Accelerando, Charles Stross [classic novels for teens .TXT] 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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on the deep-space tracking network? Like, enough to transmit a couple
of gigabytes? That’s going to take some serious bandwidth, I know, but
if you can do it, I think I can get you exactly the kind of crew
you’re looking for.”
Franklin looks dubious. “Gigabytes? The DSN isn’t built for that!
You’re talking days. And what do you mean about a crew? What kind of
deal do you think I’m putting together? We can’t afford to add a whole
new tracking network or life-support system just to run -”
“Relax.” Pamela glances at Manfred. “Manny, why don’t you tell him why
you want the bandwidth? Maybe then he could tell you if it’s possible,
or if there’s some other way to do it.” She smiles at Franklin: “I’ve
found that he usually makes more sense if you can get him to explain
his reasoning. Usually.”
“If I -” Manfred stops. “Okay, Pam. Bob, it’s those KGB lobsters. They
want somewhere to go that’s insulated from human space. I figure I can
get them to sign on as crew for your cargo-cult self-replicating
factories, but they’ll want an insurance policy: hence the deep-space
tracking network. I figured we could beam a copy of them at the alien
Matrioshka brains around M31 -”
“KGB?” Pam’s voice is rising: “You said you weren’t mixed up in spy
stuff!”
“Relax, it’s just the Moscow Windows NT user group, not the FSB. The
uploaded crusties hacked in and -”
Bob is watching him oddly. “Lobsters?”
“Yeah.” Manfred stares right back. “Panulirus interruptus uploads.
Something tells me you might have heard of it?”
“Moscow.” Bob leans back against the wall: “how did you hear about
it?”
“They phoned me.” With heavy irony: “It’s hard for an upload to stay
subsentient these days, even if it’s just a crustacean. Bezier labs
have a lot to answer for.”
Pamela’s face is unreadable. “Bezier labs?”
“They escaped.” Manfred shrugs. “It’s not their fault. This Bezier
dude. Is he by any chance ill?”
“I -” Pamela stops. “I shouldn’t be talking about work.”
“You’re not wearing your chaperone now,” he nudges quietly.
She inclines her head. “Yes, he’s ill. Some sort of brain tumor they
can’t hack.”
Franklin nods. “That’s the trouble with cancer - the ones that are
left to worry about are the rare ones. No cure.”
“Well, then.” Manfred chugs the remains of his glass of beer. “That
explains his interest in uploading. Judging by the crusties, he’s on
the right track. I wonder if he’s moved on to vertebrates yet?”
“Cats,” says Pamela. “He was hoping to trade their uploads to the
Pentagon as a new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of income tax
payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or
birds or something before feeding it to their sensorium. The old
kitten and laser pointer trick.”
Manfred stares at her, hard. “That’s not very nice. Uploaded cats are
a bad idea.”
“Thirty-million-dollar tax bills aren’t nice either, Manfred. That’s
lifetime nursing-home care for a hundred blameless pensioners.”
Franklin leans back, sourly amused, keeping out of the crossfire.
“The lobsters are sentient,” Manfred persists. “What about those poor
kittens? Don’t they deserve minimal rights? How about you? How would
you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into
thinking that some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer’s target of the
hour is your heart’s desire? How would you like to wake up a thousand
times, only to die again? Worse: The kittens are probably not going to
be allowed to run. They’re too fucking dangerous - they grow up into
cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With
intelligence and no socialization they’ll be too dangerous to have
around. They’re prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover
they’re under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?”
“But they’re only uploads.” Pamela stares at him. “Software, right?
You could reinstantiate them on another hardware platform, like, say,
your Aineko. So the argument about killing them doesn’t really apply,
does it?”
“So? We’re going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. I think
we need to take a rain check on the utilitarian philosophy, before it
bites us on the cerebral cortex. Lobsters, kittens, humans — it’s a
slippery slope.”
Franklin clears his throat. “I’ll be needing an NDA and various
due-diligence statements off you for the crusty pilot idea,” he says
to Manfred. “Then I’ll have to approach Jim about buying the IP.”
“No can do.” Manfred leans back and smiles lazily. “I’m not going to
be a party to depriving them of their civil rights. Far as I’m
concerned, they’re free citizens. Oh, and I patented the whole idea of
using lobster-derived AI autopilots for spacecraft this morning - it’s
logged all over the place, all rights assigned to the FIF. Either you
give them a contract of employment, or the whole thing’s off.”
“But they’re just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for
God’s sake! I’m not even sure they are sentient - I mean, they’re
what, a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a syntax engine and a
crappy knowledge base? What kind of basis for intelligence is that?”
Manfred’s finger jabs out: “That’s what they’ll say about you, Bob. Do
it. Do it or don’t even think about uploading out of meatspace when
your body packs in, because your life won’t be worth living. The
precedent you set here determines how things are done tomorrow. Oh,
and feel free to use this argument on Jim Bezier. He’ll get the point
eventually, after you beat him over the head with it. Some kinds of
intellectual land grab just shouldn’t be allowed.”
