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Charles Stross Contents Antibodies A Boy and his God The Boys A Colder War The Concrete Jungle Dechlorinating the Moderator Different Flesh Down On The Farm Examination Night Extracts from the Club Diary Generation Gap Halo Lobsters MAXO signals Mss*g* n t*m* c*ps*l* The Midlist Bombers Minutes of the Labour Party Conference, 2016 Missile Gap Nightfall Pimpf Red, Hot and Dark Remade Rogue Farm SEAQ and Destroy Ship of Fools Snowball’s Chance Something Sweet Toast: A Con Report Trunk And Disorderly Yellow Snow Appeals Court Unwirer Jury Service Tarkovsky’s Cut There were less than two weeks to go until Christmas, and flakes of snow were settling silently on the windowsill. Sue leaned against the wall next to the casement so that her breath formed patterns of condensation on the glass. The red glow of the newly-lit street lights turned the falling snow to blood, drifting down across the deserted alleyway behind the lab. She blinked slowly. Was it her imagination or was there a new shadow
There were less than two weeks to go until Christmas, and flakes of snow were settling silently on the windowsill. Sue leaned against the wall next to the casement so that her breath formed patterns of condensation on the glass. The red glow of the newly-lit street lights turned the falling snow to blood, drifting down across the deserted alleyway behind the lab. She blinked slowly. Was it her imagination or was there a new shadow behind the dump-bins? Holding her breath so that it would not fog the glass, she stared out of the window. The shadow disappeared and she breathed out. Then she undid the catch and swung the window open in invitation. “You’re late,” she said. The shadow reappeared in front of her, resolved into the shape of a man shrouded in a donkey-jacket against the cold. “Rush-hour traffic,” he said, his voice somehow deadened by the softness that settled on every surface. “Help me in?” Sue extended a hand. He took it and levered himself up and over the sill. He swung him
EVERYONE REMEMBERS WHERE they were and what they were doing when a member of the great and the good is assassinated. Gandhi, the Pope, Thatcher-if you were old enough you remembered where you were when you heard, the ticker-tape of history etched across your senses. You can kill a politician but their ideas usually live on. They have a life of their own. How much more dangerous, then, the ideas of mathematicians ? I was elbow-deep in an eviscerated PC, performing open heart surgery on a diseased network card, when the news about the travelling salesman theorem came in. Over on the other side of the office John’s terminal beeped, notification of incoming mail. A moment later my own workstation bonged. “Hey, Geoff! Get a load of this!” I carried on screwing the card back into its chassis. John is not a priority interrupt. “Someone’s come up with a proof that NP-complete problems lie in P! There’s a posting in comp.risks saying they’ve used it to find an O*(n 2) solution to the travelling
Once upon a time Howie had a god. It lived in the kennel where Juniper the mongrel had stayed until he died the winter before. Howie’s mom Sophie was of the opinion that a pet god represented better value for money. After all, it didn’t wake you up barking whenever the postwoman came by. And you didn’t have to have a licence for one, either. Howie was inconsolable when Juniper died. They’d grown up together, been playmates for all of Howie’s twelve years, and though Howie never did learn to wag his tail – or Juniper to to do his sums – they understood one another perfectly. He sobbed and wailed and wept rivers when Juniper was run over, and sulked all March until Fred Phillips said to his wife, “Don’t you think it’s about time we got something to replace Juniper?” Sophie Phillips rolled her eyes. “Pooper-scooper,” she muttered; “flea powder, bath time, walks in the rain. Are you crazy?” Do not be decieved; it wasn’t that Sophie didn’t like animals. She loved them; she’d been so crazy a
The boys scuttled over the concrete slab like cockroaches, exoskeletons a dull bronze in the orange glare that passed for daylight. A dense mist concealed rocks and ankles and a corpse. The roar of a police carrier echoed through the trees, a pulsing racket of authority: the boys didn’t care. By the time the patrol arrived the corpse was brain dead, stripped of eyes and kidneys and viscera as well as bionics. The boys had left their incestuous joke with the corpse; a noose. Darkness descended on the area, a protective screen for the armoured hovercraft as it swept through the gap in the forest, cruising slowly between fungus-streaked biomass modules. Among the video surfaces that lined the cabin the Hunter sat bolt upright; her screens scintillated as she focussed on the partially-dismembered cadaver. “Boys; He’s been dead for half an hour.” The constables flinched and whined; she noticed them and moderated her voice. They were sensitive units, too valuable to waste. “Nothing here,” sh
