"Michael Swanwick - The Dog Said Bow - Wow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

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 shockтАУhe 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 donтАЩt believe his lifestyle can exist
without racketeering. And there exist items that no money canтАЩt buy: like the respect
of his parents. He hasnтАЩt spoken to them for three years: his father thinks heтАЩs a
hippie scrounger and his mother still hasnтАЩt forgiven him for dropping out of his
down-market Harvard emulation course. His fianc├йe and sometime dominatrix
Pamela threw him over six months ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear on.
(Ironically, sheтАЩs 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

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"The Dog Said Bow-Wow" by Michael Swanwick


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 wasnтАЩt for the dead kittens one of their followersтАУhe presumes itтАЩs one of their
followersтАУkeeps 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 WildemannтАЩs; itтАЩs 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: theyтАЩre 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. TheyтАЩre burning GM cocoa in Belize and books in Edinburgh.
NASA still canтАЩt 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 BillsтАУwho have automated their
legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries, IPOтАЩing them, and exchanging title in
a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that by the time the
injunctions are signed the targets donтАЩt exist any more.

Welcome to the twenty-first century.