Accelerando

whatever bit-bucket you've given control of your speech centers to – they're putting out way too much double entendre, somebody might mistake you for a grown-up.'

'You stick to your business, and I'll stick to mine,' she says, emphatically. 'And you can start by telling me what's happening.'

'Nothing.' He leans back and crosses his arms, grimacing at the screen. 'It's going to drift for five hundred seconds, now, then there's the midcourse correction and a deceleration burn before touch down. And then it's going to be an hour while it unwraps itself and starts unwinding the cable spool. What do you want, minute noodles with that?'

'Uh-huh.' Amber spreads her bat wings and lies back in mid air, staring at the window, feeling rich and idle as Pierre works his way through her day shift. 'Wake me when there's something interesting to see.' Maybe she should have had him feed her peeled grapes or give her a foot massage, something more traditionally hedonistic; but right now, just knowing he's her own little piece of alienated labor is doing good things for her self-esteem. Looking at those tense arms, the curve of his neck, she thinks maybe there's something to this whispering and giggling he really fancies you stuff the older girls go in for -

The window rings like a gong, and Pierre coughs. 'You've got mail,' he says drily. 'You want me to read it for you?'

'What the -' A message is flooding across the screen, right-to-left snaky script like the stuff on her corporate instrument (now lodged safely in a deposit box in Zurich). It takes her a while to load in a grammar agent that can handle Arabic, and another minute for her to take in the meaning of the message. When she does, she starts swearing, loudly and continuously.

'You bitch, Mom, why'd you have to go and do a thing like that?'

* * *

The corporate instrument arrived in a huge FedEx box addressed to Amber: It happened on her birthday while Mom was at work, and she remembers it as if it was only an hour ago.

She remembers reaching up and scraping her thumb over the deliveryman's clipboard, the rough feel of the microsequencers sampling her DNA. She drags the package inside. When she pulls the tab on the box, it unpacks itself automatically, regurgitating a compact 3D printer, half a ream of paper printed in old-fashioned dumb ink, and a small calico cat with a large @-symbol on its flank. The cat hops out of the box, stretches, shakes its head, and glares at her. 'You're Amber?' it mrowls. It actually makes real cat noises, but the meaning is clear – it's able to talk directly to her linguistic competence interface.

'Yeah,' she says, shyly. 'Are you from Tante 'Nette?'

'No, I'm from the fucking tooth fairy.' It leans over and head-butts her knee, strops the scent glands between its ears all over her skirt. 'Listen, you got any tuna in the kitchen?'

'Mom doesn't believe in seafood,' says Amber. 'It's all foreign-farmed muck these days, she says. It's my birthday today, did I tell you?'

'Happy fucking birthday, then.' The cat yawns, convincingly realistic. 'Here's your dad's present. Bastard put me in hibernation and sent me along to show you how to work it. You take my advice, you'll trash the fucker.

No good will come of it.'

Amber interrupts the cat's grumbling by clapping her hands gleefully; 'So what is it?' she demands: 'A new invention? Some kind of weird sex toy from Amsterdam? A gun, so I can shoot Pastor Wallace?'

'Naah.' The cat yawns, yet again, and curls up on the floor next to the 3D printer. 'It's some kinda dodgy business model to get you out of hock to your mom. Better be careful, though – he says its legality is narrowly scoped jurisdiction-wise. Your Mom might be able to undermine it if she learns about how it works.'

'Wow. Like, how totally cool.' In truth, Amber is delighted because it is her birthday; but Mom's at work, and Amber's home alone, with just the TV in moral majority mode for company. Things have gone downhill since Mom decided a modal average dose of old-time religion was an essential part of her upbringing, to the point that absolutely the best thing in the world Tante Annette could send her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If it doesn't work, Mom will take her to Church tonight, and she's certain she'll end up making a scene again.

Amber's tolerance of willful idiocy is diminishing rapidly, and while building up her memetic immunity might be the real reason Mom's forcing this shit on her – it's always hard to tell with Mom – things have been tense ever since she got expelled from Sunday school for mounting a spirited defense of the theory of evolution.

The cat sniffs in the direction of the printer. 'Why doncha fire it up?' Amber opens the lid on the printer, removes the packing popcorn, and plugs it in. There's a whir and a rush of waste heat from its rear as it cools the imaging heads down to working temperature and registers her ownership.

'What do I do now?' she asks.

'Pick up the page labeled READ ME and follow the instructions,' the cat recites in a bored singsong voice.

It winks at her, then fakes an exaggerated French accent: 'Le READ ME, il sont contain directions pour executing le corporate instrument dans le boit. In event of perplexity, consult the accompanying Aineko for clarification.' The cat wrinkles its nose rapidly, as if it's about to bite an invisible insect: 'Warning: Don't rely on your father's cat's opinions, it is a perverse beast and cannot be trusted. Your mother helped seed its meme base, back when they were married. Ends.' It mumbles on for a while: 'Fucking snotty Parisian bitch, I'll piss in her knicker drawer, I'll molt in her bidet…'

'Don't be vile.' Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards – a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari'a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn't easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law – the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It's not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her – that's what her grammar engine is for – or even that they're full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: But the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning chattel slaves.

'What's going on?' she asks the cat. 'What's this all about?'

The cat sneezes, then looks disgusted. 'This wasn't my idea, big shot. Your father is a very weird guy, and your mother hates him lots because she's still in love with him. She's got kinks, y'know? Or maybe she's sublimating them, if she's serious about this church shit she's putting you through. He thinks she's a control freak, and he's not entirely wrong. Anyway, after your dad ran off in search of another dom, she took out an injunction against him.

But she forgot to cover his partner, and she bought this parcel of worms and sent them to you, okay? Annie is a real bitch, but he's got her wrapped right around his finger, or something. Anyway, he built these companies and this printer – which isn't hardwired to a filtering proxy, like your mom's – specifically to let you get away from her legally. If that's what you want to do.'

Amber fast-forwards through the dynamic chunks of the README – boring legal UML diagrams, mostly

– soaking up the gist of the plan. Yemen is one of the few countries to implement traditional Sunni shari'a law and a limited liability company scam at the same time. Owning slaves is legal – the fiction is that the owner has an option hedged on the indentured laborer's future output, with interest payments that grow faster than the unfortunate victim can pay them off – and companies are legal entities. If Amber sells herself into slavery to this company, she will become a slave and the company will be legally liable for her actions and upkeep. The rest of the legal instrument – about ninety percent of it, in fact – is a set of self-modifying corporate mechanisms coded in a variety of jurisdictions that permit Turing-complete company constitutions, and which act as an ownership shell for the slavery contract. At the far end of the corporate shell game is a trust fund of which Amber is the prime beneficiary and shareholder. When she reaches the age of majority, she'll acquire total control over all the companies in the network and can dissolve her slave contract; until then, the trust fund (which she essentially owns) oversees the company that owns her (and keeps it safe from hostile takeover bids). Oh, and the company network is primed by an extraordinary general meeting that instructed it to move the trust's assets to Paris immediately. A one-way airline ticket is enclosed.

'You think I should take this?' she asks uncertainly. It's hard to tell how smart the cat really is – there's