Analyst Roger Jourgensen tilts back in his chair, reading. He’s a fair-haired man, in his mid-thirties: hair razor-cropped, skin pallid from too much time spent under artificial lights. Spectacles, short-sleeved white shirt and tie, photographic ID badge on a chain round his neck. He works in an air-conditioned office with no windows. The file he is reading frightens him. Once, when Roger was a young boy, his father took him to an open day at Nellis AFB, out in the California desert. Sunlight glared brilliantly from the polished silverplate flanks of the big bombers, sitting in their concrete-lined dispersal bays behind barriers and blinking radiation monitors. The brightly coloured streamers flying from their pitot tubes lent them a strange, almost festive appearance. But they were sleeping nightmares: once awakened, nobody—except the flight crew—could come within a mile of the nuclear-powered bombers and live. Looking at the gleaming, bulging pods slung under their wingtip pylons, Ro
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/ The death rattle of a mortally wounded telephone is a horrible thing to hear at four o’clock on a Tuesday morning. It’s even worse when you’re sleeping the sleep that follows a pitcher of iced margueritas in the basement of the Dog’s Bollocks, with a chaser of nachos and a tequila slammer or three for dessert. I come to, sitting upright, bare-ass naked in the middle of the wooden floor, clutching the receiver with one hand and my head with the other—purely to prevent it from exploding, you understand—and moaning quietly. “Who is it?” I croak into the microphone. “Bob, get your ass down to the office right away. This line isn’t secure.” I recognize that voice: I have nightmares about it. That’s because I work for its owner. “Whoa, I was asleep, boss. Can’t it—” I gulp and look at the alarm clock “—wait until morning?” “No. I’m calling a code blue.” “Jesus.” The band of demons stomping around my skull strike up an encore with drums. “Okay, boss. Ready to
A perspective on Particulate 7: HiNRG & B-OND Venue: Maastricht Hilton Travelodge International Hotel, 30 March—2 April 2018 Yr hmbl crrspndnt rprts: This was the seventh and biggest Particulate. It’s fair to say that these cons have come of age; with about seven hundred guests and maybe three—hundred walkins on the door there’s no longer any question that the concom can make ends meet. Indeed they’re already hard at work scoping out a venue for Particulate #8. I checked in on Friday morning to find that about a hundred die-hard geeks had hit the con the night before, and the registration desk’s bookings system was toast. The hotel has hosted the last two Particulates, and they knew what to expect; as I arrived two bemused porters were helping a spotty youth hump weird-shaped bits of gear crusted in radiation trefoils into the baggage lifts. Everyone had to pass a check at a discreet security booth by the door, to prevent any recurrence of the regrettable incident that nearly wrecked l
The five of them gathered together on the stone balcony that jutted from the western wing of the ballroom, high above the formal gardens of the Schloss Twilight. The dancers whirled on into the evening behind them, unaware of the passage of time outside their dream of music and motion. Bishop Morden looked over the crumbling balustrade at the hedges and flower beds below. One of the stuffed penguins caught a slanting ray of light and seemed to wink at him; he shuddered, briefly genuflected to the five poi nts, then turned away. “Would you care for an aperitif?” asked Lady Stael, expectantly. “I am aware that the servants cannot be relied upon today, but—” The Bishop smiled uneasily and sidled away from the edge of the terrace. “No my dear,” he said, “I fear for my digestion! Perhaps an infusion of gentian would be of help, but for the time being I am distraught with worries that I would not care to inflict upon your gentle head: and they have sorely aggravated my colic. Perhaps, howeve
A “Bob Howard/Laundry” short story Ah, the joy of summer: here in the south-east of England it’s the season of mosquitoes, sunburn, and water shortages. I’m a city boy, so you can add stifling pollution to the list as a million outwardly mobile families start their Chelsea tractors and race to their holiday camps. And that’s before we consider the hellish environs of the Tube (far more literally hellish than anyone realizes, unless they’ve looked at a Transport for London journey planner and recognized the recondite geometry underlying the superimposed sigils of the underground map). But I digress … One morning, my deputy head of department wanders into my office. It’s a cramped office, and I’m busy practicing my Frisbee throw with a stack of beer mats and a dart-board decorated with various cabinet ministers. “Bob,” Andy pauses to pluck a moist cardboard square out of the air as I sit up, guiltily: “a job’s just come up that you might like to look at—I think it’s right up your street.
