Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [60]
Donovan was the only participant who had never received the standing invitation that came in some form to almost everyone who became conspicuously successful, terrorist and trillionaire alike. He had hacked his way in. The feat was so unprecedented and alarming that it had caused a five-minute global financial crash and an immediate arrangement to the effect that his electronic warfare would not bring down the wrath of Space Defense. Handling more localized retaliation would remain his own business.
Tonight he received an urgent summons, his first in years. It flashed around his screens, interrupting his interrogations of the entities that slunk and prowled in forgotten reaches of the datasphere. He dismissed them and subvocalized the passwords, and in an instant he was there, out of it. He needed no VR gear to be there, to be out of it – he took it straight from the screens, his mind vaulting unaided into the lucid dream of mainframing.
Free fall in black space, faint fall of photons. Step up the magnification and resolution to:
A distant galaxy, a chalk thumbprint whorl, a cloud of points of light, a hovering firefly swarm, a crowded cloud of bright fantastic bodies, a multi-level masquerade where everyone was talking but no one could overhear. Donovan’s fetch – the body-construct that other users saw – was based on a younger self, not out of vanity but because he couldn’t be bothered to update it. Others inclined to the Masque of the Red Death approach. It looked like a heaven for the wicked.
‘Glad to see you, Donovan.’
The angel that spoke to him had chubby pink cheeks, iridescent feathered wings, a shining robe and an uncertain halo that wavered over her head like a smoke-ring.
‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced.’
The angel simpered, a visual effect so cloying that Donovan felt metaphysically sick.
‘My name is Melody Lawson. Do you remember me?’
Donovan struggled to sustain the illusion of telepresence as (‘back’ at the rig, as he couldn’t help thinking) he fumbled with a hot-key databoard. Melody Lawson’s details flickered past the corner of his eye.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘You and your husband left the movement – oh, it must be nearly twenty years ago. But I seem to recall a few very welcome sums of’ – he smiled – ‘angel money.’ Conscience money, more like. ‘What are you doing now, and why have you called me?’
‘I look after data security for Beulah City,’ Mrs Lawson said. ‘Cracker turned keeper, as they say. I must admit that what I learned in my young and foolish days has been enormously useful professionally. And I still share your concern about the dangers of AI, though some of your actions have been quite a nuisance to me in the past.’
‘And yours to me,’ Donovan said. It wasn’t entirely flattery: Beulah City’s censorship filters made it a tough one, although with its relatively backward systems it seldom deserved disruption anyway.
‘However,’ Mrs Lawson went on, ‘we should all be willing to let bygones be bygones when we find that we have a common interest, don’t you think?’
‘And what common interest is that?’ Donovan asked.
‘I think you know what I’m talking about,’ Mrs Lawson said.
Before Donovan could respond he heard a discreet murmur in his head informing him that somebody else in the Clearing House wanted to speak to him. It had to be someone high up in the informal hierarchy to get through at a time like this. Mrs Lawson, too, seemed to be getting paged. Donovan chinned the go-ahead, wondering if she had set him up for this. He remembered her, now, quite unassisted: she’d been devious even before she’d got religion.
A privacy bubble snapped into existence, enclosing them and two others: a man in black who looked like one of the Men In Black, the mythical