Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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property.”
“Oh, Manfred, you hopeless idealist.” She strokes his shoulder.
“Whatever for?”
“It’s not just the music. When we develop a working AI or upload minds
we’ll need a way of defending it against legal threats. That’s what
Gianni pointed out to me …”
He’s still explaining to her how he’s laying the foundations for the
transhuman explosion due early in the next decade when she picks him
up in both arms, carries him to her bedroom, and commits outrageous
acts of tender intimacy with him. But that’s okay. He’s still human,
this decade.
This, too, will pass, thinks the bulk of his metacortex. And it drifts
off into the net to think deep thoughts elsewhere, leaving his
meatbody to experience the ancient pleasures of the flesh set free.
Spring-Heeled Jack runs blind, blue fumes crackling from his heels.
His right hand, outstretched for balance, clutches a mark’s stolen
memories. The victim is sitting on the hard stones of the pavement
behind him. Maybe he’s wondering what’s happened; maybe he looks after
the fleeing youth. But the tourist crowds block the view effectively,
and in any case, he has no hope of catching the mugger. Hit-and-run
amnesia is what the polis call it, but to Spring-Heeled Jack it’s just
more loot to buy fuel for his Russian army-surplus motorized combat
boots.
*
The victim sits on the cobblestones clutching his aching temples. What
happened? he wonders. The universe is a brightly colored blur of
fast-moving shapes augmented by deafening noises. His ear-mounted
cameras are rebooting repeatedly: They panic every eight hundred
milliseconds, whenever they realize that they’re alone on his personal
area network without the comforting support of a hub to tell them
where to send his incoming sensory feed. Two of his mobile phones are
bickering moronically, disputing ownership of his grid bandwidth, and
his memory … is missing.
A tall blond clutching an electric chainsaw sheathed in pink bubble
wrap leans over him curiously: “you all right?” she asks.
“I -” He shakes his head, which hurts. “Who am I?” His medical monitor
is alarmed because his blood pressure has fallen: His pulse is racing,
his serum cortisol titer is up, and a host of other biometrics suggest
that he’s going into shock.
“I think you need an ambulance,” the woman announces. She mutters at
her lapel, “Phone, call an ambulance. ” She waves a finger vaguely at
him as if to reify a geolink, then wanders off, chainsaw clutched
under one arm. Typical southern �migr� behavior in the Athens of the
North, too embarrassed to get involved. The man shakes his head again,
eyes closed, as a flock of girls on powered blades skid around him in
elaborate loops. A siren begins to warble, over the bridge to the
north.
Who am I? he wonders. “I’m Manfred,” he says with a sense of stunned
wonder. He looks up at the bronze statue of a man on a horse that
looms above the crowds on this busy street corner. Someone has
plastered a Hello Cthulhu! holo on the plaque that names its rider:
Languid fluffy pink tentacles wave at him in an attack of kawaii. “I’m
Manfred - Manfred. My memory. What’s happened to my memory?” Elderly
Malaysian tourists point at him from the open top deck of a passing
bus. He burns with a sense of horrified urgency. I was going
somewhere, he recalls. What was I doing? It was amazingly important,
he thinks, but he can’t remember what exactly it was. He was going to
see someone about - it’s on the tip of his tongue -
*
Welcome to the eve of the third decade: a time of chaos
characterized by an all-out depression in the space industries.
Most of the thinking power on the planet is now manufactured rather
than born; there are ten microprocessors for every human being, and
the number is doubling every fourteen months. Population growth in
the developing world has stalled, the birth rate dropping below
replacement level. In the wired nations, more forward-looking
politicians are looking for ways to enfranchise their nascent AI
base.
Space exploration is still stalled on the cusp of the second
recession of the century. The Malaysian government has announced
the goal of placing an imam on Mars within ten years, but nobody
else cares enough to try.
The Space Settlers Society is still trying to interest Disney Corp.
in the media rights to their latest L5 colony plan, unaware that
there’s already a colony out there and it isn’t human:
First-generation uploads, Californian spiny lobsters in wobbly
symbiosis with elderly expert systems, thrive aboard an asteroid
mining project established by the Franklin Trust. Meanwhile,
Chinese space agency cutbacks are threatening the continued
existence of Moonbase Mao. Nobody, it seems, has figured out how to
turn a profit out beyond geosynchronous orbit.
Two years ago, JPL, the ESA, and the uploaded lobster colony on
comet Khrunichev-7 picked up an apparently artificial signal from
outside the solar system; most people don’t know, and of those who
do, even fewer care. After all, if humans can’t even make it to
Mars, who cares what’s going on a hundred trillion kilometers
farther out?
*
Portrait of a wasted youth:
Jack is seventeen years and eleven months old. He has never met his
father; he was unplanned, and Dad managed to kill himself in a
building-site accident before the Child Support could garnish his
income for the upbringing. His mother raised him in a two-bedroom
housing association flat in Hawick. She worked in a call center when
he was young, but business dried up: Humans aren’t needed on the end
of a phone anymore. Now she works in a drop-in business shop, stacking
shelves for virtual fly-by-nights that come and go like tourists in
the Festival season - but humans aren’t in demand for shelf stacking
either, these days.
