Accelerando (5 page)

“I followed your weblog—I'm your diary's biggest fan. Is that for me? You shouldn't have!” Her eyes light up, recalculating his reproductive
fitness score according to some kind of arcane fin-de-siècle rulebook. Or maybe she's just pleased to see him.

“Yes, it's for you.” He slides the package toward her. “I know I shouldn't, but you have this effect on me. One question, Pam?”

“I—” She glances around quickly. “It's safe. I'm off duty. I'm not carrying any bugs that I know of. Those badges—there are rumors about the off switch, you know? That they keep recording even when you think they aren't, just in case.”

“I didn't know,” he says, filing it away for future reference. “A loyalty test thing?”

“Just rumors. You had a question?”

“I—” It's his turn to lose his tongue. “Are you still interested in me?”

She looks startled for a moment, then chuckles. “Manny, you are the most
outrageous
nerd I've ever met! Just when I think I've convinced myself that you're mad, you show the weirdest signs of having your head screwed on.” She reaches out and grabs his wrist, surprising him with a shock of skin on skin. “Of
course
I'm still interested in you. You're the biggest, baddest bull geek I know. Why do you think I'm here?”

“Does this mean you want to reactivate our engagement?”

“It was never deactivated, Manny. It was just sort of on hold while you got your head sorted out. I figured you needed the space. Only you haven't stopped running; you're still not—”

“Yeah, I get it.” He pulls away from her hand. “And the kittens?”

She looks perplexed. “What kittens?”

“Let's not talk about that. Why this bar?”

She frowns. “I had to find you as soon as possible. I keep hearing rumors about some KGB plot you're mixed up in, how you're some sort of communist spy. It isn't true, is it?”

“True?” He shakes his head, bemused. “The KGB hasn't existed for more than twenty years.”

“Be careful, Manny. I don't want to lose you. That's an order. Please.”

The floor creaks, and he looks round. Dreadlocks and dark glasses with flickering lights behind them—Bob Franklin. Manfred vaguely remembers with a twinge that he left with Miss Arianespace leaning on his arm, shortly before things got seriously inebriated. She was hot, but in a different direction from Pamela, he decides. Bob looks none the
worse for wear. Manfred makes introductions. “Bob, meet Pam, my fiancée. Pam? Meet Bob.” Bob puts a full glass down in front of him; he has no idea what's in it, but it would be rude not to drink.

“Sure thing. Uh, Manfred, can I have a word? About your idea last night?”

“Feel free. Present company is trustworthy.”

Bob raises an eyebrow at that, but continues anyway. “It's about the fab concept. I've got a team of my guys doing some prototyping using FabLab hardware, and I think we can probably build it. The cargo-cult aspect puts a new spin on the old Lunar von Neumann factory idea, but Bingo and Marek say they think it should work until we can bootstrap all the way to a native nanolithography ecology; we run the whole thing from Earth as a training lab and ship up the parts that are too difficult to make on-site as we learn how to do it properly. We use FPGAs for all critical electronics and keep it parsimonious—you're right about it buying us the self-replicating factory a few years ahead of the robotics curve. But I'm wondering about on-site intelligence. Once the comet gets more than a couple of light minutes away—”

“You can't control it. Feedback lag. So you want a crew, right?”

“Yeah. But we can't send humans—way too expensive. Besides, it's a fifty-year run even if we build the factory on a chunk of short-period Kuiper belt ejecta. And I don't think we're up to coding the kind of AI that could control such a factory any time this decade. So what do you have in mind?”

“Let me think.” Pamela glares at Manfred for a while before he notices her. “Yeah?”

“What's going on? What's this all about?”

Franklin shrugs expansively, dreadlocks clattering. “Manfred's helping me explore the solution space to a manufacturing problem.” He grins. “I didn't know Manny had a fiancée. Drink's on me.”

She glances at Manfred, who is gazing into whatever weirdly colored space his metacortex is projecting on his glasses, fingers twitching. Coolly: “Our engagement was on hold while he
thought
about his future.”

“Oh, right. We didn't bother with that sort of thing in my day; like, too formal, man.” Franklin looks uncomfortable. “He's been very helpful. Pointed us at a whole new line of research we hadn't thought of. It's
long-term and a bit speculative, but if it works, it'll put us a whole generation ahead in the off-planet infrastructure field.”

“Will it help reduce the budget deficit, though?”

“Reduce the—”

Manfred stretches and yawns: The visionary is returning from planet Macx. “Bob, if I can solve your crew problem, can you book me a slot on the deep-space tracking network? Like, enough to transmit a couple of gigabytes? That's going to take some serious bandwidth, I know, but if you can do it, I think I can get you exactly the kind of crew you're looking for.”

Franklin looks dubious. “
Gigabytes?
The DSN isn't built for that! You're talking days. And what do you mean about a crew? What kind of deal do you think I'm putting together? We can't afford to add a whole new tracking network or life-support system just to run—”

“Relax.” Pamela glances at Manfred. “Manny, why don't you tell him why you want the bandwidth? Maybe then he could tell you if it's possible, or if there's some other way to do it.” She smiles at Franklin. “I've found that he usually makes more sense if you can get him to explain his reasoning. Usually.”

