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

ten thousand hopeful subs in the chat room, et cetera. If I choose a man to contribute to my family tree, the one
thing you can be certain of is he won't be a cheapskate when it comes to providing for his children."
"Last I heard, you were spending a lot of time with Brian," he says carefully. Brian: a name without a face.
Too much money, too little sense. Something to do with a blue-chip accountancy partnership.
"Brian?" She snorts. "That ended ages ago. He turned weird on me — burned my favorite corset, called me a
slut for going clubbing, wanted to fuck me. Saw himself as a family man: one of those promise-keeper types. I
crashed him hard, but I think he stole a copy of my address book — got a couple of friends say he keeps sending
them harassing mail."
"There's a lot of it about these days." Manfred nods, almost sympathetically, although an edgy little corner
of his mind is gloating. "Good riddance, then. I suppose this means you're still playing the scene? But looking
around for the, er —"
"Traditional family thing? Yes. Your trouble, Manny? You were born forty years too late: You still believe
in rutting before marriage but find the idea of coping with the after-effects disturbing."
Manfred drinks the rest of his coffee, unable to reply effectively to her non sequitur. It's 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: a social side effect of the last century's antibiotic abuse. Despite being engaged
for two years, he and Pamela never had intromissive intercourse.
"I just don't feel positive about having children," he says eventually. "And I'm not planning on changing my
mind anytime soon. Things are changing so fast that even a twenty-year commitment is too far to plan — you might
as well be talking about the next ice age. As for the money thing, I am reproductively fit — just not within the
parameters of the outgoing paradigm. Would you be happy about the future if it was 1901 and you'd just married a
buggy-whip mogul?"



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Her fingers twitch, and his ears flush red; but she doesn't follow up the double entendre. "You don't feel any
responsibility, do you? Not to your country, not to me. That's what this is about: None of your relationships count,
all this nonsense about giving intellectual property away notwithstanding. You're actively harming people you
know. That twelve mil isn't just some figure I pulled out of a hat, Manfred; they don't actually expect you to pay it.
But it's almost exactly how much you'd owe in income tax if you'd only come home, start up a corporation, and be a
self-made —"
"I don't agree. You're confusing two wholly different issues and calling them both 'responsibility.' And I
refuse to start charging now, just to balance the IRS's spreadsheet. It's their fucking fault, and they know it. If they
hadn't 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
— electrically earthed to prevent embarrassing emissions. "With a bit of the right advice we can get all that set
aside. You'll 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 don't understand what you're about."
Manfred bites his tongue to stifle his first response, then refills his coffee cup and takes another mouthful.
His heart does a flip-flop: She's challenging him again, always trying to own him. "I work for the betterment of
everybody, not just some narrowly defined national interest, Pam. It's the agalmic future. You're still locked into a
pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn't a problem anymore — it's
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 signs of smart matter — MACHOs, big brown
dwarfs in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared — suspiciously high entropy leakage. The latest