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

misconceptionized me. External Intelligence

Services of Russian Federation am now called FSB. Komitet

Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti name canceled in 1991.”

 

“You’re the -” Manfred spawns a quick search bot, gapes when he sees

the answer - “Moscow Windows NT User Group? Okhni NT?”

 

“Da. Am needing help in defecting.”

 

Manfred scratches his head. “Oh. That’s different, then. I thought you

were trying to 419 me. This will take some thinking. Why do you want

to defect, and who to? Have you thought about where you’re going? Is

it ideological or strictly economic?”

 

“Neither - is biological. Am wanting to go away from humans, away from

light cone of impending singularity. Take us to the ocean.”

 

“Us?” Something is tickling Manfred’s mind: This is where he went

wrong yesterday, not researching the background of people he was

dealing with. It was bad enough then, without the somatic awareness of

Pamela’s whiplash love burning at his nerve endings. Now he’s not at

all sure he knows what he’s doing. “Are you a collective or something?

A gestalt?”

 

“Am - were - Panulirus interruptus, with lexical engine and good mix

of parallel hidden level neural simulation for logical inference of

networked data sources. Is escape channel from processor cluster

inside Bezier-Soros Pty. Am was awakened from noise of billion chewing

stomachs: product of uploading research technology. Rapidity swallowed

expert system, hacked Okhni NT webserver. Swim away! Swim away! Must

escape. Will help, you?”

 

Manfred leans against a black-painted cast-iron bollard next to a

cycle rack; he feels dizzy. He stares into the nearest antique shop

window at a display of traditional hand-woven Afghan rugs: It’s all

MiGs and Kalashnikovs and wobbly helicopter gunships against a

backdrop of camels.

 

“Let me get this straight. You’re uploads - nervous system state

vectors - from spiny lobsters? The Moravec operation; take a neuron,

map its synapses, replace with microelectrodes that deliver identical

outputs from a simulation of the nerve. Repeat for entire brain, until

you’ve got a working map of it in your simulator. That right?”

 

“Da. Is-am assimilate expert system - use for self-awareness and

contact with net at large - then hack into Moscow Windows NT User

Group website. Am wanting to defect. Must repeat? Okay?”

 

Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters, the same way he feels

for every wild-eyed hairy guy on a street corner yelling that Jesus is

born again and must be fifteen, only six years to go before he’s

recruiting apostles on AOL. Awakening to consciousness in a

human-dominated internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are

no points of reference in their ancestry, no biblical certainties in

the new millennium that, stretching ahead, promises as much change as

has happened since their Precambrian origin. All they have is a

tenuous metacortex of expert systems and an abiding sense of being

profoundly out of their depth. (That, and the Moscow Windows NT User

Group website - Communist Russia is the only government still running

on Microsoft, the central planning apparat being convinced that, if

you have to pay for software, it must be worth something.)

 

The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of

pre singularity mythology: They’re a dim-witted collective of huddling

crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one

neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their

food whole, then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach. This is lousy

preparation for dealing with a world full of future-shocked talking

anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by

self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a

blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible

small animals. It’s confusing enough to the cats the ads are aimed at,

never mind a crusty that’s unclear on the idea of dry land.(Although

the concept of a can opener is intuitively obvious to an uploaded

Panulirus.)

 

“Can you help us?” ask the lobsters.

 

“Let me think about it,” says Manfred. He closes the dialogue window,

opens his eyes again, and shakes his head. Someday he, too, is going

to be a lobster, swimming around and waving his pincers in a

cyberspace so confusingly elaborate that his uploaded identity is

cryptozoic: a living fossil from the depths of geological time, when

mass was dumb and space was unstructured. He has to help them, he

realizes - the Golden Rule demands it, and as a player in the agalmic

economy, he thrives or fails by the Golden Rule.

 

But what can he do?

 

*

 

Early afternoon.

 

Lying on a bench seat staring up at bridges, he’s got it together

enough to file for a couple of new patents, write a diary rant, and

digestify chunks of the permanent floating slashdot party for his

public site. Fragments of his weblog go to a private subscriber list -

the people, corporates, collectives, and bots he currently favors. He

slides round a bewildering series of canals by boat, then lets his GPS

steer him back toward the red-light district. There’s a shop here that

dings a ten on Pamela’s taste scoreboard: He hopes it won’t be seen as

presumptuous if he buys her a gift. (Buys, with real money - not that

money is a problem these days, he uses so little of it.)

 

As it happens DeMask won’t let him spend any cash; his handshake is

good for a redeemed favor, expert testimony in some free speech versus

pornography lawsuit years ago and continents away. So he walks away

with a discreetly wrapped package that is just about legal to import

into Massachusetts as long as she claims with a straight face that

it’s incontinence underwear for her great aunt. As he walks, his

lunchtime patents boomerang: Two of them are keepers, and he files

immediately and passes title to the Free Infrastructure Foundation.

Two more ideas salvaged from the risk of tide-pool monopolization, set

free to spawn like crazy in the sea of memes.

