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

face.

 

“You.” Amber pauses, her cheek twitching as bits of her mind page in

and out of her skull, polling external information sources. “You

really are -”

 

A hasty cloud materializes under her hand as her fingers relax,

dropping the glass.

 

“Uh.” Manfred stares, at a complete loss for words. “I’d, uh.” After a

moment he looks down. “I’m sorry. I’ll get you another drink ..?”

 

“Why didn’t someone warn me?” Amber complains.

 

“We thought you could use the good advice,” Annette stated into the

awkward silence. “And a family reunion. It was meant to be a

surprise.”

 

“A surprise.” Amber looks perplexed. “You could say that.”

 

“You’re taller than I was expecting,” Manfred says unexpectedly.

“People look different when you’re not using human eyes.”

 

“Yeah?” She looks at him, and he turns his head slightly, facing her.

It’s a historic moment, and Annette is getting it all on memory

diamond, from every angle. The family’s dirty little secret is that

Amber and her father have never met, not face-to-face in physical

meat-machine proximity. She was born years after Manfred and Pamela

separated, after all, decanted prefertilized from a tank of liquid

nitrogen. This is the first time either of them have actually seen the

other’s face without electronic intermediation. And while they’ve said

everything that needed to be said on a businesslike level, anthropoid

family politics is still very much a matter of body language and

pheromones. “How long have you been out and about?” she asks, trying

to disguise her confusion.

 

“About six hours.” Manfred manages a rueful chuckle, trying to take

the sight of her in all at once. “Let’s get you another drink and put

our heads together?”

 

“Okay.” Amber takes a deep breath and glares at Annette. “You set this

up, you clean up the mess.”

 

Annette just stands there smiling at the confusion of her

accomplishment.

 

*

 

The cold light of dawn finds Sirhan angry, sober, and ready to pick a

fight with the first person who comes through the door of his office.

The room is about ten meters across, with a floor of polished marble

and skylights in the intricately plastered ceiling. The walkthrough of

his current project sprouts in the middle of the floor like a ghostly

abstract cauliflower, fractal branches dwindling down to infolded

nodes tagged with compressed identifiers. The branches expand and

shrink as Sirhan paces around it, zooming to readability in response

to his eyeball dynamics. But he isn’t paying it much attention. He’s

too disturbed, uncertain, trying to work out whom to blame. Which is

why, when the door bangs open, his first response is to whirl angrily

and open his mouth - then stop. “What do you want?” he demands.

 

“A word, if you please?” Annette looks around distractedly. “This is

your project?”

 

“Yes,” he says icily, and banishes the walkthrough with a wave of one

hand. “What do you want?”

 

“I’m not sure.” Annette pauses. For a moment she looks weary, tired

beyond mortal words, and Sirhan momentarily wonders if perhaps he’s

spreading the blame too far. This ninetysomething Frenchwoman who is

no blood relative, who was in years past the love of his

scatterbrained grandfather’s life, seems the least likely person to be

trying to manipulate him, at least in such an unwelcome and intimate

manner. But there’s no telling. Families are strange things, and even

though the current instantiations of his father and mother aren’t the

ones who ran his preadolescent brain through a couple of dozen

alternative lifelines before he was ten, he can’t be sure - or that

they wouldn’t enlist Tante Annette’s assistance in fucking with his

mind. “We need to talk about your mother,” she continues.

 

“We do, do we?” Sirhan turns around and sees the vacancy of the room

for what it is, a socket, like a pulled tooth, informed as much by

what is absent as by what is present. He snaps his fingers, and an

intricate bench of translucent bluish utility fog congeals out of the

air behind him. He sits: Annette can do what she wants.

 

“Oui.” She thrusts her hands deep into the pocket of the peasant smock

she’s wearing - a major departure from her normal style - and leans

against the wall. Physically, she looks young enough to have spent her

entire life blitzing around the galaxy at three nines of lightspeed,

but her posture is world-weary and ancient. History is a foreign

country, and the old are unwilling emigrants, tired out by the

constant travel. “Your mother, she has taken on a huge job, but it’s

one that needs doing. You agreed it needed doing, years ago, with the

archive store. She is now trying to get it moving, that is what the

campaign is about, to place before the electors a choice of how best

to move an entire civilization. So I ask, why do you obstruct her?”

 

Sirhan works his jaw; he feels like spitting. “Why?” he snaps.

 

“Yes. Why?” Annette gives in and magics up a chair from the swirling

fogbank beneath the ceiling. She crouches in it, staring at him. “It

is a question.”

 

“I have nothing against her political machinations,” Sirhan says

tensely. “But her uninvited interference in my personal life -”

 

“What interference?”

 

He stares. “Is that a question?” He’s silent for a moment. Then:

“Throwing that wanton at me last night -”

 

Annette stares at him. “Who? What are you talking about?”

