Accelerando by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online Page B

I’ll give you back a new intelligence, and you can look after it to your heart’s content.”
    â€œBut you didn’t need to do it this way—”
    â€œDidn’t I?” She slides off the bed and pulls down her dress. “You give too much away too easily, Manny! Slow down, or there won’t be anything left.” Leaning over the bed she dribbles acetone onto the fingers of his left hand, then unlocks the cuff. She leaves the bottle of solvent conveniently close to hand so he can untangle himself.
    â€œSee you tomorrow. Remember, after breakfast.”
    She’s in the doorway when he calls, “But you didn’t say why !”
    â€œThink of it as being sort of like spreading your memes around,” she says, blowing a kiss at him and then closing the door. She bends down and thoughtfully places another cardboard box containing an uploaded kitten right outside it. Then she returns to her suite to make arrangements for the alchemical wedding.

2: TROUBADOUR
    T HREE YEARS LATER , M ANFRED IS ON THE RUN . H IS gray-eyed fate is in hot pursuit, blundering after him through divorce court, chat room, and meetings of the International Monetary Emergency Fund. It’s a merry dance he leads her. But Manfred isn’t running away, he’s discovered a mission. He’s going to make a stand against the laws of economics in the ancient city of Rome. He’s going to mount a concert for the spiritual machines. He’s going to set the companies free, and break the Italian state government.
    In his shadow, his monster runs, keeping him company, never halting.

    Manfred re-enters Europe through an airport that’s all twentieth-century chrome and ductwork, barbaric in its decaying nuclear-age splendor. He breezes through customs and walks down a long, echoing arrival hall, sampling the local media feeds. It’s November, and in a misplaced corporate search for seasonal cheer, the proprietors have come up with a final solution to the Christmas problem, a mass execution of plush Santas and elves. Bodies hang limply overhead every few meters,feet occasionally twitching in animatronic death, like a war crime perpetrated in a toy shop. Today’s increasingly automated corporations don’t understand mortality, Manfred thinks, as he passes a mother herding along her upset children. Their immortality is a drawback when dealing with the humans they graze on: They lack insight into one of the main factors that motivates the meat machines who feed them. Well, sooner or later we’ll have to do something about that, he tells himself.
    The free media channels here are denser and more richly self-referential than anything he’s seen in President Santorum’s America. The accent’s different, though. Luton, London’s fourth satellite airport, speaks with an annoyingly bumptious twang, like Australian with a plum in its mouth. Hello, stranger! Is that a brain in your pocket or are you just pleased to think me? Ping Watford Informatics for the latest in cognitive modules and cheesy motion-picture references. He turns the corner and finds himself squeezed up against the wall between the baggage reclaim office and a crowd of drunken Belgian tractor-drag fans, while his left goggle is trying to urgently tell him something about the railway infrastructure of Columbia. The fans wear blue face paint and chant something that sounds ominously like the ancient British war cry, Wemberrrly, Wemberrrly, and they’re dragging a gigantic virtual tractor totem through the webspace analogue of the arrivals hall. He takes the reclaim office instead.
    As he enters the baggage reclaim zone, his jacket stiffens, and his glasses dim: He can hear the lost souls of suitcases crying for their owners. The eerie keening sets his own accessories on edge with a sense of loss, and for a moment he’s so spooked that he nearly shuts down the thalamic–limbic shunt interface that lets him