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

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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.