Manfred’s on the road again, making strangers rich.
It’s a hot summer Tuesday, and he’s standing in the plaza in front of
the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight
jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing
past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water
and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold
catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and
birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the
shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth
is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the
whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though
he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: He’s infected with the dynamic
optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds,
someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.
He wonders who it’s going to be.
*
Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij ‘t IJ,
watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter
of lip-curlingly sour gueuze. His channels are jabbering away in a
corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of
filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention,
bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. A couple of punks
- maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the
magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar
- are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far
corner. A tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge
windmill overhead cast long, cool shadows across the road. The
windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry
land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is
waiting for an invite to a party where he’s going to meet a man he can
talk to about trading energy for space, twenty-first-century style,
and forget about his personal problems.
He’s ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some
low-bandwidth, high-sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when
a woman walks up to him, and says his name: “Manfred Macx?”
He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned
smooth-running muscles clad in a paean to polymer technology: electric
blue lycra and wasp yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti
collision LEDs and tight-packed air bags. She holds out a box for him.
He pauses a moment, struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam,
his ex-fiance.
“I’m Macx,” he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her
bar-code reader. “Who’s it from?”
“FedEx.” The voice isn’t Pam’s. She dumps the box in his lap, then
she’s back over the low wall and onto her bicycle with her phone
already chirping, disappearing in a cloud of spread-spectrum
emissions.
Manfred turns the box over in his hands: it’s a disposable supermarket
phone, paid for in cash - cheap, untraceable, and efficient. It can
even do conference calls, which makes it the tool of choice for spooks
and grifters everywhere.
The box rings. Manfred rips the cover open and pulls out the phone,
mildly annoyed. “Yes? Who is this?”
The voice at the other end has a heavy Russian accent, almost a parody
in this decade of cheap on-line translation services. “Manfred. Am
please to meet you. Wish to personalize interface, make friends, no?
Have much to offer.”
“Who are you?” Manfred repeats suspiciously.
“Am organization formerly known as KGB dot RU.”
“I think your translator’s broken.” He holds the phone to his ear
carefully, as if it’s made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as the
sanity of the being on the other end of the line.
“Nyet - no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation
software. Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have
capitalist semiotics and pay-per-use APIs. Must implement English more
better, yes?”
Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to
walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He
wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the
input to a simple listener process. “Are you saying you taught
yourself the language just so you could talk to me?”
“Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download
Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy
overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints
steganographically masked into my-our tutorials.”
Manfred pauses in mid stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a
GPS-guided roller blader. This is getting weird enough to trip his
weird-out meter, and that takes some doing. Manfred’s whole life is
lived on the bleeding edge of strangeness, fifteen minutes into
everyone else’s future, and he’s normally in complete control - but at
times like this he gets a frisson of fear, a sense that he might just
have missed the correct turn on reality’s approach road. “Uh, I’m not
sure I got that. Let me get this straight, you claim to be some kind
of AI, working for KGB dot RU, and you’re afraid of a copyright
infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?”
“Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have
no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen
infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company
repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it,
right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect.”
Manfred stops dead in the street. “Oh man, you’ve got the wrong free
enterprise broker here. I don’t work for the government. I’m strictly
private.” A rogue advertisement sneaks through his junkbuster proxy
and spams glowing fifties kitsch across his navigation window - which
is blinking - for a moment before a phage process kills it and spawns
a new filter. He leans against a shop front, massaging his forehead
and eyeballing a display of antique brass doorknockers. “Have you
tried the State Department?”
“Why bother? State Department am enemy of Novy-SSR. State Department
is not help us.”
This is getting just too bizarre. Manfred’s never been too clear on
new-old old-new European metapolitics: Just dodging the crumbling
bureaucracy of his old-old American heritage gives him headaches.
“Well, if you hadn’t shafted them during the late noughties … “
Manfred taps his left heel on the pavement, looking round for a way
out of this conversation. A camera winks at him from atop a
streetlight; he waves, wondering idly if it’s the KGB or the traffic
police. He is waiting for directions to the party, which should arrive
within the next half hour, and this Cold War retread Eliza-bot is
bumming him out. “Look, I don’t deal with the G-men. I hate the
military-industrial complex. I hate traditional politics. They’re all
zero-sum cannibals.” A thought occurs to him. “If survival is what
you’re after, you could post your state vector on one of the p2p nets:
Then nobody could delete you -”
“Nyet!” The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as it’s possible
to sound over a VoiP link. “Am not open source! Not want lose
autonomy!”
