Accelerando

Chapter 2: Troubadour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the Italian state government.

 

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

 

*

 

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

twentieth-century chrome and ductwork, barbaric in its decaying

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

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

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

proprietors have come up with a final solution to the Christmas

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

limply overhead every few meters, feet occasionally twitching in

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

increasingly automated corporations don’t understand mortality,

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

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

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

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

have to do something about that, he tells himself.

 

The free media channels here are denser and more richly

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

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

satellite airport, speaks with an annoyingly bumptious twang, like

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

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

Informatics for the latest in cognitive modules and cheesy

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

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

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

trying to urgently tell him something about the railway infrastructure

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

sounds ominously like the ancient British war cry, Wemberrrly,

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

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

reclaim office instead.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

divorce proceedings and the blood sacrifice Pam is trying to extract

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Only bags need fear for their freedom in here.

 

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

accidental cryptographic routing feature embedded in an airline

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

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

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

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

carries it to convince the airline passenger-profiling expert systems

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

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

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

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

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

midst of the transatlantic trade war between new world protectionists

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

sticking to it.

 

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

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

among them is a rather good-quality suitcase with integral

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

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

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

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

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

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

bellwether on the desk.

 

“Ninety euros,” it says placidly.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

*

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

forming.

 

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

“Who do you belong to?” he asks.

 

“Manfred Macx,” it replies, slightly bashfully.

 

“No, before me.”

 

“I don’t understand that question.”

 

He sighs. “Open up.”

 

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

looks inside to confirm the contents.

 

The suitcase is full of noise.

 

*

 

Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.

 

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

rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future.

The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes

meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is

down to single-digit years …

 

*

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The metacortex - a distributed cloud of software agents that surrounds

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

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

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

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

roost and share their knowledge.

 

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

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

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

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

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

a kiss of steel, then she presents the income tax bill.

 

There’s nothing accidental about this dream. As he experiences it,

microelectrodes in his hypothalamus trigger sensitive neurons.

Revulsion and shame flood him at the sight of her face, the sense of

his vulnerability. Manfred’s metacortex, in order to facilitate his

divorce, is trying to decondition his strange love. It has been

working on him for weeks, but still he craves her whiplash touch, the

humiliation of his wife’s control, the sense of helpless rage at her

unpayable taxes, demanded with interest.

 

Aineko watches him from the pillow, purring continuously. Retractable

claws knead the bedding, first one paw, then the next. Aineko is full

of ancient feline wisdom that Pamela installed back when mistress and

master were exchanging data and bodily fluids rather than legal

documents. Aineko is more cat than robot, these days, thanks in part

to her hobbyist’s interest in feline neuroanatomy. Aineko knows that

Manfred is experiencing nameless neurasthenic agonies, but really

doesn’t give a shit about that as long as the power supply is clean

and there are no intruders.

 

Aineko curls up and joins Manfred in sleep, dreaming of laser-guided

mice.

 

*

 

Manfred is jolted awake by the hotel room phone shrilling for

attention.

 

“Hello?” he asks, fuzzily.

 

“Manfred Macx?” It’s a human voice, with a gravelly east coast accent.

 

“Yeah?” Manfred struggles to sit up. His mouth feels like the inside

of a tomb, and his eyes don’t want to open.

 

“My name is Alan Glashwiecz, of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates. Am I

correct in thinking that you are the Manfred Macx who is a director of

a company called, uh, agalmic dot holdings dot root dot one-eight-four

dot ninety-seven dot A-for-able dot B-for-baker dot five,

incorporated?”

 

“Uh.” Manfred blinks and rubs his eyes. “Hold on a moment.” When the

retinal patterns fade, he pulls on his glasses and powers them up.

“Just a second now.” Browsers and menus ricochet through his

sleep-laden eyes. “Can you repeat the company name?”

 

“Sure.” Glashwiecz repeats himself patiently. He sounds as tired as

Manfred feels.

 

“Um.” Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object

hierarchy. It’s flashing for attention. There’s a priority interrupt,

an incoming lawsuit that hasn’t propagated up the inheritance tree

yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. “I’m afraid I’m

not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be

retained by it as a technical contractor with non-executive power,

reporting to the president, but frankly, this is the first time I’ve

ever heard of the company. However, I can tell you who’s in charge if

you want.”

 

“Yes?” The attorney sounds almost interested. Manfred figures it out;

the guy’s in New Jersey, it must be about three in the morning over

there.

 

Malice - revenge for waking him up - sharpens Manfred’s voice. “The

president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is

agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.201. The secretary is

agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is

agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those

companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations

are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!” He thumps the bedside

phone control and sits up, yawning, then pushes the do-not-disturb

button before it can interrupt again. After a moment he stands up and

stretches, then heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth, comb his

hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a human

being managed to get far enough through his web of robot companies to

bug him.

 

*

 

While he’s having breakfast in the hotel restaurant, Manfred decides

that he’s going to do something unusual for a change: He’s going to

make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred’s

normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred doesn’t believe

in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition - his world is too fast

and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games. However,

his current situation calls for him to do something radical: something

like making himself a temporary billionaire so he can blow off his

divorce settlement in an instant, like a wily accountancy octopus

escaping a predator by vanishing in a cloud of his own black ink.

 

Pam is chasing him partially for ideological reasons - she still

hasn’t given up on the idea of government as the dominant

superorganism of the age - but also because she loves him in her own

peculiar way, and the last thing any self-respecting dom can tolerate

is rejection by her slave. Pam is a born-again postconservative, a

member of the first generation to grow up after the end of the

American century. Driven by the need to fix the decaying federal

system before it collapses under a mound of Medicare bills, overseas

adventurism, and decaying infrastructure, she’s willing to use

self-denial, entrapment, predatory mercantilism, dirty tricks, and any

other tool that boosts the bottom line. She doesn’t approve of

Manfred’s jetting around the world on free airline passes, making

strangers rich, somehow never needing money. She can see his listing

on the reputation servers, hovering about thirty points above IBM: All

the metrics of integrity, effectiveness and goodwill value him above

even that most fundamentalist of open-source computer companies. And

she knows he craves her tough love, wants to give himself to her

completely. So why is he running away?

 

The reason he’s running away is entirely more ordinary. Their unborn

daughter, frozen in liquid nitrogen, is an unimplanted 96-hour-old

blastula. Pam’s bought into the whole Parents for Traditional Children

parasite meme. PTC are germ-line recombination refuseniks: They refuse

to have their children screened for fixable errors. If there’s one

thing that Manfred really can’t cope with, it’s the idea that nature

knows best - even though that isn’t the point she’s making. One

steaming row too many, and he kicked back, off to traveling fast and

footloose again, spinning off new ideas like a memetic dynamo and

living on the largesse of the new paradigm. File for divorce on

grounds of irreconcilable ideological differences. No more

whiplash-and-leather sex.

