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

a deal. Amber wants you to ignore them. Got that?”

 

“Got it.” There’s a hollow bong! from one of the communication bells.

“Hey, that’s interesting.”

 

“What is?” She stretches, neck extending snakelike so that she can see

the window on underlying reality that’s flickered into existence in

the air before him.

 

“An ack from …” he pauses, then plucks a neatly reified concept from

the screen in front of him and presents it to her in a silvery caul of

light. “… about two hundred light-years away! Someone wants to

talk.” He smiles. Then the front panel workstation bong’s again. “Hey

again. I wonder what that says.”

 

It’s the work of a moment to pipe the second message through the

translator. Oddly, it doesn’t translate at first. Pierre has to

correct for some weird destructive interference in the fake lobster

network before it’ll spill its guts. “That’s interesting,” he says.

 

“I’ll say.” Ang lets her neck collapse back to normal. “I’d better go

tell Amber.”

 

“You do that,” Pierre says worriedly. He makes eye contact with her,

but what she’s hoping to see in his face just isn’t there. He’s

wearing his emotions entirely on the surface. “I’m not surprised their

translator didn’t want to pass that message along.”

 

“It’s a deliberately corrupted grammar,” Ang murmurs, and bangs out in

the direction of Amber’s audience chamber; “and they’re actually

making threats.” The Wunch, it seems, have acquired a very bad

reputation somewhere along the line - and Amber needs to know.

 

*

 

Glashwiecz leans toward Lobster Number One, stomach churning. It’s

only a realtime kilosecond since his bar-room interview, but in the

intervening subjective time, he’s abolished a hangover, honed his

brief, and decided to act. In the Tuileries. “You’ve been lied to,” he

confides quietly, trusting the privacy ackles that he browbeat Amber’s

mother into giving him - access lists that give him a degree of

control over the regime within this virtual universe that the cat

dragged in.

 

“Lied? Context rendered horizontal in past, or subjected to

grammatical corruption? Linguistic evil?”

 

“The latter.” Glashwiecz enjoys this, even though it forces him to get

rather closer to the two-meter-long virtual crustacean than he’d like.

Showing a mark how they’ve been scammed is always good, especially

when you hold the keys to the door of the cage they’re locked inside.

“They are not telling you the truth about this system.”

 

“We received assurances,” Lobster Number One says clearly. Its

mouthparts move ceaselessly - the noise comes from somewhere inside

its head. “You do not share this phenotype. Why?”

 

“That information will cost you,” says Glashwiecz. “I am willing to

provide it on credit.”

 

They haggle briefly. An exchange rate in questions is agreed, as is a

trust metric to grade the answers by. “Disclose all,” insists the

Wunch negotiator.

 

“There are multiple sentient species on the world we come from,” says

the lawyer. “The form you wear belongs to only one - one that wanted

to get away from the form I wear, the original conscious tool-creating

species. Some of the species today are artificial, but all of us trade

information for self-advantage.”

 

“This is good to know,” the lobster assures him. “We like to buy

species.”

 

“You buy species?” Glashwiecz cocks his head.

 

“We have the unbearable yearning to be not-what-we-are,” says the

lobster. “Novelty, surprise! Flesh rots and wood decays. We seek the

new being-ness of aliens. Give us your somatotype, give us all your

thoughts, and we will dream you over.”

 

“I think something might be arranged,” Glashwiecz concedes. “So you

want to be - no, to lease the rights to temporarily be human? Why is

that?”

 

“Untranslatable concept #3 means untranslatable concept #4. God told

us to.”

 

“Okay, I think I’ll just have to take that on trust for now. What is

your true form?” he asks.

 

“Wait and I show you,” says the lobster. It begins to shudder.

 

“What are you doing -”

 

“Wait.” The lobster twitches, writhing slightly, like a portly

businessman adjusting his underwear after a heavy business lunch.

Disturbing shapes move, barely visible through the thick chitinous

armor. “We want your help,” the lobster explains, voice curiously

muffled. “Want to establish direct trade links. Physical emissaries,

yes?”

 

“Yes, that’s very good,” Glashwiecz agrees excitedly: It’s exactly

what he’s hoped for, the sought-after competitive advantage that will

prove his fitness in Amber’s designated trial by corporate combat.

“You’re going to deal with us directly without using that shell

interface?”

 

“Agreed.” The lobster trails off into muffled silence; little

crunching noises trickle out of its carapace. Then Glashwiecz hears

footsteps behind him on the gravel path.

 

“What are you doing here?” he demands, looking round. It’s Pierre,

back in standard human form - a sword hangs from his belt, and there’s

a big wheel-lock pistol in his hands. “Hey!”

 

“Step away from the alien, lawyer,” Pierre warns, raising the gun.

 

Glashwiecz glances back at Lobster Number One. It’s pulled its front

inside the protective shell, and it’s writhing now, rocking from side

to side alarmingly. Something inside the shell is turning black,

acquiring depth and texture. “I stand on counsel’s privilege,”

Glashwiecz insists. “Speaking as this alien’s attorney, I must protest

in the strongest terms -”

 

Without warning, the lobster lurches forward and rises up on its rear

legs. It reaches out with huge claws, chellipeds coated with spiny

hairs, and grabs Glashwiecz by his arms. “Hey!”

 

Glashwiecz tries to turn away, but the lobster is already looming over

him, maxillipeds and maxillae reaching out from its head. There’s a

sickening crunch as one of his elbow joints crumbles, humerus

shattered by the closing jaws of a chelliped. He draws breath to

scream, then the four small maxillae grip his head and draw it down

toward the churning mandibles.