“If I—” Manfred stops. “Okay, Pam. Bob, it's those KGB lobsters. They want somewhere to go that's insulated from human space. I figure I can get them to sign on as crew for your cargo-cult self-replicating factories, but they'll want an insurance policy: hence the deep-space tracking network. I figured we could beam a copy of them at the alien Matrioshka brains around M31—”

“KGB?” Pam's voice is rising. “You said you weren't mixed up in spy stuff!”

“Relax, it's just the Moscow Windows NT user group, not the FSB. The uploaded crusties hacked in and—”

Bob is watching him oddly. “Lobsters?”

“Yeah.” Manfred stares right back. “
Panulirus interruptus
uploads. Something tells me you might have heard of it?”

“Moscow.” Bob leans back against the wall. “How did you hear about it?”

“They phoned me.” With heavy irony: “It's hard for an upload to stay subsentient these days, even if it's just a crustacean. Your labs have a lot to answer for.”

Pamela's face is unreadable. “Bezier labs?”

“They escaped.” Manfred shrugs. “It's not their fault. This Bezier dude. Is he by any chance ill?”

“I—” Pamela stops. “I shouldn't be talking about work.”

“You're not wearing your chaperone now,” he nudges quietly.

She inclines her head. “Yes, he's ill. Some sort of brain tumor they can't hack.”

Franklin nods. “That's the trouble with cancer—the ones that are left to worry about are the rare ones. No cure.”

“Well, then.” Manfred chugs the remains of his glass of beer. “That explains his interest in uploading. Judging by the crusties, he's on the right track. I wonder if he's moved on to vertebrates yet?”

“Cats,” says Pamela. “He was hoping to trade their uploads to the Pentagon as a new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of income tax payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something before feeding it to their sensorium. The old kitten and laser pointer trick.”

Manfred stares at her, hard. “That's not very nice. Uploaded cats are a
bad
idea.”

“Thirty-million-dollar tax bills aren't nice either, Manfred. That's lifetime nursing-home care for a hundred blameless pensioners.”

Franklin leans back, sourly amused, keeping out of the crossfire.

“The lobsters are sentient,” Manfred persists. “What about those poor kittens? Don't they deserve minimal rights? How about you? How would you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer's target of the hour is your heart's desire? How would you like to wake up a thousand times, only to die again? Worse: The kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They're too fucking dangerous—they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they'll be too dangerous to have around. They're prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they're under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?”

“But they're only uploads.” Pamela stares at him. “Software, right? You could reinstantiate them on another hardware platform, like, say, your Aineko. So the argument about killing them doesn't really apply, does it?”

“So? We're going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. I think we need to take a rain check on the utilitarian philosophy before it bites us on the cerebral cortex. Lobsters, kittens, humans—it's a slippery slope.”

Franklin clears his throat. “I'll be needing an NDA and various due-diligence statements off you for the crusty pilot idea,” he says to Manfred. “Then I'll have to approach Jim about buying the IP.”

“No can do.” Manfred leans back and smiles lazily. “I'm not going to be a party to depriving them of their civil rights. Far as I'm concerned, they're free citizens. Oh, and I patented the whole idea of using lobster-derived AI autopilots for spacecraft this morning—it's logged all over the place, all rights assigned to the FIF. Either you give them a contract of employment, or the whole thing's off.”

“But they're just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God's sake! I'm not even sure they
are
sentient—I mean, they're, what, a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a syntax engine and a crappy knowledge base? What kind of basis for intelligence is
that
?”

Manfred's finger jabs out. “That's what they'll say about
you,
Bob. Do it. Do it or don't even
think
about uploading out of meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won't be worth living. The precedent you set here determines how things are done tomorrow. Oh, and feel free to use this argument on Jim Bezier. He'll get the point eventually, after you beat him over the head with it. Some kinds of intellectual land grab just shouldn't be allowed.”

“Lobsters—” Franklin shakes his head. “Lobsters, cats. You're serious, aren't you? You think they should be treated as human-equivalent?”

“It's not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that if they
aren't
treated as people, it's quite possible that other uploaded beings won't be treated as people either. You're setting a legal precedent, Bob. I know of six other companies doing uploading work right now, and not one of 'em's thinking about the legal status of the uploaded. If you don't start thinking about it now, where are you going to be in three to five years' time?”

Pam is looking back and forth between Franklin and Manfred like a bot stuck in a loop, unable to quite grasp what she's seeing. “How much is this worth?” she asks plaintively.

“Oh, quite a few million, I guess.” Bob stares at his empty glass.
“Okay. I'll talk to them. If they bite, you're dining out on me for the next century. You really think they'll be able to run the mining complex?”

“They're pretty resourceful for invertebrates.” Manfred grins innocently, enthusiastically. “They may be prisoners of their evolutionary background, but they can still adapt to a new environment. And just think, you'll be winning civil rights for a whole new minority group—one that won't be a minority for much longer!”