 

*

 

Before he hits the TGV for Rome, Manfred takes time to visit a model

airplane show. It’s a good place to be picked up by a CIA stringer -

he’s had a tip-off that someone will be there - and besides, flying

models are hot hacker shit this decade. Add microtechnology, cameras,

and neural networks to balsa-wood flyers, and you’ve got the next

generation of military stealth flyer: It’s a fertile talent-show

scene, like the hacker cons of yore. This particular gig is happening

in a decaying out-of-town supermarket that rents out its shop floor

for events like this. Its emptiness is a sign of the times, ubiquitous

broadband and expensive gas. (The robotized warehouse next door is, in

contrast, frenetically busy, packing parcels for home delivery.

Whether they telecommute or herd in meatspace offices, people still

need to eat.)

 

Today, the food hall is full of people. Eldritch ersatz insects buzz

menacingly along the shining empty meat counters without fear of

electrocution. Big monitors unfurled above the deli display cabinets

show a weird, jerky view of a three-dimensional nightmare, painted all

the synthetic colors of radar. The feminine-hygiene galley has been

wheeled back to make room for a gigantic plastic-shrouded tampon five

meters long and sixty centimeters in diameter - a microsat launcher

and conference display, plonked there by the show’s sponsors in a

transparent attempt to talent-spot the up-and-coming engineering

geeks.

 

Manfred’s glasses zoom in and grab a particularly fetching Fokker

triplane that buzzes at face height through the crowd: He pipes the

image stream up to one of his websites in real time. The Fokker pulls

up in a tight Immelman turn beneath the dust-shrouded pneumatic cash

tubes that line the ceiling, then picks up the trail of an F-104G.

Cold War Luftwaffe and Great War Luftwaffe dart across the sky in an

intricate game of tag. Manfred’s so busy tracking the warbirds that he

nearly trips over the fat white tube’s launcher-erector.

 

“Eh, Manfred! More care, s’il vous plait!”

 

He wipes the planes and glances round. “Do I know you?” he asks

politely, even as he feels a shock of recognition.

 

“Amsterdam, three years ago.” The woman in the double-breasted suit

raises an eyebrow at him, and his social secretary remembers her for

him, whispers in his ear.

 

“Annette from Arianespace marketing?” She nods, and he focuses on her.

Still dressing in the last-century retro mode that confused him the

first time they met, she looks like a Kennedy-era Secret Service man:

cropped bleached crew cut like an angry albino hedgehog, pale blue

contact lenses, black tie, narrow lapels. Only her skin color hints at

her Berber ancestry. Her earrings are cameras, endlessly watching. Her

raised eyebrow turns into a lopsided smile as she sees his reaction.

“I remember. That cafe in Amsterdam. What brings you here?”

 

“Why “- her wave takes in the entirety of the show - “this talent

show, of course.” An elegant shrug and a wave at the orbit-capable

tampon. “It’s good talent. We’re hiring this year. If we re-enter the

launcher market, we must employ only the best. Amateurs, not

time-servers, engineers who can match the very best Singapore can

offer.”

 

For the first time, Manfred notices the discreet corporate logo on the

flank of the booster. “You outsourced your launch-vehicle

fabrication?”

 

Annette pulls a face as she explains with forced casualness: “Space

hotels were more profitable, this past decade. The high-ups, they

cannot be bothered with the rocketry, no? Things that go fast and

explode, they are pass�, they say. Diversify, they say. Until -” She

gives a very Gallic shrug. Manfred nods; her earrings are recording

everything she says, for the purposes of due diligence.

 

“I’m glad to see Europe re-entering the launcher business,” he says

seriously. “It’s going to be very important when the nanosystems

conformational replication business gets going for real. A major

strategic asset to any corporate entity in the field, even a hotel

chain.” Especially now they’ve wound up NASA and the moon race is down

to China and India, he thinks sourly.

 

Her laugh sounds like glass bells chiming. “And yourself, mon cher?

What brings you to the Confedera�ion? You must have a deal in mind.”

 

“Well., it’s Manfred’s turn to shrug, “I was hoping to find a CIA

agent, but there don’t seem to be any here today.”

 

“That is not surprising,” Annette says resentfully. “The CIA thinks

the space industry, she is dead. Fools!” She continues for a minute,

enumerating the many shortcomings of the Central Intelligence Agency

with vigor and a distinctly Parisian rudeness. “They are become almost

as bad as AP and Reuters since they go public,” she adds. “All these

wire services! And they are, ah, stingy. The CIA does not understand

that good news must be paid for at market rates if freelance stringers

are to survive. They are to be laughed at. It is so easy to plant

disinformation on them, almost as easy as the Office of Special

Plans…” She makes a banknote-riffling gesture between fingers and

thumb. By way of punctuation, a remarkably maneuverable miniature

ornithopter swoops around her head, does a double-back flip, and dives

off in the direction of the liquor display.

 

An Iranian woman wearing a backless leather minidress and a nearly

transparent scarf barges up and demands to know how much the

microbooster costs to buy: She is dissatisfied with Annette’s attempt

to direct her to the manufacturer’s website, and Annette looks

distinctly flustered by the time the woman’s boyfriend - a dashing

young air force pilot - shows up to escort her away. “Tourists,” she

mutters, before noticing Manfred, who is staring off into space with

fingers twitching. “Manfred?”

 

“Uh - what?”

 

“I have been on this shop floor for six hours, and my feet, they kill

me.” She takes hold of his left arm and very deliberately unhooks her

earrings, turning them off. “If I say to you I can write for the CIA

wire service, will you take me to a restaurant and buy me dinner and

tell me what it is you want to say?”

 

*

 

Welcome to the second decade of the twenty-first century; the

second decade in human history when the intelligence of the

environment has shown signs of rising to match human demand.

 

The news from around the world is distinctly depressing this

evening. In Maine, guerrillas affiliated with Parents for

Traditional Children announce they’ve planted logic bombs in

antenatal-clinic gene scanners, making them give random false

positives when checking for hereditary disorders: The damage so far

is six illegal abortions and fourteen lawsuits.

 

The International Convention on Performing Rights is holding a

third round of crisis talks in an attempt to stave off the final

collapse of the WIPO music licensing regime. On the one hand,

hard-liners representing the Copyright Control Association of

America are pressing for restrictions on duplicating the altered

emotional states associated with specific media performances: As a

demonstration that they mean business, two “software engineers” in

California have been kneecapped, tarred, feathered, and left for

dead under placards accusing them of reverse-engineering movie plot

lines using avatars of dead and out-of-copyright stars.

