Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (641 page)

First published in
Starline
, 2003

Even as Napoleon, Hitler, and Philip the Second

marched triumphantly into London,

as Caesar escaped assassination

and conquered the whole East,

and Grant died of tetanus

after stepping on a nail at Vicksburg,

while time-travelers gave Frederick Barbarossa

an AK-47 and a life-jacket,

the stranger who might have been my friend,

whose colored coat I could not see clearly

in the mud and darkness,

lay beside me in a little hollow of ground,

coughing up blood, babbling of green fields,

and calling out some woman’s name.

The light on the horizon

might have been a burning city,

or the sunrise, which for him,

at least, never came.

First published in
Starline
, November 2005

When we were master and mistress of the world,

when our airships soared like apocalyptic visions

above the helpless navies,

we could have erased whole cities,

even continents, at the touch of a lever,

with our bombs, gas, and radium rays,

forcing mankind to yield to our demands.

But, lacking any messianic agenda,

or the desire to slaughter anonymous strangers,

we merely voyaged on, admiring

the Alps and Himalayas gleaming like icy teeth,

and the brilliant moonlight on the clouds below.

I steered the great vessel; you held my hand steady,

while kings and kaisers trembled

at the thunder of our engines.

In the end, we dismissed all our minions

on good pensions, detonated the secret island base,

and in our old age, sat side by side

on cold winter’s nights,

feeding plans and blueprints into the fire,

reminiscing about the times we had,

very much aware of what might happen

if such knowledge ever fell

into irresponsible hands.

First published in
Dreams & Nightmares
, 2003

Of course we won.

Earth’s clever scientists

deftly disassembled your fiendish devices,

built shields against your rays,

rays against your clanking machines,

then knocked your moon-sized dreadnoughts

out of the sky, blowing them

to smithereens and crackling sparks.

In the end, our grim-jawed,

space-armored heroes trampled

the dust of your home world

into, well, more dust,

shouting as they did, “Die, alien scum!

Free Men” — a term which includes women —

“are coming to kill you!”

It’s a shame

that we couldn’t have shared

what eons of alternate evolution

crammed into your bulging brains

before we reduced them to jelly.

The perspectives would have been staggering,

to say nothing of the beauty of your ancient art,

the scroll books illuminated

when our ancestors were still in trees

now delicate as ash, and indecipherable.

Your million lost Shakespeares

could have been saved

if only you hadn’t tried

to abduct our women

(a term which includes only women),

steal our water and air,

plow our cities under to plant your garden,

and turn us into zombie-slaves

with mind-controlling slugs on our backs.

It was your fault, you know.

So now we can only

write “KILROY WAS HERE”

on your enigmatic ruins,

put up our billboards and hotdog stands,

express romantic longings and crackpot theories,

compose sad little poems,

and forget.

* * * *

“Alternate Histories” Copyright © 2003 by Darrell Schweitzer.

“Scientific Romance” Copyright © 2003 by Darrell Schweitzer.

“At the Conclusion of an Interstellar War” Copyright © 2003 by Darrell Schweitzer.

(1964- )

Something that I think only happens in the SF community: I keep forgetting the Charlie Stross and I have never met face to face. It’s not just that we have friends in common—SF publishing is incestuous enough that pretty much every professional with better social skills than Emily Dickinson has friends in common—it’s that one of my closest friends has also been very close to Charlie for years, and the stories she tells about events and adventures where he was there and the ones about events where I was there have blurred a bit in the many retellings to the point where I think we all sometimes forget which was which. And then I remember that Charlie lives on another continent, so we’re not actually in the same room all that much. Phantom or not, however, he’s a scarily good writer.

Born in Leeds, England, Charlie wanted to write genre fiction from a young age, but also felt it was pretty unlikely he could make a living wage at it. While he had a few gaming articles published in
White Dwarf
magazine, he didn’t sell his first SF story until the short story “The Boys” (1987) appeared in
Interzone
. Instead he became a pharmacist, then a few years later earned a degree in computer science. He published short stories and articles about computer science sporadically while working as a programmer and technical writer. He also wrote nonfiction, in addition to fiction. When the dot com bubble burst, the company he was programming for went under. With his only steady income a monthly column about Linux he was writing, a full-time career writing suddenly seemed a lot more practical than it had before the bubble burst.

