Accelerando (13 page)

Gianni looks worried. “Manfred is prone to fits of do his own thing with telling nobody in advance. But I don't like this. He should have to told one of us first.” Ever since that first meeting in Rome when Gianni offered him a job, Manfred has been a core member of Gianni's team, the fixer who goes out and meets people and solves their problems. Losing him at this point could be more than embarrassing. Besides, he's a friend.

“I do not like this either.” She stands up. “If he doesn't call back soon—”

“You'll go and fetch him.”

“Oui.”
A smile flashes across her face, rapidly replaced by worry lines. “What can have happened?”

“Anything. Nothing.” Gianni shrugs. “But we cannot do without him.” He casts her a warning glance. “Or you. Don't let the borg get you. Either of you.”

“Not to worry. I will just bring him back, whatever has happened.” She stands up, surprising a vacuum cleaner that skulks behind her desk.
“Au revoir!”

“Ciao.”

As she vacates her office, the minister flickers off behind her, leaving the far wall the dull gray of a cold display panel. Gianni is in Rome, she's in Paris, Markus is in Düsseldorf, and Eva's in Wroclaw. There are others, trapped in digital cells scattered halfway across an elderly continent, but as long as they don't try to shake hands, they're free to shout across the office at each other. Their confidences and dirty jokes tunnel through multiple layers of anonymized communication.

Gianni is trying to make his break out of regional politics and into European national affairs: Their job—his election team—is to get him a seat on the Confederacy Commission, as Representative for Intelligence Oversight, and push the boundaries of posthumanistic action outward, into deep space and deeper time. Which makes the loss of a key team player, the house futurologist and fixer, profoundly interesting to certain people: The walls have ears, and not all the brains they feed into are human.

Annette is more worried than she's letting on to Gianni. It's unlike Manfred to be out of contact for long and even odder for his receptionist to stonewall her, given that her apartment is the nearest thing to a home he's had for the past couple of years. But something smells fishy. He sneaked out last night, saying it would be an overnight trip, and now he's not answering.
Could it be his ex-wife?
she wonders, despite Gianni's hints about a special mission. But there's been no word from Pamela other than the sarcastic cards she dispatches every year without fail, timed to arrive on the birthday of the daughter Manfred has never met.
The music Mafiya? A letter bomb from the Copyright Control Association of America?
But no, his medical monitor would have been screaming its head off if anything like that had happened.

Annette has organized things so that he's safe from the intellectual property thieves. She's lent him the support he needs, and he's helped her find her own path. She gets a warm sense of happiness whenever she considers how much they've achieved together. But that's exactly why she's worried now. The watchdog hasn't barked . . .

Annette summons a taxi to Charles de Gaulle. By the time she arrives, she's already used her parliamentary
carte
to bump an executive-class seat on the next A320 to Turnhouse, Edinburgh's airport, and scheduled accommodation and transport for her arrival. The plane is climbing out over la Manche before the significance of Gianni's last comment hits her. Might he think the Franklin Collective could be dangerous to Manfred?

The hospital emergency suite has a waiting room with green plastic bucket seats and subtractive volume renderings by preteens stuck to the walls like surreal Lego sculptures. It's deeply silent, the available bandwidth all sequestrated for medical monitors—there are children crying, periodic sirens wailing as ambulances draw up, and people chattering all around him, but to Manfred, it's like being at the bottom of a deep blue pool of quiet. He feels stoned, except this particular drug brings no euphoria or sense of well-being. Corridor-corner vendors hawk kebab-spitted pigeons next to the chained and rusted voluntary service booth; video cameras watch the blue bivvy bags of the chronic cases lined up next to the nursing station. Alone in his own head, Manfred is frightened and confused.

“I can't check you in 'less you sign the confidentiality agreement,” says the triage nurse, pushing an antique tablet at Manfred's face. Service in the NHS is still free, but steps have been taken to reduce the incidence of scandals. “Sign the nondisclosure clause here and here, or the house officer won't see you.”

Manfred stares blearily up at the nurse's nose, which is red and slightly inflamed from a nosocomial infection. His phones are bickering again, and he can't remember why; they don't normally behave like this. Something must be missing, but thinking about it is hard. “Why am I here?” he asks for the third time.

“Sign it.” A pen is thrust into his hand. He focuses on the page, jerks upright as deeply canalized reflexes kick in.

“This is theft of human rights! It says here that the party of the second part is enjoined from disclosing information relating to the operations management triage procedures and processes of the said health-giving institution, that's you, to any third party—that's the public media—on pain of forfeiture of health benefits pursuant to section two of the Health Service Reform Act. I can't sign this! You could repossess my left kidney if I post on the Net about how long I've been in hospital!”

“So don't sign, then.” The Hijra nurse shrugs, hitches up his sari, and walks away. “Enjoy your wait!”

Manfred pulls out his backup phone and stares at its display. “Something's
wrong
here.” The keypad beeps as he laboriously inputs opcodes. This gets him into an arcane and ancient X.25 PAD, and he has a vague, disturbing memory that hints about where he can go from here—mostly into the long-since-decommissioned bowels of NHSNet—but the memories spring a page fault and die somewhere between fingertips and the moment when understanding dawns. It's a frustrating feeling: His brain is like an ancient car engine with damp spark plugs, turning over and over without catching fire.

