Accelerando

Sirhan recoils in disgust. "You again! What do you want from me this time?"

"Nothing." The ape ignores him: "Amber, it is time for you to call your father."

"Yeah, but will he come when I call?" Amber stares at the ape. Her pupils expand: "Hey, you're not my —"

"You." Sirhan glares at the ape. "Go away! I didn't invite you here!"

"More unwelcome visitors?" asks Pamela, raising an eyebrow.

"Yes, you did." The ape grins at Amber, then crouches down, hoots quietly and beckons tothe cat, who is hiding behind one of the graceful silver servitors.

"Manfred isn't welcome here. And neither is that woman," Sirhan swears. He catches Pamela's eye: "Did you know anything about this? Or about the bailiffs?" He gestures at the window, beyond which the drive flare casts jagged shadows. It's dropping toward the horizon as it de-orbits – next time it comes into view, it'll be at the leading edge of a hypersonic shock wave, streaking toward them at cloud top height in order to consummate the robbery.

"Me?" Pamela snorts. "Grow up." She eyes the ape warily. "I don't have that much control over things. And as for bailiffs, I wouldn't set them on my worst enemies. I've seen what those things can do." For a moment her eyes flash anger: "Grow up, why don't you!" she repeats.

"Yes, please do," says another voice from behind Sirhan. The new speaker is a woman, slightly husky, accented – he turns to see her: tall, black-haired, wearing a dark man's suit of archaic cut and mirrored glasses. "Ah, Pamela, ma chérie! Long time no cat fight." She grins frighteningly and holds out a hand.

Sirhan is already off-balance. Now, seeing his honorary aunt in human skin for a change, he looks at the ape in confusion. Behind him Pamela advances on A

"You." Amber backs away until she bumps into Sirhan, at whom she glares. "What the fuck did you invite both of them for? Are you trying to start a thermonuclear war?"

"Don't ask me," he says helplessly, "I don't know why they came! What's this about —" He focuses on the orang-utan, who is now letting the cat lick one hairy palm. "Your cat?"

"I don't think the orange hair suits Aineko," Amber says slowly. "Did I tell you about our hitchhiker?"

Sirhan shakes his head, trying to dispel the confusion. "I don't think we've got time. In under two hours the bailiffs up there will be back. They're armed and dangerous, and if they turn their drive flame on the roof and set fire to the atmosphere in here, we'll be in trouble – it would rupture our lift cells, and even computronium doesn't work too well under a couple of million atmospheres of pressurized metallic hydrogen."

"Well, you'd better make time." Amber takes his elbow in an iron grip and turns him toward the footpath back to the museum. "Crazy," she mutters. "Tante A

"The cat's —" Sirhan trails off. "I've heard about your cat," he says, lamely. "You took him with you in the Field Circus."

"Really?" She glances behind them. The ape blows a kiss at her; it's cradling the cat on one shoulder and tickling it under the chin. "Has it occurred to you that Aineko isn't just a robot cat?"

"Ah," Sirhan says faintly. "Then the bailiffs —"

"No, that's all bullshit. What I mean is, Aineko is a human-equivalent, or better, artificial intelligence. Why do you think he keeps a cat's body?"

"I have no idea."

"Because humans always underestimate anything that's small, furry, and cute," says the orang-utan.

"Thanks, Aineko," says Amber. She nods at the ape. "How are you finding it?"

Aineko shambles along, with a purring cat draped over one shoulder, and gives the question due consideration. "Different," she says, after a bit. "Not better."

"Oh." Amber sounds slightly disappointed to Sirhan's confused ears. They pass under the fronds of a weeping willow, round the side of a pond, beside an overgrown hibiscus bush, then up to the main entrance of the museum.

"A

"The usual." He gestures at the hallway inside the front doors. "Replay the ultimatum, if you please, City."

The air shimmers with an archaic holographic field, spooling the output from a compressed visual presentation tailored for human eyesight. A piratical-looking human male wearing a tattered and much-patched space suit leers at the recording viewpoint from the pilot's seat of an ancient Soyuz capsule. One of his eyes is completely black, the sign of a high-bandwidth implant. A weedy moustache crawls across his upper lip. "Greetins an' salutations," he drawls. "We is da' Californi-uhn nashnul gaard an' we-are got lett-uhz o' marque an' reprise from da' ledgish-fuckn' congress o' da excited snakes of uhhmerica."

"He sounds drunk!" Amber's eyes are wide. "What's this —"

"Not drunk. CJD is a common side effect of dodgy Economics 2.0 neural adjuvant therapy. Unlike the old saying, you do have to be mad to work there. Listen."

City, which paused the replay for Amber's outburst, permits it to continue. "Youse harbbring da' fugitive Amber Macx an' her magic cat. We wan' da cat. Da puta's yours. Gotser uno orbit: You ready give us ther cat an' we no' zap you."

The screen goes dead. "That was a fake, of course," Sirhan adds, looking inward where a ghost is merging memories from the city's orbital mechanics subsystem: "They aerobraked on the way in, hit ninety gees for nearly half a minute. While that was sent afterward. It's just a machinima avatar, a human body that had been through that kind of deceleration would be pulped."

"So the bailiffs are —" Amber is visibly struggling to wrap her head around the situation.

"They're not human," Sirhan says, feeling a sudden pang of – no, not affection, but the absence of malice will do for the moment – toward this young woman who isn't the mother he loves to resent, but who might have become her in another world. "They've absorbed a lot of what it is to be human, but their corporate roots show. Even though they run on an hourly accounting loop, rather than one timed for the production cycles of dirt-poor Sumerian peasant farmers, and even though they've got various ethics and business practice patches, at root they're not human: They're limited liability companies."

"So what do they want?" asks Pierre, making Sirhan jump, guiltily. He hadn't realized Pierre could move that quietly.

"They want money. Money in Economy 2.0 is quantized originality – that which allows one sentient entity to outmaneuver another. They think your cat has got something, and they want it. They probably wouldn't mind eating your brains, too, but —" He shrugs. "Obsolete food is stale food."

"Hah." Amber looks pointedly at Pierre, who nods at her.

"What?" asks Sirhan.

"Where's the – uh, cat?" asks Pierre.

"I think Aineko's got it." She looks thoughtful. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"Time to drop off the hitcher." Pierre nods. "Assuming it agrees …"

"Do you mind explaining yourselves?" Sirhan asks, barely able to contain himself.

Amber grins, looking up at the Mercury capsule suspended high overhead. "The conspiracy theorists were half right. Way back in the Dark Ages, Aineko cracked the second alien transmission. We had a very good idea we were going to find something out there, we just weren't totally sure exactly what. Anyway, the creature incarnated in that cat body right now isn't Aineko – it's our mystery hitchhiker. A parasitic organism that infects, well, we ran across something not too dissimilar to Economics 2.0 out at the router and beyond, and it's got parasites. Our hitcher is one such creature – it's nearest human-comprehensible analogy would be the Economics 2.0 equivalent of a pyramid scheme crossed with a 419 scam. As it happens, most of the runaway corporate ghosts out beyond the router are wise to that sort of thing, so it hacked the router's power system to give us a beam to ride home in return for sanctuary. That's as far as it goes."