Midsummer night, and a thin haze of mist rose from the gutters. Vendors and peddlars hawked their wares by the light of guttering oil lamps, long after most would normally have been abed. A strange bustle of business kept them busy, tradesmen and fishwives and dragoons and whores strutting and shrieking and haggling with forced vehemence beneath the posies hanging from the eaves of taverns and shops; meanwhile balls and soirees ran on late into the night among the scented gardens of the rich. There was a dark undertow of fear among the revellers in the streets, and some of them muttered prayers and cast out the evil eye with fetishistic regularity. It was a custom of the city that on solstice night one must not sleep; for according to the legend anyone who closed their eyes between sunset and sunrise would awaken to find themselves in the abyss. Midsummer night was a time when the slings and arrows of fate were supplemented by the guided missiles of demonic malice, for the University h
August 16th, 1889 Nobody likes to admit to an addiction; especially when the substance abused is as apparently innoccuous, yet as subtly damaging as the subject of this diary. It reflects a lack of foresight on the part of the participant, a naivete if you will, in not predicting the inevitable social humiliation, concordant upon the revelation that they lack sufficient moral probity to avoid the pitfalls of temptation. It is my hope that, having confessed privately to one-another that we share this particular craving, and having incorporated our club with all due secrecy and pomp, we may now indulge in our infatuation. Morever, it is my hope that we may do so secure in the knowledge that no murmur of our Habit may reach the world at large—or worse, the Press. It being the case that our Club is a secret body, admittance to the membership of which is by invitation only—and then to the most close-lipped and trustworthy of fellows—I feel it incumbent upon me to start a journal of our acti
I didn’t go to school to learn about genocide; I learned it on the bus with Jerzy and Moira and Hammurabi, and we made beautiful corpses. The light was blue and the time was five diurns from sunset when we caught on to the idea; and it was slick. Slick and smooth as my inside parts when I come. My Wisdom pipes me that there’s a type-descriptor for what we were – juvenile delinquents. Pejorative, maybe envious context is implied. (Envious of what? We shone with youth. Wouldn’t you be envious?) Anyway, I guess you’ll want to know why we did it, or at least why I went along, so here goes … School was irrelevant. That was the initial factor that started the tree growing. It’s public knowledge, I guess; all there is to learn in life is search strategy and peoplemoving. If you can dig the data and move masses you can roll. The moon’s your runway. Why the earth we reference it as the moon is beyond me, by the way; moon of what? Some radioactive dirt-ball? I guess we should redefine “the world
The asteroid is running Barney: it sings of love on the high frontier, of the passion of matter for replicators, and its friendship for the needy billions of the Pacific Rim. “I love you,” it croons in Amber’s ears as she seeks a precise fix on it: “let me give you a big hug ….” A fraction of a light-second away, Amber locks a cluster of cursors together on the signal, trains them to track its Doppler shift, and reads off the orbital elements. “Locked and loaded,” she mutters. The animated purple dinosaur pirouettes and prances in the middle of her viewport, throwing a diamond-tipped swizzle-stick overhead. Sarcastically: “big hug time! I got asteroid!” Cold gas thrusters bang somewhere behind her in the interstage docking ring, prodding the cumbersome farm ship round to orient on the Barney rock. She damps her enthusiasm selfconsciously, her implants hungrily sequestrating surplus neurotransmitter molecules floating around her synapses before reuptake sets in: it doesn’t do to get too
Manfred’s on the road again, making strangers rich. It’s a hot summer Tuesday and he’s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops it and squirts at his website to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: he’s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed. He wonders who it’s going to be. Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at th
Futures Nature|Vol 436|25 August 2005 A new and unfortunate solution to the Fermi paradox. SIR—In the three years since the publica tion and confirmation of the first micro wave artefact of xenobiological origin (MAXO), and the subsequent detection of similar signals, interdisciplinary teams have invested substantial effort in object frequency analysis, parsing, symbolic encoding and signal processing. The excitement generated by the availability of such close evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence proximity. has been enormous. However, after the We have formu initial, easily decoded symbolic represenlated an explana tational map was analysed, the semantics tory hypothesis that of the linguistic payload were found to cultural variables unfa be refractory. A total of 21 confirmed MAXO signals have been received to date. These super ficially similar signals originate from planetary systems within a range of 11 par secs, median 9.9 parsecs1. It has been spec ulated that the observed gr
