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

puts her drink down and moves in on the youth, “something

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