Accelerando

Manfred glances round, puts his phone on hold for a moment: "Where's my suitcase?" he asks Aineko. The cat sidles away, ignoring him. "Shit." He can't see the new luggage anywhere. Quite possibly it's on its way to Morocco, complete with its priceless cargo of high-density noise. He returns his attention to the phone. Glashwiecz is droning on about equitable settlements, cumulative IRS tax demands – that seem to have materialized out of fantasy with Pam's imprimatur on them – and the need to make a clean breast of things in court and confess to his sins. "Where's the fucking suitcase?" He takes the phone off hold. "Shut the fuck up, please, I'm trying to think."

"I'm not going to shut up! You're on the court docket already, Macx. You can't evade your responsibilities forever. You've got a wife and a helpless daughter to care for —"

"A daughter?" That cuts right through Manfred's preoccupation with the suitcase.

"Didn't you know?" Glashwiecz sounds pleasantly surprised. "She was decanted last Thursday. Perfectly healthy, I'm told. I thought you knew; you have viewing rights via the clinic webcam. Anyway, I'll just leave you with this thought – the sooner you come to a settlement, the sooner I can unfreeze your companies. Good-bye."

The suitcase rolls into view, peeping coyly out from behind A

Anticlimax.

A

Try as he may, Manfred can't see anything in the press release that is at all unusual. It's just the sort of thing he does, and getting it on the net was why he was looking for a CIA stringer in the first place.

He tries to explain this to her in the bath as he soaps her back. "I don't understand what they're on about," he complains. "There's nothing that tipped them off – except that I was in Paris, and you filed the news. You did nothing wrong."

"Mais oui." She turns round, slippery as an eel, and slides backward into the water. "I try to tell you this, but you are not listening."

"I am now." Water droplets cling to the outside of his glasses, plastering his view of the room with laser speckle highlights. "I'm sorry, A

"No!" She rises up in front of him and leans forward, face serious. "I said yesterday. I want to be your manager. Take me in."

"I don't need a manager; my whole thing is about being fast and out of control!"

"You think you do not need a manager, but your companies do," she observes. "You have lawsuits, how many? You ca

A

"It is not?" She looks delighted. "Excellent! To who can this be sold, to Moscow? To SLORC? To —"

"I was thinking of the Italian Communist Party," he says. "It's a pilot project. I was working on selling it – I need the money for my divorce, and to close the deal on the luggage – but it's not that simple. Someone has to run the damn thing – someone with a keen understanding of how to interface a central pla

Rome is hotter than downtown Columbia, South Carolina, over Thanksgiving weekend; it stinks of methane-burning Skodas with a low undertone of cooked dog shit. The cars are brightly colored subcompact missiles, hurtling in and out of alleyways like angry wasps: Hot-wiring their drive-by-wire seems to be the national sport, although Fiat's embedded systems people have always written notoriously wobbly software.

Manfred emerges from the Stazione Termini into dusty sunlight, blinking like an owl. His glasses keep up a rolling monologue about who lived where in the days of the late Republic. They're stuck on a tourist cha

The ex-minister's private persona isn't what Manfred was expecting. All Manfred has seen so far is a polished public avatar in a traditionally cut suit, addressing the Chamber of Deputies in cyberspace; which is why, when he rings the doorbell set in the whitewashed doorframe of Gia

"Hello, I am here to see the minister," Manfred says carefully. Aineko, perched on his left shoulder, attempts to translate: It trills something that sounds extremely urgent. Everything sounds urgent in Italian.

"It's okay, I'm from Iowa," says the guy in the doorway. He tucks a thumb under one leather strap and grins over his moustache: "What's it about?" Over his shoulder: "Gia

"It's about the economy," Manfred says carefully. "I'm here to make it obsolete."

The beefcake backs away from the door cautiously – then the minister appears behind him. "Ah, signore Macx! It's okay, Joh

Five minutes later, Manfred is buried up to his ears in a sofa covered in buttery white cowhide, a cup of virulently strong espresso balanced precariously on his knee, while Gia