Accelerando - Charles Stross (classic books for 10 year olds .txt) 📗
- Author: Charles Stross
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Marxist dialectic and Austrian School economics: They’re so thoroughly
hypnotized by the short-term victory of global capitalism that they
can’t surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term.
Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he’s
going to patent next.
*
Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful
multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public
transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for
services rendered. He has airline employee’s travel rights with six
flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush
jacket has sixty-four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it,
four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to
grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to
measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines he’s never met. Law
firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy,
does he patent a lot - although he always signs the rights over to
the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their
obligation-free infrastructure project.
In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he’s the guy who patented
the business practice of moving your ebusiness somewhere with a
slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing
encumbrances. He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to
patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of
a problem domain - not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all
possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are
legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will
become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the
coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear
that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of
crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate
Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe
another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and
Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on
wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists
in Prague who think he’s the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of
the Pope.
Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially
coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people
who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In
return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is
a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for
anything.
There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a
constant burn of future shock - he has to assimilate more than a
megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to
stay current. The Internal Revenue Service is investigating him
continuously because it doesn’t believe his lifestyle can exist
without racketeering. And then there are the items that no money
can’t buy: like the respect of his parents. He hasn’t spoken to
them for three years, his father thinks he’s a hippy scrounger, and
his mother still hasn’t forgiven him for dropping out of his
downmarket Harvard emulation course. (They’re still locked in the
boringly bourgeois twen-cen paradigm of college-career-kids.) His
fiance and sometime dominatrix Pamela threw him over six months
ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear on. (Ironically,
she’s a headhunter for the IRS, jetting all over the place at
public expense, trying to persuade entrepreneurs who’ve gone global
to pay taxes for the good of the Treasury Department.) To cap it
all, the Southern Baptist Conventions have denounced him as a
minion of Satan on all their websites. Which would be funny
because, as a born-again atheist Manfred doesn’t believe in Satan,
if it wasn’t for the dead kittens that someone keeps mailing him.
*
Manfred drops in at his hotel suite, unpacks his Aineko, plugs in a
fresh set of cells to charge, and sticks most of his private keys in
the safe. Then he heads straight for the party, which is currently
happening at De Wildemann’s; it’s a twenty-minute walk, and the only
real hazard is dodging the trams that sneak up on him behind the cover
of his moving map display.
Along the way, his glasses bring him up to date on the news. Europe
has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: They’re
using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature
of bananas. The Middle East is, well, it’s just as bad as ever, but
the war on fundamentalism doesn’t hold much interest for Manfred. In
San Diego, researchers are uploading lobsters into cyberspace,
starting with the stomatogastric ganglion, one neuron at a time.
They’re burning GM cocoa in Belize and books in Georgia. NASA still
can’t put a man on the moon. Russia has reelected the communist
government with an increased majority in the Duma; meanwhile, in
China, fevered rumors circulate about an imminent rehabilitation, the
second coming of Mao, who will save them from the consequences of the
Three Gorges disaster. In business news, the US Justice Department is
- ironically - outraged at the Baby Bills. The divested Microsoft
divisions have automated their legal processes and are spawning
subsidiaries, IPOing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of
bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that, by the time the windfall tax
demands are served, the targets don’t exist anymore, even though the
same staff are working on the same software in the same Mumbai cubicle
farms.
Welcome to the twenty-first century.
The permanent floating meatspace party Manfred is hooking up with is a
strange attractor for some of the American exiles cluttering up the
cities of Europe this decade - not trustafarians, but honest-to-God
political dissidents, draft dodgers, and terminal outsourcing victims.
It’s the kind of place where weird connections are made and crossed
lines make new short circuits into the future, like the street cafes
of Switzerland where the pre Great War Russian exiles gathered. Right
now it’s located in the back of De Wildemann’s, a three-hundred-year
old brown cafe with a list of brews that runs to sixteen pages and
wooden walls stained the color of stale beer. The air is thick with
the smells of tobacco, brewer’s yeast, and melatonin spray: Half the
dotters are nursing monster jet lag hangovers, and the other half are
babbling a Eurotrash creole at each other while they work on the
hangover. “Man did you see that? He looks like a Democrat!” exclaims
one whitebread hanger-on who’s currently propping up the bar. Manfred
slides in next to him, catches the bartender’s eye.
“Glass of the Berlinerweisse, please,” he says.