 

On the opposite side of the fence, the Association of Free Artists

are demanding the right of perform music in public without a

recording contract, and are denouncing the CCAA as being a tool of

Mafiya apparachiks who have bought it from the moribund music

industry in an attempt to go legit. FBI Director Leonid Kuibyshev

responds by denying that the Mafiya is a significant presence in

the United States. But the music biz’s position isn’t strengthened

by the near collapse of the legitimate American entertainment

industry, which has been accelerating ever since the nasty

noughties.

 

A marginally intelligent voicemail virus masquerading as an IRS

auditor has caused havoc throughout America, garnishing an

estimated eighty billion dollars in confiscatory tax withholdings

into a numbered Swiss bank account. A different virus is busy

hijacking people’s bank accounts, sending ten percent of their

assets to the previous victim, then mailing itself to everyone in

the current mark’s address book: a self-propelled pyramid scheme

in action. Oddly, nobody is complaining much. While the mess is

being sorted out, business IT departments have gone to standby,

refusing to process any transaction that doesn’t come in the shape

of ink on dead trees.

 

Tipsters are warning of an impending readjustment in the

overinflated reputations market, following revelations that some

u-media gurus have been hyped past all realistic levels of

credibility. The consequent damage to the junk-bonds market in

integrity is serious.

 

The EU council of independent heads of state has denied plans for

another attempt at Eurofederalisme, at least until the economy

rises out of its current slump. Three extinct species have been

resurrected in the past month; unfortunately, endangered ones are

now dying off at a rate of one a day. And a group of militant

anti-GM campaigners are being pursued by Interpol, after their

announcement that they have spliced a metabolic pathway for

cyanogenic glycosides into maize seed corn destined for

human-edible crops. There have been no deaths yet, but having to

test breakfast cereal for cyanide is really going to dent consumer

trust.

 

About the only people who’re doing well right now are the uploaded

lobsters - and the crusties aren’t even remotely human.

 

*

 

Manfred and Annette eat on the top deck of the buffet car, chatting as

their TGV barrels through a tunnel under the English Channel. Annette,

it transpires, has been commuting daily from Paris; which was, in any

case, Manfred’s next destination. From the show, he messaged Aineko to

round up his baggage and meet him at St. Pancras Station, in a

terminal like the shell of a giant steel woodlouse. Annette left her

space launcher in the supermarket overnight: an unfueled test article,

it is of no security significance.

 

The railway buffet car is run by a Nepalese fast-food franchise. “I

sometimes wish for to stay on the train,” Annette says as she waits

for her mismas bhat. “Past Paris! Think. Settle back in your

couchette, to awaken in Moscow and change trains. All the way to

Vladivostok in two days.”

 

“If they let you through the border,” Manfred mutters. Russia is one

of those places that still requires passports and asks if you are now

or ever have been an anti-anticommunist: It’s still trapped by its

bloody-handed history. (Rewind the video stream to Stolypin’s necktie

party and start out fresh.) Besides, they have enemies: White Russian

oligarchs, protection racketeers in the intellectual property

business. Psychotic relics of the last decade’s experiment with

Marxism-Objectivism. “Are you really a CIA stringer?”

 

Annette grins, her lips disconcertingly red: “I file dispatches from

time to time. Nothing that could get me fired.”

 

Manfred nods. “My wife has access to their unfiltered stream.”

 

“Your -” Annette pauses. “It was she who I, I met? In De Wildemann’s?”

She sees his expression. “Oh, my poor fool!” She raises her glass to

him. “It is, has, not gone well?”

 

Manfred sighs and raises a toast toward Annette. “You know your

marriage is in a bad way when you send your spouse messages via the

CIA, and she communicates using the IRS.”

 

“In only five years.” Annette winces. “You will pardon me for saying

this - she did not look like your type.” There’s a question hidden

behind that statement, and he notices again how good she is at

overloading her statements with subtexts.

 

“I’m not sure what my type is,” he says, half-truthfully. He can’t

elude the sense that something not of either of their doing went wrong

between him and Pamela, a subtle intrusion that levered them apart by

stealth. Maybe it was me, he thinks. Sometimes he isn’t certain he’s

still human; too many threads of his consciousness seem to live

outside his head, reporting back whenever they find something

interesting. Sometimes he feels like a puppet, and that frightens him

because it’s one of the early-warning signs of schizophrenia. And it’s

too early for anyone out there to be trying to hack exocortices …

isn’t it? Right now, the external threads of his consciousness are

telling him that they like Annette, when she’s being herself instead

of a cog in the meatspace ensemble of Arianespace management. But the

part of him that’s still human isn’t sure just how far to trust

himself. “I want to be me. What do you want to be?”

 

She shrugs, as a waiter slides a plate in front of her. “I’m just a, a

Parisian babe, no? An ing�nue raised in the lilac age of le

Confedera�ion Europ�, the self-deconstructed ruins of the gilded

European Union.”

 

“Yeah, right.” A plate appears in front of Manfred. “And I’m a good

old microboomer from the MassPike corridor.” He peels back a corner of

the omelet topping and inspects the food underneath it. “Born in the

sunset years of the American century.” He pokes at one of the

unidentifiable meaty lumps in the fried rice with his fork, and it

pokes right back. There’s a limit to how much his agents can tell him

about her - European privacy laws are draconian by American standards

- but he knows the essentials. Two parents who are still together,

father a petty politician in some town council down in the vicinity of

Toulouse. Went to the right �cole. The obligatory year spent bumming

around the Confedera�ion at government expense, learning how other

people live - a new kind of empire building, in place of the 20th

century’s conscription and jackboot wanderjahr. No weblog or personal

site that his agents can find. She joined Arianespace right out of the

Polytechnique and has been management track ever since: Korou,

Manhattan Island, Paris. “You’ve never been married, I take it.”

 

She chuckles. “Time is too short! I am still young.” She picks up a

forkful of food, and adds quietly. “Besides, the government would

insist on paying.”

 

“Ah.” Manfred tucks into his bowl thoughtfully. With the birth rate

declining across Europe, the EC bureaucracy is worried; the old EU

started subsidizing babies, a new generation of carers, a decade ago,

and it still hasn’t dented the problem. All it’s done is alienate the

brightest women of childbearing age. Soon they’ll have to look to the

east for a solution, importing a new generation of citizens - unless

the long-promised aging hacks prove workable, or cheap AI comes along.