“Lobsters - ” Franklin shakes his head. “Lobsters, cats. You’re
serious, aren’t you? You think they should be treated as
human-equivalent?”
“It’s not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as
that, if they aren’t treated as people, it’s quite possible that other
uploaded beings won’t be treated as people either. You’re setting a
legal precedent, Bob. I know of six other companies doing uploading
work right now, and not one of ‘em’s thinking about the legal status
of the uploaded. If you don’t start thinking about it now, where are
you going to be in three to five years’ time?”
Pam is looking back and forth between Franklin and Manfred like a bot
stuck in a loop, unable to quite grasp what she’s seeing. “How much is
this worth?” she asks plaintively.
“Oh, quite a few million, I guess.” Bob stares at his empty glass.
“Okay. I’ll talk to them. If they bite, you’re dining out on me for
the next century. You really think they’ll be able to run the mining
complex?”
“They’re pretty resourceful for invertebrates.” Manfred grins
innocently, enthusiastically. “They may be prisoners of their
evolutionary background, but they can still adapt to a new
environment. And just think, you’ll be winning civil rights for a
whole new minority group - one that won’t be a minority for much
longer!”
*
That evening, Pamela turns up at Manfred’s hotel room wearing a
strapless black dress, concealing spike-heeled boots and most of the
items he bought for her that afternoon. Manfred has opened up his
private diary to her agents. She abuses the privilege, zaps him with a
stunner on his way out of the shower, and has him gagged,
spread-eagled, and trussed to the bed frame before he has a chance to
speak. She wraps a large rubber pouch full of mildly anesthetic lube
around his tumescent genitals - no point in letting him climax - clips
electrodes to his nipples, lubes a rubber plug up his rectum and
straps it in place. Before the shower, he removed his goggles. She
resets them, plugs them into her handheld, and gently eases them on
over his eyes. There’s other apparatus, stuff she ran up on the hotel
room’s 3D printer.
Setup completed, she walks round the bed, inspecting him critically
from all angles, figuring out where to begin. This isn’t just sex,
after all: It’s a work of art.
After a moment’s thought, she rolls socks onto his exposed feet, then,
expertly wielding a tiny tube of cyanoacrylate, glues his fingertips
together. Then she switches off the air conditioning. He’s twisting
and straining, testing the cuffs. Tough, it’s about the nearest thing
to sensory deprivation she can arrange without a flotation tank and
suxamethonium injection. She controls all his senses, only his ears
unstoppered. The glasses give her a high-bandwidth channel right into
his brain, a fake metacortex to whisper lies at her command. The idea
of what she’s about to do excites her, puts a tremor in her thighs:
It’s the first time she’s been able to get inside his mind as well as
his body. She leans forward and whispers in his ear, “Manfred, can you
hear me?”
He twitches. Mouth gagged, fingers glued. Good. No back channels. He’s
powerless.
“This is what it’s like to be tetraplegic, Manfred. Bedridden with
motor neuron disease. Locked inside your own body by nv-CJD from
eating too many contaminated burgers. I could spike you with MPTP, and
you’d stay in this position for the rest of your life, shitting in a
bag, pissing through a tube. Unable to talk and with nobody to look
after you. Do you think you’d like that?”
He’s trying to grunt or whimper around the ball gag. She hikes her
skirt up around her waist and climbs onto the bed, straddling him. The
goggles are replaying scenes she picked up around Cambridge the
previous winter - soup kitchen scenes, hospice scenes. She kneels atop
him, whispering in his ear.
“Twelve million in tax, baby, that’s what they think you owe them.
What do you think you owe me? That’s six million in net income, Manny,
six million that isn’t going into your virtual children’s mouths.”
He’s rolling his head from side to side, as if trying to argue. That
won’t do; she slaps him hard, thrills to his frightened expression.
“Today I watched you give uncounted millions away, Manny. Millions, to
a bunch of crusties and a MassPike pirate! You bastard. Do you know
what I should do with you?” He’s cringing, unsure whether she’s
serious or doing this just to get him turned on. Good.
There’s no point trying to hold a conversation. She leans forward
until she can feel his breath in her ear. “Meat and mind, Manny. Meat,
and mind. You’re not interested in meat, are you? Just mind. You could
be boiled alive before you noticed what was happening in the meatspace
around you. Just another lobster in a pot. The only thing keeping you
out of it is how much I love you.” She reaches down and tears away the
gel pouch, exposing his penis: it’s stiff as a post from the
vasodilators, dripping with gel, numb. Straightening up, she eases
herself slowly down on it. It doesn’t hurt as much as she expected,
and the sensation is utterly different from what she’s used to. She
begins to lean forward, grabs hold of his straining arms, feels his
thrilling helplessness. She can’t control herself: She almost bites
through her lip with the intensity of the sensation. Afterward, she
reaches down and massages him until he begins to spasm, shuddering
uncontrollably, emptying the Darwinian river of his source code into
her, communicating via his only output device.
She rolls off his hips and carefully uses the last of the superglue to
gum her labia together. Humans don’t produce seminiferous plugs, and
although she’s fertile, she wants to be absolutely sure. The glue will
last for a
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