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

licked:

a kiss of steel, then she presents the income tax bill.

 

There’s nothing accidental about this dream. As he experiences it,

microelectrodes in his hypothalamus trigger sensitive neurons.

Revulsion and shame flood him at the sight of her face, the sense of

his vulnerability. Manfred’s metacortex, in order to facilitate his

divorce, is trying to decondition his strange love. It has been

working on him for weeks, but still he craves her whiplash touch, the

humiliation of his wife’s control, the sense of helpless rage at her

unpayable taxes, demanded with interest.

 

Aineko watches him from the pillow, purring continuously. Retractable

claws knead the bedding, first one paw, then the next. Aineko is full

of ancient feline wisdom that Pamela installed back when mistress and

master were exchanging data and bodily fluids rather than legal

documents. Aineko is more cat than robot, these days, thanks in part

to her hobbyist’s interest in feline neuroanatomy. Aineko knows that

Manfred is experiencing nameless neurasthenic agonies, but really

doesn’t give a shit about that as long as the power supply is clean

and there are no intruders.

 

Aineko curls up and joins Manfred in sleep, dreaming of laser-guided

mice.

 

*

 

Manfred is jolted awake by the hotel room phone shrilling for

attention.

 

“Hello?” he asks, fuzzily.

 

“Manfred Macx?” It’s a human voice, with a gravelly east coast accent.

 

“Yeah?” Manfred struggles to sit up. His mouth feels like the inside

of a tomb, and his eyes don’t want to open.

 

“My name is Alan Glashwiecz, of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates. Am I

correct in thinking that you are the Manfred Macx who is a director of

a company called, uh, agalmic dot holdings dot root dot one-eight-four

dot ninety-seven dot A-for-able dot B-for-baker dot five,

incorporated?”

 

“Uh.” Manfred blinks and rubs his eyes. “Hold on a moment.” When the

retinal patterns fade, he pulls on his glasses and powers them up.

“Just a second now.” Browsers and menus ricochet through his

sleep-laden eyes. “Can you repeat the company name?”

 

“Sure.” Glashwiecz repeats himself patiently. He sounds as tired as

Manfred feels.

 

“Um.” Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object

hierarchy. It’s flashing for attention. There’s a priority interrupt,

an incoming lawsuit that hasn’t propagated up the inheritance tree

yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. “I’m afraid I’m

not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be

retained by it as a technical contractor with non-executive power,

reporting to the president, but frankly, this is the first time I’ve

ever heard of the company. However, I can tell you who’s in charge if

you want.”

 

“Yes?” The attorney sounds almost interested. Manfred figures it out;

the guy’s in New Jersey, it must be about three in the morning over

there.

 

Malice - revenge for waking him up - sharpens Manfred’s voice. “The

president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is

agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is

agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is

agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those

companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations

are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!” He thumps the bedside

phone control and sits up, yawning, then pushes the do-not-disturb

button before it can interrupt again. After a moment he stands up and

stretches, then heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth, comb his

hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a human

being managed to get far enough through his web of robot companies to

bug him.

 

*

 

While he’s having breakfast in the hotel restaurant, Manfred decides

that he’s going to do something unusual for a change: He’s going to

make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred’s

normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn’t believe

in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition - his world is too fast

and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games. However,

his current situation calls for him to do something radical: something

like making himself a temporary billionaire so he can blow off his

divorce settlement in an instant, like a wily accountancy octopus

escaping a predator by vanishing in a cloud of his own black ink.

 

Pam is chasing him partially for ideological reasons - she still

hasn’t given up on the idea of government as the dominant

superorganism of the age - but also because she loves him in her own

peculiar way, and the last thing any self-respecting dom can tolerate

is rejection by her slave. Pam is a born-again postconservative, a

member of the first generation to grow up after the end of the

American century. Driven by the need to fix the decaying federal

system before it collapses under a mound of Medicare bills, overseas

adventurism, and decaying infrastructure, she’s willing to use

self-denial, entrapment, predatory mercantilism, dirty tricks, and any

other tool that boosts the bottom line. She doesn’t approve of

Manfred’s jetting around the world on free airline passes, making

strangers rich, somehow never needing money. She can see his listing

on the reputation servers, hovering about thirty points above IBM: All

the metrics of integrity, effectiveness and goodwill value him above

even that most fundamentalist of open-source computer companies. And

she knows he craves her tough love, wants to give himself to her

completely. So why is he running away?

 

The reason he’s running away is entirely more ordinary. Their unborn

daughter, frozen in liquid nitrogen, is an unimplanted 96-hour-old

blastula. Pam’s bought into the whole Parents for Traditional Children

parasite meme. PTC are germ-line recombination refuseniks: They refuse

to have their children screened for fixable errors. If there’s one

thing that Manfred really can’t cope with, it’s the idea that nature

knows best - even though that isn’t the point she’s making. One

steaming row too many, and he kicked back, off to traveling fast and

footloose again, spinning off new ideas like a memetic dynamo and

living on the largesse of the new paradigm. File for divorce on

grounds of irreconcilable ideological differences. No more

whiplash-and-leather sex.

