Accelerando

by Charles Stross

  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 medieval 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, secondhand 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 passersby with ironically stylized gestures.

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

  “The—” Annette does a double take 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 chèr,” 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 e-mailed 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 Diet 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 extradark, 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 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 chérie?”

  Pause. “I lost him. But I got his aide-mémoire 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 afterward. 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’ve got his spectacles.”

  “Merde, as you say. Take them to him, ma chérie. 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 toward The Meadows. As she pauses opposite the site of the gallows, a fight breaks out: Some Paleolithic hangover t
akes 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 nöosphere 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’être. 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—”