Accelerando by Charles Stross (books to read in a lifetime .txt) 📖

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