Accelerando (15 page)

“Here.” Alan, still top-hatted and muttonchopped, holds out a pair of spectacles to Manfred. “Take these. They may do you some good.” His topper wobbles, as if a strange A-life experiment is nesting under its brim.

“Oh. Thank you.” Manfred reaches for them with a pathetic sense of gratitude. As soon as he puts them on, they run through a test series, whispering questions and watching how his eyes focus: After a minute, the room around him clears as the specs build a synthetic image to compensate for his myopia. There's limited net access, too, he notices, a warm sense of relief stealing over him. “Do you mind if I call somebody?” he asks. “I want to check my backups.”

“Be my guest.” Alan slips out through the door; Monica sits down opposite him and stares into some inner space. The room has a tall ceiling, with whitewashed walls and wooden shutters to cover the aerogel window bays. The furniture is modern modular, and clashes horribly with the original nineteenth-century architecture. “We were expecting you.”

“You were—” He shifts track with an effort. “I was here to see somebody. Here in Scotland, I mean.”

“Us.” She catches his eye deliberately. “To discuss sapience options with our patron.”

“With your—” He squeezes his eyes shut. “
Damn!
I don't
remember
. I need my glasses back. Please.”

“What about your backups?” she asks curiously.

“A moment.” Manfred tries to remember what address to ping. It's useless, and painfully frustrating. “It would help if I could remember where I keep the rest of my mind,” he complains. “It used to be at—oh,
there
.”

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—”