Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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kisses him and slides his glasses and earpieces off his head so that
he’s really naked, sits on his lap, and fucks his brains out again,
and whispers in his ear that she loves him and wants to be his
manager. Then she leads him into her bedroom and tells him exactly
what she wants him to wear, and she puts on her own clothes, and she
gives him a mirror with some white powder on it to sniff. When she’s
got him dolled up they go out for a night of really serious clubbing,
Annette in a tuxedo and Manfred in a blond wig, red silk
off-the-shoulder gown, and high heels. Sometime in the early hours,
exhausted and resting his head on her shoulder during the last tango
in a BDSM club in the Rue Ste-Anne, he realizes that it really is
possible to be in lust with someone other than Pamela.
*
Aineko wakes Manfred by repeatedly head-butting him above the left
eye. He groans, and as he tries to open his eyes, he finds that his
mouth tastes like a dead trout, his skin feels greasy with make-up,
and his head is pounding. There’s a banging noise somewhere. Aineko
meows urgently. He sits up, feeling unaccustomed silk underwear
rubbing against incredibly sore skin - he’s fully dressed, just
sprawled out on the sofa. Snores emanate from the bedroom; the banging
is coming from the front door. Someone wants to come in. Shit. He rubs
his head, stands up, and nearly falls flat on his face: He hasn’t even
taken those ridiculous high heels off. How much did I drink last
night? he wonders. His glasses are on the breakfast bar; he pulls them
on and is besieged by an urgent flurry of ideas demanding attention.
He straightens his wig, picks up his skirts, and trips across to the
door with a sinking feeling. Luckily his publicly traded reputation is
strictly technical.
He unlocks the door. “Who is it?” he asks in English. By way of reply
somebody shoves the door in, hard. Manfred falls back against the
wall, winded. His glasses stop working, sidelook displays filling with
multicolored static.
Two men charge in, identically dressed in jeans and leather jackets.
They’re wearing gloves and occlusive face masks, and one of them
points a small and very menacing ID card at Manfred. A self-propelled
gun hovers in the doorway, watching everything. “Where is he?”
“Who?” gasps Manfred, breathless and terrified.
“Macx.” The other intruder steps into the living room quickly, pans
around, ducks through the bathroom door. Aineko flops as limp as a
dishrag in front of the sofa. The intruder checks out the bedroom:
There’s a brief scream, cut off short.
“I don’t know - who?” Manfred is choking with fear.
The other intruder ducks out of the bedroom, waves a hand
dismissively.
“We are sorry to have bothered you,” the man with the card says
stiffly. He replaced it in his jacket pocket. “If you should see
Manfred Macx, tell him that the Copyright Control Association of
America advises him to cease and desist from his attempt to assist
music thieves and other degenerate mongrel secondhander enemies of
Objectivism. Reputations only of use to those alive to own them.
Goodbye.”
The two copyright gangsters disappear through the door, leaving
Manfred to shake his head dizzily while his glasses reboot. It takes
him a moment to register the scream from the bedroom. “Fuck -
Annette!”
She appears in the open doorway, holding a sheet around her waist,
looking angry and confused. “Annette!” he calls. She looks around,
sees him, and begins to laugh shakily. “Annette!” He crosses over to
her. “You’re okay,” he says. “You’re okay.”
“You too.” She hugs him, and she’s shaking. Then she holds him at
arm’s length. “My, what a pretty picture!”
“They wanted me,” he says, and his teeth are chattering. “Why?”
She looks up at him seriously. “You must bathe. Then have coffee. We
are not at home, oui?”
“Ah, oui.” He looks down. Aineko is sitting up, looking dazed.
“Shower. Then that dispatch for CIA news.”
“The dispatch?” She looks puzzled. “I filed that last night. When I
was in the shower. The microphone, he is waterproof.”
*
By the time Arianespace’s security contractors show up, Manfred has
stripped off Annette’s evening gown and showered; he’s sitting in the
living room wearing a bathrobe, drinking a half-liter mug of espresso
and swearing under his breath.
While he was dancing the night away in Annette’s arms, the global
reputation market has gone nonlinear: People are putting their trust
in the Christian Coalition and the Eurocommunist Alliance - always a
sign that the times are bad - while perfectly sound trading
enterprises have gone into free fall, as if a major bribery scandal
has broken out.
Manfred trades ideas for kudos via the Free Intellect Foundation,
bastard child of George Soros and Richard Stallman. His reputation is
cemented by donations to the public good that don’t backfire. So he’s
offended and startled to discover that he’s dropped twenty points in
the past two hours - and frightened to see that this is by no means
unusual. He was expecting a ten-point drop mediated via an options
trade - payment for the use of the anonymous luggage remixer that
routed his old suitcase to Mombasa and in return sent this new one to
him via the left-luggage office in Luton - but this is more serious.
