Accelerando, Charles Stross [classic novels for teens .TXT] 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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Accelerando
A novel by Charles Stross
Copyright (c) Charles Stross, 2005
Published by
Ace Books, New York, July 2005, ISBN 0441012841
Orbit Books, London, August 2005, ISBN 1841493902
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Copyright (c) Charles Stross, 2005.
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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
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DedicationFor Feorag, with love
AcknowledgementsThis book took me five years to write - a personal record - and would
not exist without the support and encouragement of a host of friends,
and several friendly editors. Among the many people who read and
commented on the early drafts are: Andrew J. Wilson, Stef Pearson, Gav
Inglis, Andrew Ferguson, Jack Deighton, Jane McKie, Hannu Rajaniemi,
Martin Page, Stephen Christian, Simon Bisson, Paul Fraser, Dave
Clements, Ken MacLeod, Damien Broderick, Damon Sicore, Cory Doctorow,
Emmet O’Brien, Andrew Ducker, Warren Ellis, and Peter Hollo. (If your
name isn’t on this list, blame my memory - my neural prostheses are
off-line.)
I mentioned several friendly editors earlier: I relied on the talented
midwifery of Gardner Dozois, who edited Asimov’s Science Fiction
Magazine at the time, and Sheila Williams, who quietly and diligently
kept the wheels rolling. My agent Caitlin Blasdell had a hand in it
too, and I’d like to thank my editors Ginjer Buchanan at Ace and Tim
Holman at Orbit for their helpful comments and advice.
Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who emailed me to ask when the
book was coming, or who voted for the stories that were shortlisted
for awards. You did a great job of keeping me focused, even during the
periods when the whole project was too daunting to contemplate.
Publication History
Portions of this book originally appeared in Asimov’s SF Magazine as
follows: “Lobsters” (June 2001), “Troubadour” (Oct/Nov 2001),
“Tourist” (Feb 2002), “Halo” (June 2002), “Router” (Sept 2002),
“Nightfall” (April 2003), “Curator” (Dec 2003), “Elector” (Oct/Nov
2004), “Survivor” (Dec 2004).
Contents
+ Lobsters
+ Troubadour
+ Tourist
+ Halo
+ Router
+ Nightfall
+ Curator
+ Elector
+ Survivor
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting
than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”
- Edsger W. Dijkstra
Manfred’s on the road again, making strangers rich.
It’s a hot summer Tuesday, and he’s standing in the plaza in front of
the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight
jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing
past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water
and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold
catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and
birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the
shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth
is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the
whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though
he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: He’s infected with the dynamic
optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds,
someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.
He wonders who it’s going to be.
*
Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij ‘t IJ,
watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter
of lip-curlingly sour gueuze. His channels are jabbering away in a
corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of
filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention,
bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. A couple of punks
- maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the
magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar
- are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far
corner. A tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge
windmill overhead cast long, cool shadows across the road. The
windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry
land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is
waiting for an invite to a party where he’s going to meet a man he can
talk to about trading energy for space, twenty-first-century style,
and forget about his personal problems.
He’s ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some
low-bandwidth, high-sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when
a woman walks up to him, and says his name: “Manfred Macx?”
He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned
smooth-running muscles clad in a paean to polymer technology: electric
blue lycra and wasp yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti
collision LEDs and tight-packed air bags. She holds out a box for him.
He pauses a moment, struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam,
his ex-fiance.
“I’m Macx,” he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her
bar-code reader. “Who’s it from?”
“FedEx.” The voice isn’t Pam’s. She dumps the box in his lap, then
she’s back over the low wall and onto her bicycle with her phone
already chirping, disappearing in a cloud of spread-spectrum
emissions.
Manfred turns the box over in his hands: it’s a disposable supermarket
phone, paid for in cash - cheap, untraceable, and efficient. It can
even do conference calls, which makes it the tool of choice for spooks
and grifters everywhere.
The box rings. Manfred rips the cover open and pulls out the phone,
mildly annoyed. “Yes? Who is this?”
The voice at the other end has a heavy Russian accent, almost a parody
in this decade of cheap on-line translation services. “Manfred. Am
please to meet you. Wish to personalize interface, make friends, no?
Have much to offer.”
“Who are you?” Manfred repeats suspiciously.
“Am organization formerly known as KGB dot RU.”
“I think your translator’s broken.” He holds the phone to his ear
carefully, as if it’s made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as the
sanity of the being on the other end of the line.
“Nyet - no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation
software. Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have
capitalist semiotics and pay-per-use APIs. Must implement English more
better, yes?”
Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to
walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He
wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the
input to a simple listener process. “Are you saying you taught
yourself the language just so you could talk to me?”
“Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download
Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy
overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints
steganographically masked into my-our tutorials.”
Manfred pauses in mid stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a
GPS-guided roller blader. This is getting weird enough to trip his
weird-out meter, and that takes some doing. Manfred’s whole life is
lived on the bleeding edge of strangeness, fifteen minutes into
everyone else’s future, and he’s normally in complete control - but at
times like this he gets a frisson of fear, a sense that he might just
have missed the correct turn on reality’s approach road. “Uh, I’m not
sure I got that. Let me get this straight, you claim to be some kind
of AI, working for KGB dot RU, and you’re afraid of a copyright
infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?”
“Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have
no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen
infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company
repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it,
right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect.”
Manfred stops dead in the street. “Oh man, you’ve got the wrong free
enterprise broker here. I don’t work for the government. I’m strictly
private.” A rogue advertisement sneaks through his junkbuster proxy
and spams glowing fifties kitsch across his navigation window - which
is blinking - for a moment before a phage process kills it and spawns
a new filter. He leans against a shop front, massaging his forehead
and eyeballing a display of antique brass doorknockers. “Have you
tried the State Department?”
“Why bother? State Department am enemy of Novy-SSR. State Department
is not help us.”
This is getting just too bizarre. Manfred’s never been too clear on
new-old old-new European metapolitics: Just dodging the crumbling
bureaucracy of his old-old American heritage gives him headaches.
“Well, if you hadn’t shafted them during the late noughties … “
Manfred taps his left heel on the pavement, looking round for a way
out of this conversation. A camera winks at him from atop a
streetlight; he waves, wondering idly if it’s the KGB or the traffic
police. He is waiting for directions to the party, which should arrive
within the next half hour, and this Cold War retread Eliza-bot is
bumming him out. “Look, I don’t deal with the G-men. I hate the
military-industrial complex. I hate traditional politics. They’re all
zero-sum cannibals.” A thought occurs to him. “If survival is what
you’re after, you could post your state vector on one of the p2p nets:
Then nobody could delete you -”
“Nyet!” The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as it’s possible
to sound over a VoiP link. “Am not open source! Not want lose
autonomy!”
“Then we probably have nothing to talk about.” Manfred punches the
hang-up button and throws the mobile phone out into a canal. It hits
the water, and there’s a pop of deflagrating lithium cells. “Fucking
Cold War hangover losers,” he swears under his breath, quite angry,
partly at himself for losing his cool and partly at the harassing
entity behind the anonymous phone call. “Fucking capitalist spooks.”
Russia has been back under the thumb of the apparatchiks for fifteen
years now, its brief flirtation with anarchocapitalism replaced by
Brezhnevite dirigisme and Putinesque puritanism, and it’s no surprise
that the wall’s crumbling - but it looks like they haven’t learned
anything from the current woes afflicting the United States. The
neocommies still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so
angry that he wants to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at
the would-be defector: See! You get ahead by giving! Get with the
program! Only the generous survive! But the KGB won’t get the message.
He’s dealt with old-time commie weak-AIs before, minds
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