“You drink that stuff?” asks the hanger-on, curling a hand
protectively around his Coke. “Man, you don’t want to do that! It’s
full of alcohol!”
Manfred grins at him toothily. “Ya gotta keep your yeast intake up:
There are lots of neurotransmitter precursors in this shit,
phenylalanine and glutamate.”
“But I thought that was a beer you were ordering …”
Manfred’s away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels
the more popular draught items in from the cask storage in back; one
of the hipper floaters has planted a contact bug on it, and the vCards
of all the personal network owners who’ve have visited the bar in the
past three hours are queuing up for attention. The air is full of
ultrawideband chatter, WiMAX and ‘tooth both, as he speed-scrolls
through the dizzying list of cached keys in search of one particular
name.
“Your drink.” The barman holds out an improbable-looking goblet full
of blue liquid with a cap of melting foam and a felching straw stuck
out at some crazy angle. Manfred takes it and heads for the back of
the split-level bar, up the steps to a table where some guy with
greasy dreadlocks is talking to a suit from Paris. The hanger-on at
the bar notices him for the first time, staring with suddenly wide
eyes: He nearly spills his Coke in a mad rush for the door.
Oh shit, thinks Manfred, better buy some more server time. He can
recognize the signs: He’s about to be slashdotted. He gestures at the
table. “This one taken?”
“Be my guest,” says the guy with the dreads. Manfred slides the chair
open then realizes that the other guy - immaculate double-breasted
Suit, sober tie, crew cut - is a girl. She nods at him, half-smiling
at his transparent double take. Mr. Dreadlock nods. “You’re Macx? I
figured it was about time we met.”
“Sure.” Manfred holds out a hand, and they shake. His PDA discreetly
swaps digital fingerprints, confirming that the hand belongs to Bob
Franklin, a Research Triangle startup monkey with a VC track record,
lately moving into micromachining and space technology. Franklin made
his first million two decades ago, and now he’s a specialist in
extropian investment fields. Operating exclusively overseas these past
five years, ever since the IRS got medieval about trying to suture the
sucking chest wound of the federal budget deficit. Manfred has known
him for nearly a decade via a closed mailing list, but this is the
first time they’ve ever met face-to-face. The Suit silently slides a
business card across the table; a little red devil brandishes a
trident at him, flames jetting up around its feet. He takes the card,
raises an eyebrow: “Annette Dimarcos? I’m pleased to meet you. Can’t
say I’ve ever met anyone from Arianespace marketing before.”
She smiles warmly; “That is all right. I have not the pleasure of
meeting the famous venture altruist either.” Her accent is noticeably
Parisian, a pointed reminder that she’s making a concession to him
just by talking. Her camera earrings watch him curiously, encoding
everything for the company memory. She’s a genuine new European,
unlike most of the American exiles cluttering up the bar.
“Yes, well.” He nods cautiously, unsure how to deal with her. “Bob. I
assume you’re in on this ball?”
Franklin nods; beads clatter. “Yeah, man. Ever since the Teledesic
smash it’s been, well, waiting. If you’ve got something for us, we’re
game.”
“Hmm.” The Teledesic satellite cluster was killed by cheap balloons
and slightly less cheap high-altitude, solar-powered drones with
spread-spectrum laser relays: It marked the beginning of a serious
recession in the satellite biz. “The depression’s got to end sometime:
But” - a nod to Annette from Paris - “with all due respect, I don’t
think the break will involve one of the existing club carriers.”
She shrugs. “Arianespace is forward-looking. We face reality. The
launch cartel cannot stand. Bandwidth is not the only market force in
space. We must explore new opportunities. I personally have helped us
diversify into submarine reactor engineering, microgravity
nanotechnology fabrication, and hotel management.” Her face is a
well-polished mask as she recites the company line, but he can sense
the sardonic amusement behind it as she adds: “We are more flexible
than the American space industry …”
Manfred shrugs. “That’s as may be.” He sips his Berlinerweisse slowly
as she launches into a long, stilted explanation of how Arianespace is
a diversified dot-com with orbital aspirations, a full range of
merchandising spin-offs, Bond movie sets, and a promising hotel chain
in LEO. She obviously didn’t come up with these talking points
herself. Her face is much more expressive than her voice as she mimes
boredom and disbelief at appropriate moments - an out-of-band signal
invisible to her corporate earrings. Manfred plays along, nodding
occasionally, trying to look as if he’s taking it seriously: Her droll
subversion has got his attention far more effectively than the content
of the marketing pitch. Franklin is nose down in his beer,
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