Accelerando (12 page)

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-à-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 bulletproof. 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.

S
PRING
-
H
EELED
J
ACK RUNS BLIND
,
BLUE FUMES
crackling from his heels. His right hand, outstretched for balance, clutches a mark's stolen memories. The victim is sitting on the hard stones of the pavement behind him. Maybe he's wondering what's happened; maybe he looks after the fleeing youth. But the tourist crowds block the view effectively, and in any case, he has no hope of catching the mugger. Hit-and-run amnesia is what the polis call it, but to Spring-Heeled Jack it's just more loot to buy fuel for his Russian army-surplus motorized combat boots.

The victim sits on the cobblestones clutching his aching temples.
What happened?
he wonders. The universe is a brightly colored blur of fast-moving shapes augmented by deafening noises. His ear-mounted cameras are rebooting repeatedly: They panic every eight hundred milliseconds, whenever they realize that they're alone on his personal area network without the comforting support of a hub to tell them where to send his incoming sensory feed. Two of his mobile phones are
bickering moronically, disputing ownership of his grid bandwidth, and his memory . . . is missing.

A tall blond clutching an electric chainsaw sheathed in pink bubble wrap leans over him curiously. “You all right?” she asks.

“I—” He shakes his head, which hurts. “Who am I?” His medical monitor is alarmed because his blood pressure has fallen: His pulse is racing, his serum cortisol titer is up, and a host of other biometrics suggest that he's going into shock.

“I think you need an ambulance,” the woman announces. She mutters at her lapel, “Phone, call an ambulance.” She waves a finger vaguely at him as if to reify a geolink, then wanders off, chainsaw clutched under one arm. Typical southern émigré behavior in the Athens of the North, too embarrassed to get involved. The man shakes his head again, eyes closed, as a flock of girls on powered blades skid around him in elaborate loops. A siren begins to warble, over the bridge to the north.

Who am I?
he wonders. “I'm Manfred,” he says with a sense of stunned wonder. He looks up at the bronze statue of a man on a horse that looms above the crowds on this busy street corner. Someone has plastered a Hello Cthulhu! holo on the plaque that names its rider: Languid fluffy pink tentacles wave at him in an attack of
kawaii
. “I'm Manfred—Manfred. My memory. What's happened to my memory?” Elderly Malaysian tourists point at him from the open top deck of a passing bus. He burns with a sense of horrified urgency.
I was going somewhere,
he recalls.
What was I doing?
It was amazingly important, he thinks, but he can't remember what exactly it was. He was going to see someone about—it's on the tip of his tongue—

Welcome to the eve of the third decade: a time of chaos characterized by an all-out depression in the space industries.

Most of the thinking power on the planet is now manufactured rather than born; there are ten microprocessors for every human being, and the number is doubling every fourteen months. Population growth in the developing world has stalled, the birth rate dropping below replacement level. In the wired nations, more forward-looking politicians are looking for ways to enfranchise their nascent AI base.

Space exploration is still stalled on the cusp of the second recession of the century. The Malaysian government has announced the goal of placing an imam on Mars within ten years, but nobody else cares enough to try.

The Space Settlers Society is still trying to interest Disney Corp. in the media rights to their latest L5 colony plan, unaware that there's already a colony out there and it isn't human: First-generation uploads, Californian spiny lobsters in wobbly symbiosis with elderly expert systems, thrive aboard an asteroid mining project established by the Franklin Trust. Meanwhile, Chinese space agency cutbacks are threatening the continued existence of Moonbase Mao. Nobody, it seems, has figured out how to turn a profit out beyond geosynchronous orbit.

Two years ago, JPL, the ESA, and the uploaded lobster colony on comet Khrunichev-7 picked up an apparently artificial signal from outside the solar system; most people don't know, and of those who do, even fewer care. After all, if humans can't even make it to Mars, who cares what's going on a hundred trillion kilometers farther out?

Portrait of a wasted youth:

Jack is seventeen years and eleven months old. He has never met his father; he was unplanned, and Dad managed to kill himself in a building-site accident before the Child Support could garnish his income for the upbringing. His mother raised him in a two-bedroom housing association flat in Hawick. She worked in a call center when he was young, but business dried up: Humans aren't needed on the end of a phone anymore. Now she works in a drop-in business shop, stacking shelves for virtual fly-by-nights that come and go like tourists in the Festival season—but humans aren't in demand for shelf stacking either, these days.

