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

can you book me a slot

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