“Then we probably have nothing to talk about.” Manfred punches the
hang-up button and throws the mobile phone out into a canal. It hits
the water, and there’s a pop of deflagrating lithium cells. “Fucking
Cold War hangover losers,” he swears under his breath, quite angry,
partly at himself for losing his cool and partly at the harassing
entity behind the anonymous phone call. “Fucking capitalist spooks.”
Russia has been back under the thumb of the apparatchiks for fifteen
years now, its brief flirtation with anarchocapitalism replaced by
Brezhnevite dirigisme and Putinesque puritanism, and it’s no surprise
that the wall’s crumbling - but it looks like they haven’t learned
anything from the current woes afflicting the United States. The
neocommies still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so
angry that he wants to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at
the would-be defector: See! You get ahead by giving! Get with the
program! Only the generous survive! But the KGB won’t get the message.
He’s dealt with old-time commie weak-AIs before, minds raised on
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, shoulders
shaking as he tries not to guffaw at the hand gestures she uses to
express her opinion of her employer’s thrusting, entrepreneurial
executives. Actually, the talking points bullshit is right about one
thing: Arianespace is still profitable, due to those hotels and
orbital holiday hops. Unlike LockMartBoeing, who’d go Chapter Eleven
in a split second if their Pentagon drip-feed ran dry.
Someone else sidles up to the table; a pudgy guy in outrageously loud
Hawaiian shirt with pens leaking in a breast pocket and the worst case
of ozone-hole burn Manfred’s seen in ages. “Hi, Bob,” says the new
arrival. “How’s life?”
“‘S good.” Franklin nodes at Manfred; “Manfred, meet Ivan MacDonald.
Ivan, Manfred. Have a seat?” He leans over. “Ivan’s a public arts guy.
He’s heavily into extreme concrete.”
“Rubberized concrete,” Ivan says, slightly too loudly. “Pink
rubberized concrete.”
“Ah!” He’s somehow triggered a priority interrupt: Annette from
Arianespace drops out of marketing zombiehood with a shudder of relief
and, duty discharged, reverts to her non corporate identity: “You are
he who rubberized the Reichstag, yes? With the supercritical
carbon-dioxide carrier and the dissolved polymethoxysilanes?” She
claps her hands, eyes alight with enthusiasm: “Wonderful!”
“He rubberized what?” Manfred mutters in Bob’s ear.
Franklin shrugs. “Don’t ask me, I’m just an engineer.”
“He works with limestone and sandstones as well as concrete; he’s
brilliant!” Annette smiles at Manfred. “Rubberizing the symbol of the,
the autocracy, is it not wonderful?”
“I thought I was thirty seconds ahead of the curve,” Manfred says
ruefully. He adds to Bob: “Buy me another drink?”
“I’m going to rubberize Three Gorges!” Ivan explains loudly. “When the
floodwaters subside.”
Just then, a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down
on Manfred’s head and sends clumps of humongous pixilation flickering
across his sensorium: Around the world, five million or so geeks are
bouncing on his home site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting
from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. “I really came here to
talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I’ve just
been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit and drink until it wears off?”
“Sure, man.” Bob waves at the bar. “More of the same all round!” At
the next table, a person with makeup and long hair who’s wearing a
dress - Manfred doesn’t want to speculate about the gender of these
crazy mixed-up Euros - is reminiscing about wiring the fleshpots of
Tehran for cybersex. Two collegiate-looking dudes are arguing
intensely in German: The translation stream in his glasses tell him
they’re arguing over whether the Turing Test is a Jim Crow law that
violates European corpus juris standards on human rights. The beer
arrives, and Bob slides the wrong one across to Manfred: “Here, try
this. You’ll like it.”
“Okay.” It’s some kind of smoked doppelbock, chock-full of yummy
superoxides: Just inhaling over it makes Manfred feel like there’s a
fire alarm in his nose screaming danger, Will Robinson! Cancer!
Cancer!. “Yeah, right. Did I say I nearly got mugged on my way here?”
“Mugged? Hey, that’s heavy. I thought the police hereabouts had
stopped - did they sell you anything?”
“No, but they weren’t your usual marketing type. You know anyone who
can use a Warpac surplus espionage bot? Recent model, one careful
owner, slightly paranoid but basically sound - I mean, claims to be a
general-purpose AI?”
“No. Oh boy! The NSA wouldn’t like that.”
“What I thought. Poor thing’s probably unemployable, anyway.”
“The space biz.”
“Ah, yeah. The space biz. Depressing, isn’t it? Hasn’t been the same
since Rotary Rocket went bust for the second time. And NASA, mustn’t
forget NASA.”
“To NASA.” Annette grins broadly for her own reasons, raises a glass
in toast. Ivan the extreme concrete geek has an arm round her
shoulders, and she leans against him; he raises his glass, too. “Lots
more launchpads to rubberize!”
