The Rhesus Chart by Charles Stross

Author:Charles Stross [Stross, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Fiction, SciFi, Horror, Mythos
ISBN: 9780356502533
Goodreads: 18211295
Publisher: Ace
Published: 2014-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

Leaving Mo sobbing in the bedroom, I head downstairs, grab a couple of tumblers, and rummage around the bottle rack for the single malt in question. (The bottle’s still about half-full: neither of us is fond of drinking alone, which is a good thing.) I find a spare box of tissues on the kitchen worktop and hook it on a little finger, then take the stairs back up to the bedroom two at a time—but I needn’t have bothered; Mo is moist but composed, if a bit fragile-looking.

“Here,” I say, shaking the box of tissues loose over her lap: “I’ll pour.” I put the glasses down, uncork the bottle, and serve up a couple of uneven double-fingers of whisky. Mo gets the marginally taller tumbler once she finishes dabbing at her eyes—the bloody violin is leaning against her bedside table and she’s let go of it, hallelujah—and I get back into bed beside her and plump up the pillows so we’ve got something to lean against. “You don’t have to talk about it unless you want to.”

She sips thoughtfully at the amber liquid. Her hair’s a mess of twisted locks, almost in dreads: still coppery-red, although much of that comes from a bottle these days. Evidently wearing a headscarf disagrees with it, and she hasn’t had the time or energy to untangle it. “Maybe some good will come of it,” she says quietly. “They’ll have to stop the mass executions.”

“The—” I bite my tongue. Then I take an incautiously large sip from my own glass. Gears crunch in my head: she’s back from Iran. In the past few years, since the Arab Spring and the Green uprising that failed, the always-dependably-draconian regime has been going mad. So mad that our own Conservative government (catch phrase: hang ’em and flog ’em), who have hitherto been enthusiastically rendering all due assistance to the Iranian heroin traffic interdiction cops through the usual international police intelligence channels, have been backing away and muttering about not going too far, chaps. “What happened?” I ask, queasily curious.

“CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN strikes again.” Mo sips at her whisky, clutching the tumbler in both hands to steady it. And my heart sinks.

CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is the end of the world, more or less. Magic is a side effect of computation, and we’re building too damn many microprocessors into too damn many toys these days—worse, we can’t stop; civilization will fall apart if we don’t have singing Christmas cards and intelligent gas meters, apparently. But there are other sources of computation. Human brains are computing machines par excellence, and the more of them there are, the more thaumaturgic processor cycles we produce. The whole thing is a runaway positive-feedback loop; while the demographic transition to a low birth/low death rate means we’re near the top of the population roller coaster, it’s going to take us a long time to get rid of all those surplus brains and the microprocessors they depend on, and in the meantime, the ultrastructure of reality is becoming extra-porous.

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