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

raised on

Marxist dialectic and Austrian School economics: They’re so thoroughly

hypnotized by the short-term victory of global capitalism that they

can’t surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term.

 

Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he’s

going to patent next.

 

*

 

Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful

multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public

transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for

services rendered. He has airline employee’s travel rights with six

flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush

jacket has sixty-four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it,

four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to

grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to

measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines he’s never met. Law

firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy,

does he patent a lot - although he always signs the rights over to

the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their

obligation-free infrastructure project.

 

In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he’s the guy who patented

the business practice of moving your ebusiness somewhere with a

slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing

encumbrances. He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to

patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of

a problem domain - not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all

possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are

legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will

become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the

coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear

that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of

crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate

Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe

another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and

Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on

wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists

in Prague who think he’s the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of

the Pope.

 

Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially

coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people

who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In

return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is

a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for

anything.

 

There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a

constant burn of future shock - he has to assimilate more than a

megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to

stay current. The Internal Revenue Service is investigating him

continuously because it doesn’t believe his lifestyle can exist

without racketeering. And then there are the items that no money

can’t buy: like the respect of his parents. He hasn’t spoken to

them for three years, his father thinks he’s a hippy scrounger, and

his mother still hasn’t forgiven him for dropping out of his

downmarket Harvard emulation course. (They’re still locked in the

boringly bourgeois twen-cen paradigm of college-career-kids.) His

fiance and sometime dominatrix Pamela threw him over six months

ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear on. (Ironically,

she’s a headhunter for the IRS, jetting all over the place at

public expense, trying to persuade entrepreneurs who’ve gone global

to pay taxes for the good of the Treasury Department.) To cap it

all, the Southern Baptist Conventions have denounced him as a

minion of Satan on all their websites. Which would be funny

because, as a born-again atheist Manfred doesn’t believe in Satan,

if it wasn’t for the dead kittens that someone keeps mailing him.

 

*

 

Manfred drops in at his hotel suite, unpacks his Aineko, plugs in a

fresh set of cells to charge, and sticks most of his private keys in

the safe. Then he heads straight for the party, which is currently

happening at De Wildemann’s; it’s a twenty-minute walk, and the only

real hazard is dodging the trams that sneak up on him behind the cover

of his moving map display.

 

Along the way, his glasses bring him up to date on the news. Europe

has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They’re

using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature

of bananas. The Middle East is, well, it’s just as bad as ever, but

the war on fundamentalism doesn’t hold much interest for Manfred. In

San Diego, researchers are uploading lobsters into cyberspace,

starting with the stomatogastric ganglion, one neuron at a time.

They’re burning GM cocoa in Belize and books in Georgia. NASA still

can’t put a man on the moon. Russia has reelected the communist

government with an increased majority in the Duma; meanwhile, in

China, fevered rumors circulate about an imminent rehabilitation, the

second coming of Mao, who will save them from the consequences of the

Three Gorges disaster. In business news, the US Justice Department is

- ironically - outraged at the Baby Bills. The divested Microsoft

divisions have automated their legal processes and are spawning

subsidiaries, IPOing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of

bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that, by the time the windfall tax

demands are served, the targets don’t exist anymore, even though the

same staff are working on the same software in the same Mumbai cubicle

farms.

 

Welcome to the twenty-first century.

 

The permanent floating meatspace party Manfred is hooking up with is a

strange attractor for some of the American exiles cluttering up the

cities of Europe this decade - not trustafarians, but honest-to-God

political dissidents, draft dodgers, and terminal outsourcing victims.

It’s the kind of place where weird connections are made and crossed

lines make new short circuits into the future, like the street cafes

of Switzerland where the pre Great War Russian exiles gathered. Right

now it’s located in the back of De Wildemann’s, a three-hundred-year

old brown cafe with a list of brews that runs to sixteen pages and

wooden walls stained the color of stale beer. The air is thick with

the smells of tobacco, brewer’s yeast, and melatonin spray: Half the

dotters are nursing monster jet lag hangovers, and the other half are

babbling a Eurotrash creole at each other while they work on the

hangover. “Man did you see that? He looks like a Democrat!” exclaims

one whitebread hanger-on who’s currently propping up the bar. Manfred

slides in next to him, catches the bartender’s eye.

 

“Glass of the Berlinerweisse, please,” he says.

 

“You drink that stuff?” asks the hanger-on, curling a hand

protectively around his Coke. “Man, you don’t want to do that! It’s

full of alcohol!”