 

“That, that loose woman!” Sirhan is reduced to spluttering. “False

pretenses! If this is one of Father’s matchmaking ideas, it is so very

wrong that -”

 

Annette is shaking her head. “Are you crazy? Your mother simply wanted

you to meet her campaign team, to join in planning the policy. Your

father is not on this planet! But you stormed out, you really upset

Rita, did you know that? Rita, she is the best belief maintenance and

story construction operative I have! Yet you to tears reduce her. What

is wrong with you?”

 

“I -” Sirhan swallows. “She’s what?” he asks again, his mouth dry. “I

thought …” He trails off. He doesn’t want to say what he thought.

The hussy, that brazen trollop, is part of his mother’s campaign

party? Not some plot to lure him into corruption? What if it was all a

horrible misunderstanding?

 

“I think you need to apologize to someone,” Annette says coolly,

standing up. Sirhan’s head is spinning between a dozen dialogues of

actors and ghosts, a journal of the party replaying before his

ghast-stricken inner gaze. Even the walls have begun to flicker,

responding to his intense unease. Annette skewers him with a disgusted

look: “When you can a woman behave toward as a person, not a threat,

we can again talk. Until then.” And she stands up and walks out of the

room, leaving him to contemplate the shattered stump of his anger, so

startled he can barely concentrate on his project, thinking, Is that

really me? Is that what I look like to her? as the cladistic graph

slowly rotates before him, denuded branches spread wide, waiting to be

filled with the nodes of the alien interstellar network just as soon

as he can convince Aineko to stake him the price of the depth-first

tour of darkness.

 

*

 

Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons - literally, his exocortex

dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored

facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels

inexplicably odd, even without the added distractions of his sex

drive, which he has switched off until he gets used to being unitary

again. Not only does he get shooting pains in his neck whenever he

tries to look over his left shoulder with his right eye, but he’s lost

the habit of spawning exocortical agents to go interrogate a database

or bush robot or something, then report back to him. Instead he keeps

trying to fly off in all directions at once, which usually ends with

him falling over.

 

But at present, that’s not a problem. He’s sitting comfortably at a

weathered wooden table in a beer garden behind a hall lifted from

somewhere like Frankfurt, a liter glass of straw-colored liquid at his

elbow and a comforting multiple whispering of knowledge streams

tickling the back of his head. Most of his attention is focused on

Annette, who frowns at him with mingled concern and affection. They

may have lived separate lives for almost a third of a century, since

she declined to upload with him, but he’s still deeply attuned to her.

 

“You are going to have to do something about that boy,” she says

sympathetically. “He is close enough to upset Amber. And without

Amber, there will be a problem.”

 

“I’m going to have to do something about Amber, too,” Manfred retorts.

“What was the idea, not warning her I was coming?”

 

“It was meant to be a surprise.” Annette comes as close to pouting as

Manfred’s seen her recently. It brings back warm memories; he reaches

out to hold her hand across the table.

 

“You know I can’t handle the human niceties properly when I’m a

flock.” He strokes the back of her wrist. She pulls back after a

while, but slowly. “I expected you to manage all that stuff.”

 

“That stuff.” Annette shakes her head. “She’s your daughter, you know?

Did you have no curiosity left?”

 

“As a bird?” Manfred cocks his head to one side so abruptly that he

hurts his neck and winces. “Nope. Now I do, but I think I pissed her

off -”

 

“Which brings us back to point one.”

 

“I’d send her an apology, but she’d think I was trying to manipulate

her” - Manfred takes a mouthful of beer - “and she’d be right.” He

sounds slightly depressed. “All my relationships are screwy this

decade. And it’s lonely.”

 

“So? Don’t brood.” Annette pulls her hand back. “Something will sort

itself out eventually. And in the short term, there is the work, the

electoral problem becomes acute.” When she’s around him the remains of

her once-strong French accent almost vanish in a transatlantic drawl,

he realizes with a pang. He’s been abhuman for too long - people who

meant a lot to him have changed while he’s been away.

 

“I’ll brood if I want to,” he says. “I didn’t ever really get a chance

to say goodbye to Pam, did I? Not after that time in Paris when the

gangsters …” He shrugs. “I’m getting nostalgic in my old age.” He

snorts.

 

“You’re not the only one,” Annette says tactfully. “Social occasions

here are a minefield, one must tiptoe around so many issues, people

have too much, too much history. And nobody knows everything that is

going on.”

 

“That’s the trouble with this damned polity.” Manfred takes another

gulp of hefeweisen. “We’ve already got six million people living on

this planet, and it’s growing like the first-generation Internet.

Everyone who is anyone knows everyone, but there are so many incomers

diluting the mix and not knowing that there is a small world network

here that everything is up for grabs again after only a couple of

megaseconds. New networks form, and we don’t even know they exist

until they sprout a political agenda and surface under us. We’re

acting under time pressure. If we don’t get things rolling now, we’ll

never be able to …” He shakes his head. “It wasn’t like this for you

in Brussels, was it?”

 

“No. Brussels was a mature system. And I had Gianni to look after in

his dotage after you left. It will only get worse from here on in, I

think.”

 

“Democracy 2.0.” He shudders