Fractions by Ken MacLeod

up the collective on the open phone and left a message that he was off-active and looking forward to some good music when he came home. In their constantly shuffled slangy codes, ‘music’ currently meant party, ‘good music’ meant some heavy political problem had come down. He pacified the ravenous cravings that usually followed marijuana with a coffee, biscuits and a tobacco cigarette. A week of night shifts and his circadian rhythms were shot. And any day or week or month now he could be trying to deal with not one but two insurrections. One of which would target sites he and his company were paid to protect.
    Once he would have welcomed both. Now, the thought of yet another of the ANR ’s notorious ‘final’ offensives filled him only with a weary dismay, for all that he wished them well. Still theoretically a citizen of the Republic, true-born son of England and so on and so forth, Kohn had what he considered a sober grasp of the ANR ’s chances. On any scale of political realism they’d be registered by a needle twitching at the bottom end of the dial.
    As for the other lot, the Left Alliance…Their only chance lay in the remote possibility of detonating the kind of social explosion which they had discounted in advance by the alliances they’d made – with the cranks, the greens, the barbarians, the whole rabble that everyone with a glimmer of sense lumped together as the barb. Socialism and barbarism. Some factions of the old party, fragments of old man Trotsky’s endlessly twisting and recombining junk DNA, were in the Alliance, just like they were in all the other movements: lost cause and effect of a forgotten history that had taken too many wrong turnings ever to find its way back. Nothing left for him now but to fight a rearguard action, to hold back the multiplying divisions of the night, where red and green showed the same false colours in the dark.
    Good music.
    He thought about Cat, how nearly he had come to killing her, but her image was pale, fading off into the background. He kept seeing Janis Taine – his memories sharp, delineated, definite. Like the woman herself. One of his most distinct impressions was that she wasn’t at all impressed with him. Part of him, he realized, had already marked that down as a challenge.
    Memories. She was investigating memory. He’d discovered this interesting fact while checking damage reports after coming off-shift, and it had brought him moseying and nosing along this morning. Her conversation had confirmed it, and now it was time for him to investigate it.
    Kohn had a problem with memories. He had vivid memories of his childhood and of his teens, but there was a period in between where it was all scratches and static. He knew what had happened then, but he found it almost impossible to think himself back to it, to remember.
    He got up and laid the gun gently on the desk and connected it to the back of the terminal.
    â€˜Seek,’ he told it.
    In his own mind he called it The Swiss Army Gun. He’d customized it around a state-of-the-art Kalashnikov and a Fujitsu neural-net chip, upgraded its capabilities with all the pirated software he could lay hands on – he’d stripped processors and sensors out of security devices he’d outwitted, out of little nuisance maintenance robots he’d potted like pigeons, and he’d bolted the whole lot on. He suspected that its hardware capacity by now vastly exceeded its resident software. Besides the standard features that made it a smart weapon, it ran pattern-recognition learning systems, natural-language HCI , interfaces that patched images to his glades, and enough specialized information-servers to start a small business – gophers to explore databases and bring back selected information, filters to scan newsgroups – all integrated around and reporting back to a fetch that could throw a convincing virtual image of himself: his