Accelerando (9 page)

Afterward, he's even more surprised to discover that he's still tumescent. “The capsules?” he asks.

She sprawls a well-muscled but thin thigh across him, then reaches down to grab his penis. Squeezes it. “Yes,” she admits. “You need much special help to unwind, I think.” Another squeeze. “Crystal meth and a traditional phosphodiesterase inhibitor.” He grabs one of her small breasts, feeling very brutish and primitive.
Naked
. He's not sure Pamela ever let him see her fully naked: She thought skin was more sexy when it was covered. Annette squeezes him again, and he stiffens. “More!”

By the time they finish, he's aching, and she shows him how to use the bidet. Everything is crystal clear, and her touch is electrifying. While she showers, he sits on the toilet seat lid and rants about Turing-completeness as an attribute of company law, about cellular automata and the blind knapsack problem, about his work on solving the Communist Central Planning problem using a network of interlocking unmanned companies. About the impending market adjustment in
integrity, the sinister resurrection of the recording music industry, and the still-pressing need to dismantle Mars.

When she steps out of the shower, he tells her that he loves her. She kisses him and slides his glasses and earpieces off his head so that he's
really
naked, sits on his lap, and fucks his brains out again, and whispers in his ear that she loves him and wants to be his manager. Then she leads him into her bedroom and tells him exactly what she wants him to wear, and she puts on her own clothes, and she gives him a mirror with some white powder on it to sniff. When she's got him dolled up they go out for a night of really serious clubbing, Annette in a tuxedo and Manfred in a blond wig, red silk off-the-shoulder gown, and high heels. Sometime in the early hours, exhausted and resting his head on her shoulder during the last tango in a BDSM club in the Rue Ste-Anne, he realizes that it really
is
possible to be in lust with someone other than Pamela.

Aineko wakes Manfred by repeatedly head-butting him above the left eye. He groans and, as he tries to open his eyes, he finds that his mouth tastes like a dead trout, his skin feels greasy with makeup, and his head is pounding. There's a banging noise somewhere. Aineko meows urgently. He sits up, feeling unaccustomed silk underwear rubbing against incredibly sore skin—he's fully dressed, just sprawled out on the sofa. Snores emanate from the bedroom; the banging is coming from the front door. Someone wants to come in.
Shit
. He rubs his head, stands up, and nearly falls flat on his face: He hasn't even taken those ridiculous high heels off.
How
much
did I drink last night?
he wonders. His glasses are on the breakfast bar; he pulls them on and is besieged by an urgent flurry of ideas demanding attention. He straightens his wig, picks up his skirts, and trips across to the door with a sinking feeling. Luckily, his publicly traded reputation is strictly technical.

He unlocks the door. “Who is it?” he asks in English. By way of reply somebody shoves the door in, hard. Manfred falls back against the wall, winded. His glasses stop working, sidelook displays filling with multicolored static.

Two men charge in, identically dressed in jeans and leather jackets. They're wearing gloves and occlusive face masks, and one of them
points a small and very menacing ID card at Manfred. A self-propelled gun hovers in the doorway, watching everything. “Where is he?”

“Who?” gasps Manfred, breathless and terrified.

“Macx.” The other intruder steps into the living room quickly, pans around, ducks through the bathroom door. Aineko flops as limp as a dishrag in front of the sofa. The intruder checks out the bedroom: There's a brief scream, cut off short.

“I don't know—who?” Manfred is choking with fear.

The other intruder ducks out of the bedroom, waves a hand dismissively.

“We are sorry to have bothered you,” the man with the card says stiffly. He replaced it in his jacket pocket. “If you should see Manfred Macx, tell him that the Copyright Control Association of America advises him to cease and desist from his attempt to assist music thieves and other degenerate mongrel secondhander enemies of Objectivism. Reputations only of use to those alive to own them. Goodbye.”

The two copyright gangsters disappear through the door, leaving Manfred to shake his head dizzily while his glasses reboot. It takes him a moment to register the scream from the bedroom. “Fuck!
Annette!
”

She appears in the open doorway, holding a sheet around her waist, looking angry and confused. “Annette!” he calls. She looks around, sees him, and begins to laugh shakily. “Annette!” He crosses over to her. “You're okay,” he says. “You're okay.”

“You, too.” She hugs him, and she's shaking. Then she holds him at arm's length. “My, what a pretty picture!”

“They wanted me,” he says, and his teeth are chattering.
“Why?”

She looks up at him seriously. “You must bathe. Then have coffee. We are not at home,
oui
?”

“Ah,
oui
.” He looks down. Aineko is sitting up, looking dazed. “Shower. Then that dispatch for CIA news.”

“The dispatch?” She looks puzzled. “I filed that last night. When I was in the shower. The microphone, he is waterproof.”

By the time Arianespace's security contractors show up, Manfred has stripped off Annette's evening gown and showered; he's sitting in the
living room wearing a bathrobe, drinking a half-liter mug of espresso and swearing under his breath.

