Accelerando

Spring-Heeled Jack runs blind, blue fumes crackling from his heels. His right hand, outstretched for balance, clutches a mark's stolen memories. The victim is sitting on the hard stones of the pavement behind him. Maybe he's wondering what's happened; maybe he looks after the fleeing youth. But the tourist crowds block the view effectively, and in any case, he has no hope of catching the mugger. Hit-and-run amnesia is what the polis call it, but to Spring-Heeled Jack it's just more loot to buy fuel for his Russian army-surplus motorized combat boots.

* * *

The victim sits on the cobblestones clutching his aching temples. What happened? he wonders. The universe is a brightly colored blur of fast-moving shapes augmented by deafening noises. His ear-mounted cameras are rebooting repeatedly: They panic every eight hundred milliseconds, whenever they realize that they're alone on his personal area network without the comforting support of a hub to tell them where to send his incoming sensory feed. Two of his mobile phones are bickering moronically, disputing ownership of his grid bandwidth, and his memory… is missing.

A tall blond clutching an electric chainsaw sheathed in pink bubble wrap leans over him curiously: 'you all right?' she asks.

'I -' He shakes his head, which hurts. 'Who am I?' His medical monitor is alarmed because his blood pressure has fallen: His pulse is racing, his serum cortisol titer is up, and a host of other biometrics suggest that he's going into shock.

'I think you need an ambulance,' the woman announces. She mutters at her lapel, 'Phone, call an ambulance. ' She waves a finger vaguely at him as if to reify a geolink, then wanders off, chainsaw clutched under one arm. Typical southern emigre behavior in the Athens of the North, too embarrassed to get involved. The man shakes his head again, eyes closed, as a flock of girls on powered blades skid around him in elaborate loops. A siren begins to warble, over the bridge to the north.

Who am I? he wonders. 'I'm Manfred,' he says with a sense of stunned wonder. He looks up at the bronze statue of a man on a horse that looms above the crowds on this busy street corner. Someone has plastered a Hello Cthulhu! holo on the plaque that names its rider: Languid fluffy pink tentacles wave at him in an attack of kawaii.

'I'm Manfred – Manfred. My memory. What's happened to my memory?' Elderly Malaysian tourists point at him from the open top deck of a passing bus. He burns with a sense of horrified urgency. I was going somewhere, he recalls. What was I doing? It was amazingly important, he thinks, but he can't remember what exactly it was. He was going to see someone about – it's on the tip of his tongue -

* * *

Welcome to the eve of the third decade: a time of chaos characterized by

an all-out depression in the space industries.

Most of the thinking power on the planet is now manufactured rather than

born; there are ten microprocessors for every human being, and the

number is doubling every fourteen months. Population growth in the

developing world has stalled, the birth rate dropping below replacement

level. In the wired nations, more forward-looking politicians are looking for

ways to enfranchise their nascent AI base.

Space exploration is still stalled on the cusp of the second recession of

the century. The Malaysian government has announced the goal of

placing an imam on Mars within ten years, but nobody else cares enough

to try.

The Space Settlers Society is still trying to interest Disney Corp. in the

media rights to their latest L5 colony plan, unaware that there's already a

colony out there and it isn't human: First-generation uploads, Californian

spiny lobsters in wobbly symbiosis with elderly expert systems, thrive

aboard an asteroid mining project established by the Franklin Trust.

Meanwhile, Chinese space agency cutbacks are threatening the

continued existence of Moonbase Mao. Nobody, it seems, has figured out

how to turn a profit out beyond geosynchronous orbit.

Two years ago, JPL, the ESA, and the uploaded lobster colony on comet

Khrunichev-7 picked up an apparently artificial signal from outside the

solar system; most people don't know, and of those who do, even fewer

care. After all, if humans can't even make it to Mars, who cares what's

going on a hundred trillion kilometers farther out?

* * *

Portrait of a wasted youth:

Jack is seventeen years and eleven months old. He has never met his father; he was unplanned, and Dad managed to kill himself in a building-site accident before the Child Support could garnish his income for the upbringing. His mother raised him in a two-bedroom housing association flat in Hawick. She worked in a call center when he was young, but business dried up: Humans aren't needed on the end of a phone anymore. Now she works in a drop-in business shop, stacking shelves for virtual fly-by-nights that come and go like tourists in the Festival season – but humans aren't in demand for shelf stacking either, these days.

His mother sent Jack to a local religious school, where he was regularly excluded and effectively ran wild from the age of twelve. By thirteen, he was wearing a parole cuff for shoplifting; by fourteen, he'd broken his collarbone in a car crash while joyriding and the dour Presbyterian sheriff sent him to the Wee Frees, who completed the destruction of his educational prospects with high principles and an illicit tawse.

Today, he's a graduate of the hard school of avoiding public surveillance cameras, with distinctions in steganographic alibi construction. Mostly this entails high-density crime – if you're going to mug someone, do so where there are so many bystanders that they can't pin the blame on you. But the polis expert systems are on his tail.

If he keeps it up at this rate, in another four months they'll have a positive statistical correlation that will convince even a jury of his peers that he's guilty as fuck – and then he'll go down to Saughton for four years.

But Jack doesn't understand the meaning of a Gaussian distribution or the significance of a chi-square test, and the future still looks bright to him as he pulls on the chunky spectacles he ripped off the tourist gawking at the statue on North Bridge. And after a moment, when they begin whispering into his ears in stereo and showing him pictures of the tourist's vision, it looks even brighter.

'Gotta make a deal, gotta close a deal,' whisper the glasses. 'Meet the borg, strike a chord.' Weird graphs in lurid colors are filling up his peripheral vision, like the hallucinations of a drugged marketroid.

'Who the fuck are ye?' asks Jack, intrigued by the bright lights and icons.

'I am your Cartesian theatre and you are our focus,' murmur the glasses. 'Dow Jones down fifteen points, Federated Confidence up three, incoming briefing on causal decoupling of social control of skirt hem lengths, shaving pattern of beards, and emergence of multidrug antibiotic resistance in Gram-negative bacilli: Accept?'

'Ah can take it,' Jack mumbles, as a torrent of images crashes down on his eyeballs and jackhammers its way in through his ears like the superego of a disembodied giant. Which is actually what he's stolen: The glasses and waist pouch he grabbed from the tourist are stuffed with enough hardware to run the entire Internet, circa the turn of the millennium. They've got bandwidth coming out the wazoo, distributed engines running a bazillion inscrutable search tasks, and a whole slew of high-level agents that collectively form a large chunk of the society of mind that is their owner's personality. Their owner is a posthuman genius loci of the net, an agalmic entrepreneur turned policy wonk, specializing in the politics of AI emancipation. When he was in the biz he was the kind of guy who catalysed value wherever he went, leaving money trees growing in his footprints. Now he's the kind of political