eye, visibly worried. With crew-cut hair, and wearing a

  black trouser suit with narrow lapels, she looks like a

  G-man from a 1960’s conspiracy movie.

  Gianni nods and leans back, regarding her from behind

  his desk. “Manfred are prone to fits of do his own thing

  with telling nobody in advance,” he points out. “Do you

  have concrete reason to suspect something is wrong?” De-

  spite his words he looks slightly worried. Manfred is a

  core team member; losing him at this point could be more

  than embarrassing. Besides, he’s a friend—for posthuman

  values of friendship.

  The office translator is good, but it can’t provide real-

  time lip-synch morphing between French and Italian:

  Annette has to make an effort to listen to his words be-

  cause the shape of his mouth is all wrong, like a badly-

  dubbed video. And the desk switches from black ash to

  rosewood abruptly, halfway across its expanse, and the

  air currents are all wrong. “His answerphone, it is very

  good: like Manfred, it does not lie convincingly.”

  “But it doesn’t pass the Turing test. Yet.”

  “Non.” A smile flashes across her face, rapidly replaced by worry lines. “Where can he be? You are relying

  on him and I—”

  The minister prods at the highly polished rosewood

  6

  T O U R I S T

  desktop; the woodgrain slips, sliding into a strangely different conformation, generating random dot stereoiso-

  grams—messages for his eyes only. “You will find him in

  Scotland,” he says after a moment. “That was on his Out-

  look. I find it harder to trace his exact whereabouts—the privacy safeguards—but if you, as next of kin by common

  law, travel in person . . .”

  “I go.”

  The woman in black stands up, surprising a vacuum

  cleaner that skulks behind her desk. “Au revoir!”

  “Ciao.”

  As she vacates her office the minister flickers off be-

  hind her, leaving the far wall the dull grey of a cold display panel. Outside, she’s cut off from the shared

  groupspace that she, and Gianni, and the rest of the team, have established. Gianni is in Rome; she’s in Paris,

  Markus is in Dusseldorf, and Eva’s in Wrocklaw. There

  are others, trapped in digital cells scattered halfway

  across an elderly continent: but as long as they don’t try to shake hands they’re free to shout across the office at each other. Their confidences and dirty jokes tunnel

  through multiple layers of anonymized communication:

  Gianni can swing the best facilities, and it’s a good thing too. He’s making his break out of regional politics and

  into European national affairs: their job—his election

  team—is to get him a seat on the Confederacy Comission,

  as Representative for Intelligence Oversight, and push the boundaries of post-humanitarian action outward, into

  deep space and deeper time. Which makes their casual

  working conversation profoundly interesting to certain

  people: the walls have ears, and not all the brains at-

  tached to them are human.

  Annette is more worried than she’s letting on to Gi-

  7

  C H A R L E S S T R O S S

  anni. It’s unlike Manfred to be out of contact for long:

  even odder for his receptionist to stonewall her, given

  that her apartment is the nearest thing to a home he’s had for the past couple of years. But something smells fishy.

  He sneaked out last night, saying it would be an

  overnight trip, and now he’s not answering. Could it be his ex-wife? she wonders: but no, there’s been no word from the obsessive bitch for months, other than the sarcastic cards she despatches every year without fail, timed to arrive on the birthday of the daughter Manfred has

  never met. The music mafia? A letter bomb from the

  Copyright Enforcement Front? But no, his medical monitor would have been screaming its head off if anything

  like that had happened. She’s organised things so that

  he’s safe from the intellectual property thieves, lent him the guiding hand he needs. She gets a a warm sense of

  accomplishment whenever she considers how comple-

  mentary their abilities are: how much of a mess he was in before he met her for the second time, eyes meeting

  across a microsat launcher in an abandoned supermarket

  outside London. But that’s exactly why she’s worried

  now. The watchdog hasn’t barked . . .

  Annette takes a taxi to Charles de Gaulle, uses her par-

  liamentary carte to bump an executive class seat on the

  next A320 to Turnhouse, Edinburgh’s airport. The plane

  is climbing out over la Manche before it hits her: what if the Franklin Collective isn’t as harmless as he thinks?

  The hospital emergency suite has a waiting room with

  green plastic bucket seats and subtractive volume render-

  ings by pre-teens stuck to the walls like surreal Lego

  sculptures. It’s deeply silent, the available bandwidth all sequestrated for medical monitors—there are children

  8

  T O U R I S T

  crying, periodic sirens wailing as ambulances draw up,

  and people chattering all around him, but to Manfred it’s like being at the bottom of a deep blue pool of quiet. He feels stoned, except there’s no euphoria with this drug.

  Corridor-corner vendors hawk kebab-spitted pigeons

  next to the chained and rusted voluntary service booth;

  video cameras watch the blue bivvy bags of the chronic

  cases lined up next to the nursing station. Alone in his

  own head, Manfred is frightened and confused.

  “I can’t check you in ’less you sign the confidentiality

  agreement,” says the triage nurse, pushing an antique

  clipboard at Manfred’s face. Service in the NHS is still

  free, but steps have been taken to reduce the incidence of scandals: “sign the nondisclosure clause here and here, or the house officer won’t see you.”

