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

Lobsters
Charles Stross

ManfredТs on the road again, making strangers rich.
ItТs a hot summer Tuesday and heТs 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 heТs arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and itТs not just the bandwidth, itТs the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though heТs fresh off the train from Schiphol: heТs 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 itТs going to be.

Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij Тt IJ, watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter 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 Ц maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar Ц 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 heТs 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.
HeТs 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-fiancщe.
"IТm Macx," he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her barcode reader. "WhoТs it from?"
"FedEx." The voice isnТt Pam. She dumps the box in his lap, then sheТs 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: itТs 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 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 translatorТs broken." He holds the phone to his ear carefully, as if itТs made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as the sanity of the being on the other end of the line.
"Nyet Ц 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. "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. YouТre the KGBТs core AI, but youТre 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, youТve got the wrong free enterprise broker here. I donТt work for the government. IТm strictly private." A rogue advertisement sneaks through his junkbuster proxy and spams glowing fifties kitsch across his navigation window Ц which is blinking Ц 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 hadnТt 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 itТs 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 donТt deal with the G-men. I hate the military industrial complex. TheyТre zero-sum cannibals." A thought occurs to him. "If survival is what youТre after, I could post your state vector to Eternity: then nobody could delete youЦ"
"Nyet!" The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as itТs possible to sound over a GSM link. "Am not open source!"
"We have nothing to talk about, then." Manfred punches the hang-up button and throws the mobile phone out into a canal. It hits the water and thereТs 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 itТs no surprise that the wallТs crumbling Ц but it looks like they havenТt 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 wonТt get the message. HeТs dealt with old-time commie weak-AIТs before, minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian School economics: theyТre so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of capitalism in the industrial age that they canТt surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term.
Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what heТs 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 employeeТs 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 heТs never met. Law firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy does he patent a lot Ц 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; heТs 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. HeТs the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain Ц 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 underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think heТs 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 wacky 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 Ц 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 is investigating him continuously because they donТt believe his lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And there exist items that no money canТt buy: like the respect of his parents. He hasnТt spoken to them for three years: his father thinks heТs a hippie scrounger and his mother still hasnТt forgiven him for dropping out of his down-market Harvard emulation course. His fiancщe and sometime dominatrix Pamela threw him over six months ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear on. (Ironically, sheТs 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 wasnТt for the dead kittens one of their followers Ц he presumes itТs one of their followers Ц 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 WildemannТs; itТs 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: theyТre 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. TheyТre burning GM cocoa in Belize and books in Edinburgh. NASA still canТt put a man on the moon. Russia has re-elected the communist government with an increased majority in the Duma; meanwhile in China fevered rumors 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 Ц who have automated their legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries, IPOТing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that by the time the injunctions are signed the targets donТt exist any more.
Welcome to the twenty-first century.
The permanent floating meatspace party has taken over the back of De WildemannТs, a three hundred year old brown cafщ with a beer menu that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale beer. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewerТs 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 whoТs currently propping up the bar. Manfred slides in next to him, catches the bartenderТs 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 donТt want to do that! ItТs 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..."
ManfredТs 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 vCardТs 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: heТs about to be slashdotted. He gestures at the table: "This one taken?"
"Be my guest," says the guy with the dreads. Manfred slides the chair open then realizes that the other guy Ц immaculate double-breasted suit, sober tie, crew-cut Ц is a girl. Mr. Dreadlock nods. "YouТre Macx? I figured it was about time we met."
"Sure." Manfred holds out a hand and they shake. Manfred realizes the hand belongs to Bob Franklin, a Research Triangle startup monkey with a VC track record, lately moving into micromachining and space technology: he made his first million two decades ago and now heТs a specialist in extropian investment fields. Manfred has known Bob for nearly a decade via a closed mailing list. The Suit silently slides a business card across the table; a little red devil brandishes a trident at him, flames jetting up around its feet. He takes the card, raises an eyebrow: "Annette Dimarcos? IТm pleased to meet you. CanТt say IТve ever met anyone from Arianespace marketing before."
She smiles, humorlessly; "That is convenient, all right. I have not the pleasure of meeting the famous venture altruist before." Her accent is noticeably Parisian, a pointed reminder that sheТs making a concession to him just by talking. Her camera earrings watch him curiously, encoding everything for the company channels.
"Yes, well." He nods cautiously. "Bob. I assume youТre in on this ball?"