweat. “I do believe we’ve met, in a manner of speaking

…” Oh boy, this is going to upset so many applecarts, he realizes,

spinning off a ghost to think about the matter. The implications are

enormous.

 

The naked newcomer nods, grinning at some private joke. “You look

different from ground level. And now I’m human again.” He runs his

hands down his ribs, pauses, and glances at Sirhan owlishly. “Um. I

didn’t mean to frighten you. But I don’t suppose you could find your

aged grandfather something to wear?”

 

Sirhan sighs and points his staff straight up at the sky. The rings

are edge on, for the lily pad continent floats above an ocean of cold

gas along Saturn’s equator, and they glitter like a ruby laser beam

slashed across the sky. “Let there be aerogel.”

 

A cloud of wispy soap bubble congeals in a cone shape above the newly

resurrected ancient and drops over him, forming a caftan. “Thanks,” he

says. He looks round, twisting his neck, then winces. “Damn, that

hurt. Ouch. I need to get myself a set of implants.”

 

“They can sort you out in the processing center. It’s in the basement

in the west wing. They’ll give you something more permanent to wear,

too.” Sirhan peers at him. “Your face -” He pages through rarely used

memories. Yes, it’s Manfred as he looked in the early years of the

last century. As he looked around the time Mother-not was born.

There’s something positively indecent about meeting your own

grandfather in the full flush of his