Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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“Uh - what?”
“I have been on this shop floor for six hours, and my feet, they kill
me.” She takes hold of his left arm and very deliberately unhooks her
earrings, turning them off. “If I say to you I can write for the CIA
wire service, will you take me to a restaurant and buy me dinner and
tell me what it is you want to say?”
*
Welcome to the second decade of the twenty-first century; the
second decade in human history when the intelligence of the
environment has shown signs of rising to match human demand.
The news from around the world is distinctly depressing this
evening. In Maine, guerrillas affiliated with Parents for
Traditional Children announce they’ve planted logic bombs in
antenatal-clinic gene scanners, making them give random false
positives when checking for hereditary disorders: The damage so far
is six illegal abortions and fourteen lawsuits.
The International Convention on Performing Rights is holding a
third round of crisis talks in an attempt to stave off the final
collapse of the WIPO music licensing regime. On the one hand,
hard-liners representing the Copyright Control Association of
America are pressing for restrictions on duplicating the altered
emotional states associated with specific media performances: As a
demonstration that they mean business, two “software engineers” in
California have been kneecapped, tarred, feathered, and left for
dead under placards accusing them of reverse-engineering movie plot
lines using avatars of dead and out-of-copyright stars.
On the opposite side of the fence, the Association of Free Artists
are demanding the right of perform music in public without a
recording contract, and are denouncing the CCAA as being a tool of
Mafiya apparachiks who have bought it from the moribund music
industry in an attempt to go legit. FBI Director Leonid Kuibyshev
responds by denying that the Mafiya is a significant presence in
the United States. But the music biz’s position isn’t strengthened
by the near collapse of the legitimate American entertainment
industry, which has been accelerating ever since the nasty
noughties.
A marginally intelligent voicemail virus masquerading as an IRS
auditor has caused havoc throughout America, garnishing an
estimated eighty billion dollars in confiscatory tax withholdings
into a numbered Swiss bank account. A different virus is busy
hijacking people’s bank accounts, sending ten percent of their
assets to the previous victim, then mailing itself to everyone in
the current mark’s address book: a self-propelled pyramid scheme
in action. Oddly, nobody is complaining much. While the mess is
being sorted out, business IT departments have gone to standby,
refusing to process any transaction that doesn’t come in the shape
of ink on dead trees.
Tipsters are warning of an impending readjustment in the
overinflated reputations market, following revelations that some
u-media gurus have been hyped past all realistic levels of
credibility. The consequent damage to the junk-bonds market in
integrity is serious.
The EU council of independent heads of state has denied plans for
another attempt at Eurofederalisme, at least until the economy
rises out of its current slump. Three extinct species have been
resurrected in the past month; unfortunately, endangered ones are
now dying off at a rate of one a day. And a group of militant
anti-GM campaigners are being pursued by Interpol, after their
announcement that they have spliced a metabolic pathway for
cyanogenic glycosides into maize seed corn destined for
human-edible crops. There have been no deaths yet, but having to
test breakfast cereal for cyanide is really going to dent consumer
trust.
About the only people who’re doing well right now are the uploaded
lobsters - and the crusties aren’t even remotely human.
*
Manfred and Annette eat on the top deck of the buffet car, chatting as
their TGV barrels through a tunnel under the English Channel. Annette,
it transpires, has been commuting daily from Paris; which was, in any
case, Manfred’s next destination. From the show, he messaged Aineko to
round up his baggage and meet him at St. Pancras Station, in a
terminal like the shell of a giant steel woodlouse. Annette left her
space launcher in the supermarket overnight: an unfueled test article,
it is of no security significance.
The railway buffet car is run by a Nepalese fast-food franchise. “I
sometimes wish for to stay on the train,” Annette says as she waits
for her mismas bhat. “Past Paris! Think. Settle back in your
couchette, to awaken in Moscow and change trains. All the way to
Vladivostok in two days.”
“If they let you through the border,” Manfred mutters. Russia is one
of those places that still requires passports and asks if you are now
or ever have been an anti-anticommunist: It’s still trapped by its
bloody-handed history. (Rewind the video stream to Stolypin’s necktie
party and start out fresh.) Besides, they have enemies: White Russian
oligarchs, protection racketeers in the intellectual property
business. Psychotic relics of the last decade’s experiment with
Marxism-Objectivism. “Are you really a CIA stringer?”
Annette grins, her lips disconcertingly red: “I file dispatches from
time to time. Nothing that could get me fired.”
Manfred nods. “My wife has access to their unfiltered stream.”
“Your -” Annette pauses. “It was she who I, I met? In De Wildemann’s?”
She sees his expression. “Oh, my poor fool!” She raises her glass to
him. “It is, has, not gone well?”
Manfred sighs and raises a toast toward Annette. “You know your
marriage is in a bad way when you send your spouse messages via the
CIA, and she communicates using the IRS.”
“In only five years.” Annette winces. “You will pardon me for saying
this - she did not look like your type.” There’s a question hidden
behind that statement, and he notices again how good she is at
overloading her statements with subtexts.