The entire reputation market seems to have been hit by the confidence
flu.
Annette bustles around busily, pointing out angles and timings to the
forensics team her head office sent in answer to her call for back-up.
She seems more angry and shaken than worried by the intrusion. It’s
probably an occupational hazard for any upwardly mobile executive in
the old, grasping network of greed that Manfred’s agalmic future aims
to supplant. The forensics dude and dudette, a pair of cute, tanned
Lebanese youngsters, point the yellow snout of their mass spectroscope
into various corners and agree that there’s something not unlike gun
oil in the air. But, so sorry, the intruders wore masks to trap the
skin particles and left behind a spray of dust vacuumed from the seat
of a city bus, so there’s no way of getting a genotype match.
Presently they agree to log it as a suspected corporate intrusion
(origin: unclassified; severity: worrying) and increase the logging
level on her kitchen telemetry. And remember to wear your earrings at
all times, please. They leave, and Annette locks the door, leans
against it, and curses for a whole long minute.
“They gave me a message from the copyright control agency,” Manfred
says unevenly when she winds down. “Russian gangsters from New York
bought the recording cartels a few years ago, you know? After the
rights stitch-up fell apart, and the artists all went on-line while
they focused on copy prevention technologies, the Mafiya were the only
people who would buy the old business model. These guys add a whole
new meaning to copy protection: This was just a polite cease and
desist notice by their standards. They run the record shops, and they
try to block any music distribution channel they don’t own. Not very
successfully, though - most gangsters are living in the past, more
conservative than any normal businessman can afford to be. What was it
that you put on the wire?”
Annette closes her eyes. “I don’t remember. No.” She holds up a hand.
“Open mike. I streamed you into a file and cut, cut out the bits about
me.” She opens her eyes and shakes her head. “What was I on?”
“You don’t know either?”
He stands up, and she walks over and throws her arms around him. “I
was on you,” she murmurs.
“Bullshit.” He pulls away, then sees how this upsets her. Something is
blinking for attention in his glasses; he’s been off-line for the best
part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the
idea of not being in touch with everything that’s happened in the last
twenty kiloseconds. “I need to know more. Something in that report
rattled the wrong cages. Or someone ratted on the suitcase exchange -
I meant the dispatch to be a heads-up for whoever needs a working
state planning system, not an invitation to shoot me!”
“Well, then.” She lets go of him. “Do your work.” Coolly: “I’ll be
around.”
He realizes that he’s hurt her, but he doesn’t see any way of
explaining that he didn’t mean to - at least, not without digging
himself in deeper. He finishes his croissant and plunges into one of
those unavoidable fits of deep interaction, fingers twitching on
invisible keypads and eyeballs jiggling as his glasses funnel deep
media straight into his skull through the highest bandwidth channel
currently available.
One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic
messages, companies with names like agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0
screaming for the attention of their transitive director. Each of
these companies - and there are currently more than sixteen thousand
of them, although the herd is growing day by day - has three directors
and is the director of three other companies. Each of them executes a
script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors tell
the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass
instructions on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of
cellular automata, like the cells in Conway’s Game of Life, only far
more complex and powerful.
Manfred’s companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed
with capital in the form of patents Manfred filed, then delegated
rather than passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them
are effectively nontrading, but occupy directorial roles. Their
corporate functions (such as filing of accounts and voting in new
directors) are all handled centrally through his company-operating
framework, and their trading is carried out via several of the more
popular B2B enabler dot-coms. Internally, the companies do other, more
obscure load-balancing computations, processing resource-allocation
problems like a classic state central planning system. None of which
explains why fully half of them have been hit by lawsuits in the past
twenty-two hours.
The lawsuits are … random. That’s the only pattern Manfred can
detect. Some of them allege patent infringements; these he might take
seriously, except that about a third of the targets are director
companies that don’t actually do anything visible to the public. A few
lawsuits allege mismanagement, but then there’s a whole bizarre raft
of spurious nonsense: suits for wrongful dismissal or age
discrimination - against companies with no employees - complaints
about reckless trading, and one action alleging that the defendant (in
conspiracy with the prime minister of Japan, the government of Canada,
and the Emir of Kuwait) is using orbital mind-control lasers to make
the plaintiff’s pet chihuahua bark at all hours of day and night.
Manfred groans and does a quick calculation. At the current rate,
lawsuits are hitting his corporate grid at a rate of one every sixteen
seconds - up from none in the preceding six months. In another day,
this is going to saturate him. If it keeps up for a week, it’ll
saturate every court in the United States. Someone has found a means
to do for lawsuits what he’s doing for companies - and they’ve chosen
him as their target.
To say that Manfred is unamused is an understatement. If he wasn’t
already preoccupied with Annette’s emotional state and edgy from the
intrusion, he’d be livid - but he’s still human enough that he
responds to human stimuli first. So he determines to do something
about it,
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