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

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“I think we ought to see how Pierre is doing,” Amber says aloud. “I

certainly don’t want them poisoning him.” Grin: “That’s my job.”

 

*

 

Donna the Journalist is everywhere simultaneously. It’s a handy

talent: Makes for even-handed news coverage when you can interview

both sides at the same time.

 

Right now, one of her is in the bar with Alan Glashwiecz, who

evidently hasn’t realized that he can modulate his ethanol

dehydrogenase levels voluntarily and who is consequently well on the

way to getting steaming drunk. Donna is assisting the process: She

finds it fascinating to watch this bitter young man who has lost his

youth to a runaway self-enhancement process.

 

“I’m a full partner,” he says bitterly, “in Glashwiecz and Selves. I’m

one of the Selves. We’re all partners, but it’s only Glashwiecz Prime

who has any clout. The old bastard - if I’d known I’d grow up to

become that, I’d have run away to join some hippie antiglobalist

commune instead.” He drains his glass, demonstrating his oropharyngeal

integrity, snaps his fingers for a refill. “I just woke up one morning

to find I’d been resurrected by my older self. He said he valued my

youthful energy and optimistic outlook, then offered me a minority

stake with stock options that would take five years to vest. The

bastard.”

 

“Tell me about it,” Donna coaxes sympathetically. “Here we are,

stranded among idiopathic types, not among them a single multiplex -”

 

“Damn straight.” Another bottle of Bud appears in Glashwiecz’a hands.

“One moment I’m standing in this apartment in Paris facing total

humiliation by a cross-dressing commie asshole called Macx and his

slimy French manager bitch, and the next I’m on the carpet in front of

my alter ego’s desk and he’s offering me a job as junior partner. It’s

seventeen years later, all the weird nonsense that guy Macx was

getting up to is standard business practice, and there’s six of me in

the outer office taking research notes because

myself-as-senior-partner doesn’t trust anyone else to work with him.

It’s humiliating, that’s what it is.”

 

“Which is why you’re here.” Donna waits while he takes a deep swig

from the bottle.

 

“Yeah. Better than working for myself, I can tell you - it’s not like

being self-employed. You know how you sometimes get distant from your

work? It’s really bad when you see yourself from the outside with

another half gigasecond of experience and the new-you isn’t just

distant from the client base, he’s distant from the you-you. So I went

back to college and crammed up on artificial intelligence law and

ethics, the jurisprudence of uploading, and recursive tort. Then I

volunteered to come out here. He’s still handling her account, and I

figured -” Glashwiecz shrugged.

 

“Did any of the delta-yous contest the arrangement?” asks Donna,

spawning ghosts to focus in on him from all angles. For a moment, she

wonders if this is wise. Glashwiecz is dangerous - the power he wields

over Amber’s mother, to twist her arm into extending his power of

attorney, hints at dark secrets. Maybe there’s more to her persistent

lawsuits than a simple family feud?

 

Glashwiecz’s face is a study in perspectives. “Oh, one did,” he says

dismissively: One of Donna’s viewports captures the contemptuous

twitch in his cheek. “I left her in my apartment freezer. Figured it’d

be a while before anybody noticed. It’s not murder - I’m still here,

right? - and I’m not about to claim tort against myself. I think. It’d

be a left-recursive lawsuit, anyway, if I did it to myself.”

 

“The aliens,” prompts Donna, “and the trial by combat. What’s your

take on that?”

 

Glashwiecz sneers. “Little bitch-queen takes after her father, doesn’t

she? He’s a bastard, too. The competitive selection filter she’s

imposed is evil - it’ll cripple her society if she leaves it in place

for too long, but in the short run, it’s a major advantage. So she

wants me to trade for my life, and I don’t get to lay my formal claim

against her unless I can outperform her pet day trader, that punk from

Marseilles. Yes? What he doesn’t know is, I’ve got an edge. Full

disclosure.” He lifts his bottle drunkenly. “Y’see, I know that cat.

One that’s gotta brown @-sign on its side, right? It used to belong to

queenie-darling’s old man, Manfred, the bastard. You’ll see. Her Mom,

Pamela, Manfred’s ex, she’s my client in this case. And she gave me

the cat’s ackle keys. Access control.” (Hic.) “Get ahold of its brains

and grab that damn translation layer it stole from the CETI@home mob.

Then I can talk to them straight.”

 

The drunken, future-shocked lawyer is on a roll. “I’ll get their shit,

and I’ll disassemble it. Disassembly is the future of industry,

y’know?”

 

“Disassembly?” asks the reporter, watching him in disgusted

fascination from behind her mask of objectivity.

 

“Hell, yeah. There’s a singularity going on, that implies

disequilibrium. An’ wherever there’s a disequilibrium, someone is

going to get rich disassembling the leftovers. Listen, I once knew

this econo-economist, that’s what he was. Worked for the Eurofeds,

rubber fetishist. He tole me about this fact’ry near Barcelona. It had

a disassembly line running in it. Spensive servers in boxes’d roll in

at one end. Be unpacked. Then workers’d take the cases off, strip the

disk drives, memory, processors, bits’n’guts out. Bag and tag job.

Throw the box, what’s left, ‘cause it wasn’t worth dick. Thing is, the

manufact’rer charged so much for parts, it was worth their while to

buy whole machines’n’strip them. To bits. And sell the bits. Hell,

they got an enterprise award for ingenuity! All ‘cause they knew that

disassembly was the wave of the future.”

 

“What happened to the factory?” asks Donna, unable to tear her eyes

away.

