Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [131]
Cat broke into his thoughts.
‘OK, so that’s one thing you can do. Speak, write, patch stuff from anything on the net or here that catches your eye’ – she waved a hand at the mass of pamphlets – ‘whatever. Don’t talk about the ANR – talk about how stupid the Free States are, and the Kingdom and the UN. And get as much information as you can about what’s going on, how things are lining up.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, yeah. Something else. You say you were a businessman? Know anything about stock trading?’
Jordan found he’d bounded to his feet. ‘Yes. Yes, as a matter of fact I do.’
Cat stood up. ‘Great,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the comrades to shove some of the money they’ve been sitting on into your work-space. Any time you get a moment, speculate.’ She paused, frowning. ‘Can you actually make money in a falling market?’
Jordan grinned broadly. ‘You bet.’
‘OK,’ Cat said. She picked her way across the untidy floor. ‘Got to it. Stop about, oh, not long after midnight.’
‘Then what?’
Cat looked at him over her shoulder from the doorway. ‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘You’re soon going to need all the sleep you can get.’
And with that ambiguous promise she was gone.
16
The Eve of Just-In-Time Destruction
Jordan, up to his eyeballs and elbows in virtual reality, was occasionally aware of Cat’s feral, feline, female presence as she whispered in his ear, disturbed the air around him, brushed against his back. It fired him up and drove him, and it was more bearable and less distracting than being haunted by her image, tormented by her absence.
She’d shaken him awake at 05.30. He sat up, staring at her with a sense of unreality. She struck a pose like a good fairy, in the shimmer and sparkle of the same dress she’d worn the previous night, and she held out a mug of coffee and a plate with a bacon sandwich on it.
‘Good morning.’ He swallowed. ‘Thank you.’
She passed him the breakfast and said, ‘Hi. Mary said to tell you Vladivostok’s fallen, Tokyo’s down, and the pound’s two point three million to the mark and rising.’
‘Rising?’ The central banks must be desperate. Jordan found himself at the small table where the glades and computer were jacked in. By the time he had formed a picture from the market reports the coffee and sandwich were finished. A pause after shifting some yen into sterling brought a vague feeling of disquiet. He came back to actual reality to find that he had no clothes on. It didn’t bother him; he guessed that it hadn’t bothered Cat. After another quick look at the market he showered and pulled on jeans and a tee-shirt and hurried down to the comms room.
He spent the morning and early afternoon doing as Cat had suggested, flipping from the agitated, agitating chatter of the newsgroups and information channels to the consequences in the markets. He was on a roll, he was ahead of the game…As soon as nerves rattled by the fall of Vladivostok (to what the channels described as the Vorkuta Popular Front) settled down, a surge of hot money flowed back into Britain. The investors and speculators seemed impressed with the government’s steady hand; there was a lot of smart advice about how the ANR offensive wasn’t shaping up.
Hah!
Convinced he knew better, Jordan rode the upswing as far as he dared and sold out around midday, moving as sharply as he could into gold after doubling his own stake as well as the Collective’s; the latter was a disgracefully large sum to have left in a low-interest savings account. Mercenaries just weren’t mercenary enough, he thought.
He returned his attention to the news networks, flipping channels, sifting through screeds to build more or less by natural selection a filter program that focused