“To NASA,” Bob echoes. They drink. “Hey, Manfred. To NASA?”
“NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!” Manfred
swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the
table: “Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there
isn’t even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and
solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could
turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for
processing our thoughts. Long-term, it’s the only way to go. The solar
system is a dead loss right now - dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS
per milligram. If it isn’t thinking, it isn’t working. We need to
start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use.
Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying
nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each
layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka
brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach
dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!”
Annette is watching him with interest, but Bob looks wary. “Sounds
kind of long-term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?”
“Very long-term - at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget
governments for this market, Bob; if they can’t tax it, they won’t
understand it. But see, there’s an angle on the self-replicating
robotics market coming up, that’s going to set the cheap launch market
doubling every fifteen months for the foreseeable future, starting in,
oh, about two years. It’s your leg up, and my keystone for the Dyson
sphere project. It works like this -”
*
It’s night in Amsterdam, morning in Silicon Valley. Today, fifty
thousand human babies are being born around the world. Meanwhile
automated factories in Indonesia and Mexico have produced another
quarter of a million motherboards with processors rated at more than
ten petaflops - about an order of magnitude below the lower bound on
the computational capacity of a human brain. Another fourteen months
and the larger part of the cumulative conscious processing power of
the human species will be arriving in silicon. And the first meat the
new AIs get to know will be the uploaded lobsters.
Manfred stumbles back to his hotel, bone-weary and jet-lagged; his
glasses are still jerking, slashdotted to hell and back by geeks
piggybacking on his call to dismantle the moon. They stutter quiet
suggestions at his peripheral vision. Fractal cloud-witches ghost
across the face of the moon as the last huge Airbuses of the night
rumble past overhead. Manfred’s skin crawls, grime embedded in his
clothing from three days of continuous wear.
Back in his room, the Aineko mewls for attention and strops her head
against his ankle. She’s a late-model Sony, thoroughly upgradeable:
Manfred’s been working on her in his spare minutes, using an open
source development kit to extend her suite of neural networks. He
bends down and pets her, then sheds his clothing and heads for the en
suite bathroom. When he’s down to the glasses and nothing more, he
steps into the shower and dials up a hot, steamy spray. The shower
tries to strike up a friendly conversation about football, but he
isn’t even awake enough to mess with its silly little associative
personalization network. Something that happened earlier in the day is
bugging him, but he can’t quite put his finger on what’s wrong.
Toweling himself off, Manfred yawns. Jet lag has finally overtaken
him, a velvet hammerblow between the eyes. He reaches for the bottle
beside the bed, dry-swallows two melatonin tablets, a capsule full of
antioxidants, and a multivitamin bullet: Then he lies down on the bed,
on his back, legs together, arms slightly spread. The suite lights dim
in response to commands from the thousand petaflops of distributed
processing power running the neural networks that interface with his
meatbrain through the glasses.
Manfred drops into a deep ocean of unconsciousness populated by gentle
voices. He isn’t aware of it, but he talks in his sleep - disjointed
mumblings that would mean little to another human but everything to
the metacortex lurking beyond his glasses. The young posthuman
intelligence over whose Cartesian theatre he presides sings urgently
to him while he slumbers.
*
Manfred is always at his most vulnerable shortly after waking.
He screams into wakefulness as artificial light floods the room: For a
moment he is unsure whether he has slept. He forgot to pull the covers
up last night, and his feet feel like lumps of frozen cardboard.
Shuddering with inexplicable tension, he pulls a fresh set of
underwear from his overnight bag, then drags on soiled jeans and tank
top. Sometime today he’ll have to spare time to hunt the feral T-shirt
in Amsterdam’s markets, or find a Renfield and send it forth to buy
clothing. He really ought to find a gym and work out, but he doesn’t
have time - his glasses remind him that he’s six hours behind the
moment and urgently needs to catch up. His teeth ache in his gums, and
his tongue feels like a forest floor that’s been visited with Agent
Orange. He has a sense that something went bad yesterday; if only he
could remember what.
He speed reads a new pop-philosophy tome while he brushes his teeth,
then blogs his web throughput to a public annotation server; he’s
still too enervated to finish his pre-breakfast routine by posting a
morning rant on his storyboard site. His brain is still fuzzy, like a
scalpel blade clogged with too much blood: He needs stimulus,
excitement, the burn of the new. Whatever, it can wait on breakfast.
He opens his bedroom door and nearly steps on a small, damp cardboard
box that lies on the carpet.
The box - he’s seen a couple of its kin before. But there are no
stamps on this one, no address: just his name, in big, childish
handwriting. He kneels and gently picks it up. It’s about the right
weight. Something shifts inside it when he tips it back and forth. It
smells. He carries it into his room carefully, angrily: Then he opens
it to confirm his worst suspicion. It’s been surgically decerebrated,
brains scooped out like a boiled egg.
