Accelerando, Charles Stross [classic novels for teens .TXT] 📗

at him. “You know I don’t have any money.”

 

“Ah,” Glashwiecz smiles, “but you must be mistaken. Certainly the

judge will agree with me that you must be mistaken - all a lack of

paper documentation means is that you’ve covered your trail. There’s

the small matter of the several thousand corporations you own,

indirectly. Somewhere at the bottom of that pile there has got to be

something, hasn’t there?”

 

A hissing, burbling noise like a sackful of large lizards being

drowned in mud emanates from the kitchen, suggesting that Annette’s

percolator is nearly ready. Manfred’s left hand twitches, playing

chords on an air keyboard. Without being at all obvious, he’s

releasing a bulletin about his current activities that should soon

have an effect on the reputation marketplace. “Your attack was rather

elegant,” he comments, sitting down on the sofa as Pam disappears into

the kitchen.

 

Glashwiecz nods. “The idea was one of my interns’,” he says. “I don’t

understand this distributed denial of service stuff, but Lisa grew up

on it. Something about it being a legal travesty, but workable all the

same.”

 

“Uh-huh.” Manfred’s opinion of the lawyer drops a notch. He notices

Pam reappearing from the kitchen, her expression icy. A moment later

Annette surfaces carrying a jug and some cups, beaming innocently.

Something’s going on, but at that moment, one of his agents nudges him

urgently in the left ear, his suitcase keens mournfully and beams a

sense of utter despair at him, and the doorbell rings again.

 

“So what’s the scam?” Glashwiecz sits down uncomfortably close to

Manfred and murmurs out of one side of his mouth. “Where’s the money?”

 

Manfred looks at him irritably. “There is no money,” he says. “The

idea is to make money obsolete. Hasn’t she explained that?” His eyes

wander, taking in the lawyer’s Patek Philippe watch, his Java-enabled

signet ring.

 

“C’mon. Don’t give me that line. Look, all it takes is a couple of

million, and you can buy your way free for all I care. All I’m here

for is to see that your wife and daughter don’t get left penniless and

starving. You know and I know that you’ve got bags of it stuffed away

- just look at your reputation! You didn’t get that by standing at the

roadside with a begging bowl, did you?”

 

Manfred snorts. “You’re talking about an elite IRS auditor here. She

isn’t penniless; she gets a commission on every poor bastard she takes

to the cleaners, and she was born with a trust fund. Me, I -” The

stereo bleeps. Manfred pulls his glasses on. Whispering ghosts of dead

artists hum through his earlobes, urgently demanding their freedom.

Someone knocks at the door again, and he glances around to see Annette

walking toward it.

 

“You’re making it hard on yourself,” Glashwiecz warns.

 

“Expecting company?” Pam asks, one brittle eyebrow raised in Manfred’s

direction.

 

“Not exactly -”

 

Annette opens the door and a couple of guards in full SWAT gear march

in. They’re clutching gadgets that look like crosses between digital

sewing machines and grenade launchers, and their helmets are studded

with so many sensors that they resemble 1950s space probes. “That’s

them,” Annette says clearly.

 

“Mais Oui.” The door closes itself and the guards stand to either

side. Annette stalks toward Pam.

 

“You think to walk in here, to my pied-a-terre, and take from

Manfred?” she sniffs.

 

“You’re making a big mistake, lady,” Pam says, her voice steady and

cold enough to liquefy helium.

 

A burst of static from one of the troopers. “No,” Annette says

distantly. “No mistake.”

 

She points at Glashwiecz. “Are you aware of the takeover?”

 

“Takeover?” The lawyer looks puzzled, but not alarmed by the presence

of the guards.

 

“As of three hours ago,” Manfred says quietly, “I sold a controlling

interest in agalmic.holdings.root.1.1.1 to Athene Accelerants BV, a

venture capital outfit from Maastricht. One dot one dot one is the

root node of the central planning tree. Athene aren’t your usual VC,

they’re accelerants - they take explosive business plans and detonate

them.” Glashwiecz is looking pale - whether with anger or fear of a

lost commission is impossible to tell. “Actually, Athene Accelerants

is owned by a shell company owned by the Italian Communist Party’s

pension trust. The point is, you’re in the presence of one dot one dot

one’s chief operations officer.”

 

Pam looks annoyed. “Puerile attempts to dodge responsibility -”

 

Annette clears her throat. “Exactly who do you think you are trying to

sue?” she asks Glashwiecz sweetly. “Here we have laws about unfair

restraint of trade. Also about foreign political interference,

specifically in the financial affairs of an Italian party of

government.”

 

“You wouldn’t -”

 

“I would.” Manfred brushes his hands on his knees and stands up.

“Done, yet?” he asks the suitcase.

 

Muffled beeps, then a gravelly synthesized voice speaks. “Uploads

completed.”

 

“Ah, good.” He grins at Annette. “Time for our next guests?”

 

On cue, the doorbell rings again. The guards sidle to either side of

the door. Annette snaps her fingers, and it opens to admit a pair of

smartly dressed thugs. It’s beginning to get crowded in the living

room.

 

“Which one of you is Macx?” snaps the older one of the two thugs,

staring at Glashwiecz for no obvious reason. He hefts an aluminum

briefcase. “Got a writ to serve.”

 

“You’d be the CCAA?” asks Manfred.

