Accelerando (16 page)

“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 takes 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—”

Alan glances over his shoulder at Manfred. “I don't think feeding him guarana was a good idea,” he says in tones of deep foreboding.

Manfred's mode of vibration has gone nonlinear by this point. He's rocking front to back and jiggling up and down in little hops, like a technophiliacal yogic flyer trying to bounce his way to the singularity. Monica leans toward him and her eyes widen: “Manfred,” she hisses,
“shut up!”

He stops babbling abruptly, with an expression of deep puzzlement. “Who am I?” he asks, and keels over backward. “Why am
I,
here and now, occupying this body—”

“Anthropic anxiety attack,” Monica comments. “I think he did this in Amsterdam eight years ago when Bob first met him.” She looks alarmed, a different identity coming to the fore. “What shall we
do
?”

“We have to make him comfortable.” Alan raises his voice. “Bed, make yourself ready, now.” The back of the sofa Manfred is sprawled on flops downward, the base folds up, and a strangely animated duvet crawls up over his feet. “Listen, Manny, you're going to be all right.”

“Who am I and what do I signify?” Manfred mumbles incoherently. “A mass of propagating decision trees, fractal compression, lots of synaptic junctions lubricated with friendly endorphins—” Across the
room, the bootleg pharmacopoeia is cranking up to manufacture some heavy tranquilizers. Monica heads for the kitchen to get something for him to drink them in. “Why are you doing this?” Manfred asks, dizzily.

“It's okay. Lie down and relax.” Alan leans over him. “We'll talk about everything in the morning, when you know who you are.” (Aside to Monica, who is entering the room with a bottle of iced tea: “Better let Gianni know that he's unwell. One of us may have to go visit the minister. Do you know if Macx has been audited?”) “Rest up, Manfred. Everything is being taken care of.”

About fifteen minutes later, Manfred—who, in the grip of an existential migraine, meekly obeys Monica's instruction to drink down the spiked tea—lies back on the bed and relaxes. His breathing slows; the subliminal muttering ceases. Monica, sitting next to him, reaches out and takes his right hand, which is lying on top of the bedding.

“Do you want to live forever?” she intones in Bob Franklin's tone of voice. “You can live forever in me . . .”