Accelerando

'The -' Annette does a doubletake as her thesaurus conspires with her open government firmware and dumps a geographical database of city social services into her sensorium. 'Oh, I see.' The Grassmarket itself is touristy, but the bits off to one end – down a dingy canyon of forbidding stone buildings six stories high – are decidedly downmarket. 'Okay.'

Annette weaves past a stall selling disposable cellphones and cheaper genome explorers, round a gaggle of teenage girls in the grips of some kind of imported kawaii fetish, who look at her in alarm from atop their pink platform heels – probably mistaking her for a school probation inspector – and past a stand of chained and parked bicycles. The human attendant looks bored out of her mind. Annette tucks a blandly anonymous ten-Euro note in her pocket almost before she notices: 'If you were going to buy a hot bike,' she asks, 'where would you go?' The parking attendant stares, and for a moment Annette thinks she's overestimated her. Then she mumbles something.

'What?'

'McMurphy's. Used to be called Bannerman's. Down yon Cowgate, thataway.' The meter maid looks anxiously at her rack of charges. 'You didn't -'

'Uh-huh.' Annette follows her gaze: straight down the dark stone canyon. Well, okay. 'This had better be worth it, Manny mon cher,' she mutters under her breath.

McMurphy's is a fake Irish pub, a stone grotto installed beneath a mound of blank-faced offices. It was once a real Irish pub before the developers got their hands on it and mutated it in rapid succession into a punk nightclub, a wine bar, and a fake Dutch coffee shop; after which, as burned-out as any star, it left the main sequence. Now it occupies an unnaturally prolonged, chilly existence as the sort of recycled imitation Irish pub that has neon four- leafed clovers hanging from the artificially blackened pine beams above the log tables – in other words, the burned-out black dwarf afterlife of a once-serious drinking establishment. Somewhere along the line, the beer cellar was replaced with a toilet (leaving more room for paying patrons upstairs), and now its founts dispense fizzy concentrate diluted with water from the city mains.

'Say, did you hear the one about the Eurocrat with the robot pussy who goes into a dodgy pub on the Cowgate and orders a coke? And when it arrives, she says 'hey, where's the mirror?''

'Shut up,' Annette hisses into her shoulder bag. 'That isn't funny.' Her personal intruder telemetry has just emailed her wristphone, and it's displaying a rotating yellow exclamation point, which means that according to the published police crime stats, this place is likely to do grievous harm to her insurance premiums.

Aineko looks up at her from his nest in the bag and yawns cavernously, baring a pink, ribbed mouth and a tongue like pink suede. 'Want to make me? I just pinged Manny's head. The network latency was trivial.'

The barmaid sidles up and pointedly manages not to make eye contact with Annette. 'I'll have a Diet Coke,'

Annette orders. In the direction of her bag, voice pitched low: 'Did you hear the one about the Eurocrat who goes into a dodgy pub, orders half a liter of Diet Coke, and when she spills it in her shoulder bag she says 'oops, I've got a wet pussy'?'

The Coke arrives. Annette pays for it. There may be a couple of dozen people in the pub; it's hard to tell because it looks like an ancient cellar, lots of stone archways leading off into niches populated with secondhand church pews and knife-scarred tables. Some guys who might be bikers, students, or well-dressed winos are hunched over one table: hairy, wearing vests with too many pockets, in an artful bohemianism that makes Annette blink until one of her literary programs informs her that one of them is a moderately famous local writer, a bit of a guru for the space and freedom party. There're a couple of women in boots and furry hats in one corner, poring over the menu, and a parcel of off-duty street performers hunching over their beers in a booth. Nobody else is wearing anything remotely like office drag, but the weirdness coefficient is above average; so Annette dials her glasses to extra-dark, straightens her tie, and glances around.

The door opens and a nondescript youth slinks in. He's wearing baggy BDUs, woolly cap, and a pair of boots that have that quintessential essense de panzer division look, all shock absorbers and olive drab Kevlar panels.

He's wearing -

'I spy with my little network intrusion detector kit,' begins the cat, as Annette puts her drink down and moves in on the youth, 'something beginning with -'

'How much you want for the glasses, kid?' she asks quietly.

He jerks and almost jumps – a bad idea in MilSpec combat boots, the ceiling is eighteenth-century stone half a meter thick; 'Dinnae fuckin' dae that,' he complains in an eerily familiar way: 'Ah -' he swallows. 'Annie!

Who -'

'Stay calm. Take them off – they'll only hurt you if you keep wearing them,' she says, careful not to move too fast because now she has a second, scary-jittery fear, and she knows without having to look that the exclamation mark on her watch has turned red and begun to flash: 'Look, I'll give you two hundred Euros for the glasses and the belt pouch, real cash, and I won't ask how you got them or tell anyone.' He's frozen in front of her, mesmerized, and she can see the light from inside the lenses spilling over onto his half-starved adolescent cheekbones, flickering like cold lightning, like he's plugged his brain into a grid bearer; swallowing with a suddenly dry mouth, she slowly reaches up and pulls the spectacles off his face with one hand and takes hold of the belt pouch with the other. The kid shudders and blinks at her, and she sticks a couple of hundred-Euro notes in front of his nose. 'Scram,' she says, not unkindly.

He reaches up slowly, then seizes the money and runs – blasts his way through the door with an ear-popping concussion, hangs a left onto the cycle path, and vanishes downhill toward the parliament buildings and university complex.

Annette watches the doorway apprehensively. 'Where is he?' she hisses, worried: 'Any ideas, cat?'

'Naah. It's your job to find him,' Aineko opines complacently. But there's an icicle of anxiety in Annette's spine. Manfred's been separated from his memory cache? Where could he be? Worse – who could he be?

'Fuck you, too,' she mutters. 'Only one thing for it, I guess.' She takes off her own glasses – they're much less functional than Manfred's massively ramified custom rig – and nervously raises the repo'd specs toward her face. Somehow what she's about to do makes her feel unclean, like snooping on a lover's e-mail folders. But how else can she figure out where he might have gone?

She slides the glasses on and tries to remember what she was doing yesterday in Edinburgh.

* * *

'Gianni?'

' Oui, ma cherie? '

Pause. 'I lost him. But I got his aid-memoire back. A teenage freeloader playing cyberpunk with them. No sign of his location – so I put them on.'

Pause. 'Oh dear.'

'Gianni, why exactly did you send him to the Franklin Collective?'

Pause. (During which, the chill of the gritty stone wall she's leaning on begins to penetrate the weave of her jacket.) 'I not wanting to bother you with trivia.'

' Merde. It's not trivia, Gianni, they're accelerationistas. Have you any idea what that's going to do to his head?'

Pause: Then a grunt, almost of pain. 'Yes.'

'Then why did you do it?' she demands vehemently. She hunches over, punching words into her phone so that other passers-by avoid her, unsure whether she's hands-free or hallucinating: 'Shit, Gianni, I have to pick up the pieces every time you do this! Manfred is not a healthy man, he's on the edge of acute future shock the whole time, and I was not joking when I told you last February that he'd need a month in a clinic if you tried running him flat out again! If you're not careful, he could end up dropping out completely and joining the borganism -'

'Annette.' A heavy sigh: 'He are the best hope we got. Am knowing half-life of agalmic catalyst now down to six months and dropping; Manny outlast his career expectancy, four deviations outside the normal, yes, we know this. But I are having to break civil rights deadlock now, this election. We must achieve consensus, and Manfred are only staffer we got who have hope of talking to Collective on its own terms. He are deal-making messenger, not force burnout, right? We need coalition reserve before term limit lockout followed by