While he was dancing the night away in Annette's arms, the global reputation market has gone nonlinear: People are putting their trust in the Christian Coalition and the Eurocommunist Alliance—always a sign that the times are bad—while perfectly sound trading enterprises have gone into free fall, as if a major bribery scandal has broken out.

Manfred trades ideas for kudos via the Free Intellect Foundation, bastard child of George Soros and Richard Stallman.
His
reputation is cemented by donations to the public good that don't backfire. So he's offended and startled to discover that he's dropped twenty points in the past two hours—and frightened to see that this is by no means unusual. He was expecting a ten-point drop mediated via an options trade—payment for the use of the anonymous luggage remixer that routed his old suitcase to Mombasa and in return sent this new one to him via the left-luggage office in Luton—but this is more serious. The entire reputation market seems to have been hit by the confidence flu.

Annette bustles around busily, pointing out angles and timings to the forensics team her head office sent in answer to her call for backup. She seems more angry and shaken than worried by the intrusion. It's probably an occupational hazard for any upwardly mobile executive in the old, grasping network of greed that Manfred's agalmic future aims to supplant. The forensics dude and dudette, a pair of cute, tanned Lebanese youngsters, point the yellow snout of their mass spectroscope into various corners and agree that there's something not unlike gun oil in the air. But, so sorry, the intruders wore masks to trap the skin particles and left behind a spray of dust vacuumed from the seat of a city bus, so there's no way of getting a genotype match. Presently they agree to log it as a suspected corporate intrusion (origin: unclassified; severity: worrying) and increase the logging level on her kitchen telemetry. And remember to wear your earrings at all times, please. They leave, and Annette locks the door, leans against it, and curses for a whole long minute.

“They gave me a message from the copyright control agency,” Manfred says unevenly when she winds down. “Russian gangsters from New York bought the recording cartels a few years ago, you know? After the rights stitch-up fell apart, and the artists all went online while they focused on copy prevention technologies, the Mafiya were the only people
who would buy the old business model. These guys add a whole new meaning to copy protection: This was just a polite cease and desist notice by their standards. They run the record shops, and they
try
to block any music distribution channel they don't own. Not very successfully, though—most gangsters are living in the past, more conservative than any normal businessman can afford to be. What was it that you put on the wire?”

Annette closes her eyes. “I don't remember. No.” She holds up a hand. “Open mike. I streamed you into a file and cut, cut out the bits about me.” She opens her eyes and shakes her head. “What was I
on
?”

“You don't know either?”

He stands up, and she walks over and throws her arms around him. “I was on
you,
” she murmurs.

“Bullshit.” He pulls away, then sees how this upsets her. Something is blinking for attention in his glasses; he's been off-line for the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that's happened in the last twenty kiloseconds. “I need to know more.
Something
in that report rattled the wrong cages. Or someone ratted on the suitcase exchange—I meant the dispatch to be a heads-up for whoever needs a working state planning system, not an invitation to shoot me!”

“Well, then.” She lets go of him. “Do your work.” Coolly: “I'll be around.”

He realizes that he's hurt her, but he doesn't see any way of explaining that he didn't mean to—at least, not without digging himself in deeper. He finishes his croissant and plunges into one of those unavoidable fits of deep interaction, fingers twitching on invisible keypads and eyeballs jiggling as his glasses funnel deep media straight into his skull through the highest bandwidth channel currently available.

One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic messages, companies with names like agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0 screaming for the attention of their transitive director. Each of these companies—and there are currently more than sixteen thousand of them, although the herd is growing day by day—has three directors and is the director of three other companies. Each of them executes a script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors tell the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass instructions
on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of cellular automata, like the cells in Conway's Game of Life, only far more complex and powerful.

Manfred's companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed with capital in the form of patents Manfred filed, then delegated rather than passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them are effectively nontrading, but occupy directorial roles. Their corporate functions (such as filing of accounts and voting in new directors) are all handled centrally through his company-operating framework, and their trading is carried out via several of the more popular B2B enabler dot-coms. Internally, the companies do other, more obscure load-balancing computations, processing resource-allocation problems like a classic state central planning system. None of which explains why fully half of them have been hit by lawsuits in the past twenty-two hours.

The lawsuits are . . .
random
. That's the only pattern Manfred can detect. Some of them allege patent infringements; these he might take seriously, except that about a third of the targets are director companies that don't actually do anything visible to the public. A few lawsuits allege mismanagement, but then there's a whole bizarre raft of spurious nonsense: suits for wrongful dismissal or age discrimination—against companies with no employees—complaints about reckless trading, and one action alleging that the defendant (in conspiracy with the prime minister of Japan, the government of Canada, and the Emir of Kuwait) is using orbital mind-control lasers to make the plaintiff's pet Chihuahua bark at all hours of day and night.