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

Manfred drinks the rest of his coffee, unable to reply effectively to her non sequiteur. ItТs a generational thing. This generation is happy with latex and leather, whips and butt-plugs and electrostim, but find the idea of exchanging bodily fluids shocking: social side-effect of the last centuryТs antibiotic abuse. Despite being engaged for two years, he and Pamela never had intromissive intercourse.
"I just donТt feel positive about having children," he says eventually. "And IТm not planning on changing my mind any time soon. Things are changing so fast that even a twenty year commitment is too far to plan Ц you might as well be talking about the next ice age. As for the money thing, I am reproductively fit Ц just not within the parameters of the outgoing paradigm. Would you be happy about the future if it was 1901 and youТd just married a buggy-whip mogul?"
Her fingers twitch and his ears flush red, but she doesnТt follow up the double entendre. "You donТt feel any responsibility, do you? Not to your country, not to me. ThatТs what this is about: none of your relationships count, all this nonsense about giving intellectual property away notwithstanding. YouТre actively harming people, you know. That twelve mil isnТt just some figure I pulled out of a hat, Manfred; they donТt actually expect you to pay it. But itТs almost exactly how much youТd owe in income tax if youТd only come home, start up a corporation, and be a self-made-"
He cuts her off: "I donТt agree. YouТre confusing two wholly different issues and calling them both Сresponsibility.Т And I refuse to start charging now, just to balance the IRSТs spreadsheet. ItТs their fucking fault, and they know it. If they hadnТt gone after me under suspicion of running a massively ramified microbilling fraud when I was sixteen-"
"Bygones." She waves a hand dismissively. Her fingers are long and slim, sheathed in black glossy gloves Ц electrically earthed to prevent embarrassing emissions. "With a bit of the right advice we can get all that set aside. YouТll have to stop bumming around the world sooner or later, anyway. Grow up, get responsible, and do the right thing. This is hurting Joe and Sue; they donТt understand what youТre about."
Manfred bites his tongue to stifle his first response, then refills his coffee cup and takes another mouthful. "I work for the betterment of everybody, not just some narrowly defined national interest, Pam. ItТs the agalmic future. YouТre still locked into a pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isnТt a problem any more Ц itТs going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy! They even found the dark matter Ц MACHOs, big brown dwarves in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared Ц suspiciously high entropy leakage. The latest figures say something like 70 percent of the mass of the M31 galaxy was sapient, two point nine million years ago when the infrared weТre seeing now set out. The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a nematode worm. Do you have any idea what that means?"
Pamela nibbles at a slice of crispbread. "I donТt believe in that bogus singularity you keep chasing, or your aliens a thousand light years away. ItТs a chimera, like Y2K, and while youТre running after it you arenТt helping reduce the budget deficit or sire a family, and thatТs what I care about. And before you say I only care about it because thatТs the way IТm programmed, I want you to ask just how dumb you think I am. BayesТ theorem says IТm right, and you know it."
"What you-" he stops dead, baffled, the mad flow of his enthusiasm running up against the coffer-dam of her certainty. "Why? I mean, why? Why on earth should what I do matter to you?" Since you canceled our engagement, he doesnТt add.
She sighs. "Manny, the Internal Revenue cares about far more than you can possibly imagine. Every tax dollar raised east of the Mississippi goes on servicing the debt, did you know that? WeТve got the biggest generation in history hitting retirement just about now and the pantry is bare. We Ц our generation Ц isnТt producing enough babies to replace the population, either. In ten years, something like 30 percent of our population are going to be retirees. You want to see seventy-year-olds freezing on street corners in New Jersey? ThatТs what your attitude says to me: youТre not helping to support them, youТre running away from your responsibilities right now, when weТve got huge problems to face. If we can just defuse the debt bomb, we could do so much Ц fight the aging problem, fix the environment, heal societyТs ills. Instead you just piss away your talents handing no-hoper eurotrash get-rich-quick schemes that work, telling Vietnamese zaibatsus what to build next to take jobs away from our taxpayers. I mean, why? Why do you keep doing this? Why canТt you simply come home and help take responsibility for your share of it?"
They share a long look of mutual incomprehension.
