Free Accelerando by Charles Stross

railway buffet car is run by a Nepalese fast-food franchise.“I sometimes wish for to stay on the train,” Annette says as she waits for her mismas bhat . “Past Paris! Think. Settle back in your couchette, to awaken in Moscow and change trains. All the way to Vladivostok in two days.”
    â€œIf they let you through the border,” Manfred mutters. Russia is one of those places that still requires passports and asks if you are now or ever have been an anti-anticommunist: It’s still trapped by its bloody-handed history. (Rewind the video stream to Stolypin’s necktie party and start out fresh.) Besides, they have enemies: White Russian oligarchs, protection racketeers in the intellectual property business. Psychotic relics of the last decade’s experiment with Marxism-Objectivism. “Are you really a CIA stringer?”
    Annette grins, her lips disconcertingly red. “I file dispatches from time to time. Nothing that could get me fired.”
    Manfred nods. “My wife has access to their unfiltered stream.”
    â€œYour—” Annette pauses. “It was she who I, I met? In De Wildemann’s?” She sees his expression. “Oh, my poor fool!” She raises her glass to him. “It is, has, not gone well?”
    Manfred sighs and raises a toast toward Annette. “You know your marriage is in a bad way when you send your spouse messages via the CIA, and she communicates using the IRS.”
    â€œIn only five years.” Annette winces. “You will pardon me for saying this—she did not look like your type.” There’s a question hidden behind that statement, and he notices again how good she is at overloading her statements with subtexts.
    â€œI’m not sure what my type is,” he says, half-truthfully. He can’t elude the sense that something not of either of their doing went wrong between him and Pamela, a subtle intrusion that levered them apart by stealth. Maybe it was me, he thinks. Sometimes he isn’t certain he’s still human; too many threads of his consciousness seem to live outside his head, reporting back whenever they find something interesting. Sometimes he feels like a puppet, and that frightens him because it’s one of the early-warning signs of schizophrenia. And it’s too early for anyone out there to be trying to hack exocortices . . . isn’t it? Right now, the external threads of his consciousness are telling him that they like Annette, when she’s being herself instead of a cog in the meatspace ensemble of Arianespace management. But the part of him that’s still human isn’tsure just how far to trust himself. “I want to be me. What do you want to be?”
    She shrugs, as a waiter slides a plate in front of her. “I’m just a, a Parisian babe, no? An ingénue raised in the lilac age of le Confederaçion Europé, the self-deconstructed ruins of the gilded European Union.”
    â€œYeah, right.” A plate appears in front of Manfred. “And I’m a good old microboomer from the MassPike corridor.” He peels back a corner of the omelet topping and inspects the food underneath it. “Born in the sunset years of the American century.” He pokes at one of the unidentifiable meaty lumps in the fried rice with his fork, and it pokes right back. There’s a limit to how much his agents can tell him about her—European privacy laws are draconian by American standards—but he knows the essentials. Two parents who are still together, father a petty politician in some town council down in the vicinity of Toulouse. Went to the right école . The obligatory year spent bumming around the Confederaçion at government expense, learning how other people live—a new kind of empire building, in place of the twentieth century’s conscription and jackboot walkabout. No weblog or personal site that his agents can find. She joined