  Manfred stares blearily up at the nurse’s nose, which is

  red and slightly inflamed from a nosocomial infection.

  His phones are bickering again, and he can’t remember

  why; they don’t normally behave like this, something

  must be missing, but thinking about it is hard. “Why am

  I here?” he asks for the third time.

  “Sign it.” A pen is thrust into his hand. He focusses

  on the page, jerks upright as deeply canalized reflexes

  kick in.

  “This is theft of human rights! It says here that the

  party of the second part is enjoined from disclosing in-

  formation relating to the operations management triage

  procedures and processes of the said healthgiving institution, that’s you, to any third party—that’s the public media—on pain of forfeiture of health benefits pursuant to

  section two of the Health Service Reform Act. I can’t sign this! You could reposess my left kidney if I post on the

  net about how long I’ve been in hospital!”

  9

  C H A R L E S S T R O S S

  “So don’t sign, then.” The nurse shrugs, hitches up his

  sari, and walks away: “enjoy your wait!”

  Manfred pulls out his backup phone and stares at its

  megapixel display. “Something wrong here.” The keypad beeps as he laboriously inputs opcodes. This gets him into an X.25 PAD, and he has a vague, disturbing memory

  that hints about where he can go from here—mostly into

  the long-since decommissioned bowels of NHSNet—but

  the memories spring a page fault and die, somewhere be-

  tween fingertips and the moment when understanding

  dawns. It’s a frustrating feeling: his brain is like an ancient car engine with damp spark plugs, turning over and

  over without catching fire.

  The kebab vendor next to Manfred’s seating rail

  chucks a stock cube on his grill; it begins to smoke, aromatic and blue and herbal—cannabinoids to induce tran-

  quility and appetite. Manfred sniffs twice, then staggers to his feet and heads off in search of the toilet, his head spinning. He’s mumbling at his wrist watch: “hello,

  Guatemala? Get me posology please. Click down my

  meme tree, I’m confused. Oh shit. Who was I? What happened? Why is everything blurry? I can’t find my

  glasses . . .”

  A gaggle of day-trippers are leaving the leprosy ward,

  men and women dressed in anachronistic garb: men in

  dark suits, women in long dresses. All of them wear elec-

  tric blue disposable gloves and face masks. There’s a hum and crackle of encrypted bandwidth emanating from

  them, and Manfred instinctively turns to follow them.

  They leave the A&E unit through the wheelchair exit, two ladies escorted by three gentlemen, with a deranged distressed refugee from the twenty-first century shuffling

  dizzily after. They’re all young, Manfred realises vaguely.

  1 0

  T O U R I S T

  Where’s my cat? Aineko might be able to make sense of this, if Aineko was interested.

  “I rather fancy we should retire to the club house,”

  says one young beau: “oh yes! please!” his short blonde

  companion chirps, clapping her hands together, then irri-

  tably stripping off the anachronistic plastic gloves to reveal wired lace positional-sensor mitts underneath. “This trip has obviously been unproductive. If our contact is

  here, I see no easy way of locating of him without breach of medical confidence or a hefty gratuity.”

  “The poor things,” murmurs the other woman, glancing

  back at the leprosarium. “Such a humiliating way to die.”

  “Their own fault: if they hadn’t participated in antibi-

  otic abuse they wouldn’t be in the isolation ward,” har-

  rumphs a twenty-something with mutton-chops and the

  manner of a precocious paterfamilias. He raps his walk-

  ing stick on the pavement for punctuation, and they

  pause for a flock of cyclists and a rickshaw before they

  cross the road onto the Meadows. “Degenerate medica-

  tion compliance, degenerate immune systems.”

  Manfred pauses to survey the grass, brain spinning as

  he ponders the fractal dimensionality of leaves: then he

  lurches after them, nearly getting himself run down by a

  flywheel-powered tourist bus. Club. His feet hit the pavement, cross it, thud down onto three billion years of veg-etative evolution: Something about those people. He feels a weird yearning, a tropism for information. It’s almost

  all that’s left of him—his voracious will to know. The tall, dark-haired woman hitches up her long skirts to keep

  them out of the mud: he sees a flash of iridescent petti-

  coats that ripple like oil on water, worn over old-

  fashioned combat boots. Not Victorian, then: something

  else. I came here to see—the name is on the tip of his 1 1

  C H A R L E S S T R O S S

  tongue. Almost. He feels that it has something to do with these people.

  The squad crosses the Meadows by way of a tree-lined

  path, and come to a Georgian cheesecake frontage with

  wide steps and a polished brass doorbell. They enter, and the man with the mutton-chops pauses on the threshold

  and turns to face Manfred. “You’ve followed us this far,”

  he says. “Do you want to come in? You might find what

  you’re looking for.”

  Manfred follows with knocking knees, desperately

  afraid of whatever he’s forgotten.

  Annette sits cross-legged on the hotel room floor and in-

  terrogates Manfred’s cat.