 

“Do you have a hotel?” Annette asks suddenly.

 

“In Paris?” Manfred is startled: “Not yet.”

 

“You must come home with me, then.” She looks at him quizzically.

 

“I’m not sure I - ” He catches her expression. “What is it?”

 

“Oh, nothing. My friend Henri, he says I take in strays too easily.

But you are not a stray. I think you can look after yourself. Besides,

it is the Friday today. Come with me, and I will file your press

release for the Company to read. Tell me, do you dance? You look as if

you need a wild week ending, to help forget your troubles!”

 

*

 

Annette drives a steamroller seduction through Manfred’s plans for the

weekend. He intended to find a hotel, file a press release, then spend

some time researching the corporate funding structure of Parents for

Traditional Children and the dimensionality of confidence variation on

the reputation exchanges - then head for Rome. Instead, Annette drags

him back to her apartment, a large studio flat tucked away behind an

alley in the Marais. She sits him at the breakfast bar while she

tidies away his luggage, then makes him close his eyes and swallow two

dubious-tasting capsules. Next, she pours them each a tall glass of

freezing-cold Aqvavit that tastes exactly like Polish rye bread. When

they finish it, she just about rips his clothes off. Manfred is

startled to discover that he has a crowbar-stiff erection; since the

last blazing row with Pamela, he’d vaguely assumed he was no longer

interested in sex. Instead, they end up naked on the sofa, surrounded

by discarded clothing - Annette is very conservative, preferring the

naked penetrative fuck of the last century to the more sophisticated

fetishes of the present day.

 

Afterward, he’s even more surprised to discover that he’s still

tumescent. “The capsules?” he asks.

 

She sprawls a well-muscled but thin thigh across him, then reaches

down to grab his penis. Squeezes it. “Yes,” she admits. “You need much

special help to unwind, I think.” Another squeeze. “Crystal meth and a

traditional phosphodiesterase inhibitor.” He grabs one of her small

breasts, feeling very brutish and primitive. Naked. He’s not sure

Pamela ever let him see her fully naked: She thought skin was more

sexy when it was covered. Annette squeezes him again, and he stiffens.

“More!”

 

By the time they finish, he’s aching, and she shows him how to use the

bidet. Everything is crystal clear, and her touch is electrifying.

While she showers, he sits on the toilet seat lid and rants about

Turing-completeness as an attribute of company law, about cellular

automata and the blind knapsack problem, about his work on solving the

Communist Central Planning problem using a network of interlocking

unmanned companies. About the impending market adjustment in

integrity, the sinister resurrection of the recording music industry,

and the still-pressing need to dismantle Mars.

 

When she steps out of the shower, he tells her that he loves her. She

kisses him and slides his glasses and earpieces off his head so that

he’s really naked, sits on his lap, and fucks his brains out again,

and whispers in his ear that she loves him and wants to be his

manager. Then she leads him into her bedroom and tells him exactly

what she wants him to wear, and she puts on her own clothes, and she

gives him a mirror with some white powder on it to sniff. When she’s

got him dolled up they go out for a night of really serious clubbing,

Annette in a tuxedo and Manfred in a blond wig, red silk

off-the-shoulder gown, and high heels. Sometime in the early hours,

exhausted and resting his head on her shoulder during the last tango

in a BDSM club in the Rue Ste-Anne, he realizes that it really is

possible to be in lust with someone other than Pamela.

 

*

 

Aineko wakes Manfred by repeatedly head-butting him above the left

eye. He groans, and as he tries to open his eyes, he finds that his

mouth tastes like a dead trout, his skin feels greasy with make-up,

and his head is pounding. There’s a banging noise somewhere. Aineko

meows urgently. He sits up, feeling unaccustomed silk underwear

rubbing against incredibly sore skin - he’s fully dressed, just

sprawled out on the sofa. Snores emanate from the bedroom; the banging

is coming from the front door. Someone wants to come in. Shit. He rubs

his head, stands up, and nearly falls flat on his face: He hasn’t even

taken those ridiculous high heels off. How much did I drink last

night? he wonders. His glasses are on the breakfast bar; he pulls them

on and is besieged by an urgent flurry of ideas demanding attention.

He straightens his wig, picks up his skirts, and trips across to the

door with a sinking feeling. Luckily his publicly traded reputation is

strictly technical.

 

He unlocks the door. “Who is it?” he asks in English. By way of reply

somebody shoves the door in, hard. Manfred falls back against the

wall, winded. His glasses stop working, sidelook displays filling with

multicolored static.

 

Two men charge in, identically dressed in jeans and leather jackets.

They’re wearing gloves and occlusive face masks, and one of them

points a small and very menacing ID card at Manfred. A self-propelled

gun hovers in the doorway, watching everything. “Where is he?”

 

“Who?” gasps Manfred, breathless and terrified.

 

“Macx.” The other intruder steps into the living room quickly, pans

around, ducks through the bathroom door. Aineko flops as limp as a

dishrag in front of the sofa. The intruder checks out the bedroom:

There’s a brief scream, cut off short.

 

“I don’t know - who?” Manfred is choking with fear.

 

The other intruder ducks out of the bedroom, waves a hand

dismissively.

 

“We are sorry to have bothered you,” the man with the card says

stiffly. He replaced it in his jacket pocket. “If you should see

Manfred Macx, tell him that the Copyright Control Association of

America advises him to cease and desist from his attempt to assist

music thieves and other degenerate mongrel secondhander enemies of

Objectivism. Reputations only of use to those alive to own them.

Goodbye.”

 

The two copyright gangsters disappear through the door, leaving

Manfred to shake his head dizzily while his glasses reboot. It takes

him a moment to register the scream from the bedroom. “Fuck -

Annette!”

 

She appears in the open doorway, holding a sheet around her waist,

looking angry and confused. “Annette!” he calls. She looks around,

sees him, and begins to laugh shakily. “Annette!” He crosses over to

her. “You’re okay,” he says. “You’re okay.”

 

“You too.” She hugs him, and she’s shaking. Then she holds him at

arm’s length. “My, what a pretty picture!”

 

“They wanted me,” he says, and his teeth are chattering. “Why?”

 

She looks up at him seriously. “You must bathe. Then have coffee. We

are not at home, oui?”

 

“Ah, oui.” He looks down. Aineko is sitting up, looking dazed.

“Shower. Then that dispatch for CIA news.”

 

“The dispatch?” She looks puzzled. “I filed that last night. When I

was in the shower. The microphone, he is waterproof.”