 

“You bet. If you’re Macx, I have a restraining order -”

 

Manfred raises a hand. “It’s not me you want,” he says. “It’s this

lady.” He points at Pam, whose mouth opens in silent protest. “Y’see,

the intellectual property you’re chasing wants to be free. It’s so

free that it’s now administered by a complex set of corporate

instruments lodged in the Netherlands, and the prime shareholder as of

approximately four minutes ago is my soon-to-be-ex-wife Pamela, here.”

He winks at Glashwiecz. “Except she doesn’t control anything.”

 

“Just what do you think you’re playing at, Manfred?” Pamela snarls,

unable to contain herself any longer. The guards shuffle: The larger,

junior CCAA enforcer tugs at his boss’s jacket nervously.

 

“Well.” Manfred picks up his coffee and takes a sip. Grimaces. “Pam

wanted a divorce settlement, didn’t she? The most valuable assets I

own are the rights to a whole bunch of recategorized work-for-hire

that slipped through the CCAA’s fingers a few years back. Part of the

twentieth century’s cultural heritage that got locked away by the

music industry in the last decade - Janis Joplin, the Doors, that sort

of thing. Artists who weren’t around to defend themselves anymore.

When the music cartels went bust, the rights went for a walk. I took

them over originally with the idea of setting the music free. Giving

it back to the public domain, as it were.”

 

Annette nods at the guards, one of whom nods back and starts muttering

and buzzing into a throat mike. Manfred continues. “I was working on a

solution to the central planning paradox - how to interface a

centrally planned enclave to a market economy. My good friend Gianni

Vittoria suggested that such a shell game could have alternative uses.

So I’ve not freed the music. Instead, I signed the rights over to

various actors and threads running inside the agalmic holdings network

- currently one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred and

seventy-five companies. They swap rights rapidly - the rights to any

given song are resident in a given company for, oh, all of fifty

milliseconds at a time. Now understand, I don’t own these companies. I

don’t even have a financial interest in them anymore. I’ve deeded my

share of the profits to Pam, here. I’m getting out of the biz,

Gianni’s suggested something rather more challenging for me to do

instead.”

 

He takes another mouthful of coffee. The recording Mafiya goon glares

at him. Pam glares at him. Annette stands against one wall, looking

amused. “Perhaps you’d like to sort it out between you?” he asks.

Aside, to Glashwiecz: “I trust you’ll drop your denial of service

attack before I set the Italian parliament on you? By the way, you’ll

find the book value of the intellectual property assets I deeded to

Pamela - by the value these gentlemen place on them - is somewhere in

excess of a billion dollars. As that’s rather more than

ninety-nine-point-nine percent of my assets, you’ll probably want to

look elsewhere for your fees.”

 

Glashwiecz stands up carefully. The lead goon stares at Pamela. “Is

this true?” he demands. “This little squirt give you IP assets of Sony

Bertelsmann Microsoft Music? We have claim! You come to us for

distribution or you get in deep trouble.”

 

The second goon rumbles agreement: “Remember, dose MP3s, dey bad for

you health!”

 

Annette claps her hands. “If you would to leave my apartment, please?”

The door, attentive as ever, swings open: “You are no longer welcome

here!”

 

“This means you,” Manfred advises Pam helpfully.

 

“You bastard,” she spits at him.

 

Manfred forces a smile, bemused by his inability to respond to her the

way she wants. Something’s wrong, missing, between them. “I thought

you wanted my assets. Are the encumbrances too much for you?”

 

“You know what I mean! You and that two-bit Euro-whore! I’ll nail you

for child neglect!”

 

His smile freezes. “Try it, and I’ll sue you for breach of patent

rights. My genome, you understand.”

 

Pam is taken aback by this. “You patented your own genome? What

happened to the brave new communist, sharing information freely?”

 

Manfred stops smiling. “Divorce happened. And the Italian Communist

Party happened.”

 

She turns on her heel and stalks out of the apartment bravely, tame

attorney in tow behind her, muttering about class action lawsuits and

violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The CCAA lawyer’s

tame gorilla makes a grab for Glashwiecz’s shoulder, and the guards

move in, hustling the whole movable feast out into the stairwell. The

door slams shut on a chaos of impending recursive lawsuits, and

Manfred breathes a huge wheeze of relief.

 

Annette walks over to him and leans her chin on the top of his head.

“Think it will work?” she asks.

 

“Well, the CCAA will sue the hell out of the company network for a

while if they try to distribute by any channel that isn’t controlled

by the Mafiya. Pam gets rights to all the music, her settlement, but

she can’t sell it without going through the mob. And I got to serve

notice on that legal shark: If he tries to take me on he’s got to be

politically bullet-proof. Hmm. Maybe I ought not to plan on going back

to the USA this side of the singularity.”

 

“Profits,” Annette sighs, “I do not easily understand this way of

yours. Or this apocalyptic obsession with singularity.”

 

“Remember the old aphorism, if you love something, set it free? I

freed the music.”

 

“But you didn’t! You signed rights over -”

 

“But first I uploaded the entire stash to several cryptographically

anonymized public network filesystems over the past few hours, so

there’ll be rampant piracy. And the robot companies are all set to

automagically grant any and every copyright request they receive,

royalty-free, until the goons figure out how to hack them. But that’s

not the point. The point is abundance. The Mafiya can’t stop it being

distributed. Pam is welcome to her cut if she can figure an angle -

but I bet she can’t. She still believes in classical economics, the

allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information

doesn’t work that way. What matters is that people will be able to

hear the music - instead of a Soviet central planning system, I’ve

turned the