 

Pierre scurries sideways, trying to find a line of fire on the lobster

that doesn’t pass through the lawyer’s body. The lobster isn’t

cooperating. It turns on the spot, clutching Glashwiecz’s convulsing

body to itself. There’s a stench of shit, and blood is squirting from

its mouthparts. Something is very wrong with the biophysics model

here, the realism turned up way higher than normal.

 

“Merde,” whispers Pierre. He fumbles with the bulky trigger, and

there’s a faint whirring sound but no explosion.

 

More wet crunching sounds follow as the lobster demolishes the

lawyer’s face and swallows convulsively, sucking his head and

shoulders all the way into its gastric mill.

 

Pierre glances at the heavy handgun. “Shit!” he screams. He glances

back at the lobster, then turns and runs for the nearest wall. There

are other lobsters loose in the formal garden. “Amber, emergency!” he

sends over their private channel. “Hostiles in the Louvre!”

 

The lobster that’s taken Glashwiecz hunkers down over the body and

quivers. Pierre desperately winds the spring on his gun, too rattled

to check that it’s loaded. He glances back at the alien intruder.

They’ve sprung the biophysics model, he sends. I could die in here, he

realizes, momentarily shocked. This instance of me could die forever.

 

The lobster shell sitting in the pool of blood and human wreckage

splits in two. A humanoid form begins to uncurl from within it,

pale-skinned and glistening wet: vacant blue eyes flicker from side to

side as it stretches and stands upright, wobbling uncertainty on its

two unstable legs. Its mouth opens and a strange gobbling hiss comes

forth.

 

Pierre recognizes her. “What are you doing here?” he yells.

 

The nude woman turns toward him. She’s the spitting image of Amber’s

mother, except for the chellipeds she has in place of hands. She

hisses “Equity!” and takes a wobbly step toward him, pincers clacking.

 

Pierre winds the firing handle again. There’s a crash of gunpowder and

smoke, a blow that nearly sprains his elbow, and the nude woman’s

chest erupts in a spray of blood. She snarls at him wordlessly and

staggers - then ragged flaps of bloody meat close together, knitting

shut with improbable speed. She resumes her advance.

 

“I told Amber the Matrix would be more defensible,” Pierre snarls,

dropping the firearm and drawing his sword as the alien turns in his

direction and raises arms that end in pincers. “We need guns, damit!

Lots of guns!”

 

“Waaant equity,” hisses the alien intruder.

 

“You can’t be Pamela Macx,” says Pierre, his back to the wall, keeping

the sword point before the lobster-woman-thing. “She’s in a nunnery in

Armenia or something. You pulled that out of Glashwiecz’s memories -

he worked for her, didn’t he?”

 

Claws go snicker-snack before his face. “Investment partnership!”

screeches the harridan. “Seat on the board! Eat brains for breakfast!”

It lurches sideways, trying to get past his guard.

 

“I don’t fucking believe this,” Pierre snarls. The Wunch-creature

jumps at just the wrong moment and slides onto the point of his blade,

claws clacking hungrily. Pierre slides away, nearly leaving his skin

on the rough bricks of the wall - and what’s good for one is good for

all, as the hacked model in force in this reality compels the attacker

to groan and collapse.

 

Pierre pulls the sword out then, nervously glancing over his shoulder,

whacks at her neck. The impact jars his arm, but he keeps hacking

until there’s blood spraying everywhere, blood on his shirt, blood on

his sword, and a round thing sitting on a stump of savaged neck

nearby, jaw working soundlessly in undeath.

 

He looks at it for a moment, then his stomach rebels and tries to

empty itself into the mess. “Where the hell is everybody?” he

broadcasts on the private channel. “Hostiles in the Louvre!”

 

He straightens up, gasping for breath. He feels alive, frightened and

appalled and exhilarated simultaneously. The crackle of bursting

shells on all sides drowns out the birdsong as the Wunch’s emissaries

adopt a variety of new and supposedly more lethal forms. “They don’t

seem to be very clear on how to take over a simulation space,” he

adds. “Maybe we already are untranslatable concept number #1 as far as

they’re concerned.”

 

“Don’t worry, I’ve cut off the incoming connection,” sends Su Ang.

“This is just a bridgehead force; the invasion packets are being

filtered out.”

 

Blank-eyed men and women in dusty black uniforms are hatching from the

lobster shells, stumbling and running around the grounds of the royal

palace like confused Huguenot invaders.

 

Boris winks into reality behind Pierre. “Which way?” he demands,

pulling out an anachronistic but lethal katana.

 

“Over here. Let’s work this together.” Pierre jacks his emotional

damper up to a dangerously high setting, suppressing natural aversion

reflexes and temporarily turning himself into a sociopathic killer. He

stalks toward an infant lobster-thing with big black eyes and a

covering of white hair that mewls at him from a rose bed, and Boris

looks away while he kills it. Then one of the larger ones makes the

mistake of lunging at Boris, and he chops at it reflexively.

 

Some of the Wunch try to fight back when Pierre and Boris try to kill

them, but they’re handicapped by their anatomy, a curious mixture of

crustacean and human, claw and mandible against sword and dagger. When

they bleed the ground soaks with the cuprous hue of lobster juice.

 

“Let’s fork,” suggests Boris. “Get this over with.” Pierre nods, dully

- everything around him is wrapped in a layer of don’t-care, except

for a glowing dot of artificial hatred - and they fork, multiplying

their state vectors to take full advantage of the virtualization

facilities of this universe. There’s no need for reinforcements; the

Wunch focused on attacking the biophysics model of the universe,

making it mimic a physical reality