Asimov's Science Fiction 10-11/2001 Page 14
* * *
Manfred and Annette eat on the top deck of the buffet car as their TGV barrels through a tunnel under the English Channel. Annette, it transpires, has been commuting daily from Paris; which was, in any case, Manfred's next destination. From the show, he messaged Aineko to round up his baggage and meet him at Waterloo Station, in a terminal like the shell of a giant steel woodlouse. Annette left her space launcher in the supermarket overnight: an unfueled test article, it is of no security significance.
The railway buffet car is run by a Nepalese fast food franchise. “I sometimes wish for to stay on the train,” Annette says as she waits for her mismas bhat. “Past Paris! Think. Settle back in your couchette, to awaken in Moscow and change onto the TGV. All the way to Vladivostok in two days.” She reaches round her ears and removes her camera bugs, drops them in her breast pocket.
“If they let you through the border,” Manfred mutters. Russia is one of those places that still requires passports and asks if you are now or ever have been an anti-anti-communist: it's still trapped by its bloody-handed history. (Rewind the video stream to Stolypin and start out fresh.) Besides, they have enemies: white Russian oligarchs, protection racketeers in the intellectual property business. Psychotic relics of the failed experiment with Marxism-Objectivism. “Are you really a CIA stringer?”
Annette grins, her lips disconcertingly red: “I file dispatches from time to time. Nothing sensitive.”
Manfred nods. “My wife has access to their unfiltered stream.”
“Your—” Annette pauses. “She, I met? In De Wildemann's?” She sees his expression. “Oh, my poor fool!” She raises her glass to him. “It is not, has not gone, well?”
Manfred sighs and raises a toast toward Annette. “You know your marriage is in a bad way when you send your spouse messages via the CIA, and she communicates using the IRS.”
“In only two years.” Annette winces. “You will pardon me for saying this—she did not look like your type?”
“I'm not sure what my type is,” he says, truthfully. Sometimes he isn't even sure he's human any more; too many threads of his consciousness seem to live outside his head, reporting back whenever they find something interesting. Sometimes he feels like a puppet, and that frightens him because it's one of the early warning signs of schizophrenia. Right now, the external threads of his consciousness are telling him that they like Annette, when she's being herself instead of a cog in the meatspace ensemble of Arianespace management. “I want to be me. What do you want to be?”
She shrugs, as a waiter slides a plate in front of her. “I'm just a, a Parisian babe, no? An ingenue raised in the lilac age of le Confederacion Europée, the self-deconstructed ruins of the gilded European Union.”
“Yeah, right.” A plate appears in front of Manfred. “And I'm a good old micro-boomer from the MassPike corridor.” He peels back a corner of the omelet topping and inspects the food underneath it. “Born in the sunset years of the American century.” He pokes at one of the unidentifiable meaty lumps in the fried rice with his fork; it pokes right back. There's a limit to how much his agents can tell him about her—European privacy laws are draconian by American standards—but he knows the essentials. Two parents who are still together, father a petty politician in some town council down in the vicinity of Toulouse. Went to the right école. The obligatory year spent bumming around the Confederacion at government expense, learning how other people live—a new kind of empire building, in place of the last century's conscription and jackboot walkabout. No weblog or personal site that his agents can find. She joined Arianespace right out of the polytechnique and has been management track ever since: Korou, Manhattan Island, Paris. “You've never been married, I take it.”
She chuckles. “Time is too short! I am still young.” She picks up a forkful of food, and adds quietly: “Besides, the government would insist on paying.”
“Ah.” Manfred tucks into his bowl thoughtfully. With the birthrate declining across Europe, the EC bureaucracy is worried; the old EU started subsidizing babies, a new generation of carers, a decade ago, and it still hasn't dented the problem. All it's done is alienated the brightest women of childbearing age. Soon they'll have to look to the east for a solution, importing a new generation of citizens—unless the long-promised aging hacks prove workable.
“Do you have a hotel?” Annette asks suddenly.
“In Paris?” Manfred is startled: “Not yet.”
“You must come home with me, then.” She looks at him quizzically.
“I'm not sure I—” He catches her expression. “What is it?”
“Oh, nothing. My friend Henri, he says I take in strays too easily. But you are not stray. Besides, it is the Friday today. Come with me and I will file your press release for the Company to read. Tell me, do you dance? You look as if you need a wild week-ending, to help forget your troubles!”
* * *
Annette drives a steamroller seduction through Manfred's ascetic plans for the weekend. He intended to find a hotel, file a press release, then spend some time researching the corporate funding structure of Parents for Traditional Children and the dimensionality of confidence variation on the reputation exchanges—before heading for Rome. Instead, Annette drags him back to her apartment, a large studio flat tucked away behind an alley in the Marais. She sits him at the breakfast bar while she tidies away his luggage, then makes him close his eyes and swallow two dubious-tasting capsules. Next, she pours them each a tall glass of freezing-cold Aquavit that tastes exactly like Polish rye bread. When they finish it she just about rips his clothes off. Manfred is startled to discover that he has a crowbar-stiff erection; since the last blazing row with Pamela he'd vaguely assumed he was no longer interested in sex. Instead, they end up naked on the sofa, surrounded by discarded clothing—Annette is very conservative, preferring the naked penetrative fuck of the last century to the more sophisticated fetishes of the present day.
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, 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 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 blonde wig, red silk off-the-shoulder gown and high heels. Some time 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 multi-colored 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 replaces 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 second-hander enemies of objectivism. Reputations are 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—shaking his head, what was I on?—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. This is bad news for Manfred, who essentially earns his living by traveling the world, inventing cool intellectual properties, and giving them away in such a manner that they contribute as much to the commons as to their immediate recipients.
Manfred is a classic agalmic entrepreneur: he 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; being caught on the wrong side of the bed is a non-issue. 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. She seems more angry and shaken than worried by the intrusion; it's probably an occupational hazard in her line of work, as an upward-rising 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, so there's no way of getting a genotype match, and they left nothing on the door handles. 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 after the software industry won the lawsuits over MP3 downloads. They 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 now that he's hurt her, but he doesn't see any way of explaining that he didn't mean to—at least, not without working 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 email 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 c
ellular 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 and then delegated rather than passing on to the Free Intellect Foundation; some of them are effectively non-trading, 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 random 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 mis-management, 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 an 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 the day and night.
Manfred groans and does a quick calculation. At the current rate, lawsuits are hitting his corporate grid at a rate of one every sixteen seconds—up from none in the preceding six months. In another day, this is going to saturate him. If it keeps up for a week, it'll saturate every court in the United States. Someone has found a means to do for lawsuits what he's doing for companies—and they've chosen him as their target.
To say that Manfred is unamused is an understatement. If he weren't already preoccupied with Annette's emotional state and edgy from the intrusion, he'd be livid—but he's still human enough that he responds to human stimuli first. So he determines to do something about it, but he's still flashing on the floating gun, her cross-dressing cool.