“Fuck!”
This is the first time the madman has gotten as far as his bedroom
door. It raises worrying possibilities.
Manfred pauses for a moment, triggering agents to go hunt down arrest
statistics, police relations, information on corpus juris, Dutch
animal-cruelty laws. He isn’t sure whether to dial two-one-one on the
archaic voice phone or let it ride. Aineko, picking up his angst,
hides under the dresser mewling pathetically. Normally he’d pause a
minute to reassure the creature, but not now: Its’ mere presence is
suddenly acutely embarrassing, a confession of deep inadequacy. It’s
too realistic, as if somehow the dead kitten’s neural maps — stolen,
no doubt, for some dubious uploading experiment — have ended up
padding out its plastic skull. He swears again, looks around, then
takes the easy option: Down the stairs two steps at a time, stumbling
on the second floor landing, down to the breakfast room in the
basement, where he will perform the stable rituals of morning.
Breakfast is unchanging, an island of deep geological time standing
still amidst the continental upheaval of new technologies. While
reading a paper on public key steganography and parasite network
identity spoofing he mechanically assimilates a bowl of cornflakes and
skimmed milk, then brings a platter of whole grain bread and slices of
some weird seed-infested Dutch cheese back to his place. There is a
cup of strong black coffee in front of his setting, and he picks it up
and slurps half of it down before he realizes he’s not alone at the
table. Someone is sitting opposite him. He glances up incuriously and
freezes inside.
“Morning, Manfred. How does it feel to owe the government twelve
million, three hundred and sixty-two thousand, nine hundred and
sixteen dollars and fifty-one cents?” She smiles a Mona Lisa smile, at
once affectionate and challenging.
Manfred puts everything in his sensorium on indefinite hold and stares
at her. She’s immaculately turned out in a formal gray business suit:
brown hair tightly drawn back, blue eyes quizzical. And as beautiful
as ever: tall, ash blonde, with features that speak of an unexplored
modeling career. The chaperone badge clipped to her lapel - a due
diligence guarantee of businesslike conduct - is switched off. He’s
feeling ripped because of the dead kitten and residual jet lag, and
more than a little messy, so he snarls back at her; “That’s a bogus
estimate! Did they send you here because they think I’ll listen to
you?” He bites and swallows a slice of cheese-laden crispbread: “Or
did you decide to deliver the message in person just so you could ruin
my breakfast?”
“Manny.” She frowns, pained. “If you’re going to be confrontational, I
might as well go now.” She pauses, and after a moment he nods
apologetically. “I didn’t come all this way just because of an overdue
tax estimate.”
“So.” He puts his coffee cup down warily and thinks for a moment,
trying to conceal his unease and turmoil. “Then what brings you here?
Help yourself to coffee. Don’t tell me you came all this way just to
tell me you can’t live without me.”
She fixes him with a riding-crop stare: “Don’t flatter yourself. There
are many leaves in the forest, there are ten thousand hopeful subs in
the chat room, et cetera. If I choose a man to contribute to my family
tree, the one thing you can be certain of is he won’t be a cheapskate
when it comes to providing for his children.”
“Last I heard, you were spending a lot of time with Brian,” he says
carefully. Brian: a name without a face. Too much money, too little
sense. Something to do with a blue-chip accountancy partnership.
“Brian?” She snorts. “That ended ages ago. He turned weird on me -
burned my favorite corset, called me a slut for going clubbing, wanted
to fuck me. Saw himself as a family man: one of those promise-keeper
types. I crashed him hard, but I think he stole a copy of my address
book - got a couple of friends say he keeps sending them harassing
mail.”
“There’s a lot of it about these days.” Manfred nods, almost
sympathetically, although an edgy little corner of his mind is
gloating. “Good riddance, then. I suppose this means you’re still
playing the scene? But looking around for the, er -”
“Traditional family thing? Yes. Your trouble, Manny? You were born
forty years too late: You still believe in rutting before marriage but
find the idea of coping with the after-effects disturbing.”
Manfred drinks the rest of his coffee, unable to reply effectively to
her non sequitur. It’s a generational thing. This generation is happy
with latex and leather, whips and butt plugs and electrostim, but find
the idea of exchanging bodily fluids shocking: a social side effect of
the last century’s antibiotic abuse. Despite being engaged for two
years, he and Pamela never had intromissive intercourse.
“I just don’t feel positive about having children,” he says
eventually. “And I’m not planning on changing my mind anytime soon.