His mother sent Jack to a local religious school, where he was
regularly excluded and effectively ran wild from the age of twelve. By
thirteen, he was wearing a parole cuff for shoplifting; by fourteen,
he’d broken his collarbone in a car crash while joyriding and the dour
Presbyterian sheriff sent him to the Wee Frees, who completed the
destruction of his educational prospects with high principles and an
illicit tawse.
Today, he’s a graduate of the hard school of avoiding public
surveillance cameras, with distinctions in steganographic alibi
construction. Mostly this entails high-density crime - if you’re going
to mug someone, do so where there are so many bystanders that they
can’t pin the blame on you. But the polis expert systems are on his
tail. If he keeps it up at this rate, in another four months they’ll
have a positive statistical correlation that will convince even a jury
of his peers that he’s guilty as fuck - and then he’ll go down to
Saughton for four years.
But Jack doesn’t understand the meaning of a Gaussian distribution or
the significance of a chi-square test, and the future still looks
bright to him as he pulls on the chunky spectacles he ripped off the
tourist gawking at the statue on North Bridge. And after a moment,
when they begin whispering into his ears in stereo and showing him
pictures of the tourist’s vision, it looks even brighter.
“Gotta make a deal, gotta close a deal,” whisper the glasses. “Meet
the borg, strike a chord.” Weird graphs in lurid colors are filling up
his peripheral vision, like the hallucinations of a drugged
marketroid.
“Who the fuck are ye?” asks Jack, intrigued by the bright lights and
icons.
“I am your Cartesian theatre and you are our focus,” murmur the
glasses. “Dow Jones down fifteen points, Federated Confidence up
three, incoming briefing on causal decoupling of social control of
skirt hem lengths, shaving pattern of beards, and emergence of
multidrug antibiotic resistance in Gram-negative bacilli: Accept?”
“Ah can take it,” Jack mumbles, as a torrent of images crashes down on
his eyeballs and jackhammers its way in through his ears like the
superego of a disembodied giant. Which is actually what he’s stolen:
The glasses and waist pouch he grabbed from the tourist are stuffed
with enough hardware to run the entire Internet, circa the turn of the
millennium. They’ve got bandwidth coming out the wazoo, distributed
engines running a bazillion inscrutable search tasks, and a whole slew
of high-level agents that collectively form a large chunk of the
society of mind that is their owner’s personality. Their owner is a
posthuman genius loci of the net, an agalmic entrepreneur turned
policy wonk, specializing in the politics of AI emancipation. When he
was in the biz he was the kind of guy who catalysed value wherever he
went, leaving money trees growing in his footprints. Now he’s the kind
of political backroom hitter who builds coalitions where nobody else
could see common ground. And Jack has stolen his memories. There are
microcams built into the frame of the glasses, pickups in the
earpieces; everything is spooled into the holographic cache in the
belt pack, before being distributed for remote storage. At four months
per terabyte, memory storage is cheap. What makes this bunch so
unusual is that their owner - Manfred - has cross-indexed them with
his agents. Mind uploading may not be a practical technology yet, but
Manfred has made an end run on it already.
In a very real sense, the glasses are Manfred, regardless of the
identity of the soft machine with its eyeballs behind the lenses. And
it is a very puzzled Manfred who picks himself up and, with a curious
vacancy in his head - except for a hesitant request for information
about accessories for Russian army boots - dusts himself off and heads
for his meeting on the other side of town.
*
Meanwhile, in another meeting, Manfred’s absence is already being
noticed. “Something, something is wrong,” says Annette. She raises her
mirrorshades and rubs her left eye, visibly worried. “Why is he not
answering his chat? He knows we are due to hold this call with him.
Don’t you think it is odd?”
Gianni nods and leans back, regarding her from behind his desk. He
prods at the highly polished rosewood desktop. The wood grain slips,
sliding into a strangely different conformation, generating random dot
stereoisograms - messages for his eyes only. “He was visiting Scotland
for me,” he says after a moment. “I do not know his exact whereabouts
- the privacy safeguards - but if you, as his designated next of kin,
travel in person, I am sure you will find it easier. He was going to
talk to the Franklin Collective, face-to-face, one to many …”
The office translator is good, but it can’t provide realtime
lip-synch morphing between French and Italian. Annette has to make an
effort to listen to his words because the shape of his mouth is all
wrong, like a badly dubbed video. Her expensive, recent implants
aren’t connected up to her Broca’s area yet, so she can’t simply
sideload a deep grammar module for Italian. Their communications are
the best that money can buy, their VR environment painstakingly
sculpted, but it still doesn’t break down the language barrier
completely. Besides, there are distractions: the way the desk switches
from black ash to rosewood halfway across its expanse, the strange air
currents that are all wrong for a room this size. “Then what could be
up with him? His voicemail is trying to cover for him. It is good, but
it does not lie convincingly.”
Gianni looks worried. “Manfred is prone to fits of do his own thing
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