Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [55]
His first explorations were modest, tentative: after installing and booting the software and setting up a default fetch he opened an account with a local branch of the Hong Kong & Shanghai, then arranged for them to liquidate his share in his company. It was a tidying up, a formality: his two partners came out of it richer in increased stock than he did in ready cash. He just counted himself lucky the Deacons hadn’t frozen his assets. Even through all the levels of anonymity, the transaction made his bones quake. When it was over, he had no property in Beulah City. He leaned back and signalled for another coffee. When it came he stared into it, forcing himself to think.
Froth on the top went around: spiral arms held in their whorl by the hot dark matter beneath, turning one way while the rest of the universe went the other…e pur si muove. The argument from design. The Blind Watchmaker.
This could have been the last day: the hour of the Watchmaker. Mrs Lawson’s fear had seemed genuine. It was there and it was everywhere, in all the fractured cultures; godless or godly, they all had at the back of their minds the insidiously replicating meme which said that one day a system would wake up and say to its creators: ‘Yes, now there is a God.’
Blessed are the Watchmakers, for they shall inherit the earth.
Jordan had been raised with a sense of imminence, an ability to live with the possibility that The End Was At Hand. Disappointments dating from the turn of the millennium had shaped the Christian sects, a lesson reinforced by the inconclusive Armageddon that had been over before he was born. The interpreters of Revelation had been made to look foolish, even to people who still tolerated the equally uninspired interpreters of Genesis. The conviction that the imminent end was unpredictable strengthened the expectation: two thousand years and counting, and still Coming Soon.
If they could do it, Jordan thought, then so could he. Bracketing the outside chance that all speculation was about to be rendered irrelevant, what did he had to go on? A contact with a (claimed) Black Planner; a wad of money; some worries from an unreliable source about odd happenings on the networks; and an undeniable series of spectacular system crashes.
Well, he could do a search on that, cross-reference them and see what came up. He drained his cup, smoothed out the instruction leaflet and poked out a key sequence that everyone else here could probably do with their eyes shut.
DoorWays™ opened on to the world: the kingdoms and republics; the enclaves and principalities; the anarchies, states and utopias. With a silent yell he flung himself into the freedom of the net.
In virtual space Beulah City was far, far away.
The sky came down to the rooftops here, same as anywhere else. As he walked along the high street Kohn saw past the near horizon in an inescapable awareness that the sky before him was as far away as the sky above, a dizzying horizontal height. He was as conscious of the motion of the earth as previously he’d been of the time of day. Not for the first time he was impressed by the dauntless gaiety of the species. Whirled away from the sun’s fire to face again the infinite light-raddled dark, they took it when they could as their chance to go out and have fun.
Janis walked beside him with a dancer’s step, a warm lithe body naked in cool clothes, her fingers rediscovering his hand every few seconds. He was not sure what that electric contact meant to her. What it meant to him was like the new reordering of his mind, a delight he felt almost afraid to test, yet constantly renewed by the merest look at her, or within himself.
They walked along faster and easier than anyone else on that pavement, Kohn effortlessly finding an open path among the moving bodies. After they crossed the road, strolling