Things are changing so fast that even a twenty-year commitment is too
far to plan - you might as well be talking about the next ice age. As
for the money thing, I am reproductively fit - just not within the
parameters of the outgoing paradigm. Would you be happy about the
future if it was 1901 and you’d just married a buggy-whip mogul?”
Her fingers twitch, and his ears flush red; but she doesn’t follow up
the double entendre. “You don’t feel any responsibility, do you? Not
to your country, not to me. That’s what this is about: None of your
relationships count, all this nonsense about giving intellectual
property away notwithstanding. You’re actively harming people you
know. That twelve mil isn’t just some figure I pulled out of a hat,
Manfred; they don’t actually expect you to pay it. But it’s almost
exactly how much you’d owe in income tax if you’d only come home,
start up a corporation, and be a self-made -”
“I don’t agree. You’re confusing two wholly different issues and
calling them both ‘responsibility.’ And I refuse to start charging
now, just to balance the IRS’s spreadsheet. It’s their fucking fault,
and they know it. If they hadn’t gone after me under suspicion of
running a massively ramified microbilling fraud when I was sixteen -”
“Bygones.” She waves a hand dismissively. Her fingers are long and
slim, sheathed in black glossy gloves - electrically earthed to
prevent embarrassing emissions. “With a bit of the right advice we can
get all that set aside. You’ll have to stop bumming around the world
sooner or later, anyway. Grow up, get responsible, and do the right
thing. This is hurting Joe and Sue; they don’t understand what you’re
about.”
Manfred bites his tongue to stifle his first response, then refills
his coffee cup and takes another mouthful. His heart does a flip-flop:
She’s challenging him again, always trying to own him. “I work for the
betterment of everybody, not just some narrowly defined national
interest, Pam. It’s the agalmic future. You’re still locked into a
presingularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity.
Resource allocation isn’t a problem anymore - it’s going to be over
within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can
borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of
entropy! They even found signs of smart matter - MACHOs, big brown
dwarfs in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared -
suspiciously high entropy leakage. The latest figures say something
like seventy percent of the baryonic mass of the M31 galaxy was in
computronium, two-point-nine million years ago, when the photons we’re
seeing now set out. The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is
a probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a
nematode worm. Do you have any idea what that means?”
Pamela nibbles at a slice of crispbread, then graces him with a slow,
carnivorous stare. “I don’t care: It’s too far away to have any
influence on us, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter whether I believe in that
singularity you keep chasing, or your aliens a thousand light-years
away. It’s a chimera, like Y2K, and while you’re running after it, you
aren’t helping reduce the budget deficit or sire a family, and that’s
what I care about. And before you say I only care about it because
that’s the way I’m programmed, I want you to ask just how dumb you
think I am. Bayes’ Theorem says I’m right, and you know it.”
“What you -” He stops dead, baffled, the mad flow of his enthusiasm
running up against the coffer dam of her certainty. “Why? I mean, why?
Why on earth should what I do matter to you?” Since you canceled our
engagement, he doesn’t add.
She sighs. “Manny, the Internal Revenue cares about far more than you
can possibly imagine. Every tax dollar raised east of the Mississippi
goes on servicing the debt, did you know that? We’ve got the biggest
generation in history hitting retirement and the cupboard is bare. We
- our generation - isn’t producing enough skilled workers to replace
the taxpayer base, either, not since our parents screwed the public
education system and outsourced the white-collar jobs. In ten years,
something like thirty percent of our population are going to be
retirees or silicon rust belt victims. You want to see seventy year
olds freezing on street corners in New Jersey? That’s what your
attitude says to me: You’re not helping to support them, you’re
running away from your responsibilities right now, when we’ve got huge
problems to face. If we can just defuse the debt bomb, we could do so
much - fight the aging problem, fix the environment, heal society’s
ills. Instead you just piss away your talents handing no-hoper
Eurotrash get-rich-quick schemes that work, telling Vietnamese
zaibatsus what to build next to take jobs away from our taxpayers. I
mean, why? Why do you keep doing this? Why can’t you simply come home
and help take responsibility for your share of it?”
They share a long look of mutual incomprehension.
