Accelerando by Charles Stross (books to read in a lifetime .txt) 📖

door; Monica sits down

opposite him and stares into some inner space. The room has a tall

ceiling, with whitewashed walls and wooden shutters to cover the

aerogel window bays. The furniture is modern modular, and clashes

horribly with the original nineteenth-century architecture. “We were

expecting you.”

 

“You were -” He shifts track with an effort: “I was here to see

somebody. Here in Scotland, I mean.”

 

“Us.” She catches his eye deliberately. “To discuss sapience options

with our patron.”

 

“With your -” He squeezes his eyes shut. “Damn! I don’t remember. I

need my glasses back. Please.”

 

“What about your backups?” she asks curiously.

 

“A moment.” Manfred tries to remember what address to ping. It’s

useless, and painfully frustrating. “It would help if I could remember

where I keep the rest of my mind,” he complains. “It used to be at -

oh, there.”

 

An elephantine semantic network sits down on his spectacles as soon as

he asks for the site, crushing his surroundings into blocky pixilated

monochrome that jerks as he looks around. “This is going to take some

time,” he warns his hosts as a goodly chunk of his metacortex tries to

handshake with his brain over a wireless network connection that was

really only designed for web browsing. The download consists of the

part of his consciousness that isn’t security-critical - public access

actors and vague opinionated rants - but it clears down a huge memory

castle, sketching in the outline of a map of miracles and wonders onto

the whitewashed walls of the room.

 

When Manfred can see the outside world again, he feels a bit more like

himself: He can, at least, spawn a search thread that will

resynchronize and fill him in on what it found. He still can’t access

the inner mysteries of his soul (including his personal memories);

they’re locked and barred pending biometric verification of his

identity and a quantum key exchange. But he has his wits about him

again - and some of them are even working. It’s like sobering up from

a strange new drug, the infinitely reassuring sense of being back at

the controls of his own head. “I think I need to report a crime,” he

tells Monica - or whoever is plugged into Monica’s head right now,

because now he knows where he is and who he was meant to meet

(although not why) - and he understands that, for the Franklin

Collective, identity is a politically loaded issue.

 

“A crime report.” Her expression is subtly mocking. “Identity theft,

by any chance?”

 

“Yeah, yeah, I know: Identity is theft, don’t trust anyone whose state

vector hasn’t forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only

constant, et bloody cetera. Who am I talking to, by the way? And if

we’re talking, doesn’t that signify that you think we’re on the same

side, more or less?” He struggles to sit up in the recliner chair:

Stepper motors whine softly as it strives to accommodate him.

 

“Sidedness is optional.” The woman who is Monica some of the time

looks at him quirkily: “It tends to alter drastically if you vary the

number of dimensions. Let’s just say that right now I’m Monica, plus

our sponsor. Will that do you?”

 

“Our sponsor, who is in cyberspace -”

 

She leans back on the sofa, which buzzes and extrudes an occasional

table with a small bar. “Drink? Can I offer you coffee? Guarana? Or

maybe a Berlinerweisse, for old time’s sake?”

 

“Guarana will do. Hello, Bob. How long have you been dead?”

 

She chuckles. “I’m not dead, Manny. I may not be a full upload, but I

feel like me.” She rolls her eyes, self-consciously. “He’s making rude

comments about your wife,” She adds; “I’m not going to pass that on.”

 

“My ex-wife,” Manfred corrects her automatically. “The, uh, tax vamp.

So. You’re acting as a, I guess, an interpreter for Bob?”

 

“Ack.” She looks at Manfred very seriously: “We owe him a lot, you

know. He left his assets in trust to the movement along with his

partials. We feel obliged to instantiate his personality as often as

possible, even though you can only do so much with a couple of

petabytes of recordings. But we have help.”

 

“The lobsters.” Manfred nods to himself and accepts the glass that she

offers. Its diamond-plated curves glitter brilliantly in the

late-afternoon sunlight. “I knew this had something to do with them.”

He leans forward, holding his glass and frowns. “If only I could

remember why I came here! It was something emergent, something in deep

memory … something I didn’t trust in my own skull. Something to do

with Bob.”

 

The door behind the sofa opens; Alan enters. “Excuse me,” he says

quietly, and heads for the far side of the room. A workstation folds

down from the wall, and a chair rolls in from a service niche. He sits

with his chin propped on his hands, staring at the white desktop.

Every so often he mutters quietly to himself; “Yes, I understand …

campaign headquarters … donations need to be audited …”

 

“Gianni’s election campaign,” Monica prompts him.

 

Manfred jumps. “Gianni -” A bundle of memories unlock inside his head

as he remembers his political front man’s message. “Yes! That’s what

this is about. It has to be!” He looks at her excitedly. “I’m here to

deliver a message to you from Gianni Vittoria. About -” He looks

crestfallen. “I’m not sure,” he trails off uncertainly, “but it was

important. Something critical in the long term, something about group

minds and voting. But whoever mugged me got the message.”

 

*

 

The Grassmarket is an overly rustic cobbled square nestled beneath the

glowering battlements of Castle Rock. Annette stands on the site of

the gallows where they used to execute witches; she sends forth her

invisible agents to search for spoor of Manfred. Aineko, overly

familiar, drapes over her left shoulder like a satanic stole and

delivers a running stream of cracked cellphone chatter into her ear.

