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

shoulders

shaking as he tries not to guffaw at the hand gestures she uses to

express her opinion of her employer’s thrusting, entrepreneurial

executives. Actually, the talking points bullshit is right about one

thing: Arianespace is still profitable, due to those hotels and

orbital holiday hops. Unlike LockMartBoeing, who’d go Chapter Eleven

in a split second if their Pentagon drip-feed ran dry.

 

Someone else sidles up to the table; a pudgy guy in outrageously loud

Hawaiian shirt with pens leaking in a breast pocket and the worst case

of ozone-hole burn Manfred’s seen in ages. “Hi, Bob,” says the new

arrival. “How’s life?”

 

“‘S good.” Franklin nodes at Manfred; “Manfred, meet Ivan MacDonald.

Ivan, Manfred. Have a seat?” He leans over. “Ivan’s a public arts guy.

He’s heavily into extreme concrete.”

 

“Rubberized concrete,” Ivan says, slightly too loudly. “Pink

rubberized concrete.”

 

“Ah!” He’s somehow triggered a priority interrupt: Annette from

Arianespace drops out of marketing zombiehood with a shudder of relief

and, duty discharged, reverts to her non corporate identity: “You are

he who rubberized the Reichstag, yes? With the supercritical

carbon-dioxide carrier and the dissolved polymethoxysilanes?” She

claps her hands, eyes alight with enthusiasm: “Wonderful!”

 

“He rubberized what?” Manfred mutters in Bob’s ear.

 

Franklin shrugs. “Don’t ask me, I’m just an engineer.”

 

“He works with limestone and sandstones as well as concrete; he’s

brilliant!” Annette smiles at Manfred. “Rubberizing the symbol of the,

the autocracy, is it not wonderful?”

 

“I thought I was thirty seconds ahead of the curve,” Manfred says

ruefully. He adds to Bob: “Buy me another drink?”

 

“I’m going to rubberize Three Gorges!” Ivan explains loudly. “When the

floodwaters subside.”

 

Just then, a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down

on Manfred’s head and sends clumps of humongous pixilation flickering

across his sensorium: Around the world, five million or so geeks are

bouncing on his home site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting

from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. “I really came here to

talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I’ve just

been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit and drink until it wears off?”

 

“Sure, man.” Bob waves at the bar. “More of the same all round!” At

the next table, a person with makeup and long hair who’s wearing a

dress - Manfred doesn’t want to speculate about the gender of these

crazy mixed-up Euros - is reminiscing about wiring the fleshpots of

Tehran for cybersex. Two collegiate-looking dudes are arguing

intensely in German: The translation stream in his glasses tell him

they’re arguing over whether the Turing Test is a Jim Crow law that

violates European corpus juris standards on human rights. The beer

arrives, and Bob slides the wrong one across to Manfred: “Here, try

this. You’ll like it.”

 

“Okay.” It’s some kind of smoked doppelbock, chock-full of yummy

superoxides: Just inhaling over it makes Manfred feel like there’s a

fire alarm in his nose screaming danger, Will Robinson! Cancer!

Cancer!. “Yeah, right. Did I say I nearly got mugged on my way here?”

 

“Mugged? Hey, that’s heavy. I thought the police hereabouts had

stopped - did they sell you anything?”

 

“No, but they weren’t your usual marketing type. You know anyone who

can use a Warpac surplus espionage bot? Recent model, one careful

owner, slightly paranoid but basically sound - I mean, claims to be a

general-purpose AI?”

 

“No. Oh boy! The NSA wouldn’t like that.”

 

“What I thought. Poor thing’s probably unemployable, anyway.”

 

“The space biz.”

 

“Ah, yeah. The space biz. Depressing, isn’t it? Hasn’t been the same

since Rotary Rocket went bust for the second time. And NASA, mustn’t

forget NASA.”

 

“To NASA.” Annette grins broadly for her own reasons, raises a glass

in toast. Ivan the extreme concrete geek has an arm round her

shoulders, and she leans against him; he raises his glass, too. “Lots

more launchpads to rubberize!”

 

“To NASA,” Bob echoes. They drink. “Hey, Manfred. To NASA?”

 

“NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!” Manfred

swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the

table: “Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there

isn’t even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and

solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could

turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for

processing our thoughts. Long-term, it’s the only way to go. The solar

system is a dead loss right now - dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS

per milligram. If it isn’t thinking, it isn’t working. We need to

start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use.

Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying

nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each

layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka

brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach

dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!”

 

Annette is watching him with interest, but Bob looks wary. “Sounds

kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?”

 

“Very long-term - at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget

governments for this market, Bob; if they can’t tax it, they won’t

understand it. But see, there’s an angle on the self-replicating

robotics market coming up, that’s going to set the cheap launch market

doubling every fifteen months for the foreseeable future, starting in,

oh, about two years. It’s your leg up, and my keystone for the Dyson

sphere project. It works like this -”

 

*

 

It’s night in Amsterdam, morning in Silicon Valley. Today, fifty

thousand human babies are being born around the world. Meanwhile

automated factories in Indonesia and Mexico have produced another

quarter of a million motherboards with processors rated at more than

ten petaflops - about an order of magnitude below the lower bound on

the computational capacity of a human brain. Another fourteen months

and the larger part of the cumulative conscious processing power of

the human species will be arriving in silicon. And the first meat the

new AIs get to know will be the uploaded lobsters.