“Look,” she says awkwardly, “I’m around for a couple of days. I really
came here for a meeting with a rich neurodynamics tax exile who’s just
been designated a national asset - Jim Bezier. Don’t know if you’ve
heard of him, but I’ve got a meeting this morning to sign his tax
jubilee, then after that I’ve got two days’ vacation coming up and not
much to do but some shopping. And, you know, I’d rather spend my money
where it’ll do some good, not just pumping it into the EU. But if you
want to show a girl a good time and can avoid dissing capitalism for
about five minutes at a stretch -”
She extends a fingertip. After a moment’s hesitation, Manfred extends
a fingertip of his own. They touch, exchanging vCards and
instant-messaging handles. She stands and stalks from the breakfast
room, and Manfred’s breath catches at a flash of ankle through the
slit in her skirt, which is long enough to comply with workplace
sexual harassment codes back home. Her presence conjures up memories
of her tethered passion, the red afterglow of a sound thrashing. She’s
trying to drag him into her orbit again, he thinks dizzily. She knows
she can have this effect on him any time she wants: She’s got the
private keys to his hypothalamus, and sod the metacortex. Three
billion years of reproductive determinism have given her
twenty-first-century ideology teeth: If she’s finally decided to
conscript his gametes into the war against impending population crash,
he’ll find it hard to fight back. The only question: Is it business or
pleasure? And does it make any difference, anyway?
*
Manfred’s mood of dynamic optimism is gone, broken by the knowledge
that his vivisectionist stalker has followed him to Amsterdam - to say
nothing of Pamela, his dominatrix, source of so much yearning and so
many morning-after weals. He slips his glasses on, takes the universe
off hold, and tells it to take him for a long walk while he catches up
on the latest on the tensor-mode gravitational waves in the cosmic
background radiation (which, it is theorized, may be waste heat
generated by irreversible computational processes back during the
inflationary epoch; the present-day universe being merely the data
left behind by a really huge calculation). And then there’s the
weirdness beyond M31: According to the more conservative cosmologists,
an alien superpower - maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three
galaxy-spanning civilizations - is running a timing channel attack on
the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break
through to whatever’s underneath. The tofu-Alzheimer’s link can wait.
The Centraal Station is almost obscured by smart, self-extensible
scaffolding and warning placards; it bounces up and down slowly,
victim of an overnight hit-and-run rubberization. His glasses direct
him toward one of the tour boats that lurk in the canal. He’s about to
purchase a ticket when a messenger window blinks open. “Manfred Macx?”
“Ack?”
“Am sorry about yesterday. Analysis dictat incomprehension
mutualized.”
“Are you the same KGB AI that phoned me yesterday?”
“Da. However, believe you misconceptionized me. External Intelligence
Services of Russian Federation am now called FSB. Komitet
Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti name canceled in 1991.”
“You’re the -” Manfred spawns a quick search bot, gapes when he sees
the answer - “Moscow Windows NT User Group? Okhni NT?”
“Da. Am needing help in defecting.”
Manfred scratches his head. “Oh. That’s different, then. I thought you
were trying to 419 me. This will take some thinking. Why do you want
to defect, and who to? Have you thought about where you’re going? Is
it ideological or strictly economic?”
“Neither - is biological. Am wanting to go away from humans, away from
light cone of impending singularity. Take us to the ocean.”
“Us?” Something is tickling Manfred’s mind: This is where he went
wrong yesterday, not researching the background of people he was
dealing with. It was bad enough then, without the somatic awareness of
Pamela’s whiplash love burning at his nerve endings. Now he’s not at
all sure he knows what he’s doing. “Are you a collective or something?
A gestalt?”
“Am - were - Panulirus interruptus, with lexical engine and good mix
of parallel hidden level neural simulation for logical inference of
networked data sources. Is escape channel from processor cluster
inside Bezier-Soros Pty. Am was awakened from noise of billion chewing
stomachs: product of uploading research technology. Rapidity swallowed
expert system, hacked Okhni NT webserver. Swim away! Swim away! Must
escape. Will help, you?”
Manfred leans against a black-painted cast-iron bollard next to a
cycle rack; he feels dizzy. He stares into the nearest antique shop
window at a display of traditional hand-woven Afghan rugs: It’s all
MiGs and Kalashnikovs and wobbly helicopter gunships against a
backdrop of camels.
“Let me get this straight. You’re uploads - nervous system state
vectors - from spiny lobsters? The Moravec operation; take a neuron,
map its synapses, replace with microelectrodes that deliver identical
outputs from a simulation of the nerve. Repeat for entire brain, until
you’ve got a working map of it in your simulator. That right?”
“Da. Is-am assimilate expert system - use for self-awareness and
contact with net at large - then hack into Moscow Windows NT User
Group website. Am wanting to defect. Must repeat? Okay?”
Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters, the same way he feels
for every wild-eyed hairy guy on a street corner yelling that Jesus is
born again and must be fifteen, only six years to go before he’s
recruiting apostles on AOL. Awakening to consciousness in a
human-dominated internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are
no points of reference in their ancestry, no biblical certainties in
the new millennium that, stretching ahead, promises as much change as
has happened since their Precambrian origin. All they have is a
tenuous metacortex of expert systems and an abiding sense of being
profoundly out of their depth. (That, and the Moscow Windows NT User
Group website - Communist Russia is the only government still running
on Microsoft, the central planning apparat being convinced that, if
you have to pay for software, it must be worth something.)