 

“I don’t know where to begin,” she sighs, annoyed. This place is a

wall-to-wall tourist trap, a many-bladed carnivorous plant that

digests easy credit and spits out the drained husks of foreigners. The

road has been pedestrianized and resurfaced in squalidly authentic

mediaeval cobblestones; in the middle of what used to be the car park,

there’s a permanent floating antiques market, where you can buy

anything from a brass fire surround to an ancient CD player. Much of

the merchandise in the shops is generic dot-com trash, vying for the

title of Japanese-Scottish souvenir from hell: Puroland tartans,

animatronic Nessies hissing bad-temperedly at knee level, second hand

laptops. People swarm everywhere, from the theme pubs (hangings seem

to be a running joke hereabouts) to the expensive dress shops with

their fabric renderers and digital mirrors. Street performers, part of

the permanent floating Fringe, clutter the sidewalk: A robotic mime,

very traditional in silver face paint, mimics the gestures of passers

by with ironically stylized gestures.

 

“Try the doss house,” Aineko suggests from the shelter of her shoulder

bag.

 

“The -” Annette does a doubletake as her thesaurus conspires with her

open government firmware and dumps a geographical database of city

social services into her sensorium. “Oh, I see.” The Grassmarket

itself is touristy, but the bits off to one end - down a dingy canyon

of forbidding stone buildings six stories high - are decidedly

downmarket. “Okay.”

 

Annette weaves past a stall selling disposable cellphones and cheaper

genome explorers, round a gaggle of teenage girls in the grips of some

kind of imported kawaii fetish, who look at her in alarm from atop

their pink platform heels - probably mistaking her for a school

probation inspector - and past a stand of chained and parked bicycles.

The human attendant looks bored out of her mind. Annette tucks a

blandly anonymous ten-Euro note in her pocket almost before she

notices: “If you were going to buy a hot bike,” she asks, “where would

you go?” The parking attendant stares, and for a moment Annette thinks

she’s overestimated her. Then she mumbles something. “What?”

 

“McMurphy’s. Used to be called Bannerman’s. Down yon Cowgate,

thataway.” The meter maid looks anxiously at her rack of charges. “You

didn’t -”

 

“Uh-huh.” Annette follows her gaze: straight down the dark stone

canyon. Well, okay. “This had better be worth it, Manny mon ch�r,” she

mutters under her breath.

 

McMurphy’s is a fake Irish pub, a stone grotto installed beneath a

mound of blank-faced offices. It was once a real Irish pub before the

developers got their hands on it and mutated it in rapid succession

into a punk nightclub, a wine bar, and a fake Dutch coffee shop; after

which, as burned-out as any star, it left the main sequence. Now it

occupies an unnaturally prolonged, chilly existence as the sort of

recycled imitation Irish pub that has neon four-leafed clovers hanging

from the artificially blackened pine beams above the log tables - in

other words, the burned-out black dwarf afterlife of a once-serious

drinking establishment. Somewhere along the line, the beer cellar was

replaced with a toilet (leaving more room for paying patrons

upstairs), and now its founts dispense fizzy concentrate diluted with

water from the city mains.

 

“Say, did you hear the one about the Eurocrat with the robot pussy who

goes into a dodgy pub on the Cowgate and orders a coke? And when it

arrives, she says ‘hey, where’s the mirror?’”

 

“Shut up,” Annette hisses into her shoulder bag. “That isn’t funny.”

Her personal intruder telemetry has just emailed her wristphone, and

it’s displaying a rotating yellow exclamation point, which means that

according to the published police crime stats, this place is likely to

do grievous harm to her insurance premiums.

 

Aineko looks up at her from his nest in the bag and yawns cavernously,

baring a pink, ribbed mouth and a tongue like pink suede. “Want to

make me? I just pinged Manny’s head. The network latency was trivial.”

 

The barmaid sidles up and pointedly manages not to make eye contact

with Annette. “I’ll have a Diet Coke,” Annette orders. In the

direction of her bag, voice pitched low: “Did you hear the one about

the Eurocrat who goes into a dodgy pub, orders half a liter of Diet

Coke, and when she spills it in her shoulder bag she says ‘oops, I’ve

got a wet pussy’?”

 

The Coke arrives. Annette pays for it. There may be a couple of dozen

people in the pub; it’s hard to tell because it looks like an ancient

cellar, lots of stone archways leading off into niches populated with

secondhand church pews and knife-scarred tables. Some guys who might

be bikers, students, or well-dressed winos are hunched over one table:

hairy, wearing vests with too many pockets, in an artful bohemianism

that makes Annette blink until one of her literary programs informs

her that one of them is a moderately famous local writer, a bit of a

guru for the space and freedom party. There’re a couple of women in

boots and furry hats in one corner, poring over the menu, and a parcel

of off-duty street performers hunching over their beers in a booth.

Nobody else is wearing anything remotely like office drag, but the

weirdness coefficient is above average; so Annette dials her glasses

to extra-dark, straightens her tie, and glances around.

 

The door opens and a nondescript youth slinks in. He’s wearing baggy

BDUs, woolly cap, and a pair of boots that have that quintessential

essense de panzer division look, all shock absorbers and olive drab

Kevlar panels. He’s wearing -

 

“I spy with my little network intrusion detector kit,” begins the cat,

as Annette