His mother sent Jack to a local religious school, where he was regularly excluded and effectively ran wild from the age of twelve. By thirteen, he was wearing a parole cuff for shoplifting; by fourteen, he'd broken his collarbone in a car crash while joyriding and the dour Presbyterian sheriff sent him to the Wee Frees, who completed the destruction of his educational prospects with high principles and an illicit tawse.

Today, he's a graduate of the hard school of avoiding public surveillance cameras, with distinctions in steganographic alibi construction. Mostly this entails high-density crime—if you're going to mug someone, do so where there are so many bystanders that they can't pin the blame on you. But the polis expert systems are on his tail. If he keeps it up at this rate, in another four months they'll have a positive statistical correlation that will convince even a jury of his peers that he's guilty as fuck—and then he'll go down to Saughton for four years.

But Jack doesn't understand the meaning of a Gaussian distribution or the significance of a chi-square test, and the future still looks bright to him as he pulls on the chunky spectacles he ripped off the tourist gawking at the statue on North Bridge. And after a moment, when they begin whispering into his ears in stereo and showing him pictures of the tourist's vision, it looks even brighter.

“Gotta make a deal, gotta close a deal,” whisper the glasses. “Meet the borg, strike a chord.” Weird graphs in lurid colors are filling up his peripheral vision, like the hallucinations of a drugged marketroid.

“Who the fuck are ye?” asks Jack, intrigued by the bright lights and icons.

“I am your Cartesian theatre and you are our focus,” murmur the glasses. “Dow Jones down fifteen points, Federated Confidence up three, incoming briefing on causal decoupling of social control of skirt hem lengths, shaving pattern of beards, and emergence of multidrug antibiotic resistance in gram-negative bacilli: Accept?”

“Ah can take it,” Jack mumbles, as a torrent of images crashes down on his eyeballs and jackhammers its way in through his ears like the superego of a disembodied giant. Which is actually what he's stolen: The glasses and waist pouch he grabbed from the tourist are stuffed with enough hardware to run the entire Internet, circa the turn of the millennium. They've got bandwidth coming out the wazoo, distributed engines running a bazillion inscrutable search tasks, and a whole slew of high-level agents that collectively form a large chunk of the society of mind that is their owner's personality. Their owner is a posthuman genius loci of the net, an agalmic entrepreneur turned policy wonk, specializing in the politics of AI emancipation. When he was in the biz he was the kind of guy who catalyzed value wherever he went, leaving money trees growing in his footprints. Now he's the kind of political
backroom hitter who builds coalitions where nobody else could see common ground. And Jack has stolen his memories. There are micro-cams built into the frame of the glasses, pickups in the earpieces; everything is spooled into the holographic cache in the belt pack, before being distributed for remote storage. At four months per terabyte, memory storage is cheap. What makes this bunch so unusual is that their owner—Manfred—has cross-indexed them with his agents. Mind uploading may not be a practical technology yet, but Manfred has made an end run on it already.

In a very real sense, the glasses
are
Manfred, regardless of the identity of the soft machine with its eyeballs behind the lenses. And it is a very puzzled Manfred who picks himself up and, with a curious vacancy in his head—except for a hesitant request for information about accessories for Russian army boots—dusts himself off and heads for his meeting on the other side of town.

Meanwhile, in another meeting, Manfred's absence is already being noticed. “Something, something is
wrong,
” says Annette. She raises her mirrorshades and rubs her left eye, visibly worried. “Why is he not answering his chat? He knows we are due to hold this call with him. Don't you think it is odd?”

Gianni nods and leans back, regarding her from behind his desk. He prods at the highly polished rosewood desktop. The wood grain slips, sliding into a strangely different conformation, generating random dot stereoisograms—messages for his eyes only. “He was visiting Scotland for me,” he says after a moment. “I do not know his exact whereabouts—the privacy safeguards—but if you, as his designated next of kin, travel in person, I am sure you will find it easier. He was going to talk to the Franklin Collective, face-to-face, one to many . . .”

The office translator is good, but it can't provide real-time lip-synch morphing between French and Italian. Annette has to make an effort to listen to his words because the shape of his mouth is all wrong, like a badly dubbed video. Her expensive, recent implants aren't connected up to her Broca's area yet, so she can't simply sideload a deep grammar module for Italian. Their communications are the best that money can buy, their VR environment painstakingly sculpted, but it still doesn't
break down the language barrier completely. Besides, there are distractions: the way the desk switches from black ash to rosewood halfway across its expanse, the strange air currents that are all wrong for a room this size. “Then what could be up with him? His voicemail is trying to cover for him. It is good, but it does not lie convincingly.”