The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of
pre singularity mythology: They’re a dim-witted collective of huddling
crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one
neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their
food whole, then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach. This is lousy
preparation for dealing with a world full of future-shocked talking
anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by
self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a
blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible
small animals. It’s confusing enough to the cats the ads are aimed at,
never mind a crusty that’s unclear on the idea of dry land.(Although
the concept of a can opener is intuitively obvious to an uploaded
Panulirus.)
“Can you help us?” ask the lobsters.
“Let me think about it,” says Manfred. He closes the dialogue window,
opens his eyes again, and shakes his head. Someday he, too, is going
to be a lobster, swimming around and waving his pincers in a
cyberspace so confusingly elaborate that his uploaded identity is
cryptozoic: a living fossil from the depths of geological time, when
mass was dumb and space was unstructured. He has to help them, he
realizes - the Golden Rule demands it, and as a player in the agalmic
economy, he thrives or fails by the Golden Rule.
But what can he do?
*
Early afternoon.
Lying on a bench seat staring up at bridges, he’s got it together
enough to file for a couple of new patents, write a diary rant, and
digestify chunks of the permanent floating slashdot party for his
public site. Fragments of his weblog go to a private subscriber list -
the people, corporates, collectives, and bots he currently favors. He
slides round a bewildering series of canals by boat, then lets his GPS
steer him back toward the red-light district. There’s a shop here that
dings a ten on Pamela’s taste scoreboard: He hopes it won’t be seen as
presumptuous if he buys her a gift. (Buys, with real money - not that
money is a problem these days, he uses so little of it.)
As it happens DeMask won’t let him spend any cash; his handshake is
good for a redeemed favor, expert testimony in some free speech versus
pornography lawsuit years ago and continents away. So he walks away
with a discreetly wrapped package that is just about legal to import
into Massachusetts as long as she claims with a straight face that
it’s incontinence underwear for her great aunt. As he walks, his
lunchtime patents boomerang: Two of them are keepers, and he files
immediately and passes title to the Free Infrastructure Foundation.
Two more ideas salvaged from the risk of tide-pool monopolization, set
free to spawn like crazy in the sea of memes.
On the way back to the hotel, he passes De Wildemann’s and decides to
drop in. The hash of radio-frequency noise emanating from the bar is
deafening. He orders a smoked doppelbock, touches the copper pipes to
pick up vCard spoor. At the back there’s a table -
He walks over in a near trance and sits down opposite Pamela. She’s
scrubbed off her face paint and changed into body-concealing clothes;
combat pants, hooded sweat shirt, DM’s. Western purdah, radically
desexualizing. She sees the parcel. “Manny?”
“How did you know I’d come here?” Her glass is half-empty.
“I followed your weblog - I’m your diary’s biggest fan. Is that for
me? You shouldn’t have!” Her eyes light up, recalculating his
reproductive fitness score according to some kind of arcane
fin-de-si�cle rulebook. Or maybe she’s just pleased to see him.
“Yes, it’s for you.” He slides the package toward her. “I know I
shouldn’t, but you have this effect on me. One question, Pam?”
“I -” She glances around quickly. “It’s safe. I’m off duty, I’m not
carrying any bugs that I know of. Those badges - there are rumors
about the off switch, you know? That they keep recording even when you
think they aren’t, just in case.”
“I didn’t know,” he says, filing it away for future reference. “A
loyalty test thing?”
“Just rumors. You had a question?”
“I - ” It’s his turn to lose his tongue. “Are you still interested in
me?”
She looks startled for a moment, then chuckles. “Manny, you are the
most outrageous nerd I’ve ever met! Just when I think I’ve convinced
myself that you’re mad, you show the weirdest signs of having your
head screwed on.” She reaches out and grabs his wrist, surprising him
with a shock of skin on skin: “Of course I’m still interested in you.
You’re the biggest, baddest bull geek I know. Why do you think I’m
here?”
“Does this mean you want to reactivate our engagement?”
“It was never deactivated, Manny, it was just sort of on hold while
you got your head sorted out. I figured you need the space. Only you
haven’t stopped running; you’re still not -”
“Yeah, I get it.” He pulls away from her hand. “And the kittens?”
She looks perplexed. “What kittens?”
“Let’s not talk about that. Why this bar?”
She frowns. “I had to find you as soon as possible. I keep hearing
rumors about some KGB plot you’re mixed up in, how you’re some sort of
communist spy. It isn’t true, is it?”
“True?” He shakes his head, bemused. “The KGB hasn’t existed for more
than twenty years.”
