"Charles Stross - Accelerando" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

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PART 1: Slow take-off
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a
submarine can swim."
тАФ Edsger W. Dijkstra




Chapter 1: Lobsters




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 the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes;
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.
***



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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 liter of lip-curlingly sour gueuze. 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 тАФ maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to
Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar тАФ 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