 

*

 

By the time Arianespace’s security contractors show up, Manfred has

stripped off Annette’s evening gown and showered; he’s sitting in the

living room wearing a bathrobe, drinking a half-liter mug of espresso

and swearing under his breath.

 

While he was dancing the night away in Annette’s arms, the global

reputation market has gone nonlinear: People are putting their trust

in the Christian Coalition and the Eurocommunist Alliance - always a

sign that the times are bad - while perfectly sound trading

enterprises have gone into free fall, as if a major bribery scandal

has broken out.

 

Manfred trades ideas for kudos via the Free Intellect Foundation,

bastard child of George Soros and Richard Stallman. His reputation is

cemented by donations to the public good that don’t backfire. So he’s

offended and startled to discover that he’s dropped twenty points in

the past two hours - and frightened to see that this is by no means

unusual. He was expecting a ten-point drop mediated via an options

trade - payment for the use of the anonymous luggage remixer that

routed his old suitcase to Mombasa and in return sent this new one to

him via the left-luggage office in Luton - but this is more serious.

The entire reputation market seems to have been hit by the confidence

flu.

 

Annette bustles around busily, pointing out angles and timings to the

forensics team her head office sent in answer to her call for back-up.

She seems more angry and shaken than worried by the intrusion. It’s

probably an occupational hazard for any upwardly mobile executive in

the old, grasping network of greed that Manfred’s agalmic future aims

to supplant. The forensics dude and dudette, a pair of cute, tanned

Lebanese youngsters, point the yellow snout of their mass spectroscope

into various corners and agree that there’s something not unlike gun

oil in the air. But, so sorry, the intruders wore masks to trap the

skin particles and left behind a spray of dust vacuumed from the seat

of a city bus, so there’s no way of getting a genotype match.

Presently they agree to log it as a suspected corporate intrusion

(origin: unclassified; severity: worrying) and increase the logging

level on her kitchen telemetry. And remember to wear your earrings at

all times, please. They leave, and Annette locks the door, leans

against it, and curses for a whole long minute.

 

“They gave me a message from the copyright control agency,” Manfred

says unevenly when she winds down. “Russian gangsters from New York

bought the recording cartels a few years ago, you know? After the

rights stitch-up fell apart, and the artists all went on-line while

they focused on copy prevention technologies, the Mafiya were the only

people who would buy the old business model. These guys add a whole

new meaning to copy protection: This was just a polite cease and

desist notice by their standards. They run the record shops, and they

try to block any music distribution channel they don’t own. Not very

successfully, though - most gangsters are living in the past, more

conservative than any normal businessman can afford to be. What was it

that you put on the wire?”

 

Annette closes her eyes. “I don’t remember. No.” She holds up a hand.

“Open mike. I streamed you into a file and cut, cut out the bits about

me.” She opens her eyes and shakes her head. “What was I on?”

 

“You don’t know either?”

 

He stands up, and she walks over and throws her arms around him. “I

was on you,” she murmurs.

 

“Bullshit.” He pulls away, then sees how this upsets her. Something is

blinking for attention in his glasses; he’s been off-line for the best

part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the

idea of not being in touch with everything that’s happened in the last

twenty kiloseconds. “I need to know more. Something in that report

rattled the wrong cages. Or someone ratted on the suitcase exchange -

I meant the dispatch to be a heads-up for whoever needs a working

state planning system, not an invitation to shoot me!”

 

“Well, then.” She lets go of him. “Do your work.” Coolly: “I’ll be

around.”

 

He realizes that he’s hurt her, but he doesn’t see any way of

explaining that he didn’t mean to - at least, not without digging

himself in deeper. He finishes his croissant and plunges into one of

those unavoidable fits of deep interaction, fingers twitching on

invisible keypads and eyeballs jiggling as his glasses funnel deep

media straight into his skull through the highest bandwidth channel

currently available.

 

One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic

messages, companies with names like agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0

screaming for the attention of their transitive director. Each of

these companies - and there are currently more than sixteen thousand

of them, although the herd is growing day by day - has three directors

and is the director of three other companies. Each of them executes a

script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors tell

the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass

instructions on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of

cellular automata, like the cells in Conway’s Game of Life, only far

more complex and powerful.

 

Manfred’s companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed

with capital in the form of patents Manfred filed, then delegated

rather than passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them

are effectively nontrading, but occupy directorial roles. Their

corporate functions (such as filing of accounts and voting in new

directors) are all handled centrally through his company-operating

framework, and their trading is carried out via several of the more

popular B2B enabler dot-coms. Internally, the companies do other, more

obscure load-balancing computations, processing resource-allocation

problems like a classic state central planning system. None of which

explains why fully half of them have been hit by lawsuits in the past

twenty-two hours.

 

The lawsuits are … random. That’s the only pattern Manfred can

detect. Some of them allege patent infringements; these he might take

seriously, except that about a third of the targets are director

companies that don’t actually do anything visible to the public. A few

lawsuits allege mismanagement, but then there’s a whole bizarre raft

of spurious nonsense: suits for wrongful dismissal or age

discrimination - against companies with no employees - complaints

about reckless trading, and one action alleging that the defendant (in

conspiracy with the prime minister of Japan, the government of Canada,

and the Emir of Kuwait) is using orbital mind-control lasers to make

the plaintiff’s pet chihuahua bark at all hours of day and night.

 

Manfred groans and does a quick calculation. At the current rate,

lawsuits are hitting his corporate grid at a rate of one every sixteen

seconds - up from none in the preceding six months. In another day,

this is going to saturate him. If it keeps up for a week, it’ll

saturate every court in the United States. Someone has found a means

to do for lawsuits what he’s doing for companies - and they’ve chosen

him as their target.

 

To say that Manfred is unamused is an understatement. If he wasn’t

already preoccupied with Annette’s emotional state and edgy from the

intrusion, he’d be livid - but he’s still human enough that he

responds to human stimuli first. So he determines to do something

about it, but he’s still flashing on the floating gun, her

cross-dressing cool.

 

Transgression, sex, and networks; these are all on his mind when

Glashwiecz phones again.

 

“Hello?” Manfred answers distractedly; he’s busy pondering the lawsuit

bot that’s attacking his systems.

 

“Macx! The elusive Mr. Macx!” Glashwiecz sounds positively overjoyed

to have tracked down his target.

 

Manfred winces. “Who is this?” he asks.

 

“I called you yesterday,” says the lawyer; “You should have listened.”

He chortles horribly. “Now I have you!”

 

Manfred holds the phone away from his face, like something poisonous.

“I’m recording this,” he warns. “Who the hell are you and what do you

want?”