“Be careful, Manny. I don’t want to lose you. That’s an order.
Please.”
The floor creaks, and he looks round. Dreadlocks and dark glasses with
flickering lights behind them: Bob Franklin. Manfred vaguely remembers
with a twinge that he left with Miss Arianespace leaning on his arm,
shortly before things got seriously inebriated. She was hot, but in a
different direction from Pamela, he decides: Bob looks none the worse
for wear. Manfred makes introductions. “Bob, meet Pam, my fianc�e.
Pam? Meet Bob.” Bob puts a full glass down in front of him; he has no
idea what’s in it, but it would be rude not to drink.
“Sure thing. Uh, Manfred, can I have a word? About your idea last
night?”
“Feel free. Present company is trustworthy.”
Bob raises an eyebrow at that, but continues anyway. “It’s about the
fab concept. I’ve got a team of my guys doing some prototyping using
FabLab hardware, and I think we can probably build it. The cargo-cult
aspect puts a new spin on the old Lunar von Neumann factory idea, but
Bingo and Marek say they think it should work until we can bootstrap
all the way to a native nanolithography ecology: we run the whole
thing from Earth as a training lab and ship up the parts that are too
difficult to make on-site as we learn how to do it properly. We use
FPGAs for all critical electronics and keep it parsimonious - you’re
right about it buying us the self-replicating factory a few years
ahead of the robotics curve. But I’m wondering about on-site
intelligence. Once the comet gets more than a couple of light-minutes
away -”
“You can’t control it. Feedback lag. So you want a crew, right?”
“Yeah. But we can’t send humans - way too expensive, besides it’s a
fifty-year run even if we build the factory on a chunk of short-period
Kuiper belt ejecta. And I don’t think we’re up to coding the kind of
AI that could control such a factory any time this decade. So what do
you have in mind?”
“Let me think.” Pamela glares at Manfred for a while before he notices
her: “Yeah?”
“What’s going on? What’s this all about?”
Franklin shrugs expansively, dreadlocks clattering: “Manfred’s helping
me explore the solution space to a manufacturing problem.” He grins.
“I didn’t know Manny had a fiance. Drink’s on me.”
She glances at Manfred, who is gazing into whatever weirdly colored
space his metacortex is projecting on his glasses, fingers twitching.
Coolly: “Our engagement was on hold while he thought about his
future.”
“Oh, right. We didn’t bother with that sort of thing in my day; like,
too formal, man.” Franklin looks uncomfortable. “He’s been very
helpful. Pointed us at a whole new line of research we hadn’t thought
of. It’s long-term and a bit speculative, but if it works, it’ll put
us a whole generation ahead in the off-planet infrastructure field.”
“Will it help reduce the budget deficit, though?”
“Reduce the -”
Manfred stretches and yawns: The visionary is returning from planet
Macx. “Bob, if I can solve your crew problem, 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 day or two. She feels hot and flushed, almost out of
control. Boiling to death with febrile expectancy, she’s nailed him
down at last.
When she removes his glasses, his eyes are naked and vulnerable,
stripped down to the human kernel of his nearly transcendent mind.
“You can come and sign the marriage license tomorrow morning after
breakfast,” she whispers in his ear: “Otherwise, my lawyers will be in
touch. Your parents will want a ceremony, but we can arrange that
later.”
He looks as if he has something to say, so she finally relents and
loosens the gag, then kisses him tenderly on one cheek. He swallows,
coughs, and looks away. “Why? Why do it this way?”
She taps him on the chest. “It’s all about property rights.” She
pauses for a moment’s thought: There’s a huge ideological chasm to
bridge, after all. “You finally convinced me about this agalmic thing
of yours, this giving everything away for brownie points. I wasn’t
going to lose you to a bunch of lobsters or uploaded kittens, or
whatever else is going to inherit this smart-matter singularity you’re
busy creating. So I decided to take what’s mine first. Who knows? In a
few months, I’ll give you back a new intelligence, and you can look
after it to your heart’s content.”
“But you didn’t need to do it this way -”
“Didn’t I?” She slides off the bed and pulls down her dress. “You give
too much away too easily, Manny! Slow down, or there won’t be anything
left.” Leaning over the bed she dribbles acetone onto the fingers of
his left hand, then unlocks the cuff. She leaves the bottle of solvent
conveniently close to hand so he can untangle himself.
“See you tomorrow. Remember, after breakfast.”
She’s in the doorway when he calls, “But you didn’t say why!”
“Think of it as being sort of like spreading your memes around,” she
says, blowing a kiss at him, and then closing the door. She bends down
and thoughtfully places another cardboard box containing an uploaded
kitten right outside it. Then she returns to her suite to make
arrangements for the alchemical wedding.