The kebab vendor next to Manfred's seating rail chucks a stock cube on his grill; it begins to smoke, aromatic and blue and herbal—cannabinoids to induce tranquillity and appetite. Manfred sniffs twice, then staggers to his feet and heads off in search of the toilet, his head spinning. He's mumbling at his wrist watch;
“Hello, Guatemala? Get me posology please. Click down my meme tree, I'm confused. Oh shit.
Who was I? What happened? Why is everything blurry? I can't find my glasses . . .”

A gaggle of day-trippers are leaving the leprosy ward, men and women dressed in anachronistic garb: men in dark suits, women in long dresses. All of them wear electric blue disposable gloves and face masks. There's a hum and crackle of encrypted bandwidth emanating from them, and Manfred instinctively turns to follow. They leave the A&E unit through the wheelchair exit, two ladies escorted by three gentlemen, with a deranged distressed refugee from the twenty-first century shuffling dizzily after.
They're all young,
Manfred realizes vaguely.
Where's my cat?
Aineko might be able to make sense of this, if Aineko was interested.

“I rather fancy we should retire to the club house,” says one young beau. “Oh yes! please!” his short blond companion chirps, clapping her hands together, then irritably stripping off the anachronistic plastic gloves to reveal wired-lace positional-sensor mitts underneath. “This trip has obviously been unproductive. If our contact is here, I see no easy way of locating him without breach of medical confidence or a hefty gratuity.”

“The poor things,” murmurs the other woman, glancing back at the leprosarium. “Such a humiliating way to die.”

“Their own fault: If they hadn't participated in antibiotic abuse, they wouldn't be in the isolation ward,” harrumphs a twentysomething with muttonchops and the manner of a precocious paterfamilias. He raps his walking stick on the pavement for punctuation, and they pause for a flock of cyclists and a rickshaw before they cross the road onto The Meadows. “Degenerate medication compliance, degenerate immune systems.”

Manfred pauses to survey the grass, brain spinning as he ponders the fractal dimensionality of leaves. Then he lurches after them, nearly getting himself run down by a flywheel-powered tourist bus.
Club
. His feet hit the pavement, cross it, thud down onto three billion years of vegetative evolution.
Something about those people.
He feels a weird yearning, a tropism for information. It's almost all that's left of him—his voracious will to know. The tall, dark-haired woman hitches up her long skirts to keep them out of the mud. He sees a flash of iridescent petticoats that ripple like oil on water, worn over old-fashioned combat
boots. Not Victorian, then: something else.
I came here to see
—the name is on the tip of his tongue. Almost. He feels that it has something to do with these people.

The squad crosses The Meadows by way of a tree-lined path and comes to a nineteenth-century frontage with wide steps and a polished brass doorbell. They enter, and the man with the muttonchops pauses on the threshold and turns to face Manfred. “You've followed us this far,” he says. “Do you want to come in? You might find what you're looking for.”

Manfred follows with knocking knees, desperately afraid of whatever he's forgotten.

Meanwhile, Annette is busy interrogating Manfred's cat.

“When did you last see your father?”

Aineko turns its head away from her and concentrates on washing the inside of its left leg. Its fur is lifelike and thick, pleasingly patterned except for a manufacturer's URL emblazoned on its flanks, but the mouth produces no saliva; the throat opens on no stomach or lungs. “Go away,” it says. “I'm busy.”

“When did you last see Manfred?” she repeats intently. “I don't have time for this. The polis don't know. The medical services don't know. He's off-net and not responding. So what can
you
tell me?”

It took her precisely eighteen minutes to locate his hotel once she hit the airport arrivals area and checked the hotel booking front end in the terminal: She knows his preferences. It took her slightly longer to convince the concierge to let her into his room. But Aineko is proving more recalcitrant than she'd expected.

“AI Neko mod two alpha requires maintenance downtime on a regular basis,” the cat says pompously. “You knew that when you bought me this body. What were you expecting, five-nines uptime from a lump of meat? Go away, I'm thinking.” The tongue rasps out, then pauses while microprobes in its underside replace the hairs that fell out earlier in the day.

Annette sighs. Manfred's been upgrading this robot cat for years, and his ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its neural configuration, too:
This is its third body, and it's getting more realistically uncooperative with every hardware upgrade. Sooner or later it's going to demand a litter tray and start throwing up on the carpet. “Command override,” she says. “Dump event log to my Cartesian theatre, minus eight hours to present.”

The cat shudders and looks round at her. “Human bitch!” it hisses. Then it freezes in place as the air fills with a bright and silent tsunami of data. Both Annette and Aineko are wired for extremely high-bandwidth spread-spectrum optical networking; an observer would see the cat's eyes and a ring on her left hand glow blue-white at each other. After a few seconds, Annette nods to herself and wiggles her fingers in the air, navigating a time sequence only she can see. Aineko hisses resentfully at her, then stands and stalks away, tail held high.