Accelerando, Charles Stross [classic novels for teens .TXT] 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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Book online «Accelerando, Charles Stross [classic novels for teens .TXT] 📗». Author Charles Stross
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?”
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