Accelerando by Charles Stross Page B

neurasthenic agonies, but really doesn’t give a shit about that as long as the power supply is clean and there are no intruders.
    Aineko curls up and joins Manfred in sleep, dreaming of laser-guided mice.

    Manfred is jolted awake by the hotel room phone shrilling for attention.
    â€œHello?” he asks, fuzzily.
    â€œManfred Macx?” It’s a human voice, with a gravelly East Coast accent.
    â€œYeah?” Manfred struggles to sit up. His mouth feels like the inside of a tomb, and his eyes don’t want to open.
    â€œMy name is Alan Glashwiecz, of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates. Am I correct in thinking that you are the Manfred Macx who is a director of a company called, uh, agalmic dot holdings dot root dot one-eight-four dot ninety-seven dot A-for-able dot B-for-baker dot five, incorporated?”
    â€œUh.” Manfred blinks and rubs his eyes. “Hold on a moment.” When the retinal patterns fade, he pulls on his glasses and powers them up. “Just a second now.” Browsers and menus ricochet through his sleep-laden eyes. “Can you repeat the company name?”
    â€œSure.” Glashwiecz repeats himself patiently. He sounds as tired as Manfred feels.
    â€œUm.” Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object hierarchy. It’s flashing for attention. There’s a priority interrupt, an incoming lawsuit that hasn’t propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. “I’m afraid I’m not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical contractor with nonexecutive power, reporting to the president, but frankly, this is the first time I’ve ever heard of the company. However, I can tell you who’s in charge if you want.”
    â€œYes?” The attorney sounds almost interested. Manfred figures it out;the guy’s in New Jersey. It must be about three in the morning over there.
    Malice—revenge for waking him up—sharpens Manfred’s voice. “The president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!” He thumps the bedside phone control and sits up, yawning, then pushes the do-not-disturb button before it can interrupt again. After a moment he stands up and stretches, then heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth, comb his hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a human being managed to get far enough through his web of robot companies to bug him.

    While he’s having breakfast in the hotel restaurant, Manfred decides that he’s going to do something unusual for a change: He’s going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred’s normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn’t believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition—his world is too fast and information dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games. However, his current situation calls for him to do something radical: something like making himself a temporary billionaire so he can blow off his divorce settlement in an instant, like a wily accountancy octopus escaping a predator by vanishing in a cloud of his own black ink.
    Pam is chasing him partially for ideological reasons—she still hasn’t given up on the idea of government as the dominant superorganism of the age—but also because she loves him in her own peculiar way, and the last thing any self-respecting dom can tolerate is rejection by her slave. Pam is a born-again postconservative, a member of the first generation to grow up after the end of the American century. Driven by the need to fix the decaying federal system before it collapses under a mound