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

"Very long-term — at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob; if
they can't tax it, they won't understand it. But see, there's an angle on the self-replicating robotics market coming
up, that's going to set the cheap launch market doubling every fifteen months for the foreseeable future, starting in,
oh, about two years. It's your leg up, and my keystone for the Dyson sphere project. It works like this —"
***
It's night in Amsterdam, morning in Silicon Valley. Today, fifty thousand human babies are being born
around the world. Meanwhile automated factories in Indonesia and Mexico have produced another quarter of a
million motherboards with processors rated at more than ten petaflops — about an order of magnitude below the
lower bound on the computational capacity of a human brain. Another fourteen months and the larger part of the
cumulative conscious processing power of the human species will be arriving in silicon. And the first meat the new
AIs get to know will be the uploaded lobsters.
Manfred stumbles back to his hotel, bone-weary and jet-lagged; his glasses are still jerking, slashdotted to
hell and back by geeks piggybacking on his call to dismantle the moon. They stutter quiet suggestions at his
peripheral vision. Fractal cloud-witches ghost across the face of the moon as the last huge Airbuses of the night
rumble past overhead. Manfred's skin crawls, grime embedded in his clothing from three days of continuous wear.
Back in his room, the Aineko mewls for attention and strops her head against his ankle. She's a late-model
Sony, thoroughly upgradeable: Manfred's been working on her in his spare minutes, using an open source
development kit to extend her suite of neural networks. He bends down and pets her, then sheds his clothing and
heads for the en suite bathroom. When he's down to the glasses and nothing more, he steps into the shower and dials
up a hot, steamy spray. The shower tries to strike up a friendly conversation about football, but he isn't even awake
enough to mess with its silly little associative personalization network. Something that happened earlier in the day
is bugging him, but he can't quite put his finger on what's wrong.
Toweling himself off, Manfred yawns. Jet lag has finally overtaken him, a velvet hammerblow between the
eyes. He reaches for the bottle beside the bed, dry-swallows two melatonin tablets, a capsule full of antioxidants,




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and a multivitamin bullet: Then he lies down on the bed, on his back, legs together, arms slightly spread. The suite
lights dim in response to commands from the thousand petaflops of distributed processing power running the neural
networks that interface with his meatbrain through the glasses.
Manfred drops into a deep ocean of unconsciousness populated by gentle voices. He isn't aware of it, but he
talks in his sleep — disjointed mumblings that would mean little to another human but everything to the metacortex
lurking beyond his glasses. The young posthuman intelligence over whose Cartesian theatre he presides sings
urgently to him while he slumbers.
***
Manfred is always at his most vulnerable shortly after waking.
He screams into wakefulness as artificial light floods the room: For a moment he is unsure whether he has
slept. He forgot to pull the covers up last night, and his feet feel like lumps of frozen cardboard. Shuddering with
inexplicable tension, he pulls a fresh set of underwear from his overnight bag, then drags on soiled jeans and tank
top. Sometime today he'll have to spare time to hunt the feral T-shirt in Amsterdam's markets, or find a Renfield and
send it forth to buy clothing. He really ought to find a gym and work out, but he doesn't have time — his glasses
remind him that he's six hours behind the moment and urgently needs to catch up. His teeth ache in his gums, and
his tongue feels like a forest floor that's been visited with Agent Orange. He has a sense that something went bad
yesterday; if only he could remember what.