Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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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
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