Fractions by Ken MacLeod Page A

messenger, decoy and stunt double.
    Someday he would get around to documenting it.
    He set it to find out more about the project Janis Taine was working on. Terminal identifications, effortlessly and habitually memorized; official project definitions, pasted from the admin database; traces of Taine’s library searches; molecular structures decoded down from the gun’s chemical analyser – all of them pulled together by Dissembler, the most successful and widespread piece of freeware ever written, a self-correcting, evolving compiler/translator that lived in the eyeblink gap between input and output. Mips – processing cycles, computer power – had always been cheaper than bandwidth. The computers got cheaper by the week and the phone bills stayed high by the month. Dissembler exploited this differential, turning data streams – sparse and skimpy, stripped and squeezed like the words of poetry – into images and sound and text endlessly adjusted to the user’s profile. Anonymous, uncopyrighted, it had spread like a benign virus for a quarter of a century. By now not even the software engineers who’d built it into DoorWays ™ – the current smash-hit, chart-topping, must-have interface – had a clue how it worked.
    Moh did, but tried not to think about it. It was part of the memory damage.
    He launched his hastily assembled probe.
    Mindlessly sophisticated programs swarmed into the university’s networks, expanding like a lazily blown smoke-ring, searching out weaknesses, trapdoors, encryption keys left momentarily unguarded. Most of them would get trashed by Security, but there was a chance that one would come back with the goods. Not for some time, though.
    Kohn got up and reached to separate the basic weapon from its smart-box, the extra magazine that made it like a dog with two tails, then remembered where he was going and stayed his hand. Whether the rifle was smart or dumb, he couldn’t take it with him. The Geneva Convention’s Annexe On the Laws of Irregular Warfare, Inter-communal Violence and Terrorism was painstakingly explicit about that.
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    The university’s branch of the Nat-Mid-West Bank backed on to a long-established patch of waste-ground, now symbolically fenced off and holding a couple of wooden cabins, their walls emblazoned with rampantly pluralist graffiti. New Situationists, Alternative Luddites (they wore space-rigger gear and blew up wind-power plants), Christianarchists, cranks, creeps, commies, tories – all had had their say, in colour. It was legally defined as a holding area and more cynically known as a Body Bank. It wasn’t guarded, and no one tried to escape.
    â€˜Now let’s see what we’ve got, Mr Kohn,’ the teller trilled as she minced away from the counter and tapped at a keyboard, taking care with her nails, which extended a centimetre beyond her fingertips. ‘You have four against the Carbon Life Alliance, right?’
    â€˜Three,’ said Kohn.
    â€˜Oh. Oh, I see.’ She looked up at him, a neat pair of creases appearing for a moment between her plucked, pencilled eyebrows; then she looked down again. ‘Well, isn’t this your lucky day? One of your people is held by the Planet Partisans, and they have a standing arrangement, so that’s one out of the way. Bye-ee! Your friend’s just been released. Ah. The CLA are willing to offer ten thousand Dockland dollars—’
    â€˜No thanks.’
    â€˜â€”or equivalent in negotiables – arms or neurochemicals at today’s opening prices – per combatant, less equipment losses.’
    â€˜What?’
    She looked up and fluttered thick black eyelashes.
    â€˜You did damage a timing mechanism, didn’t you?’
    â€˜It wasn’t worth fifty grams!’
    â€˜Oh, that’s quite acceptable. Delivery as usual?’
    â€˜The Ruislip depot. Yeah, we’ll take it.’
    She buzzed through to