 

Glashwiecz waves an empty bottle at the starbow that stretches across

the ceiling: “Ah, who gives a fuck? They closedown round about” (hic)

“ten years ‘go. Moore’s Law topped out, killed the market. But

disassembly - production line cannibalism - it’sa way to go. Take old

assets an’ bring new life to them. A fully ‘preciated fortune.” He

grins, eyes unfocussed with greed. “‘S’what I’m gonna do to those

space lobsters. Learn to talk their language an’ll never know what hit

‘em.”

 

*

 

The tiny starship drifts in high orbit above a turbid brown soup of

atmosphere. Deep in the gravity well of Hyundai +4904/[-56], it’s a

speck of dust trapped between two light sources: the brilliant

sapphire stare of Amber’s propulsion lasers in Jovian orbit, and the

emerald insanity of the router itself, a hypertoroid spun from strange

matter.

 

The bridge of the Field Circus is in constant use at this time, a

meeting ground for minds with access to the restricted areas. Pierre

is spending more and more time here, finding it a convenient place to

focus his trading campaign and arbitrage macros. At the same time that

Donna is picking the multiplexed lawyer’s strategy apart, Pierre is

present in neomorphic form - a quicksilver outline of humanity,

six-armed and two-headed, scanning with inhuman speed through tensor

maps of the information traffic density surrounding the router’s clump

of naked singularities.

 

There’s a flicker in the emptiness at the rear of the bridge, then Su

Ang has always been there. She watches Pierre in contemplative silence

for a minute. “Do you have a moment?”

 

Pierre superimposes himself: One shadowy ghost keeps focused on the

front panel, but another instance turns round, crosses his arms, waits

for her to speak.

 

“I know you’re busy -” she begins, then stops. “Is it that important?”

she asks.

 

“It is.” Pierre blurs, resynchronizing his instances. “The router -

there are four wormholes leading off from it, did you know that? Each

of them is radiating at about 1011 Kelvins, and every wavelength is

carrying data connections, multiplexed, with a protocol stack that’s

at least eleven layers deep but maybe more - they show signs of

self-similarity in the framing headers. You know how much data that

is? It’s about 1012 times as much as our high-bandwidth uplink from

home. But compared to what’s on the other side of the ‘holes -” he

shakes his head.

 

“It’s big?”

 

“It’s unimaginably big! These wormholes, they’re a low-bandwidth link

compared to the minds they’re hooking up to.” He blurs in front of

her, unable to stay still and unable to look away from the front

panel. Excitement or agitation? Su Ang can’t tell. With Pierre,

sometimes the two states are indistinguishable. He gets emotional

easily. “I think we have the outline of the answer to the Fermi

paradox. Transcendents don’t go traveling because they can’t get

enough bandwidth - trying to migrate through one of these wormholes

would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly, if they

are what I think they are - and the slower-than-light route is out,

too, because they couldn’t take enough computronium along. Unless -”

 

He’s off again. But before he can blur out, Su Ang steps across and

lays hands on him. “Pierre. Calm down. Disengage. Empty yourself.”

 

“I can’t!” He really is agitated, she sees. “I’ve got to figure out

the best trading strategy to get Amber off the hook with that lawsuit,

then tell her to get us out of here; being this close to the router is

seriously dangerous! The Wunch are the least of it.”

 

“Stop.”

 

He pauses his multiplicity of presences, converges on a single

identity focused on the here and now. “Yes?”

 

“That’s better.” She walks round him, slowly. “You’ve got to learn to

deal with stress more appropriately.”

 

“Stress!” Pierre snorts. He shrugs, an impressive gesture with three

sets of shoulder blades. “That’s something I can turn off whenever I

need to. Side effect of this existence; we’re pigs in cyberspace,

wallowing in fleshy simulations, but unable to experience the new

environment in the raw. What did you want from me, Ang? Honestly? I’m

a busy man, I’ve got a trading network to set up.”

 

“We’ve got a problem with the Wunch right now, even if you think

something worse is out there,” Ang says patiently. “Boris thinks

they’re parasites, negative-sum gamers who stalk newbies like us.

Glashwiecz is apparently talking about cutting a deal with them.

Amber’s suggestion is that you ignore them completely, cut them out,

and talk to anyone else who’ll listen.”

 

“Anyone else who’ll listen, right,” Pierre says heavily. “Any other

gems of wisdom to pass on from the throne?”

 

Ang takes a deep breath. He’s infuriating, she realizes. And worst of

all, he doesn’t realize. Infuriating but cute. “You’re setting up a

trading network, yes?” she asks.

 

“Yes. A standard network of independent companies, instantiated as

cellular automata within the Ring Imperium switched legal service

environment.” He relaxes slightly. “Each one has access to a

compartmentalized chunk of intellectual property and can call on the

corrected parser we got from that cat. They’re set up to communicate

with a blackboard system - a souk - and I’m bringing up a link to the

router, a multicast link that’ll broadcast the souk’s existence to

anyone who’s listening. Trade …” his eyebrows furrow. “There are at

least two different currency standards in this network, used to buy

quality-of-service precedence and bandwidth. They depreciate with

distance, as if the whole concept of money was invented to promote the

development of long-range network links. If I can get in first, when

Glashwiecz tries to cut in on the dealing by offering IP at discounted

rates -”

 

“He’s not going to, Pierre,” she says as gently as possible. “Listen

to what I said: Glashwiecz is going to focus on the Wunch. He’s going

to offer them