Free Fractions by Ken MacLeod Page A

’s paperback launch as its big splash.’
    â€˜Oh. That’s good. Congratulations, Miss Packham.’
    â€˜Amanda. Thanks.’ Impossibly white teeth. ‘But—’ She stopped, frowning uncertainly into her Beck’s, then flicked her bangs out of her face and looked straight at him. ‘We can play it two ways. Either you stay out of sight, or you go for publicity, personal appearances, and that means—’
    â€˜No problem,’ Donovan said. ‘I was planning on that.’ He poked his toe against a clump of plastic shopping-bags at his feet, sending soap and detergent and shampoo bottles rolling and skidding across the polished floor. While he herded them back together, Amanda stacked a few books which had slithered from a Waterstones carrier bag: How to Win Friends and Influence People, The Magic of Thinking Big, Winning Through Intimidation …
    â€˜I think you’ve got the idea,’ she said.
    Later he asked, ‘What other books will you want for New Heretics?’
    â€˜Nothing New-Aged, nothing nineties ,’ she said carefully. ‘Just unorthodox but serious scientific speculation.’
    â€˜I see,’ said Donovan, without bitterness. ‘Cranks.’
    Â 
    He didn’t let her down: cleaned up his act, cleaned up his flat. His previous self-neglect had been partly the product of low self-esteem but more a result of his concentration on what he saw as the task to hand; a different side of it was a lack of egotism in his dealings with other people, a rationality and attentiveness which, once the grime was scrubbed away, shone out as affability and politeness. And Amanda hadn’t let him down. She got him on the chat-shows and debates. She kept her lips shut when his publicity consisted of claims of responsibility for software-virus epidemics. She kept the money going into his offshore accounts when his face appeared on the notice-boards of police stations more than it did on screens. Sometimes he wished he could have honoured that confidence with a more personal relationship: she was the first woman who had ever been consistently kind to him. But she’d found herself a newer, younger heretic whose ideas were the exact opposite of his: a machine liberationist who believed the damn things were already conscious, and oppressed. Obviously deluded but, Donovan thought charitably, perhaps Amanda had a soft spot for people like that.
    There were enough sexual opportunities among his followers to make that loss an abstraction. He tried not to exploit people, or let them use relationships with him in power struggles within the organization. He failed completely, if not miserably, with several spectacular splits and defections as a consequence. But the movement grew in parallel with the very technology it opposed, leaping continents as readily as it did hardware and software generations – a small player in the tech-sab leagues but the first to become genuinely virtual, authentically global. Its malign indifference to conventional politics allowed it to survive the repression of successive regimes – Kingdom, Republic, Restoration, Kingdom – and contending hegemonies, whose rivalries now permitted as much as compelled it to have its only local habitation here, on an abandoned platform which had been an oilrig, when there had been oil.
    Â 
    Donovan stepped carefully through the rounded door and stood for a few minutes on the deck. He breathed deeply, revelling in the heady smell of rust and oil and salt water. Below him stood the intricate structure of the rig and its bolted-on retro-fittings and armaments. Above, a small forest of antennae sighed and shifted, rotated or quivered with attention. Around, the dead North Sea stretched off into mist. Its greasy, leaden, littered swell filthily washed the platform’s legs.
    Donovan could detect almost intuitively the little struggling creatures of electric life – could nurture