 

“Your wife has retained my partnership’s services to pursue her

interests in your divorce case. When I called you yesterday it was to

point out without prejudice that your options are running out. I have

an order, signed in court three days ago, to have all your assets

frozen. These ridiculous shell companies notwithstanding, she’s going

to take you for exactly what you owe her. After tax, of course. She’s

very insistent on that point.”

 

Manfred glances round, puts his phone on hold for a moment: “Where’s

my suitcase?” he asks Aineko. The cat sidles away, ignoring him.

“Shit.” He can’t see the new luggage anywhere. Quite possibly it’s on

its way to Morocco, complete with its priceless cargo of high-density

noise. He returns his attention to the phone. Glashwiecz is droning on

about equitable settlements, cumulative IRS tax demands - that seem to

have materialized out of fantasy with Pam’s imprimatur on them - and

the need to make a clean breast of things in court and confess to his

sins. “Where’s the fucking suitcase?” He takes the phone off hold.

“Shut the fuck up, please, I’m trying to think.”

 

“I’m not going to shut up! You’re on the court docket already, Macx.

You can’t evade your responsibilities forever. You’ve got a wife and a

helpless daughter to care for -”

 

“A daughter?” That cuts right through Manfred’s preoccupation with the

suitcase.

 

“Didn’t you know?” Glashwiecz sounds pleasantly surprised. “She was

decanted last Thursday. Perfectly healthy, I’m told. I thought you

knew; you have viewing rights via the clinic webcam. Anyway, I’ll just

leave you with this thought - the sooner you come to a settlement, the

sooner I can unfreeze your companies. Goodbye.”

 

The suitcase rolls into view, peeping coyly out from behind Annette’s

dressing table. Manfred breathes a sigh of relief and beckons to it;

at the moment, it’s easier to deal with his Plan B than dawn raids by

objectivist gangsters, Annette’s sulk, his wife’s incessant legal

spamming, and the news that he is a father against his will. “C’mon

over here, you stray baggage. Let’s see what I got for my reputation

derivatives …”

 

*

 

Anticlimax.

 

Annette’s communiqu� is anodyne; a giggling confession off camera

(shower-curtain rain in the background) that the famous Manfred Macx

is in Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general

hell-raising. Oh, and he’s promised to invent three new paradigm

shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about

the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state central

planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market

systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte

Carlo free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation

problem. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he

wants to hear the screams from the Chicago School.

 

Try as he may, Manfred can’t see anything in the press release that is

at all unusual. It’s just the sort of thing he does, and getting it on

the net was why he was looking for a CIA stringer in the first place.

 

He tries to explain this to her in the bath as he soaps her back. “I

don’t understand what they’re on about,” he complains. “There’s

nothing that tipped them off - except that I was in Paris, and you

filed the news. You did nothing wrong.”

 

“Mais oui.” She turns round, slippery as an eel, and slides backward

into the water. “I try to tell you this, but you are not listening.”

 

“I am now.” Water droplets cling to the outside of his glasses,

plastering his view of the room with laser speckle highlights. “I’m

sorry, Annette, I brought this mess with me. I can take it out of your

life.”

 

“No!” She rises up in front of him and leans forward, face serious. “I

said yesterday. I want to be your manager. Take me in.”

 

“I don’t need a manager; my whole thing is about being fast and out of

control!”

 

“You think you do not need a manager, but your companies do,” she

observes. “You have lawsuits, how many? You cannot the time to oversee

them spare. The Soviets, they abolish capitalists, but even they need

managers. Please, let me manage for you!”

 

Annette is so intense about the idea that she becomes visibly aroused.

He leans toward her, cups a hand around one taut nipple. “The company

matrix isn’t sold yet,” he admits.

 

“It is not?” She looks delighted. “Excellent! To who can this be sold,

to Moscow? To SLORC? To -”

 

“I was thinking of the Italian Communist Party,” he says. “It’s a

pilot project. I was working on selling it - I need the money for my

divorce, and to close the deal on the luggage - but it’s not that

simple. Someone has to run the damn thing - someone with a keen

understanding of how to interface a central planning system with a

capitalist economy. A system administrator with experience of working

for a multinational corporation would be perfect, ideally with an

interest in finding new ways and means of interfacing the centrally

planned enterprise to the outside world.” He looks at her with

suddenly dawning surmise. “Um, are you interested?”

 

*

 

Rome is hotter than downtown Columbia, South Carolina, over

Thanksgiving weekend; it stinks of methane-burning Skodas with a low

undertone of cooked dog shit. The cars are brightly colored subcompact

missiles, hurtling in and out of alleyways like angry wasps:

Hot-wiring their drive-by-wire seems to be the national sport,

although Fiat’s embedded systems people have always written

notoriously wobbly software.

 

Manfred emerges from the Stazione Termini into dusty sunlight,

blinking like an owl. His glasses keep up a rolling monologue about

who lived where in the days of the late Republic. They’re stuck on a

tourist channel and won’t come unglued from that much history without

a struggle. Manfred doesn’t feel like a struggle right now. He feels

like he’s been sucked dry over the weekend: a light, hollow husk that

might blow away in a stiff breeze. He hasn’t had a patentable idea all

day. This is not a good state to be in on a Monday morning when he’s

due to meet the former Minister for Economic Affairs, in order to give

him a gift that will probably get the minister a shot at higher office

and get Pam’s lawyer off his back. But somehow he can’t bring himself

to worry too much: Annette has been good for him.

 

The ex-minister’s private persona isn’t what Manfred was expecting.

All Manfred has seen so far is a polished public avatar in a

traditionally cut suit, addressing the Chamber of Deputies in

cyberspace; which is why, when he rings the doorbell set in the

whitewashed doorframe of Gianni’s front door, he isn’t expecting a

piece of Tom of Finland beefcake, complete with breechclout and peaked

leather cap, to answer.

 

“Hello, I am here to see the minister,” Manfred says carefully.

Aineko, perched on his left shoulder, attempts to translate: It trills

something that sounds extremely urgent. Everything sounds urgent in

Italian.

 

“It’s okay, I’m from Iowa,” says the guy in the doorway. He tucks a

thumb under one leather strap and grins over his moustache: “What’s it

about?” Over his shoulder: “Gianni! Visitor!”

 

“It’s about the economy,” Manfred says carefully. “I’m here to make it

obsolete.”

 

The beefcake backs away from the door cautiously - then the minister

appears behind him. “Ah, signore Macx! It’s okay, Johnny, I have been

expecting him.” Gianni extends a rapid welcome, like a hyperactive

gnome buried in a white toweling bathrobe: “Please come in, my friend!

