Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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beginning with -”
“How much you want for the glasses, kid?” she asks quietly.
He jerks and almost jumps - a bad idea in MilSpec combat boots, the
ceiling is eighteenth-century stone half a meter thick; “Dinnae
fuckin’ dae that,” he complains in an eerily familiar way: “Ah -” he
swallows. “Annie! Who -”
“Stay calm. Take them off - they’ll only hurt you if you keep wearing
them,” she says, careful not to move too fast because now she has a
second, scary-jittery fear, and she knows without having to look that
the exclamation mark on her watch has turned red and begun to flash:
“Look, I’ll give you two hundred Euros for the glasses and the belt
pouch, real cash, and I won’t ask how you got them or tell anyone.”
He’s frozen in front of her, mesmerized, and she can see the light
from inside the lenses spilling over onto his half-starved adolescent
cheekbones, flickering like cold lightning, like he’s plugged his
brain into a grid bearer; swallowing with a suddenly dry mouth, she
slowly reaches up and pulls the spectacles off his face with one hand
and takes hold of the belt pouch with the other. The kid shudders and
blinks at her, and she sticks a couple of hundred-Euro notes in front
of his nose. “Scram,” she says, not unkindly.
He reaches up slowly, then seizes the money and runs - blasts his way
through the door with an ear-popping concussion, hangs a left onto the
cycle path, and vanishes downhill toward the parliament buildings and
university complex.
Annette watches the doorway apprehensively. “Where is he?” she hisses,
worried: “Any ideas, cat?”
“Naah. It’s your job to find him,” Aineko opines complacently. But
there’s an icicle of anxiety in Annette’s spine. Manfred’s been
separated from his memory cache? Where could he be? Worse - who could
he be?
“Fuck you, too,” she mutters. “Only one thing for it, I guess.” She
takes off her own glasses - they’re much less functional than
Manfred’s massively ramified custom rig - and nervously raises the
repo’d specs toward her face. Somehow what she’s about to do makes her
feel unclean, like snooping on a lover’s e-mail folders. But how else
can she figure out where he might have gone?
She slides the glasses on and tries to remember what she was doing
yesterday in Edinburgh.
*
“Gianni?”
“Oui, ma ch�rie?”
Pause. “I lost him. But I got his aid-m�moire back. A teenage
freeloader playing cyberpunk with them. No sign of his location - so I
put them on.”
Pause. “Oh dear.”
“Gianni, why exactly did you send him to the Franklin Collective?”
Pause. (During which, the chill of the gritty stone wall she’s leaning
on begins to penetrate the weave of her jacket.) “I not wanting to
bother you with trivia.”
“Merde. It’s not trivia, Gianni, they’re accelerationistas. Have you
any idea what that’s going to do to his head?”
Pause: Then a grunt, almost of pain. “Yes.”
“Then why did you do it?” she demands vehemently. She hunches over,
punching words into her phone so that other passers-by avoid her,
unsure whether she’s hands-free or hallucinating: “Shit, Gianni, I
have to pick up the pieces every time you do this! Manfred is not a
healthy man, he’s on the edge of acute future shock the whole time,
and I was not joking when I told you last February that he’d need a
month in a clinic if you tried running him flat out again! If you’re
not careful, he could end up dropping out completely and joining the
borganism -”
“Annette.” A heavy sigh: “He are the best hope we got. Am knowing
half-life of agalmic catalyst now down to six months and dropping;
Manny outlast his career expectancy, four deviations outside the
normal, yes, we know this. But I are having to break civil rights
deadlock now, this election. We must achieve consensus, and Manfred
are only staffer we got who have hope of talking to Collective on its
own terms. He are deal-making messenger, not force burnout, right? We
need coalition reserve before term limit lockout followed by gridlock
in Brussels, American-style. Is more than vital - is essential.”
“That’s no excuse -”
“Annette, they have partial upload of Bob Franklin. They got it before
he died, enough of his personality to reinstantiate it, time-sharing
in their own brains. We must get the Franklin Collective with their
huge resources lobbying for the Equal Rights Amendment: If ERA passes,
all sapients are eligible to vote, own property, upload, download,
sideload. Are more important than little gray butt-monsters with cold
speculum: Whole future depends on it. Manny started this with
crustacean rights: Leave uploads covered by copyrights not civil
rights and where will we be in fifty years? Do you think I must ignore
this? It was important then, but now, with the transmission the
lobsters received -”
“Shit.” She turns and leans her forehead against the cool stonework.
“I’ll need a prescription. Ritalin or something. And his location.
Leave the rest to me.” She doesn’t add, That includes peeling him off
the ceiling afterwards: that’s understood. Nor does she say, you’re
going to pay. That’s understood, too. Gianni may be a hard-nosed
political fixer, but he looks after his own.
“Location am easy if he find the PLO. GPS coordinates are following -”
“No need. I got his spectacles.”
“Merde, as you say. Take them to him, ma ch�rie. Bring me the
distributed trust rating of Bob Franklin’s upload, and I bring Bob the
jubilee, right to direct his own corporate self again as if still
alive. And we pull diplomatic chestnuts out of fire before they burn.
Agreed?”
“Oui.”