  “When did you last see him?”

  Aineko turns its head away from her and concentrates

  on washing the inside of its left leg. Its fur is lifelike and thick, pleasingly patterned except for a manufacturer’s

  URL emblazoned on its flanks: but the mouth produces

  no saliva, the throat opens on no stomach or lungs. “Go

  away,” it says: “I’m busy.”

  “When did you last see Manfred?” she repeats intently.

  “I don’t have time for this. The Polis don’t know. The

  medical services don’t know. He’s off-net and not re-

  sponding. So what can you tell me?”

  “Neko mod two alpha requires maintenance downtime

  on a regular basis,” the cat says pompously: “you knew

  that when you bought me this body. What were you ex-

  pecting, five-nines uptime from a lump of meat?” The

  tongue rasps out then pauses while microprobes in its un-

  derside replace the hairs that fell out earlier in the day.

  Annette sighs. Manfred’s had this robot cat for six

  years, and his ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its neu-

  1 2

  T O U R I S T

  ral wiring, too: this is its third body, and it’s getting more realistically uncooperative with every hardware upgrade.

  Sooner or later it’s going to demand a litter tray and start throwing up on the carpet out of spite. “Command over-ride,” she says. “Dump event log to my cartesian theatre, minus eight hours to present.”

  The cat shudders and looks round at her. “Human

  bitch!” it hisses. Then it freezes in place as the air fills with a bright and silent tsunami of data. Both Annette

  and Aineko are wired for extremely high bandwidth

  spread-spectrum optical networking; an observer would

  see the cat’s eyes, and a ring on her left hand, glow blue-white at each other. After a few seconds Annette nods to

  herself and wiggles her fingers in the air, navigating a

  time sequence only she can see. Aineko hisses jealousy at her then stands and stalks away, tail held high.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Annette hums to herself.

  She intertwines her fingers, pressing obscure pressure-

  points on knuckle and wrist, then sighs and rubs her eyes.

  “He left here under his own power, looking normal,” she

  calls to the cat. “Who did he say he was going to see?”

  The cat sits in a beam of sunlight falling in through the high glass window, pointedly showing her its back.

  “Merde. If you’re not going to help him—”

  “Try the Grass Market,” sulks the cat. “He was going to

  see the Franklin Collective. Much good they’ll do him . . .”

  A man wearing second-hand Chinese combat fatigues

  and a horribly expensive pair of glasses bounces up a

  flight of damp stone steps beneath a keystone that an-

  nounces the building to be a Salvation Army hostel. He

  bangs on the door, his voice almost drowned out by the

  pair of Cold War Reenactment Society MiGs that are

  1 3

  C H A R L E S S T R O S S

  buzzing the castle up the road: “open up, ye cunts! Ye’ve got a deal comin’!”

  A peephole set in the door at eye level slides to one

  side, and a pair of beady black-eyed video cameras peer

  out at him. “Who are you and what do you want?” the

  speaker crackles.

  “I’m Macx,” he says: “you’ve heard from my systems:

  I’m here to offer you a deal you can’t refuse.” At least

  that’s what his glasses tell him to say: what comes out of his mouth sounds a bit more like ah’m Macx: ye’ve heard frae ma system, Ah’m here tae gie yez a deal ye cannae refuse. The glasses haven’t had long enough to work on his accent. Meanwhile, he’s so full of himself that he

  snaps his fingers and does a little dance of impatience on the top step.

  “Aye well, hold on a minute.” The person on the other

  side of the speakerphone has the kind of cut-glass Morn-

  ingside accent that manages to sound more English than

  the King while remaining vernacular Scots. The door

  opens and Macx finds himself confronted by a tall,

  slightly cadaverous man wearing a tweed suit that has

  seen better days and a clerical collar cut from a translucent circuit board. His face is almost concealed behind a pair of recording angel goggles. “Who did you say you

  were?”

  “I’m Macx! Manfred Macx! Ah’m here wi an opportu-

  nity ye wouldnae believe. Ah’ve got the answer tae yer

  church’s financial situation. Ah’m gonnae make yez all

  rich!” The glasses prompt, and Macx speaks.

  The man in the doorway tilts his head slightly, goggles

  scanning Macx from head to foot. Bursts of blue combus-

  tion products spurt from Macx’s heels as he bounces up

  1 4

  T O U R I S T

  and down enthusiastically. “Are you sure ye’ve got the

  right address?” he asks worriedly.

  “Aye, Ah am that.”

  The resident backs into the hostel: “well then, come in,

  sit yourself down and tell me all about it.”

  Macx bounces into the room with his brain wide open

  to a blizzard of pie charts and growth curves, documents

  spawning in the bizarre phase-space of his corporate

  management software. “Ah’ve got a deal ye widnae be-

  lieve,” he begins, gliding past noticeboards upon which

  Church circulars are staked out to die like exotic butterflies, stepping over rolled-up carpets and a stack of laptops left over from a jumble sale, past the devotional

  radio telescope that does double-duty as Mrs Muirhouse’s