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

Chapter 2: Troubadour

Three years later, Manfred is on the run. His gray-eyed fate is in hot

pursuit, blundering after him through divorce court, chat room, and

meetings of the International Monetary Emergency Fund. It’s a merry

dance he leads her. But Manfred isn’t running away, he’s discovered a

mission. He’s going to make a stand against the laws of economics in

the ancient city of Rome. He’s going to mount a concert for the

spiritual machines. He’s going to set the companies free, and break

the Italian state government.

 

In his shadow, his monster runs, keeping him company, never halting.

 

*

 

Manfred re-enters Europe through an airport that’s all

twentieth-century chrome and ductwork, barbaric in its decaying

nuclear-age splendor. He breezes through customs and walks down a

long, echoing arrival hall, sampling the local media feeds. It’s

November, and in a misplaced corporate search for seasonal cheer, the

proprietors have come up with a final solution to the Christmas

problem, a mass execution of plush Santas and elves. Bodies hang

limply overhead every few meters, feet occasionally twitching in

animatronic death, like a war crime perpetrated in a toy shop. Today’s

increasingly automated corporations don’t understand mortality,

Manfred thinks, as he passes a mother herding along her upset

children. Their immortality is a drawback when dealing with the humans

they graze on: They lack insight into one of the main factors that

motivates the meat machines who feed them. Well, sooner or later we’ll

have to do something about that, he tells himself.

 

The free media channels here are denser and more richly

self-referential than anything he’s seen in President Santorum’s

America. The accent’s different, though. Luton, London’s fourth

satellite airport, speaks with an annoyingly bumptious twang, like

Australian with a plum in its mouth. Hello, stranger! Is that a brain

in your pocket or are you just pleased to think me? Ping Watford

Informatics for the latest in cognitive modules and cheesy

motion-picture references. He turns the corner and finds himself

squeezed up against the wall between the baggage reclaim office and a

crowd of drunken Belgian tractor-drag fans, while his left goggle is

trying to urgently tell him something about the railway infrastructure

of Columbia. The fans wear blue face paint and chant something that

sounds ominously like the ancient British war cry, Wemberrrly,

Wemberrrly, and they’re dragging a gigantic virtual tractor totem

through the webspace analogue of the arrivals hall. He takes the

reclaim office instead.

 

As he enters the baggage reclaim zone, his jacket stiffens, and his

glasses dim: He can hear the lost souls of suitcases crying for their

owners. The eerie keening sets his own accessories on edge with a

sense of loss, and for a moment, he’s so spooked that he nearly shuts

down the thalamic-limbic shunt interface that lets him feel their

emotions. He’s not in favor of emotions right now, not with the messy

divorce proceedings and the blood sacrifice Pam is trying to extract

from him; he’d much rather love and loss and hate had never been

invented. But he needs the maximum possible sensory bandwidth to keep

in touch with the world, so he feels it in his guts every time his

footwear takes a shine to some Moldovan pyramid scheme. Shut up, he

glyphs at his unruly herd of agents; I can’t even hear myself think!

 

“Hello, sir, have a nice day, how may I be of service?” the yellow

plastic suitcase on the counter says chirpily. It doesn’t fool

Manfred: He can see the Stalinist lines of control chaining it to the

sinister, faceless cash register that lurks below the desk, agent of

the British Airport Authority corporate bureaucracy. But that’s okay.

Only bags need fear for their freedom in here.

 

“Just looking,” he mumbles. And it’s true. Because of a not entirely

accidental cryptographic routing feature embedded in an airline

reservations server, his suitcase is on its way to Mombasa, where it

will probably be pithed and resurrected in the service of some African

cyber-Fagin. That’s okay by Manfred - it only contains a statistically

normal mixture of second hand clothes and toiletries, and he only

carries it to convince the airline passenger-profiling expert systems

that he isn’t some sort of deviant or terrorist - but it leaves him

with a gap in his inventory that he must fill before he leaves the EU

zone. He needs to pick up a replacement suitcase so that he has as

much luggage leaving the superpower as he had when he entered it: He

doesn’t want to be accused of trafficking in physical goods in the

midst of the transatlantic trade war between new world protectionists

and old world globalists. At least, that’s his cover story - and he’s

sticking to it.

