Accelerando

The door opens and a nondescript youth slinks in. He's wearing baggy BDUs, woolly cap, and a pair of boots that have that quintessential essense de panzer division look, all shock absorbers and olive drab Kevlar panels. He's wearing —

"I spy with my little network intrusion detector kit," begins the cat, as A

"How much you want for the glasses, kid?" she asks quietly.

He jerks and almost jumps – a bad idea in MilSpec combat boots, the ceiling is eighteenth-century stone half a meter thick; "Di

"Stay calm. Take them off – they'll only hurt you if you keep wearing them," she says, careful not to move too fast because now she has a second, scary-jittery fear, and she knows without having to look that the exclamation mark on her watch has turned red and begun to flash: "Look, I'll give you two hundred Euros for the glasses and the belt pouch, real cash, and I won't ask how you got them or tell anyone." He's frozen in front of her, mesmerized, and she can see the light from inside the lenses spilling over onto his half-starved adolescent cheekbones, flickering like cold lightning, like he's plugged his brain into a grid bearer; swallowing with a suddenly dry mouth, she slowly reaches up and pulls the spectacles off his face with one hand and takes hold of the belt pouch with the other. The kid shudders and blinks at her, and she sticks a couple of hundred-Euro notes in front of his nose. "Scram," she says, not unkindly.

He reaches up slowly, then seizes the money and runs – blasts his way through the door with an ear-popping concussion, hangs a left onto the cycle path, and vanishes downhill toward the parliament buildings and university complex.

A

"Naah. It's your job to find him," Aineko opines complacently. But there's an icicle of anxiety in A

"Fuck you, too," she mutters. "Only one thing for it, I guess." She takes off her own glasses – they're much less functional than Manfred's massively ramified custom rig – and nervously raises the repo'd specs toward her face. Somehow what she's about to do makes her feel unclean, like snooping on a lover's e-mail folders. But how else can she figure out where he might have gone?

She slides the glasses on and tries to remember what she was doing yesterday in Edinburgh.

"Gia

"Oui, ma chérie? "

Pause. "I lost him. But I got his aid-mémoire back. A teenage freeloader playing cyberpunk with them. No sign of his location – so I put them on."

Pause. "Oh dear."

"Gia

Pause. (During which, the chill of the gritty stone wall she's leaning on begins to penetrate the weave of her jacket.) "I not wanting to bother you with trivia."

"Merde. It's not trivia, Gia

Pause: Then a grunt, almost of pain. "Yes."

"Then why did you do it?" she demands vehemently. She hunches over, punching words into her phone so that other passers-by avoid her, unsure whether she's hands-free or hallucinating: "Shit, Gia

"A

"That's no excuse —"

"A

"Shit." She turns and leans her forehead against the cool stonework. "I'll need a prescription. Ritalin or something. And his location. Leave the rest to me." She doesn't add, That includes peeling him off the ceiling afterwards : that's understood. Nor does she say, you're going to pay. That's understood, too. Gia

"Location am easy if he find the PLO. GPS coordinates are following —"

"No need. I got his spectacles."

"Merde , as you say. Take them to him, ma chérie. Bring me the distributed trust rating of Bob Franklin's upload, and I bring Bob the jubilee, right to direct his own corporate self again as if still alive. And we pull diplomatic chestnuts out of fire before they burn. Agreed?"

"Oui. "

She cuts the co

Maybe Gia