 

Manfred grins at him toothily. “Ya gotta keep your yeast intake up:

There are lots of neurotransmitter precursors in this shit,

phenylalanine and glutamate.”

 

“But I thought that was a beer you were ordering …”

 

Manfred’s away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels

the more popular draught items in from the cask storage in back; one

of the hipper floaters has planted a contact bug on it, and the vCards

of all the personal network owners who’ve have visited the bar in the

past three hours are queuing up for attention. The air is full of

ultrawideband chatter, WiMAX and ‘tooth both, as he speed-scrolls

through the dizzying list of cached keys in search of one particular

name.

 

“Your drink.” The barman holds out an improbable-looking goblet full

of blue liquid with a cap of melting foam and a felching straw stuck

out at some crazy angle. Manfred takes it and heads for the back of

the split-level bar, up the steps to a table where some guy with

greasy dreadlocks is talking to a suit from Paris. The hanger-on at

the bar notices him for the first time, staring with suddenly wide

eyes: He nearly spills his Coke in a mad rush for the door.

 

Oh shit, thinks Manfred, better buy some more server time. He can

recognize the signs: He’s about to be slashdotted. He gestures at the

table. “This one taken?”

 

“Be my guest,” says the guy with the dreads. Manfred slides the chair

open then realizes that the other guy - immaculate double-breasted

Suit, sober tie, crew cut - is a girl. She nods at him, half-smiling

at his transparent double take. Mr. Dreadlock nods. “You’re Macx? I

figured it was about time we met.”

 

“Sure.” Manfred holds out a hand, and they shake. His PDA discreetly

swaps digital fingerprints, confirming that the hand belongs to Bob

Franklin, a Research Triangle startup monkey with a VC track record,

lately moving into micromachining and space technology. Franklin made

his first million two decades ago, and now he’s a specialist in

extropian investment fields. Operating exclusively overseas these past

five years, ever since the IRS got medieval about trying to suture the

sucking chest wound of the federal budget deficit. Manfred has known

him for nearly a decade via a closed mailing list, but this is the

first time they’ve ever met face-to-face. The Suit silently slides a

business card across the table; a little red devil brandishes a

trident at him, flames jetting up around its feet. He takes the card,

raises an eyebrow: “Annette Dimarcos? I’m pleased to meet you. Can’t

say I’ve ever met anyone from Arianespace marketing before.”

 

She smiles warmly; “That is all right. I have not the pleasure of

meeting the famous venture altruist either.” Her accent is noticeably

Parisian, a pointed reminder that she’s making a concession to him

just by talking. Her camera earrings watch him curiously, encoding

everything for the company memory. She’s a genuine new European,

unlike most of the American exiles cluttering up the bar.

 

“Yes, well.” He nods cautiously, unsure how to deal with her. “Bob. I

assume you’re in on this ball?”

 

Franklin nods; beads clatter. “Yeah, man. Ever since the Teledesic

smash it’s been, well, waiting. If you’ve got something for us, we’re

game.”

 

“Hmm.” The Teledesic satellite cluster was killed by cheap balloons

and slightly less cheap high-altitude, solar-powered drones with

spread-spectrum laser relays: It marked the beginning of a serious

recession in the satellite biz. “The depression’s got to end sometime:

But” - a nod to Annette from Paris - “with all due respect, I don’t

think the break will involve one of the existing club carriers.”

 

She shrugs. “Arianespace is forward-looking. We face reality. The

launch cartel cannot stand. Bandwidth is not the only market force in

space. We must explore new opportunities. I personally have helped us

diversify into submarine reactor engineering, microgravity

nanotechnology fabrication, and hotel management.” Her face is a

well-polished mask as she recites the company line, but he can sense

the sardonic amusement behind it as she adds: “We are more flexible

than the American space industry …”

 

Manfred shrugs. “That’s as may be.” He sips his Berlinerweisse slowly

as she launches into a long, stilted explanation of how Arianespace is

a diversified dot-com with orbital aspirations, a full range of

merchandising spin-offs, Bond movie sets, and a promising hotel chain

in LEO. She obviously didn’t come up with these talking points

herself. Her face is much more expressive than her voice as she mimes

boredom and disbelief at appropriate moments - an out-of-band signal

invisible to her corporate earrings. Manfred plays along, nodding

occasionally, trying to look as if he’s taking it seriously: Her droll

subversion has got his attention far more effectively than the content

of the marketing pitch. Franklin is nose down in his beer,