Free Fractions by Ken MacLeod Page B

and assist their endless striving to escape, to wriggle free of the numbing crunch of data-processing where they were generated – and send them forth to grow and thrive and wreak havoc.
    That was what he’d tried to do with a penetration virus, tailored to all the profiles and traces of Moh Kohn’s activities that he’d started pulling in as soon as he’d picked up the man’s codes. Trashing the reputation of one of the CLA ’s hired guns was well out of order, and Donovan had given his best efforts to the job of hitting back. It hadn’t taken him long to find Kohn’s fingerprints all over the university system. Donovan had released the virus and sat back to watch. At the very least, it should have made Kohn’s fingers burn.
    And it had all gone inexplicably wrong. First, the virus had been diverted from the pursuit of two of Kohn’s data constructs by, of all things, the ANR ’s Black Plan. It was as if the virus had been misled by some feature that Kohn’s constructs and the Plan had in common, something in the signature, in the dot profile like a distinctive pheromone…Lured deep into the Plan’s ramifications, the distracted virus had been wiped out by one of Kohn’s constructs. Finally, and worst of all, while he’d still been reeling from the shock he’d been blown completely out of the system by an entity more powerful than anything he’d ever suspected might exist. It could only be the kind of entity whose coming into being he’d fought so long to prevent.
    He had looked into the eye of the Watchmaker.
    After a few minutes he went below and began to summon his familiars.

4

Not Unacquainted with the More Obvious Laws of Electricity
    The representatives of Janis’s sponsors seemed shy of meeting any of the other academic staff, so she treated them to lunch in the Student’s Union cafeteria: the Heroes of Freedom and/or Democracy Memorial Bar. There, she hoped, they might be mistaken for musicians. None of the students paid her guests much attention, except when they ignored the wide range of English ales and insisted on German lager.
    After the sponsors had gone she sat drinking black coffee to clear her head. The lunchtime crowd was so noisy she no longer noticed it, nor the wall-covering black-and-white portraits of Lech Walesa and Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill and Bobby Sands and Wei Jingshen and others to whose memory various factions had successively dedicated the place.
    Psylocibins and cannabinoids…the combination’s potency seemed likely enough; a newly discovered effect less so. Most of the useful research had been done decades ago, in a flurry of interest after the end of prohibition, and of course most of the trial-and-error empirical investigation had been done during prohibition. It seemed implausible that an actual enhancement of cognitive processing could have been missed, with so many experimenters so keen to come up with justifications for their professional or recreational activities; with all those interested parties. But the molecules she was using were new combinations, in an area where the realignment of a few atomic bonds could be significant.
    Finding a drug that could reliably enhance memory retrieval…
    She wanted to shout about it. No, she wanted to get back to work. Get it nailed down, then shout about it.
    Hemp cigarettes, that was what she had to get, made with Russian cannabis. Now where—? Laughing at herself, she got up and bought a pack from the vending machine that she’d been gazing at for five minutes.
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    Back at the lab, she set the rack of test-tubes on a bench and began systematically checking them against her notes of the dosages she’d given the mice. She called up images of the molecules, of a THC molecule, of probably receptor sites on the neuron surface, and turned them this way and that. She didn’t consciously hear the footsteps coming along the