I’m sure you must be tired from your journey. A refreshment for the

guest if you please, Johnny. Would you prefer coffee or something

stronger?”

 

Five minutes later, Manfred is buried up to his ears in a sofa covered

in buttery white cowhide, a cup of virulently strong espresso balanced

precariously on his knee, while Gianni Vittoria himself holds forth on

the problems of implementing a postindustrial ecosystem on top of a

bureaucratic system with its roots in the bullheadedly modernist era

of the 1920s. Gianni is a visionary of the left, a strange attractor

within the chaotic phase-space of Italian politics. A former professor

of Marxist economics, his ideas are informed by a painfully honest

humanism, and everyone - even his enemies - agrees that he is one of

the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual

integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow

travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies,

accusing him of the ultimate political crime \emdash valuing truth

over power.

 

Manfred had met Gianni a couple of years earlier via a hosted politics

chat room; at the beginning of last week, he sent him a paper

detailing his embeddable planned economy and a proposal for using it

to turbocharge the endless Italian attempt to re-engineer its

government systems. This is the thin end of the wedge: If Manfred is

right, it could catalyse a whole new wave of communist expansion,

driven by humanitarian ideals and demonstrably superior performance,

rather than wishful thinking and ideology.

 

“It is impossible, I fear. This is Italy, my friend. Everybody has to

have their say. Not everybody even understands what it is we are

talking about, but that won’t stop them talking about it. Since 1945,

our government requires consensus - a reaction to what came before. Do

you know, we have five different routes to putting forward a new law,

two of them added as emergency measures to break the gridlock? And

none of them work on their own unless you can get everybody to agree.

Your plan is daring and radical, but if it works, we must understand

why we work - and that digs right to the root of being human, and not

everybody will agree.”

 

At this point Manfred realizes that he’s lost. “I don’t understand,”

he says, genuinely puzzled. “What has the human condition got to do

with economics?”

 

The minister sighs abruptly. “You are very unusual. You earn no money,

do you? But you are rich, because grateful people who have benefited

from your work give you everything you need. You are like a medieval

troubadour who has found favor with the aristocracy. Your labor is not

alienated - it is given freely, and your means of production is with

you always, inside your head.” Manfred blinks; the jargon is weirdly

technical-sounding but orthogonal to his experience, offering him a

disquieting glimpse into the world of the terminally future-shocked.

He is surprised to find that not understanding itches.

 

Gianni taps his balding temple with a knuckle like a walnut. “Most

people spend little time inside their heads. They don’t understand how

you live. They’re like medieval peasants looking in puzzlement at the

troubadour. This system you invent, for running a planned economy, is

delightful and elegant: Lenin’s heirs would have been awestruck. But

it is not a system for the new century. It is not human.”

 

Manfred scratches his head. “It seems to me that there’s nothing human

about the economics of scarcity,” he says. “Anyway, humans will be

obsolete as economic units within a couple more decades. All I want to

do is make everybody rich beyond their wildest dreams before that

happens.” A pause for a sip of coffee, and to think, one honest

statement deserves another: “And to pay off a divorce settlement.”

 

“Ye-es? Well, let me show you my library, my friend,” he says,

standing up. “This way.”

 

Gianni ambles out of the white living room with its carnivorous

leather sofas, and up a cast-iron spiral staircase that nails some

kind of upper level to the underside of the roof. “Human beings aren’t

rational,” he calls over his shoulder. “That was the big mistake of

the Chicago School economists, neoliberals to a man, and of my

predecessors, too. If human behavior was logical, there would be no

gambling, hmm? The house always wins, after all.” The staircase

debouches into another airy whitewashed room, where one wall is

occupied by a wooden bench supporting a number of ancient,

promiscuously cabled servers and a very new, eye-wateringly expensive

solid volume renderer. Opposite the bench is a wall occupied from

floor to ceiling by bookcases: Manfred looks at the ancient,

low-density medium and sneezes, momentarily bemused by the sight of

data density measured in kilograms per megabyte rather than vice

versa.

 

“What’s it fabbing?” Manfred asks, pointing at the renderer, which is

whining to itself and slowly sintering together something that

resembles a carriage clockmaker’s fever dream of a spring-powered hard

disk drive.

 

“Oh, one of Johnny’s toys - a micromechanical digital phonograph

player,” Gianni says dismissively. “He used to design Babbage engines

for the Pentagon - stealth computers. (No van Eck radiation, you

know.) Look.” He carefully pulls a fabric-bound document out of the

obsolescent data wall and shows the spine to Manfred: “On the Theory

of Games, by John von Neumann. Signed first edition.”

 

Aineko meeps and dumps a slew of confusing purple finite state

automata into Manfred’s left eye. The hardback is dusty and dry

beneath his fingertips as he remembers to turn the pages gently. “This

copy belonged to the personal library of Oleg Kordiovsky. A lucky man

is Oleg: He bought it in 1952, while on a visit to New York, and the

MVD let him to keep it.”

 

“He must be -” Manfred pauses. More data, historical time lines. “Part

of GosPlan?”

 

“Correct.” Gianni smiles thinly. “Two years before the central

committee denounced computers as bourgeois deviationist pseudoscience

intended to dehumanize the proletarian. They recognized the power of

robots even then. A shame they did not anticipate the compiler or the

Net.”

 

“I don’t understand the significance. Nobody back then could expect

that the main obstacle to doing away with market capitalism would be

overcome within half a century, surely?”

 

“Indeed not. But it’s true: Since the 1980s, it has been possible - in

principle - to resolve resource allocation problems algorithmically,

by computer, instead of needing a market. Markets are wasteful: They

allow competition, much of which is thrown on the scrap heap. So why

do they persist?”

 

Manfred shrugs. “You tell me. Conservativism?”

 

Gianni closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. “Markets afford

their participants the illusion of free will, my friend. You will find

that human beings do not like being forced into doing something, even

if it is in their best interests. Of necessity, a command economy must

be coercive - it does, after all, command.”

 

“But my system doesn’t! It mediates where supplies go, not who has to

produce what -”

 

Gianni is shaking his head. “Backward chaining or forward chaining, it

is still an expert system, my friend. Your companies need no human

beings, and this is a good thing, but they must not direct the

activities of human beings, either. If they do, you have just enslaved

people to an abstract machine, as dictators have throughout history.”

 

Manfred’s eyes scan along the bookshelf. “But the market itself is an

abstract machine! A lousy one, too. I’m mostly free of it - but how

long is it going to continue oppressing people?”