—Dash it! Is this gadget turned on, Miss Feng? —No, I was not enquiring as to its state of sexual arousal, thank you. —What, it is on, is it? Fascinating! Ahem. Look here, allow me to introduce myself. I’ve only got three hundred of your what-do-you-call-its … seconds … so I shall have to be jolly brisk, what? —This is a time capsule. I am told it only holds eight megawotsits of data, enough for a brief natter and a G&T. I’m sure your clankie tech chappies can figure it all out: something to do with the chronic entropy barrier, I’m told, otherwise we’d be able to send you a couple of uploads and a God program to eat your brains instead of this deeply tedious message in a bottle. —(Do I really sound like that? No, don’t tell me, Miss Feng. Just pass the Port.) —I am Sir Ralph Takahashi, the MacGregor of Clan MacGregor, hereditary patron of Gelnochy distillery, heir to the Takahashi trust in Yokohama, and governor-general of Batley. I come from a long line of upper-class twits; blue bloo
T minus 19 days 8:23 a.m. For Nigel Frogland, the apocalypse started with a letter. He stumbled downstairs towards kitchen and coffee percolator, pausing by the door to yawn widely and grab the daily influx of bills and overdrawn bank statements from the letter box. This was an autonomic reflex, as vital to the author as flapping its wings was to a headless chicken; he blinked sleepily at the three envelopes in his hand before staggering into the kitchen to wait for the kettle. Two bills, he thought, but what’s this? Looks like it’s from Victoria … he reached for the bread-knife. Letters from Victoria Bergdorf, his editor, were always worth reading no matter which side they were buttered on. But he was in for a surprise. Dear Nigel, As you are aware, we at Schnickel and Bergdorf have prided ourselves for fifty years on our commitment to fundamental literary values, providing the best service possible to the public and our authors. This is a tradition which we are – we think justifiably
PREAMBLE TO THE MINUTES OF THE LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE, 2016 Greetings from the National Executive. Before reading any further, please refer to the Security Note and ensure that your receipt and use of this document is in compliance with Party security policies. If you have any doubts at all, burn this document immediately. —— SECURITY NOTE —— This is an official Labour Party Document. Possession of all such documents is a specific offense under (2)(2)(f) of the Terrorism Act (2006). Amendments passed by the current government using the powers granted in the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act (2006) have raised the minimum penalty for possession to 10 years imprisonment. In addition, persons suspected of membership of or sympathy for the Labour Party are liable for arrest and sentencing as subversives under the Defence of the Realm Act (2014). You must destroy this document immediately, for your own safety, if: You have any cause to suspect that a neighbour or member of your househo
It’s 1976 again. Abba are on the charts, the Cold War is in full swing—and the Earth is flat. It’s been flat ever since the eve of the Cuban war of 1962; and the constellations overhead are all wrong. Beyond the Boreal ocean, strange new continents loom above tropical seas, offering a new start to colonists like newly-weds Maddy and Bob, and the hope of further glory to explorers like ex-cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: but nobody knows why they exist, and outside the circle of exploration the universe is inexplicably warped. Gregor, in Washington DC, knows but isn’t talking. Colonel-General Gagarin, on a years-long mission to go where New Soviet Man has not gone before, is going to find out. And on the edge of an ancient desert, beneath the aged stars of another galaxy, Maddy is about to come face-to-face with humanity’s worst fear … From Booklist: “With the dazzling success of his last two novels, including the Hugo-nominated Accelerando (2005), Stross is rapidly establishing himself as one o
A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through silent darkness. The night is quiet as the grave, colder than midwinter on Pluto. Gossamer sails as fine as soap bubbles droop, the gust of sapphire laser light that inflated them long since darkened; ancient starlight picks out the outline of a huge planet-like body beneath the jewel-and-cobweb corpse of the starwhisp. Eight years have passed since the good ship Field Circus slipped into close orbit around the frigid brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/-56. Five years have gone by since the launch lasers of the Ring Imperium shut down without warning, stranding the light sail powered craft three light years from home. There has been no response from the router, the strange alien artifact in orbit around the brown dwarf, since the crew of the starwhisp uploaded themselves through its strange quantum entanglement interface for transmission to whatever alien network it connects to. In fact, nothing happens; nothing save the slow trickle of
