Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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“Ah,” Glashwiecz smiles, “but you must be mistaken. Certainly the
judge will agree with me that you must be mistaken - all a lack of
paper documentation means is that you’ve covered your trail. There’s
the small matter of the several thousand corporations you own,
indirectly. Somewhere at the bottom of that pile there has got to be
something, hasn’t there?”
A hissing, burbling noise like a sackful of large lizards being
drowned in mud emanates from the kitchen, suggesting that Annette’s
percolator is nearly ready. Manfred’s left hand twitches, playing
chords on an air keyboard. Without being at all obvious, he’s
releasing a bulletin about his current activities that should soon
have an effect on the reputation marketplace. “Your attack was rather
elegant,” he comments, sitting down on the sofa as Pam disappears into
the kitchen.
Glashwiecz nods. “The idea was one of my interns’,” he says. “I don’t
understand this distributed denial of service stuff, but Lisa grew up
on it. Something about it being a legal travesty, but workable all the
same.”
“Uh-huh.” Manfred’s opinion of the lawyer drops a notch. He notices
Pam reappearing from the kitchen, her expression icy. A moment later
Annette surfaces carrying a jug and some cups, beaming innocently.
Something’s going on, but at that moment, one of his agents nudges him
urgently in the left ear, his suitcase keens mournfully and beams a
sense of utter despair at him, and the doorbell rings again.
“So what’s the scam?” Glashwiecz sits down uncomfortably close to
Manfred and murmurs out of one side of his mouth. “Where’s the money?”
Manfred looks at him irritably. “There is no money,” he says. “The
idea is to make money obsolete. Hasn’t she explained that?” His eyes
wander, taking in the lawyer’s Patek Philippe watch, his Java-enabled
signet ring.
“C’mon. Don’t give me that line. Look, all it takes is a couple of
million, and you can buy your way free for all I care. All I’m here
for is to see that your wife and daughter don’t get left penniless and
starving. You know and I know that you’ve got bags of it stuffed away
- just look at your reputation! You didn’t get that by standing at the
roadside with a begging bowl, did you?”
Manfred snorts. “You’re talking about an elite IRS auditor here. She
isn’t penniless; she gets a commission on every poor bastard she takes
to the cleaners, and she was born with a trust fund. Me, I -” The
stereo bleeps. Manfred pulls his glasses on. Whispering ghosts of dead
artists hum through his earlobes, urgently demanding their freedom.
Someone knocks at the door again, and he glances around to see Annette
walking toward it.
“You’re making it hard on yourself,” Glashwiecz warns.
“Expecting company?” Pam asks, one brittle eyebrow raised in Manfred’s
direction.
“Not exactly -”
Annette opens the door and a couple of guards in full SWAT gear march
in. They’re clutching gadgets that look like crosses between digital
sewing machines and grenade launchers, and their helmets are studded
with so many sensors that they resemble 1950s space probes. “That’s
them,” Annette says clearly.
“Mais Oui.” The door closes itself and the guards stand to either
side. Annette stalks toward Pam.
“You think to walk in here, to my pied-a-terre, and take from
Manfred?” she sniffs.
“You’re making a big mistake, lady,” Pam says, her voice steady and
cold enough to liquefy helium.
A burst of static from one of the troopers. “No,” Annette says
distantly. “No mistake.”
She points at Glashwiecz. “Are you aware of the takeover?”
“Takeover?” The lawyer looks puzzled, but not alarmed by the presence
of the guards.
“As of three hours ago,” Manfred says quietly, “I sold a controlling
interest in agalmic.holdings.root.1.1.1 to Athene Accelerants BV, a
venture capital outfit from Maastricht. One dot one dot one is the
root node of the central planning tree. Athene aren’t your usual VC,
they’re accelerants - they take explosive business plans and detonate
them.” Glashwiecz is looking pale - whether with anger or fear of a
lost commission is impossible to tell. “Actually, Athene Accelerants
is owned by a shell company owned by the Italian Communist Party’s
pension trust. The point is, you’re in the presence of one dot one dot
one’s chief operations officer.”
Pam looks annoyed. “Puerile attempts to dodge responsibility -”
Annette clears her throat. “Exactly who do you think you are trying to
sue?” she asks Glashwiecz sweetly. “Here we have laws about unfair
restraint of trade. Also about foreign political interference,
specifically in the financial affairs of an Italian party of
government.”
“You wouldn’t -”
“I would.” Manfred brushes his hands on his knees and stands up.
“Done, yet?” he asks the suitcase.
Muffled beeps, then a gravelly synthesized voice speaks. “Uploads
completed.”
“Ah, good.” He grins at Annette. “Time for our next guests?”
On cue, the doorbell rings again. The guards sidle to either side of
the door. Annette snaps her fingers, and it opens to admit a pair of
smartly dressed thugs. It’s beginning to get crowded in the living
room.
“Which one of you is Macx?” snaps the older one of the two thugs,
staring at Glashwiecz for no obvious reason. He hefts an aluminum
briefcase. “Got a writ to serve.”
“You’d be the CCAA?” asks Manfred.
