“Uh – what?”
“I have been on this shop floor for six hours, and my feet, they kill me.” She takes hold of his left arm and very deliberately unhooks her earrings, turning them off. “If I say to you I can write for the CIA wire service, will you take me to a restaurant and buy me dinner and tell me what it is you want to say?”
*
Welcome to the second decade of the twenty-first century; the second
decade in human history when the intelligence of the environment has
shown signs of rising to match human demand.
The news from around the world is distinctly depressing this evening. In
Maine, guerrillas affiliated with Parents for Traditional Children announce
they’ve planted logic bombs in antenatal-clinic gene scanners, making
them give random false positives when checking for hereditary disorders:
The damage so far is six illegal abortions and fourteen lawsuits.
The International Convention on Performing Rights is holding a third
round of crisis talks in an attempt to stave off the final collapse of the
WIPO music licensing regime. On the one hand, hard-liners representing
the Copyright Control Association of America are pressing for restrictions
on duplicating the altered emotional states associated with specific media
performances: As a demonstration that they mean business, two
“software engineers” in California have been kneecapped, tarred,
feathered, and left for dead under placards accusing them of reverse—
engineering movie plot lines using avatars of dead and out-of-copyright
stars.
On the opposite side of the fence, the Association of Free Artists are
demanding the right of perform music in public without a recording
contract, and are denouncing the CCAA as being a tool of Mafiya
apparachiks who have bought it from the moribund music industry in an
attempt to go legit. FBI Director Leonid Kuibyshev responds by denying
that the Mafiya is a significant presence in the United States. But the
music biz’s position isn’t strengthened by the near collapse of the
legitimate American entertainment industry, which has been accelerating
ever since the nasty noughties.
A marginally intelligent voicemail virus masquerading as an IRS auditor
has caused havoc throughout America, garnishing an estimated eighty
billion dollars in confiscatory tax withholdings into a numbered Swiss bank
account. A different virus is busy hijacking people’s bank accounts,
sending ten percent of their assets to the previous victim, then mailing
itself to everyone in the current mark’s address book: a self-propelled
pyramid scheme in action. Oddly, nobody is complaining much. While the
mess is being sorted out, business IT departments have gone to standby,
refusing to process any transaction that doesn’t come in the shape of ink
on dead trees.
Tipsters are warning of an impending readjustment in the overinflated
reputations market, following revelations that some u-media gurus have
been hyped past all realistic levels of credibility. The consequent damage
to the junk-bonds market in integrity is serious.
The EU council of independent heads of state has denied plans for
another attempt at Eurofederalisme, at least until the economy rises out
of its current slump. Three extinct species have been resurrected in the
past month; unfortunately, endangered ones are now dying off at a rate of
one a day. And a group of militant anti-GM campaigners are being
pursued by Interpol, after their announcement that they have spliced a
metabolic pathway for cyanogenic glycosides into maize seed corn
destined for human-edible crops. There have been no deaths yet, but
having to test breakfast cereal for cyanide is really going to dent
consumer trust.
About the only people who’re doing well right now are the uploaded
lobsters – and the crusties aren’t even remotely human.
*
Manfred and Annette eat on the top deck of the buffet car, chatting 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 St.
Pancras 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 trains. All the way to Vladivostok in two days.”
“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-anticommunist: It’s still trapped by its bloody-handed history. (Rewind the video stream to Stolypin’s necktie party and start out fresh.) Besides, they have enemies: White Russian oligarchs, protection racketeers in the intellectual property business. Psychotic relics of the last decade’s experiment with Marxism-Objectivism. “Are you really a CIA stringer?”
Annette grins, her lips disconcertingly red: “I file dispatches from time to time. Nothing that could get me fired.”
Manfred nods. “My wife has access to their unfiltered stream.”
“Your -” Annette pauses. “It was she who I, I met? In De Wildemann’s?” She sees his expression. “Oh, my poor fool!” She raises her glass to him. “It is, 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 five years.” Annette winces. “You will pardon me for saying this – she did not look like your type.” There’s a question hidden behind that statement, and he notices again how good she is at overloading her statements with subtexts.
“I’m not sure what my type is,” he says, half-truthfully. He can’t elude the sense that something not of either of their doing went wrong between him and Pamela, a subtle intrusion that levered them apart by stealth. Maybe it was me, he thinks. Sometimes he isn’t certain he’s still human; 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. And it’s too early for anyone out there to be trying to hack exocortices… isn’t it? 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. But the part of him that’s still human isn’t sure just how far to trust himself. “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 ingénue raised in the lilac age of le Confederaçion Europé, the self-deconstructed ruins of the gilded European Union.”
“Yeah, right.” A plate appears in front of Manfred. “And I’m a good old microboomer 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, and 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 st
andards – 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 Confederaçion at government expense, learning how other people live – a new kind of empire building, in place of the 20th century’s conscription and jackboot wanderjahr. 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 birth rate 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 alienate 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, or cheap AI comes along.
“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 a stray. I think you can look after yourself. 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 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 – then head 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 Aqvavit 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 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 make-up, 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 dis
patch 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 back-up. 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.
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