I hate days like this. It’s a rainy Monday morning and I’m late in to work at the Laundry because of a technical fault on the Tube. When I get to my desk, the first thing I find is a note from Human Resources that says one of their management team wants to talk to me, soonest, about playing computer games at work. And to put the cherry on top of the shit-pie, the office’s coffee percolator is empty because none of the other inmates in this goddamn loony bin can be arsed refilling it. It’s enough to make me long for a high place and a rifle … but in the end I head for Human Resources to take the bull by the horns, decaffeinated and mean as only a decaffeinated Bob can be. Over in the dizzying heights of HR, the furniture is fresh and the windows recently cleaned. It’s a far cry from the dingy rats’ nest of Ops Division, where I normally spend my working time. But ours is not to wonder why (at least in public). “Ms. MacDougal will see you now,” says the receptionist on the front desk, lo
Moscow: Monday morning, August the 20th, 1991: The soldiers on the back of the personnel carriers stared around, wide-eyed, clutching their rifles like drowning men hanging on to buoyant life-rafts. They were out of their depth, teenage conscripts from the sticks being trucked in by the Grey Men in the Kremlin, none of them sure what they were meant to be doing here. The emigre group seemed to be taking it quite well as the BMP’s rumbled past their hotel. They clustered in the bar, talking quietly in small groups, occasionally pestering a vodka out of the distracted staff. Reporters swarmed and darted everywhere, like wasps around a rubbish bin in summer. And Oleg Meir … Oleg Meir ignored the soldiers as he left the temporary safety of the hotel. The phones were down, only international calls from the city’s contingent of foreign correspondents getting through. They must be crazy, he thought: cutting off communications at a time like this. Trembling with a chill, he thrust his hands de
Issue 3 of Cosmos, September 2005 Illustration by Justin Randall Who said that death has to signal the end? It may just be an opportunity. A dark-skinned human with four arms walks towards me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls. Her hair forms a smoky wreath around her open and curious face. She’s interested in me. “You’re new around here, aren’t you?” she asks, pausing in front of my table. I stare at her. Apart from the neatly articulated extra shoulder joints, the body she’s wearing is roughly ortho, following the traditional human body-plan. The skulls are sub-sized, strung together on a necklace threaded with barbed wire and roses. “Yes, I’m a nube,” I say. My parole ring makes my left index finger tingle, a little reminder. “I’m required to warn you that I’m undergoing identity reindexing and rehabilitation. People in my state may be prone to violent outbursts. Don’t worry, that’s just a statutory warning: I won’t hurt you. What makes you
‘Rogue Farm’ appeared in ‘Live Without a Net’ (ed Lou Anders, pub Roc 2003). It is copyright Charles Stross. It was a bright, cool March morning: mare’s tails trailed across the south-eastern sky towards the rising sun. Joe shivered slightly in the driver’s seat as he twisted the starter handle on the old front-loader he used to muck out the barn. Like its owner, the ancient Massey-Fergusson had seen better days; but it had survived worse abuse than Joe routinely handed out. The diesel clattered, spat out a gobbet of thick blue smoke, and chattered to itself dyspeptically. His mind as blank as the sky above, Joe slid the tractor into gear, raised the front scoop, and began turning it towards the open doors of the barn—just in time to see an itinerant farm coming down the road. “Bugger,” swore Joe. The tractor engine made a hideous grinding noise and died. He took a second glance, eyes wide, then climbed down from the tractor and trotted over to the kitchen door at the side of the far
Historical note: this story was originally written in 1987. It was sold to There won’t be War in early 1988. However, it took rather a long time for that anthology to be published … it finally came out the week after the Moscow Putsch that toppled Mikhail Gorbachev and led to the breakup of the USSR. If that kind of thing annoys you, just pretend it’s an “alternate history” story … Day 1 NewsBurst:11:43 G.M.T. The Third World War began this morning with a Russian dawn raid on the City of London. Bombs exploded all over the Docklands Enterprise Zone, disrupting the white-hot core of European industrial asset-stripping; the follow-up raids involved extensive use of lethal virus weapons and tactical assault units. Casualties included Larry Steinberg, a systems analyst for BSF: Video intercut: Steinberg: “It was terrible. They must have infiltrated those time bombs weeks ago, but there was no sign of them. They began going off at nine-thirteen this morning, bringing down whole systems. O