 

Manfred stumbles back to his hotel, bone-weary and jet-lagged; his

glasses are still jerking, slashdotted to hell and back by geeks

piggybacking on his call to dismantle the moon. They stutter quiet

suggestions at his peripheral vision. Fractal cloud-witches ghost

across the face of the moon as the last huge Airbuses of the night

rumble past overhead. Manfred’s skin crawls, grime embedded in his

clothing from three days of continuous wear.

 

Back in his room, the Aineko mewls for attention and strops her head

against his ankle. She’s a late-model Sony, thoroughly upgradeable:

Manfred’s been working on her in his spare minutes, using an open

source development kit to extend her suite of neural networks. He

bends down and pets her, then sheds his clothing and heads for the en

suite bathroom. When he’s down to the glasses and nothing more, he

steps into the shower and dials up a hot, steamy spray. The shower

tries to strike up a friendly conversation about football, but he

isn’t even awake enough to mess with its silly little associative

personalization network. Something that happened earlier in the day is

bugging him, but he can’t quite put his finger on what’s wrong.

 

Toweling himself off, Manfred yawns. Jet lag has finally overtaken

him, a velvet hammerblow between the eyes. He reaches for the bottle

beside the bed, dry-swallows two melatonin tablets, a capsule full of

antioxidants, and a multivitamin bullet: Then he lies down on the bed,

on his back, legs together, arms slightly spread. The suite lights dim

in response to commands from the thousand petaflops of distributed

processing power running the neural networks that interface with his

meatbrain through the glasses.

 

Manfred drops into a deep ocean of unconsciousness populated by gentle

voices. He isn’t aware of it, but he talks in his sleep - disjointed

mumblings that would mean little to another human but everything to

the metacortex lurking beyond his glasses. The young posthuman

intelligence over whose Cartesian theatre he presides sings urgently

to him while he slumbers.

 

*

 

Manfred is always at his most vulnerable shortly after waking.

 

He screams into wakefulness as artificial light floods the room: For a

moment he is unsure whether he has slept. He forgot to pull the covers

up last night, and his feet feel like lumps of frozen cardboard.

Shuddering with inexplicable tension, he pulls a fresh set of

underwear from his overnight bag, then drags on soiled jeans and tank

top. Sometime today he’ll have to spare time to hunt the feral T-shirt

in Amsterdam’s markets, or find a Renfield and send it forth to buy

clothing. He really ought to find a gym and work out, but he doesn’t

have time - his glasses remind him that he’s six hours behind the

moment and urgently needs to catch up. His teeth ache in his gums, and

his tongue feels like a forest floor that’s been visited with Agent

Orange. He has a sense that something went bad yesterday; if only he

could remember what.

 

He speed reads a new pop-philosophy tome while he brushes his teeth,

then blogs his web throughput to a public annotation server; he’s

still too enervated to finish his pre-breakfast routine by posting a

morning rant on his storyboard site. His brain is still fuzzy, like a

scalpel blade clogged with too much blood: He needs stimulus,

excitement, the burn of the new. Whatever, it can wait on breakfast.

He opens his bedroom door and nearly steps on a small, damp cardboard

box that lies on the carpet.

 

The box - he’s seen a couple of its kin before. But there are no

stamps on this one, no address: just his name, in big, childish

handwriting. He kneels and gently picks it up. It’s about the right

weight. Something shifts inside it when he tips it back and forth. It

smells. He carries it into his room carefully, angrily: Then he opens

it to confirm his worst suspicion. It’s been surgically decerebrated,

brains scooped out like a boiled egg.

 

“Fuck!”

 

This is the first time the madman has gotten as far as his bedroom

door. It raises worrying possibilities.

 

Manfred pauses for a moment, triggering agents to go hunt down arrest

statistics, police relations, information on corpus juris, Dutch

animal-cruelty laws. He isn’t sure whether to dial two-one-one on the

archaic voice phone or let it ride. Aineko, picking up his angst,

hides under the dresser mewling pathetically. Normally he’d pause a

minute to reassure the creature, but not now: Its’ mere presence is

suddenly acutely embarrassing, a confession of deep inadequacy. It’s

too realistic, as if somehow the dead kitten’s neural maps — stolen,

no doubt, for some dubious uploading experiment — have ended up

padding out its plastic skull. He swears again, looks around, then

takes the easy option: Down the stairs two steps at a time, stumbling

on the second floor landing, down to the breakfast room in the

basement, where he will perform the stable rituals of morning.

 

Breakfast is unchanging, an island of deep geological time standing

still amidst the continental upheaval of new technologies. While

reading a paper on public key steganography and parasite network

identity spoofing he mechanically assimilates a bowl of cornflakes and

skimmed milk, then brings a platter of whole grain bread and slices of

some weird seed-infested Dutch cheese back to his place. There is a

cup of strong black coffee in front of his setting, and he picks it up

and slurps half of it down before he realizes he’s not