She cuts the connection and begins walking uphill, along the Cowgate
(through which farmers once bought their herds to market), toward the
permanent floating Fringe and then the steps towards The Meadows. As
she pauses opposite the site of the gallows, a fight breaks out: Some
Paleolithic hangover takes exception to the robotic mime aping his
movements, and swiftly rips its arm off. The mime stands there, sparks
flickering inside its shoulder, and looks confused. Two pissed-looking
students start forward and punch the short-haired vandal. There is
much shouting in the mutually incomprehensible accents of Oxgangs and
the Herriott-Watt Robot Lab. Annette watches the fight and shudders;
it’s like a flashover vision from a universe where the Equal Rights
Amendment - with its redefinition of personhood - is rejected by the
house of deputies: a universe where to die is to become property and
to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to
slavery.
Maybe Gianni was right, she ponders. But I wish the price wasn’t so
personal -
*
Manfred can feel one of his attacks coming on. The usual symptoms are
all present - the universe, with its vast preponderance of unthinking
matter, becomes an affront; weird ideas flicker like heat lightning
far away across the vast plateaus of his imagination - but, with his
metacortex running in sandboxed insecure mode, he feels blunt. And
slow. Even obsolete. The latter is about as welcome a sensation as
heroin withdrawal: He can’t spin off threads to explore his designs
for feasibility and report back to him. It’s like someone has stripped
fifty points off his IQ; his brain feels like a surgical scalpel
that’s been used to cut down trees. A decaying mind is a terrible
thing to be trapped inside. Manfred wants out, and he wants out bad -
but he’s too afraid to let on.
“Gianni is a middle-of-the-road Eurosocialist, a mixed-market
pragmatist politician,” Bob’s ghost accuses Manfred by way of Monica’s
dye-flushed lips, “hardly the sort of guy you’d expect me to vote for,
no? So what does he think I can do for him?”
“That’s a - ah - ” Manfred rocks forward and back in his chair, arms
crossed firmly and hands thrust under his armpits for protection.
“Dismantle the moon! Digitize the biosphere, make a n�osphere out of
it - shit, sorry, that’s long-term planning. Build Dyson spheres, lots
and lots of - Ahem. Gianni is an ex-Marxist, reformed high church
Trotskyite clade. He believes in achieving True Communism, which is a
state of philosophical grace that requires certain prerequisites like,
um, not pissing around with Molotov cocktails and thought police: He
wants to make everybody so rich that squabbling over ownership of the
means of production makes as much sense as arguing over who gets to
sleep in the damp spot at the back of the cave. He’s not your enemy, I
mean. He’s the enemy of those Stalinist deviationist running dogs in
Conservative Party Central Office who want to bug your bedroom and
hand everything on a plate to the big corporates owned by the pension
funds - which in turn rely on people dying predictably to provide
their raison d’�tre. And, um, more importantly dying and not trying to
hang on to their property and chattels. Sitting up in the coffin
singing extropian fireside songs, that kind of thing. The actuaries
are to blame, predicting life expectancy with intent to cause people
to buy insurance policies with money that is invested in control of
the means of production - Bayes’ Theorem is to blame -”
Alan glances over his shoulder at Manfred: “I don’t think feeding him
guarana was a good idea,” he says in tones of deep foreboding.
Manfred’s mode of vibration has gone nonlinear by this point: He’s
rocking front to back, and jiggling up and down in little hops, like a
technophiliacal yogic flyer trying to bounce his way to the
singularity. Monica leans toward him and her eyes widen: “Manfred,”
she hisses, “shut up!”
He stops babbling abruptly, with an expression of deep puzzlement.
“Who am I?” he asks, and keels over backward. “Why am I, here and now,
occupying this body -”
“Anthropic anxiety attack,” Monica comments. “I think he did this in
Amsterdam eight years ago when Bob first met him.” She looks alarmed,
a different identity coming to the fore: “What shall we do?”
“We have to make him comfortable.” Alan raises his voice: “Bed, make
yourself ready, now.” The back of the sofa Manfred is sprawled on
flops downward, the base folds up, and a strangely animated duvet
crawls up over his feet. “Listen, Manny, you’re going to be all
right.”
“Who am I and what do I signify?” Manfred mumbles incoherently: “A
mass of propagating decision trees, fractal compression, lots of
synaptic junctions lubricated with friendly endorphins -” Across the
room, the bootleg pharmacopoeia is cranking up to manufacture some
heavy tranquilizers. Monica heads for the kitchen to get something for
him to drink them in. “Why are you doing this?” Manfred asks, dizzily.
“It’s okay. Lie down and relax.” Alan leans over him. “We’ll talk
about everything in the morning, when you know who you are.” (Aside to
Monica, who is entering the room with a bottle of iced tea: “Better
let Gianni know that he’s unwell. One of us may have to go visit the
minister. Do you know if Macx has been audited?”) “Rest up, Manfred.
Everything is being taken care of.”
About fifteen minutes later, Manfred - who, in the grip of an
existential migraine, meekly obeys Monica’s instruction to drink down
the spiked tea - lies back on the bed and relaxes. His breathing
slows; the subliminal muttering ceases. Monica, sitting next to him,
reaches out and takes his right hand, which is lying on top of the
bedding.
“Do you want to live forever?” she intones in Bob
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