“You bet. If you’re Macx, I have a restraining order -”
Manfred raises a hand. “It’s not me you want,” he says. “It’s this
lady.” He points at Pam, whose mouth opens in silent protest. “Y’see,
the intellectual property you’re chasing wants to be free. It’s so
free that it’s now administered by a complex set of corporate
instruments lodged in the Netherlands, and the prime shareholder as of
approximately four minutes ago is my soon-to-be-ex-wife Pamela, here.”
He winks at Glashwiecz. “Except she doesn’t control anything.”
“Just what do you think you’re playing at, Manfred?” Pamela snarls,
unable to contain herself any longer. The guards shuffle: The larger,
junior CCAA enforcer tugs at his boss’s jacket nervously.
“Well.” Manfred picks up his coffee and takes a sip. Grimaces. “Pam
wanted a divorce settlement, didn’t she? The most valuable assets I
own are the rights to a whole bunch of recategorized work-for-hire
that slipped through the CCAA’s fingers a few years back. Part of the
twentieth century’s cultural heritage that got locked away by the
music industry in the last decade - Janis Joplin, the Doors, that sort
of thing. Artists who weren’t around to defend themselves anymore.
When the music cartels went bust, the rights went for a walk. I took
them over originally with the idea of setting the music free. Giving
it back to the public domain, as it were.”
Annette nods at the guards, one of whom nods back and starts muttering
and buzzing into a throat mike. Manfred continues. “I was working on a
solution to the central planning paradox - how to interface a
centrally planned enclave to a market economy. My good friend Gianni
Vittoria suggested that such a shell game could have alternative uses.
So I’ve not freed the music. Instead, I signed the rights over to
various actors and threads running inside the agalmic holdings network
- currently one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred and
seventy-five companies. They swap rights rapidly - the rights to any
given song are resident in a given company for, oh, all of fifty
milliseconds at a time. Now understand, I don’t own these companies. I
don’t even have a financial interest in them anymore. I’ve deeded my
share of the profits to Pam, here. I’m getting out of the biz,
Gianni’s suggested something rather more challenging for me to do
instead.”
He takes another mouthful of coffee. The recording Mafiya goon glares
at him. Pam glares at him. Annette stands against one wall, looking
amused. “Perhaps you’d like to sort it out between you?” he asks.
Aside, to Glashwiecz: “I trust you’ll drop your denial of service
attack before I set the Italian parliament on you? By the way, you’ll
find the book value of the intellectual property assets I deeded to
Pamela - by the value these gentlemen place on them - is somewhere in
excess of a billion dollars. As that’s rather more than
ninety-nine-point-nine percent of my assets, you’ll probably want to
look elsewhere for your fees.”
Glashwiecz stands up carefully. The lead goon stares at Pamela. “Is
this true?” he demands. “This little squirt give you IP assets of Sony
Bertelsmann Microsoft Music? We have claim! You come to us for
distribution or you get in deep trouble.”
The second goon rumbles agreement: “Remember, dose MP3s, dey bad for
you health!”
Annette claps her hands. “If you would to leave my apartment, please?”
The door, attentive as ever, swings open: “You are no longer welcome
here!”
“This means you,” Manfred advises Pam helpfully.
“You bastard,” she spits at him.
Manfred forces a smile, bemused by his inability to respond to her the
way she wants. Something’s wrong, missing, between them. “I thought
you wanted my assets. Are the encumbrances too much for you?”
“You know what I mean! You and that two-bit Euro-whore! I’ll nail you
for child neglect!”
His smile freezes. “Try it, and I’ll sue you for breach of patent
rights. My genome, you understand.”
Pam is taken aback by this. “You patented your own genome? What
happened to the brave new communist, sharing information freely?”
Manfred stops smiling. “Divorce happened. And the Italian Communist
Party happened.”
She turns on her heel and stalks out of the apartment bravely, tame
attorney in tow behind her, muttering about class action lawsuits and
violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The CCAA lawyer’s
tame gorilla makes a grab for Glashwiecz’s shoulder, and the guards
move in, hustling the whole movable feast out into the stairwell. The
door slams shut on a chaos of impending recursive lawsuits, and
Manfred breathes a huge wheeze of relief.
Annette walks over to him and leans her chin on the top of his head.
“Think it will work?” she asks.
“Well, the CCAA will sue the hell out of the company network for a
while if they try to distribute by any channel that isn’t controlled
by the Mafiya. Pam gets rights to all the music, her settlement, but
she can’t sell it without going through the mob. And I got to serve
notice on that legal shark: If he tries to take me on he’s got to be
politically bullet-proof. Hmm. Maybe I ought not to plan on going back
to the USA this side of the singularity.”
“Profits,” Annette sighs, “I do not easily understand this way of
yours. Or this apocalyptic obsession with singularity.”
“Remember the old aphorism, if you love something, set it free? I
freed the music.”
“But you didn’t! You signed rights over -”
“But first I uploaded the entire stash to several cryptographically
anonymized public network filesystems over the past few hours, so
there’ll be rampant piracy. And the robot companies are all set to
automagically grant any and every copyright request they receive,
royalty-free, until the goons figure out how to hack them. But that’s
not the point. The point is abundance. The Mafiya can’t stop it being
distributed. Pam is welcome to her cut if she can figure an angle -
but I bet she can’t. She still believes in classical economics, the
allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information
doesn’t work that way. What matters is that people will be able to
hear the music - instead of a Soviet central planning system, I’ve
turned the
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