Charlie’s first U.S. sale was “Lobsters” in 2001. It was nominated for the Hugo. His first novel,
Singularity Sky
, was published in 2003 and was also nominated for the Hugo. These days he writes fiction full-time, varying from hard SF to alternate history to and Lovecraftian thrillers. He won Hugos in 2005 and 2010, and a Sideways Award in 2007 for
The Family Trade, The Hidden Family, and The Clan Corporate
.

He lives in Scotland with his wife, Feòrag NicBhride.

First published in
Asimov’s Science Fiction
, June 2001

Manfred’s on the road again, making strangers rich.

It’s a hot summer Tuesday and he’s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops it and squirts at his website to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realises; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: he’s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.

He wonders who it’s going to be.

* * * *

Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij ‘t IJ, watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a litre of lip-curlingly sour geuze. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. A couple of punks—maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar—are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. A tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge windmill overhead cast long cool shadows across the road. The windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is waiting for an invite to a party where he’s going to meet a man who he can talk to about trading energy for space, twenty-first century style, and forget about his personal problems.

He’s ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low bandwidth high sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when a woman walks up to him and says his name: “Manfred Macx?”

He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned smooth-running muscles clad in a paen to polymer technology: electric blue lycra and wasp-yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti-collision LEDs and tight-packed air bags. She holds out a box for him. He pauses a moment, struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam, his ex-fiance.

“I’m Macx,” he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her bar-code reader. “Who’s it from?”

“FedEx.” The voice isn’t Pam. She dumps the box in his lap, then she’s back over the low wall and onto her bicycle with her phone already chirping, disappearing in a cloud of spread-spectrum emissions.

Manfred turns the box over in his hands: it’s a disposable supermarket phone, paid for in cash: cheap, untraceable and efficient. It can even do conference calls, which makes it the tool of choice for spooks and grifters everywhere.

The box rings. Manfred rips the cover open and pulls out the phone, mildly annoyed. “Yes, who is this?”

The voice at the other end has a heavy Russian accent, almost a parody in this decade of cheap online translation services. “Manfred. Am please to meet you; wish to personalise interface, make friends, no? Have much to offer.”

“Who are you?” Manfred repeats suspiciously.

“Am organisation formerly known as KGB dot RU.”

“I think your translator’s broken.” He holds the phone to his ear carefully, as if it’s made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenous as the sanity of the being on the other end of the line.

“Nyet—no, sorry. Am apologise for we not use commercial translation software. Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have capitalist semiotics and pay-per-use APIs. Must implement English more better, yes?”

Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. “You taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?”

“Da, was easy: spawn billion-node neural network and download Tellytubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re the KGB’s core AI, but you’re afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?” Manfred pauses in mid-stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller-blader.

“Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect.”

Manfred stops dead in the street: “oh man, you’ve got the wrong free enterprise broker here. I don’t work for the government. I’m strictly private.” A rogue advertisement sneaks through his junkbuster proxy and spams glowing fifties kitsch across his navigation window—which is blinking—for a moment before a phage guns it and spawns a new filter. Manfred leans against a shop front, massaging his forehead and eyeballing a display of antique brass doorknockers. “Have you cleared this with the State Department?”

“Why bother? State Department am enemy of Novy-USSR. State Department is not help us.”

“Well, if you hadn’t given it to them for safe-keeping during the nineties…” Manfred is tapping his left heel on the pavement, looking round for a way out of this conversation. A camera winks at him from atop a street light; he waves, wondering idly if it’s the KGB or the traffic police. He is waiting for directions to the party, which should arrive within the next half an hour, and this cold war retread is bumming him out. “Look, I don’t deal with the G-men. I
hate
the military industrial complex. They’re zero-sum cannibals.” A thought occurs to him. “If survival is what you’re after, I could post your state vector to Eternity: then nobody could delete you—”

“Nyet!” The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as it’s possible to sound over a GSM link. “Am not open source!”