 

There’s a row of unclaimed bags in front of the counter, up for sale

in the absence of their owners. Some of them are very battered, but

among them is a rather good-quality suitcase with integral

induction-charged rollers and a keen sense of loyalty: exactly the

same model as his old one. He polls it and sees not just GPS, but a

Galileo tracker, a gazetteer the size of an old-time storage area

network, and an iron determination to follow its owner as far as the

gates of hell if necessary. Plus the right distinctive scratch on the

lower left side of the case. “How much for just this one?” he asks the

bellwether on the desk.

 

“Ninety euros,” it says placidly.

 

Manfred sighs. “You can do better than that.” In the time it takes

them to settle on seventy-five, the Hang Sen Index is down

fourteen-point-one-six points, and what’s left of NASDAQ climbs

another two-point-one. “Deal.” Manfred spits some virtual cash at the

brutal face of the cash register, and it unfetters the suitcase,

unaware that Macx has paid a good bit more than seventy-five euros for

the privilege of collecting this piece of baggage. Manfred bends down

and faces the camera in its handle. “Manfred Macx,” he says quietly.

“Follow me.” He feels the handle heat up as it imprints on his

fingerprints, digital and phenotypic. Then he turns and walks out of

the slave market, his new luggage rolling at his heels.

 

*

 

A short train journey later, Manfred checks into a hotel in Milton

Keynes. He watches the sun set from his bedroom window, an occlusion

of concrete cows blocking the horizon. The room is functional in an

overly naturalistic kind of way, rattan and force-grown hardwood and

hemp rugs concealing the support systems and concrete walls behind. He

sits in a chair, gin and tonic at hand, absorbing the latest market

news and grazing his multichannel feeds in parallel. His reputation is

up two percent for no obvious reason today, he notices: Odd, that.

When he pokes at it he discovers that everybody’s reputation -

everybody, that is, who has a publicly traded reputation - is up a

bit. It’s as if the distributed Internet reputation servers are

feeling bullish about integrity. Maybe there’s a global honesty bubble

forming.

 

Manfred frowns, then snaps his fingers. The suitcase rolls toward him.

“Who do you belong to?” he asks.

 

“Manfred Macx,” it replies, slightly bashfully.

 

“No, before me.”

 

“I don’t understand that question.”

 

He sighs. “Open up.”

 

Latches whir and retract: The hard-shell lid rises toward him, and he

looks inside to confirm the contents.

 

The suitcase is full of noise.

 

*

 

Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.

 

It’s night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore’s Law

rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future.

The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of

approximately 2 x 10^27 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women

produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 10^23 MIPS

of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually

churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 10^23

MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the

solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten

years after that, the solar system’s installed processing power

will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold - one million

instructions per second per gram of matter. After that, singularity

- a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes

meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is

down to single-digit years …

 

*

 

Aineko curls on the pillow beside Manfred’s head, purring softly as

his owner dreams uneasily. The night outside is dark: Vehicles operate

on autopilot, running lights dipped to let the Milky Way shine down

upon the sleeping city. Their quiet, fuel-cell-powered engines do not

trouble Manfred’s sleep. The robot cat keeps sleepless watch, alert

for intruders, but there are none, save the whispering ghosts of

Manfred’s metacortex, feeding his dreams with their state vectors.

 

The metacortex - a distributed cloud of software agents that surrounds

him in netspace, borrowing CPU cycles from convenient processors (such

as his robot pet) - is as much a part of Manfred as the society of

mind that occupies his skull; his thoughts migrate into it, spawning

new agents to research new experiences, and at night, they return to

roost and share their knowledge.

 

While Manfred sleeps, he dreams of an alchemical marriage. She waits

for him at the altar in a strapless black gown, the surgical

instruments gleaming in her gloved hands. “This won’t hurt a bit,” she

explains as she adjusts the straps. “I only want your genome - the

extended phenotype can wait until … later.” Blood-red lips,