 

“Maybe not as long as you fear.” Gianni sits down next to the

renderer, which is currently extruding the inference mill of the

analytical engine. “The marginal value of money decreases, after all:

The more you have, the less it means to you. We are on the edge of a

period of prolonged economic growth, with annual averages in excess of

twenty percent, if the Council of Europe’s predictor metrics are

anything to go by. The last of the flaccid industrial economy has

withered away, and this era’s muscle of economic growth, what used to

be the high-technology sector, is now everything. We can afford a

little wastage, my friend, if that is the price of keeping people

happy until the marginal value of money withers away completely.”

 

Realization dawns. “You want to abolish scarcity, not just money!”

 

“Indeed.” Gianni grins. “There’s more to that than mere economic

performance; you have to consider abundance as a factor. Don’t plan

the economy; take things out of the economy. Do you pay for the air

you breathe? Should uploaded minds - who will be the backbone of our

economy, by and by - have to pay for processor cycles? No and no. Now,

do you want to know how you can pay for your divorce settlement? And

can I interest you, and your interestingly accredited new manager, in

a little project of mine?”

 

*

 

The shutters are thrown back, the curtains tied out of the way, and

Annette’s huge living room windows are drawn open in the morning

breeze.

 

Manfred sits on a leather-topped piano stool, his suitcase open at his

feet. He’s running a link from the case to Annette’s stereo, an

antique stand-alone unit with a satellite Internet uplink. Someone has

chipped it, crudely revoking its copy protection algorithm: The back

of its case bears scars from the soldering iron. Annette is curled up

on the huge sofa, wrapped in a kaftan and a pair of high-bandwidth

goggles, thrashing out an internal Arianespace scheduling problem with

some colleagues in Iran and Guyana.

 

His suitcase is full of noise, but what’s coming out of the stereo is

ragtime. Subtract entropy from a data stream - coincidentally

uncompressing it - and what’s left is information. With a capacity of

about a trillion terabytes, the suitcase’s holographic storage

reservoir has enough capacity to hold every music, film, and video

production of the twentieth century with room to spare. This is all

stuff that is effectively out of copyright control, work-for-hire

owned by bankrupt companies, released before the CCAA could make their

media clampdown stick. Manfred is streaming the music through

Annette’s stereo - but keeping the noise it was convoluted with.

High-grade entropy is valuable, too …

 

Presently, Manfred sighs and pushes his glasses up his forehead,

killing the displays. He’s thought his way around every permutation of

what’s going on, and it looks like Gianni was right: There’s nothing

left to do but wait for everyone to show up.

 

For a moment, he feels old and desolate, as slow as an unassisted

human mind. Agencies have been swapping in and out of his head for the

past day, ever since he got back from Rome. He’s developed a butterfly

attention span, irritable and unable to focus on anything while the

information streams fight it out for control of his cortex, arguing

about a solution to his predicament. Annette is putting up with his

mood swings surprisingly calmly. He’s not sure why, but he glances her

way fondly. Her obsessions run surprisingly deep, and she’s quite

clearly using him for her own purposes. So why does he feel more

comfortable around her than he did with Pam?

 

She stretches and pushes her goggles up. “Oui?”

 

“I was just thinking.” He smiles. “Three days and you haven’t told me

what I should be doing with myself, yet.”

 

She pulls a face. “Why would I do that?”

 

“Oh, no reason. I’m just not over - ” He shrugs uncomfortably. There

it is, an inexplicable absence in his life, but not one he feels he

urgently needs to fill yet. Is this what a relationship between equals

feels like? He’s not sure: Starting with the occlusive cocooning of

his upbringing and continuing through all his adult relationships,

he’s been effectively - voluntarily - dominated by his partners. Maybe

the antisubmissive conditioning is working, after all. But if so, why

the creative malaise? Why isn’t he coming up with original new ideas

this week? Could it be that his peculiar brand of creativity is an

outlet, that he needs the pressure of being lovingly enslaved to make

him burst out into a great flowering of imaginative brilliance? Or

could it be that he really is missing Pam?

 

Annette stands up and walks over, slowly. He looks at her and feels

lust and affection, and isn’t sure whether or not this is love. “When

are they due?” she asks, leaning over him.

 

“Any -” The doorbell chimes.

 

“Ah. I will get that.” She stalks away, opens the door.

 

“You!”

 

Manfred’s head snaps round as if he’s on a leash. Her leash: But he

wasn’t expecting her to come in person.

 

“Yes, me,” Annette says easily. “Come in. Be my guest.”

 

Pam enters the apartment living room with flashing eyes, her tame

lawyer in tow. “Well, look what the robot kitty dragged in,” she

drawls, fixing Manfred with an expression that owes more to anger than

to humor. It’s not like her, this blunt hostility, and he wonders

where it came from.

 

Manfred rises. For a moment he’s transfixed by the sight of his

dominatrix wife, and his - mistress? conspirator? lover? - side by

side. The contrast is marked: Annette’s expression of ironic amusement

a foil for Pamela’s angry sincerity. Somewhere behind them stands a

balding middle-aged man in a suit, carrying a folio: just the kind of

diligent serf Pam might have turned him into, given time. Manfred

musters up a smile. “Can I offer you some coffee?” he asks. “The party

of the third part seems to be late.”

 

“Coffee would be great, mine’s dark, no sugar,” twitters the lawyer.

He puts his briefcase down on a side table and fiddles with his

wearable until a light begins to blink from his spectacle frames: “I’m

recording this, I’m sure you understand.”

 

Annette sniffs and heads for the kitchen, which is charmingly manual

but not very efficient; Pam is pretending she doesn’t exist. “Well,

well, well.” She shakes her head. “I’d expected better of you than a

French tart’s boudoir, Manny. And before the ink’s dry on the divorce

- these days that’ll cost you, didn’t you think of that?”

 

“I’m surprised you’re not in the hospital,” he says, changing the

subject. “Is postnatal recovery outsourced these days?”

 

“The employers.” She slips her coat off her shoulders and hangs it

behind the broad wooden door. “They subsidize everything when you

reach my grade.” Pamela is wearing a very short, very expensive dress,

the kind of weapon in the war between the sexes that ought to come

with an end-user certificate: But to his surprise it has no effect on

him. He realizes that he’s completely unable to evaluate her gender,

almost as if she’s become a member of another species. “As you’d be

aware if you’d been paying attention.”

 

“I always pay attention, Pam. It’s the only currency I carry.”

 

“Very droll, ha-ha,” interrupts Glashwiecz. “You do realize that

you’re paying me while I stand here listening to this fascinating

byplay?”

 

Manfred stares at him. “You know I don’t have any money.”

 

“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 network into a firewall to protect freed intellectual

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.