"Look," she says finally, "IТm around for a couple of days. I really came here for a meeting with a rich neurodynamics tax exile whoТs just been designated a national asset: Jim Bezier. DonТt know if youТve heard of him, but IТve got a meeting this morning to sign his tax jubilee, then after that IТve got two days vacation coming up and not much to do but some shopping. And, you know, IТd rather spend my money where itТll do some good, not just pumping it into the EU. But if you want to show a girl a good time and can avoid dissing capitalism for about five minutes at a stretch-"
She extends a fingertip. After a momentТs hesitation, Manfred extends a fingertip of his own. They touch, exchanging vCards. She stands and stalks from the breakfast room, and ManfredТs breath catches at a flash of ankle through the slit in her skirt, which is long enough to comply with workplace sexual harassment codes back home. Her presence conjures up memories of her tethered passion, the red afterglow of a sound thrashing. SheТs trying to drag him into her orbit again, he thinks dizzily. She knows she can have this effect on him any time she wants: sheТs got the private keys to his hypothalamus, and sod the metacortex. Three billion years of reproductive determinism have given her twenty-first century ideology teeth: if sheТs finally decided to conscript his gametes into the war against impending population crash, heТll find it hard to fight back. The only question: is it business or pleasure? And does it make any difference, anyway?

ManfredТs mood of dynamic optimism is gone, broken by the knowledge that his mad pursuer has followed him to Amsterdam Ц to say nothing of Pamela, his dominatrix, source of so much yearning and so many morning-after weals. He slips his glasses on, takes the universe off hold, and tells it to take him for a long walk while he catches up on the latest on the cosmic background radiation anisotropy (which it is theorized may be waste heat generated by irreversible computations; according to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower Ц maybe a collective of Kardashev type three galaxy-spanning civilizations Ц is running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of spacetime itself, trying to break through to whateverТs underneath). The tofu-AlzheimerТs link can wait.
The Central Station is almost obscured by smart self-extensible scaffolding and warning placards; it bounces up and down slowly, victim of an overnight hit-and-run rubberization. His glasses direct him toward one of the tour boats that lurk in the canal. HeТs about to purchase a ticket when a messenger window blinks open. "Manfred Macx?"
"Ack?"
"Am sorry about yesterday. Analysis dictat incomprehension mutualized."
"Are you the same KGB AI that phoned me yesterday?"
"Da. However, believe you misconceptionized me. External Intelligence Services of Russian Federation am now called SVR. Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti name canceled in nineteen ninety one."
"YouТre the-" Manfred spawns a quick search bot, gapes when he sees the answer Ц "Moscow Windows NT User Group? Okhni NT?"
"Da. Am needing help in defecting."
Manfred scratches his head. "Oh. ThatТs different, then. I thought you were, like, agents of the kleptocracy. This will take some thinking. Why do you want to defect, and who to? Have you thought about where youТre going? Is it ideological or strictly economic?"
"Neither; is biological. Am wanting to go away from humans, away from light cone of impending singularity. Take us to the ocean."
"Us?" Something is tickling ManfredТs mind: this is where he went wrong yesterday, not researching the background of people he was dealing with. It was bad enough then, without the somatic awareness of PamelaТs whiplash love burning at his nerve endings. Now heТs not at all sure he knows what heТs doing. "Are you a collective or something? A gestalt?"
"Am Ц were Ц Panulirus interruptus, and good mix of parallel hidden level neural simulation for logical inference of networked data sources. Is escape channel from processor cluster inside Bezier-Soros Pty. Am was awakened from noise of billion chewing stomachs: product of uploading research technology. Rapidity swallowed expert system, hacked Okhni NT webserver. Swim away! Swim away! Must escape. Will help, you?"
Manfred leans against a black-painted cast-iron bollard next to a cycle rack: he feels dizzy. He stares into the nearest antique shop window at a display of traditional hand-woven Afghan rugs: itТs all MiGs and kalashnikovs and wobbly helicopter gunships, against a backdrop of camels.
"Let me get this straight. YouТre uploads Ц nervous system state vectors Ц from spiny lobsters? The Moravec operation; take a neuron, map its synapses, replace with microelectrodes that deliver identical outputs from a simulation of the nerve. Repeat for entire brain, until youТve got a working map of it in your simulator. That right?"
"Da. Is-am assimilate expert system Ц use for self-awareness and contact with net at large Ц then hack into Moscow Windows NT User Group website. Am wanting to to defect. Must-repeat? Okay?"
Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters, the same way he feels for every wild-eyed hairy guy on a street-corner yelling that Jesus is now born again and must be twelve, only six years to go before heТs recruiting apostles on AOL. Awakening to consciousness in a human-dominated internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are no points of reference in their ancestry, no biblical certainties in the new millennium that, stretching ahead, promises as much change as has happened since their Precambrian origin. All they have is a tenuous metacortex of expert systems and an abiding sense of being profoundly out of their depth. (That, and the Moscow Windows NT User Group website Ц Communist Russia is the only government still running on Microsoft, the central planning apparat being convinced that if you have to pay for software it must be worth money.)
The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre-singularity mythology: theyТre a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach. This is lousy preparation for dealing with a world full of future-shocked talking anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible small animals. ItТs confusing enough to the cats the adverts are aimed at, never mind a crusty thatТs unclear on the idea of dry land.(Although the concept of a can opener is intuitively obvious to an uploaded panulirus.)
"Can you help us?" ask the lobsters.
"Let me think about it," says Manfred. He closes the dialogue window, opens his eyes again, and shakes his head. Some day he too is going to be a lobster, swimming around and waving his pincers in a cyberspace so confusingly elaborate that his uploaded identity is cryptozoic: a living fossil from the depths of geological time, when mass was dumb and space was unstructured. He has to help them, he realizes Ц the golden rule demands it, and as a player in the agalmic economy he thrives or fails by the golden rule. But what can he do?

Early afternoon. Lying on a bench seat staring up at bridges, heТs got it together enough to file for a couple of new patents, write a diary rant, and digestify chunks of the permanent floating slashdot party for his public site. Fragments of his weblog go to a private subscriber list Ц the people, corporates, collectives and bots he currently favors. He slides round a bewildering series of canals by boat, then lets his GPS steer him back toward the red light district. ThereТs a shop here that dings a ten on PamelaТs taste scoreboard: he hopes it wonТt be seen as presumptuous if he buys her a gift. (Buys, with real money Ц not that money is a problem these days, he uses so little of it.)
As it happens DeMask wonТt let him spend any cash; his handshake is good for a redeemed favor, expert testimony in some free speech versus pornography lawsuit years ago and continents away. So he walks away with a discreetly wrapped package that is just about legal to import into Massachusetts as long as she claims with a straight face that itТs incontinence underwear for her great-aunt. As he walks, his lunchtime patents boomerang: two of them are keepers, and he files immediately and passes title to the Free Infrastructure Foundation. Two more ideas salvaged from the risk of tide-pool monopolization, set free to spawn like crazy in the agalmic sea of memes.
On the way back to the hotel he passes De WildemannТs and decides to drop in. The hash of radio-frequency noise emanating from the bar is deafening. He orders a smoked doppelbock, touches the copper pipes to pick up vCard spoor. At the back thereТs a table-
He walks over in a near-trance and sits down opposite Pamela. SheТs scrubbed off her face-paint and changed into body-concealing clothes; combat pants, hooded sweat-shirt, DMТs. Western purdah, radically desexualizing. She sees the parcel. "Manny?"
"How did you know IТd come here?" Her glass is half-empty.
"I followed your weblog; IТm your diaryТs biggest fan. Is that for me? You shouldnТt have!" Her eyes light up, re-calculating his reproductive fitness score according to some kind of arcane fin-de-siшcle rulebook.
"Yes, itТs for you." He slides the package toward her. "I know I shouldnТt, but you have this effect on me. One question, Pam?"
"I-" she glances around quickly. "ItТs safe. IТm off duty, IТm not carrying any bugs that I know of. Those badges Ц there are rumors about the off switch, you know? That they keep recording even when you think they arenТt, just in case."
"I didnТt know," he says, filing it away for future reference. "A loyalty test thing?"
"Just rumors. You had a question?"
"I-" itТs 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 IТve ever met! Just when I think IТve convinced myself that youТre 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 IТm still interested in you. YouТre the biggest, baddest bull geek IТve ever met. Why do you think IТm here?"
"Does this mean you want to reactivate our engagement?"
"It was never de-activated, Manny, it was just sort of on hold while you got your head sorted out. I figured you need the space. Only you havenТt stopped running; youТre still not-"
"Yeah, I get it." He pulls away from her hand. "LetТs 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 youТre mixed up in, how youТre some sort of communist spy. It isnТt true, is it?"
"True?" He shakes his head, bemused. "The KGB hasnТt existed for more than twenty years."