Accelerando

"Our sponsor, who is in cyberspace —"

She leans back on the sofa, which buzzes and extrudes an occasional table with a small bar. "Drink? Can I offer you coffee? Guarana? Or maybe a Berlinerweisse, for old time's sake?"

"Guarana will do. Hello, Bob. How long have you been dead?"

She chuckles. "I'm not dead, Ma

"My ex-wife," Manfred corrects her automatically. "The, uh, tax vamp. So. You're acting as a, I guess, an interpreter for Bob?"

"Ack." She looks at Manfred very seriously: "We owe him a lot, you know. He left his assets in trust to the movement along with his partials. We feel obliged to instantiate his personality as often as possible, even though you can only do so much with a couple of petabytes of recordings. But we have help."

"The lobsters." Manfred nods to himself and accepts the glass that she offers. Its diamond-plated curves glitter brilliantly in the late-afternoon sunlight. "I knew this had something to do with them." He leans forward, holding his glass and frowns. "If only I could remember why I came here! It was something emergent, something in deep memory … something I didn't trust in my own skull. Something to do with Bob."

The door behind the sofa opens; Alan enters. "Excuse me," he says quietly, and heads for the far side of the room. A workstation folds down from the wall, and a chair rolls in from a service niche. He sits with his chin propped on his hands, staring at the white desktop. Every so often he mutters quietly to himself; "Yes, I understand … campaign headquarters … donations need to be audited … "

"Gia

Manfred jumps. "Gia

The Grassmarket is an overly rustic cobbled square nestled beneath the glowering battlements of Castle Rock. A

"I don't know where to begin," she sighs, a

"Try the doss house," Aineko suggests from the shelter of her shoulder bag.

"The —" A

A

"McMurphy's. Used to be called Ba

"Uh-huh." A

McMurphy's is a fake Irish pub, a stone grotto installed beneath a mound of blank-faced offices. It was once a real Irish pub before the developers got their hands on it and mutated it in rapid succession into a punk nightclub, a wine bar, and a fake Dutch coffee shop; after which, as burned-out as any star, it left the main sequence. Now it occupies an u

"Say, did you hear the one about the Eurocrat with the robot pussy who goes into a dodgy pub on the Cowgate and orders a coke? And when it arrives, she says 'hey, where's the mirror?'"

"Shut up ," A

Aineko looks up at her from his nest in the bag and yawns cavernously, baring a pink, ribbed mouth and a tongue like pink suede. "Want to make me? I just pinged Ma

The barmaid sidles up and pointedly manages not to make eye contact with A

The Coke arrives. A