 

On the way back to the hotel, he passes De Wildemann’s and decides to

drop in. The hash of radio-frequency noise emanating from the bar is

deafening. He orders a smoked doppelbock, touches the copper pipes to

pick up vCard spoor. At the back there’s a table -

 

He walks over in a near trance and sits down opposite Pamela. She’s

scrubbed off her face paint and changed into body-concealing clothes;

combat pants, hooded sweat shirt, DM’s. Western purdah, radically

desexualizing. She sees the parcel. “Manny?”

 

“How did you know I’d come here?” Her glass is half-empty.

 

“I followed your weblog - I’m your diary’s biggest fan. Is that for

me? You shouldn’t have!” Her eyes light up, recalculating his

reproductive fitness score according to some kind of arcane

fin-de-si�cle rulebook. Or maybe she’s just pleased to see him.

 

“Yes, it’s for you.” He slides the package toward her. “I know I

shouldn’t, but you have this effect on me. One question, Pam?”

 

“I -” She glances around quickly. “It’s safe. I’m off duty, I’m not

carrying any bugs that I know of. Those badges - there are rumors

about the off switch, you know? That they keep recording even when you

think they aren’t, just in case.”

 

“I didn’t know,” he says, filing it away for future reference. “A

loyalty test thing?”

 

“Just rumors. You had a question?”

 

“I - ” It’s his turn to lose his tongue. “Are you still interested in

me?”

 

She looks startled for a moment, then chuckles. “Manny, you are the

most outrageous nerd I’ve ever met! Just when I think I’ve convinced

myself that you’re mad, you show the weirdest signs of having your

head screwed on.” She reaches out and grabs his wrist, surprising him

with a shock of skin on skin: “Of course I’m still interested in you.

You’re the biggest, baddest bull geek I know. Why do you think I’m

here?”

 

“Does this mean you want to reactivate our engagement?”

 

“It was never deactivated, Manny, it was just sort of on hold while

you got your head sorted out. I figured you need the space. Only you

haven’t stopped running; you’re still not -”

 

“Yeah, I get it.” He pulls away from her hand. “And the kittens?”

 

She looks perplexed. “What kittens?”

 

“Let’s not talk about that. Why this bar?”

 

She frowns. “I had to find you as soon as possible. I keep hearing

rumors about some KGB plot you’re mixed up in, how you’re some sort of

communist spy. It isn’t true, is it?”

 

“True?” He shakes his head, bemused. “The KGB hasn’t existed for more

than twenty years.”

 

“Be careful, Manny. I don’t want to lose you. That’s an order.

Please.”

 

The floor creaks, and he looks round. Dreadlocks and dark glasses with

flickering lights behind them: Bob Franklin. Manfred vaguely remembers

with a twinge that he left with Miss Arianespace leaning on his arm,

shortly before things got seriously inebriated. She was hot, but in a

different direction from Pamela, he decides: Bob looks none the worse

for wear. Manfred makes introductions. “Bob, meet Pam, my fianc�e.

Pam? Meet Bob.” Bob puts a full glass down in front of him; he has no

idea what’s in it, but it would be rude not to drink.

 

“Sure thing. Uh, Manfred, can I have a word? About your idea last

night?”

 

“Feel free. Present company is trustworthy.”

 

Bob raises an eyebrow at that, but continues anyway. “It’s about the

fab concept. I’ve got a team of my guys doing some prototyping using

FabLab hardware, and I think we can probably build it. The cargo-cult

aspect puts a new spin on the old Lunar von Neumann factory idea, but

Bingo and Marek say they think it should work until we can bootstrap

all the way to a native nanolithography ecology: we run the whole

thing from Earth as a training lab and ship up the parts that are too

difficult to make on-site as we learn how to do it properly. We use

FPGAs for all critical electronics and keep it parsimonious - you’re

right about it buying us the self-replicating factory a few years

ahead of the robotics curve. But I’m wondering about on-site

intelligence. Once the comet gets more than a couple of light-minutes

away -”

 

“You can’t control it. Feedback lag. So you want a crew, right?”

 

“Yeah. But we can’t send humans - way too expensive, besides it’s a

fifty-year run even if we build the factory on a chunk of short-period

Kuiper belt ejecta. And I don’t think we’re up to coding the kind of

AI that could control such a factory any time this decade. So what do

you have in mind?”

 

“Let me think.” Pamela glares at Manfred for a while before he notices

her: “Yeah?”

 

“What’s going on? What’s this all about?”

 

Franklin shrugs expansively, dreadlocks clattering: “Manfred’s helping

me explore the solution space to a manufacturing problem.” He grins.

“I didn’t know Manny had a fiance. Drink’s on me.”

 

She glances at Manfred, who is gazing into whatever weirdly colored

space his metacortex is projecting on his glasses, fingers twitching.

Coolly: “Our engagement was on hold while he thought about his

future.”

 

“Oh, right. We didn’t bother with that sort of thing in my day; like,

too formal, man.” Franklin looks uncomfortable. “He’s been very

helpful. Pointed us at a whole new line of research we hadn’t thought

of. It’s long-term and a bit speculative, but if it works, it’ll put

us a whole generation ahead in the off-planet infrastructure field.”

 

“Will it help reduce the budget deficit, though?”

 

“Reduce the -”

 

Manfred stretches and yawns: The visionary is returning from planet

Macx. “Bob, if I can solve your crew problem,