The Rhesus Chart by Charles Stross Read Free Book Online Page B

night . . .
But what if it didn’t? There’d be a reckoning at tomorrow morning’s stand-up meeting. In the theater of his mind’s eye he could see Mhari smiling at him pleasantly and voicing all the apologies he’d have loved to keep to himself. He could hear Evan exercising his sense of humor, warped and slightly patronizing, playing off the weaknesses of his pair-programming partner. Maybe Oscar gracelessly and grumpily demanding to know what his salary was good for, if not this?
I can’t go home,
he thought dismally.
Not until I’ve eaten my dog food.
    He looked round. For a miracle he was on his own. Janice was out of the office, dragged down to one of the server farms to supervise installation of some new piece of kit—he vaguely remembered hearing mention of the bank’s acquisition of a D-Wave quantum annealer. Dick and Evan had gone along to rubberneck. Mhari and Oscar were in a meeting, and John had left early to attend a summit conference in a pub. It was a rare and peculiar experience to be alone in the Scrum’s offices during working hours.
Fuck it,
he thought tiredly, then pushed himself back in his chair, seeking the focal point at the exact center of the cluster of five monitors on swivel-arms that overhung his desktop. Trading had closed a couple of hours ago: he badly needed a break.
Do I have time for half an hour in EVE Online—
    He reached out to touch his mouse and stared into the off-piste depths of My Little Pony affiliate marketing futures, just at the moment that one of the stuck Möbius gears in his mind’s eye clicked forward a notch.
     • • • 
    HIATUS.
    Consciousness crashed back into Alex’s head like the shards of a broken stable door banging to the ground behind a fleeing horse. Personality congealed out of nothing, in the midst of a monstrous chittering buzzing like a swarm of bees assembling themselves into larger and more complex units, grabbing hold of each other, reintegrating his scattered thoughts in the aftermath of—what?
    Alex opened his eyes and tried to make sense of the grainy black-and-white shapes around him. The side of his cheek was hurting; the small of his back ached. He breathed out. Inhaled again, and color flooded into his vision. He was slumped across his desk, and the sharp edges in his face were the keys of his keyboard. He was half out of his chair:
Glad I didn’t fall—
    His arms felt like limp noodles. He tensed, then braced himself and pushed upright. For a moment the world spun around his head; then he realized that he was, in fact, moving: his chair was spinning frictionlessly around on the axis of its gas strut. Nausea racked his stomach as he dragged a foot along the anti-static carpet, slowing the gyration.
I must have blacked out,
he reasoned. In his head he watched as Möbius gear-trains shimmered and rotated through a five-dimensional planetary cycle, mysterious and ineffable. It made perfect sense, in a manner he couldn’t quite bring himself to articulate.
That’s it!
he realized triumphantly, and grabbed his keyboard to freeze his insight in code before the moment slipped away.
    Fifteen minutes passed. Or it might have been an hour, or three. Alex saved a new snapshot of the project to the common code repository and leaned back, dizzy and still slightly nauseous. “What happened?” he asked aloud, then looked at the screen. Icy panic flooded through his guts.
    I lost consciousness!
a corner of his mind gibbered.
I had a mini-stroke! Just like aunt Alicia!
His great-aunt had undergone a series of transient ischemic attacks, then ended up in hospital just in time for the big one. In conjunction with too many gruesome public information ads, her experience had instilled in Alex a deep dread of cerebrovascular accidents. He fully expected to die shuddering on the floor of a dirty toilet cubicle, paralyzed on one side, if he so much as drew breath in a room where one of his colleagues had been honking the Honduran