They stopped me on the gangway and rolled up my left sleeve. “Clockwork? Or quartz?” asked the one with the hammer. “Oh—quartz,” I said. “Sorry, but rules are rules,” said the one with the leather bag. I nodded. He gently peeled the watch off my wrist and laid it over the ship’s railing. Crunch: the hammer rebounded. He scooped what was left back into the bag, careful not to drop any glass fragments on the deck. “I just forgot,” I said, slightly stunned. “Is there anything else …?” They looked at each other and shrugged. The one with the bag looked a little guilty. “Here, you can borrow mine,” he said, offering it to me. “Thanks.” I tightened the strap, then carried on up the gangway. It was an old Rolex Oyster, case tarnished with decades of sweat. I glanced back. The hammer team waited patiently for their next target. The one with the hammer was wearing a red T-shirt with a logo on its back. I squinted closer at the marketing slogan: UNIX—THE TIME IS RIGHT. Rita was already in the fo
The louring sky, half past pregnant with a caul of snow, pressed down on Davy’s head like a hangover. He glanced up once, shivered, then pushed through the doorway into the Deid Nurse and the smog of fag fumes within. His sometime conspirator Tam the Tailer was already at the bar. “Awright, Davy?” Davy drew a deep breath, his glasses steaming up the instant he stepped through the heavy blackout curtain, so that the disreputable pub was shrouded in a halo of icy iridescence that concealed its flaws. “Mine’s a Deuchars.” His nostrils flared as he took in the seedy mixture of aromas that festered in the Deid Nurse’s atmosphere–so thick you could cut it with an axe, Morag had said once with a sniff of her lopsided snot-siphon, back in the day when she’d had aught to say to Davy. “Fuckin’ Baltic oot there the night, an’ nae kiddin’.” He slid his glasses off and wiped them off, then looked around tiredly. “An’ deid tae the world in here.” Tam glanced around as if to be sure the pub populatio
Above them the sky is a neon washout pierced by airship running lights. “It’s cold out here,” says the Man in her soft, hoarse voice. “Won’t you come in?” The car is long and low and shiny. Jimmy gets in. He perches on the jump-seat opposite the Man. She wears a long sheepskin coat. He looks in her eyes and thinks of video cameras. Next to her sits some hired muscle, looking at him like Jimmy has a target pasted between his eyes. The Man can be crude in some ways. Very crude. “Two days, Jimmy,” she says. He looks out the window. The sky is mirrored in the damp gutters. “How much longer?” Her manner is exquisitely polite—utterly threatening. He shrugs. “It didn’t come with a spec sheet.” The Man gives him a long look. “What needs working on?” she asks. The car swings round a corner into a blind alley. Rubbish skips piled high with cartons conceal the far wall. He explains, “I’ve got as far as the kernel’s final password input. All we can do is wait. Breaking it is a semi-random process;
Although he made his first sale back in 1987, it’s only recently that British writer Charles Stross has begun to make a name for himself as a writer to watch in the new century ahead, with a sudden burst in the last couple of years of quirky, inventive, high-bit-rate stories such as “Antibodies,” “A Colder War,” “Bear Trap,” and “Dechlorinating the Moderator” in markets such as Interzone, Spectrum SF, Odyssey, and New Worlds. In the fast-paced and innovative story that follows, he shows us that all this “posthuman” stuff may be arriving a lot faster than anyone thinks that it is … Charles Stross is also a regular columnist for the monthly magazine Computer Shopper. Coming up is his first collection, Toast, and Other Burned Out Futures. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. Old hackers never die; they just sprout more gray hair, their Tshirts fade, and they move on to stranger and more obscure toys. Well, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. Your Antiques! asked me to write about it, so I dec
1. In Which Laura Departs and Fiona Makes a Request “I want you to know, darling, that I’m leaving you for another sex robot—and she’s twice the man you’ll ever be,” Laura explained as she flounced over to the front door, wafting an alluring aroma of mineral oil behind her. Our arguments always began like that: this one was following the script perfectly. I followed her into the hall, unsure precisely what cue I’d missed this time. “Laura—” She stopped abruptly, a faint whine coming from her ornately sculpted left knee. “I’m leaving,” she told me, deliberately pitching her voice in a modish mechanical monotone. “You can’t stop me. You’re not paying my maintenance. I’m a free woman, and I don’t have to put up with your moods!” The hell of it is, she was right. I’d been neglecting her lately, being overly preoccupied with my next autocremation attempt. “I’m terribly sorry,” I said. “But can we talk about this later? You don’t have to walk out right this instant—” “There’s nothing to talk