“I’m not sure what my type is,” he says, half-truthfully. He can’t
elude the sense that something not of either of their doing went wrong
between him and Pamela, a subtle intrusion that levered them apart by
stealth. Maybe it was me, he thinks. Sometimes he isn’t certain he’s
still human; too many threads of his consciousness seem to live
outside his head, reporting back whenever they find something
interesting. Sometimes he feels like a puppet, and that frightens him
because it’s one of the early-warning signs of schizophrenia. And it’s
too early for anyone out there to be trying to hack exocortices …
isn’t it? Right now, the external threads of his consciousness are
telling him that they like Annette, when she’s being herself instead
of a cog in the meatspace ensemble of Arianespace management. But the
part of him that’s still human isn’t sure just how far to trust
himself. “I want to be me. What do you want to be?”
She shrugs, as a waiter slides a plate in front of her. “I’m just a, a
Parisian babe, no? An ing�nue raised in the lilac age of le
Confedera�ion Europ�, the self-deconstructed ruins of the gilded
European Union.”
“Yeah, right.” A plate appears in front of Manfred. “And I’m a good
old microboomer from the MassPike corridor.” He peels back a corner of
the omelet topping and inspects the food underneath it. “Born in the
sunset years of the American century.” He pokes at one of the
unidentifiable meaty lumps in the fried rice with his fork, and it
pokes right back. There’s a limit to how much his agents can tell him
about her - European privacy laws are draconian by American standards
- but he knows the essentials. Two parents who are still together,
father a petty politician in some town council down in the vicinity of
Toulouse. Went to the right �cole. The obligatory year spent bumming
around the Confedera�ion at government expense, learning how other
people live - a new kind of empire building, in place of the 20th
century’s conscription and jackboot wanderjahr. No weblog or personal
site that his agents can find. She joined Arianespace right out of the
Polytechnique and has been management track ever since: Korou,
Manhattan Island, Paris. “You’ve never been married, I take it.”
She chuckles. “Time is too short! I am still young.” She picks up a
forkful of food, and adds quietly. “Besides, the government would
insist on paying.”
“Ah.” Manfred tucks into his bowl thoughtfully. With the birth rate
declining across Europe, the EC bureaucracy is worried; the old EU
started subsidizing babies, a new generation of carers, a decade ago,
and it still hasn’t dented the problem. All it’s done is alienate the
brightest women of childbearing age. Soon they’ll have to look to the
east for a solution, importing a new generation of citizens - unless
the long-promised aging hacks prove workable, or cheap AI comes along.
“Do you have a hotel?” Annette asks suddenly.
“In Paris?” Manfred is startled: “Not yet.”
“You must come home with me, then.” She looks at him quizzically.
“I’m not sure I - ” He catches her expression. “What is it?”
“Oh, nothing. My friend Henri, he says I take in strays too easily.
But you are not a stray. I think you can look after yourself. Besides,
it is the Friday today. Come with me, and I will file your press
release for the Company to read. Tell me, do you dance? You look as if
you need a wild week ending, to help forget your troubles!”
*
Annette drives a steamroller seduction through Manfred’s plans for the
weekend. He intended to find a hotel, file a press release, then spend
some time researching the corporate funding structure of Parents for
Traditional Children and the dimensionality of confidence variation on
the reputation exchanges - then head for Rome. Instead, Annette drags
him back to her apartment, a large studio flat tucked away behind an
alley in the Marais. She sits him at the breakfast bar while she
tidies away his luggage, then makes him close his eyes and swallow two
dubious-tasting capsules. Next, she pours them each a tall glass of
freezing-cold Aqvavit that tastes exactly like Polish rye bread. When
they finish it, she just about rips his clothes off. Manfred is
startled to discover that he has a crowbar-stiff erection; since the
last blazing row with Pamela, he’d vaguely assumed he was no longer
interested in sex. Instead, they end up naked on the sofa, surrounded
by discarded clothing - Annette is very conservative, preferring the
naked penetrative fuck of the last century to the more sophisticated
fetishes of the present day.
Afterward, he’s even more surprised to discover that he’s still
tumescent. “The capsules?” he asks.
She sprawls a well-muscled but thin thigh across him, then reaches
down to grab his penis. Squeezes it. “Yes,” she admits. “You need much
special help to unwind, I think.” Another squeeze. “Crystal meth and a
traditional phosphodiesterase inhibitor.” He grabs one of her small
breasts, feeling very brutish and primitive. Naked. He’s not sure
Pamela ever let him see her fully naked: She thought skin was more
sexy when it was covered. Annette squeezes him again, and he stiffens.
“More!”
By the time they finish, he’s aching, and she shows him how to use the
bidet. Everything is crystal clear, and her touch is electrifying.
While she showers, he sits on the toilet seat lid and rants about
Turing-completeness as an attribute of company law, about cellular
automata and the blind knapsack problem, about his work on solving the
Communist Central Planning problem using a network of interlocking
unmanned companies. About the impending market adjustment in
integrity, the sinister resurrection of the recording music industry,
and the still-pressing need to dismantle Mars.
When she steps out of the shower, he tells her that he loves her.
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