 

*

 

Before he hits the TGV for Rome, Manfred takes time to visit a model

airplane show. It’s a good place to be picked up by a CIA stringer -

he’s had a tip-off that someone will be there - and besides, flying

models are hot hacker shit this decade. Add microtechnology, cameras,

and neural networks to balsa-wood flyers, and you’ve got the next

generation of military stealth flyer: It’s a fertile talent-show

scene, like the hacker cons of yore. This particular gig is happening

in a decaying out-of-town supermarket that rents out its shop floor

for events like this. Its emptiness is a sign of the times, ubiquitous

broadband and expensive gas. (The robotized warehouse next door is, in

contrast, frenetically busy, packing parcels for home delivery.

Whether they telecommute or herd in meatspace offices, people still

need to eat.)

 

Today, the food hall is full of people. Eldritch ersatz insects buzz

menacingly along the shining empty meat counters without fear of

electrocution. Big monitors unfurled above the deli display cabinets

show a weird, jerky view of a three-dimensional nightmare, painted all

the synthetic colors of radar. The feminine-hygiene galley has been

wheeled back to make room for a gigantic plastic-shrouded tampon five

meters long and sixty centimeters in diameter - a microsat launcher

and conference display, plonked there by the show’s sponsors in a

transparent attempt to talent-spot the up-and-coming engineering

geeks.

 

Manfred’s glasses zoom in and grab a particularly fetching Fokker

triplane that buzzes at face height through the crowd: He pipes the

image stream up to one of his websites in real time. The Fokker pulls

up in a tight Immelman turn beneath the dust-shrouded pneumatic cash

tubes that line the ceiling, then picks up the trail of an F-104G.

Cold War Luftwaffe and Great War Luftwaffe dart across the sky in an

intricate game of tag. Manfred’s so busy tracking the warbirds that he

nearly trips over the fat white tube’s launcher-erector.

 

“Eh, Manfred! More care, s’il vous plait!”

 

He wipes the planes and glances round. “Do I know you?” he asks

politely, even as he feels a shock of recognition.

 

“Amsterdam, three years ago.” The woman in the double-breasted suit

raises an eyebrow at him, and his social secretary remembers her for

him, whispers in his ear.

 

“Annette from Arianespace marketing?” She nods, and he focuses on her.

Still dressing in the last-century retro mode that confused him the

first time they met, she looks like a Kennedy-era Secret Service man:

cropped bleached crew cut like an angry albino hedgehog, pale blue

contact lenses, black tie, narrow lapels. Only her skin color hints at

her Berber ancestry. Her earrings are cameras, endlessly watching. Her

raised eyebrow turns into a lopsided smile as she sees his reaction.

“I remember. That cafe in Amsterdam. What brings you here?”

 

“Why “- her wave takes in the entirety of the show - “this talent

show, of course.” An elegant shrug and a wave at the orbit-capable

tampon. “It’s good talent. We’re hiring this year. If we re-enter the

launcher market, we must employ only the best. Amateurs, not

time-servers, engineers who can match the very best Singapore can

offer.”

 

For the first time, Manfred notices the discreet corporate logo on the

flank of the booster. “You outsourced your launch-vehicle

fabrication?”

 

Annette pulls a face as she explains with forced casualness: “Space

hotels were more profitable, this past decade. The high-ups, they

cannot be bothered with the rocketry, no? Things that go fast and

explode, they are pass�, they say. Diversify, they say. Until -” She

gives a very Gallic shrug. Manfred nods; her earrings are recording

everything she says, for the purposes of due diligence.

 

“I’m glad to see Europe re-entering the launcher business,” he says

seriously. “It’s going to be very important when the nanosystems

conformational replication business gets going for real. A major

strategic asset to any corporate entity in the field, even a hotel

chain.” Especially now they’ve wound up NASA and the moon race is down

to China and India, he thinks sourly.

 

Her laugh sounds like glass bells chiming. “And yourself, mon cher?

What brings you to the Confedera�ion? You must have a deal in mind.”

 

“Well., it’s Manfred’s turn to shrug, “I was hoping to find a CIA

agent, but there don’t seem to be any here today.”

 

“That is not surprising,” Annette says resentfully. “The CIA thinks

the space industry, she is dead. Fools!” She continues for a minute,

enumerating the many shortcomings of the Central Intelligence Agency

with vigor and a distinctly Parisian rudeness. “They are become almost

as bad as AP and Reuters since they go public,” she adds. “All these

wire services! And they are, ah, stingy. The CIA does not understand

that good news must be paid for at market rates if freelance stringers

are to survive. They are to be laughed at. It is so easy to plant

disinformation on them, almost as easy as the Office of Special

Plans…” She makes a banknote-riffling gesture between fingers and

thumb. By way of punctuation, a remarkably maneuverable miniature

ornithopter swoops around her head, does a double-back flip, and dives

off in the direction of the liquor display.

 

An Iranian woman wearing a backless leather minidress and a nearly

transparent scarf barges up and demands to know how much the

microbooster costs to buy: She is dissatisfied with Annette’s attempt

to direct her to the manufacturer’s website, and Annette looks

distinctly flustered by the time the woman’s boyfriend - a dashing

young air force pilot - shows up to escort her away. “Tourists,” she

mutters, before noticing Manfred, who is staring off into space with

fingers twitching. “Manfred?”