First published: Interzone 37, 1990 Sometimes you have to make speed, not haste. I made twenty kilos and moved it fast. Good old dex is an easy synthesis but the polizei had all the organochemical suppliers bugged; when a speed stash hit the street without any blat they’d be through the audit trail fast. They’d take a cut—my lungs, heart and ribosomes. Only idiots push psychoactives in Paraguay: only idiots or the truly desperate. I burned out via Brazilia and crashed into Ant City. Jet-lagged all the way across Australia, I considered my futures; it was time to move on to something bigger. My first impression of Ant City was of being roasted, slowly. The blistering humidity was outflow from the huge heat exchangers run by the city reactors. Palm trees in the airport lounge, a rude, chattering spidermonkey loose among the branches. No power, no Ants, a simple equation: I was in Antarctica now, and wondering what the hell to do about it. It was another world out there: I could feel a
What finally wakes Huw is the pain in his bladder. His head is throbbing, but his bladder has gone weak on him lately—if he doesn’t get up and find the john soon he’s going to piss himself, so he struggles up from a sump-hole of somnolence. He opens his eyes to find that he’s lying face-down in a hammock. The hammock sways gently from side to side in the hot stuffy air. Light streams across him in a warm flood from one side of the room; the floor below the string mesh is gray and scuffed and something tells him he isn’t on land any more. Shit, he thinks, pushing stiffly against the edge and trying not to fall as the hammock slides treacherously out from under him. Why am I so tired? His bare feet touch the ground before he realises he’s bare-ass naked. He shakes his head, yawning. His veins feel as if all the blood has been replaced by something warm and syrupy and full of sleep. Drugs? he think, blinking. The walls— Three of them are bland, gray sheets of structural plastic with doors
He stared at her, stunned into bovine silence. She pinched his cheek and shoved the papers into his hands. “Bon voyage, mon ami,” she said. She kissed each cheek, then pulled out a compact and fixed the concealer on her lip. # Paris in springtime was everything it was meant to be and more. Roscoe couldn’t sit down in a cafe without being smartmobbed by unwirer groupies who wanted him to sign their repeaters and tell them war-stories about his days as a guerrilla fighter for technological freedom. They were terribly, awfully young, just kids, Marcel’s age or younger, and they were heartbreaking in their attempts to understand his crummy French. The girls were beautiful, the boys were handsome, and they laughed and smoked and ordered him glasses of wine until he couldn’t walk. He’d put on twenty pounds, and when he did the billboard ads for Be, Inc. and Motorola, they had to strap him into a girdle. “Le choix Am?ricain,” in bold sans-serif letters underneath a picture of him scaling a bu
For a change, Huw’s head hurts more than his bladder. He’s lying head-down, on his back, in a bathtub. He scrabbles for a handhold and pulls himself upright. A tub is a terrible place to spend a night-or a morning, come to think of it-he blinks and sees that it’s midafternoon. The light slanting in through a high window limns the strange bathroom’s treacly Victorian fixtures with a roseate glow. That was quite a party. He vaguely remembers the gathering dawn, its red glow staining the wall outside the kitchen window as he discussed environmental politics with a tall, shaven-headed woman with a blue forelock and a black leather mini-dress straight out of the twentieth century. (He has an equally vague memory of her defending a hardcore transhumanist line: score nil-nil to both sides.) A brief glance tells him that this room wasn’t a bathroom when he went to sleep in it: bits of the bidet are still crawling into position and there’s a strong smell of VOCs in the air. His head hurts. Lean
Once a lifetime Jewel swims in the Folded Rose lagoon. She strikes out through the mirror-still water until she can just make out the Hub wall, and then she swims a little further. She lies back in the water and lets things pass her by for a while. On a clear day she can just mke out, directly above, the fields and forests she explored as a cild. She smiles, and maps the vague topology, sharpening it with memories. Then, for the first time in many years, she turns off her Wisdom, and thinks back, unaided, to what it was like. The feel of landpussy fur. The strong savour of barbecued cockroach. The first exquisite tickle of the Wisdom uplink behind her eyes. She swims in memories and falls like a stone, into childhood, and into the black depths of the lake. Now Jewel is an old woman again, nearing the end of her fortieth lifetime, and she is ready to swim again. She stands on the foredeck of the houseboat, fingering the jewel which hangs on a silver chain about her neck. The craft turns
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