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

party where he's going to meet a man 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 paean
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's. 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 тАУ 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 on-line
translation services. "Manfred. Am please to meet you. Wish to personalize interface, make friends, no? Have much
to offer."
"Who are you?" Manfred repeats suspiciously.
"Am organization 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, tenuous as the sanity of the being on the other end of the line.
"Nyet тАФ no, sorry. Am apologize 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. "Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?"
"Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at
maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints




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steganographically masked into my-our tutorials."
Manfred pauses in mid stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller blader. This is
getting weird enough to trip his weird-out meter, and that takes some doing. Manfred's whole life is lived on the
bleeding edge of strangeness, fifteen minutes into everyone else's future, and he's normally in complete control тАФ
but at times like this he gets a frisson of fear, a sense that he might just have missed the correct turn on reality's
approach road. "Uh, I'm not sure I got that. Let me get this straight, you claim to be some kind of AI, working for
KGB dot RU, and you're afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?"
"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."