“We have nothing to talk about, then.” Manfred punches the hangup button and throws the mobile phone out into a canal. It hits the water and there’s a pop of deflagrating LiION cells. “Fucking cold war hang-over losers,” he swears under his breath, quite angry now. “
Fucking
capitalist spooks.” Russia has been back under the thumb of the apparatchiks for fifteen years now, its brief flirtation with anarcho-capitalism replaced by Brezhnevite dirigisme, and it’s no surprise that the wall’s crumbling—but it looks like they haven’t learned anything from the collapse of capitalism. They still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so angry that he wants to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at the would-be defector. See! You get ahead by giving! Get with the program! Only the generous survive! But the KGB won’t get the message. He’s dealt with old-time commie weak-AI’s before, minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian School economics: they’re so thoroughly hypnotised by the short-term victory of capitalism in the industrial age that they can’t surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term.

Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he’s going to patent next.

* * * *

Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employee’s travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush jacket has sixty four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines who he’s never met. Law firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy does he patent a lot—although he always signs the rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project.

In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he’s the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain—not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki maths borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpining of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he’s the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope.

Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.

There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock—he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current. The Internal Revenue Service are investigating him continuously because they don’t believe his lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And there exist items that no money can’t buy: like the respect of his parents. He hasn’t spoken to them for three years: his father thinks he’s a hippy scrounger and his mother still hasn’t forgiven him for dropping out of his down-market Harvard emulation course. His fiance and sometime dominatrix Pamela threw him over six months ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear on. (Ironically, she’s a headhunter for the IRS, jetting all over the globe trying to persuade open source entrepreneurs to come home and go commercial for the good of the Treasury department.) To cap it all, the Southern Baptist Conventions have denounced him as a minion of Satan on all their websites. Which would be funny, if it wasn’t for the dead kittens one of their followers—he presumes it’s one of their followers—keeps mailing him.

* * * *

Manfred drops in at his hotel suite, unpacks his aineko, plugs in a fresh set of cells to charge, and sticks most of his private keys in the safe. Then he heads straight for the party, which is currently happening at De Wildemann’s; it’s a twenty minute walk and the only real hazard is dodging the trams that sneak up on him behind the cover of his moving map display.

Along the way his glasses bring him up to date on the news. Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: they’re using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas. In San Diego, researchers are uploading lobsters into cyberspace, starting with the stomatogastric ganglion, one neuron at a time. They’re burning GM cocoa in Belize and books in Edinburgh. NASA still can’t put a man on the moon. Russia has re-elected the communist government with an increased majority in the Duma; meanwhile in China fevered rumours circulate about an imminent re-habilitation, the second coming of Mao, who will save them from the consequences of the Three Gorges disaster. In business news, the US government is outraged at the Baby Bills—who have automated their legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries, IPO’ing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that by the time the injunctions are signed the targets don’t exist any more.

Welcome to the twenty-first century.

The permanent floating meatspace party has taken over the back of De Wildemann’s, a three hundred year old brown cafe with a beer menu that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the colour of stale beer. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer’s yeast, and melatonin spray: half the dotters are nursing monster jetlag hangovers, and the other half are babbling a eurotrash creole at each other while they work on the hangover. “Man did you see that? He looks like a Stallmanite!” exclaims one whitebread hanger-on who’s currently propping up the bar. Manfred slides in next to him, catches the bartender’s eye.

“Glass of the berlinnerweise, please,” he says.

“You drink that stuff?” asks the hanger-on, curling a hand protectively around his coke: “man, you don’t want to do that! It’s full of alcohol!”

Manfred grins at him toothily. “Ya gotta keep your yeast intake up: lots of neurotransmitter precursors, phenylalanine and glutamate.”

“But I thought that was a beer you were ordering…”

Manfred’s away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels the more popular draught items in from the cask storage in back; one of the hipper floaters has planted a capacitative transfer bug on it, and all the handshake vCard’s that have visited the bar in the past three hours are queueing for attention. The air is full of bluetooth as he scrolls through a dizzying mess of public keys.

“Your drink.” The barman holds out an improbable looking goblet full of blue liquid with a cap of melting foam and a felching straw stuck out at some crazy angle. Manfred takes it and heads for the back of the split-level bar, up the steps to a table where some guy with greasy dreadlocks is talking to a suit from Paris. The hanger-on at the bar notices him for the first time, staring with suddenly wide eyes: nearly spills his coke in a mad rush for the door.

Oh shit, thinks Macx, better buy some more server PIPS. He can recognize the signs: he’s about to be slashdotted. He gestures at the table: “this one taken?”