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

She's in the doorway when he calls, "But you didn't say why!"
"Think of it as being sort of like spreading your memes around," she says, blowing a kiss at him, and then
closing the door. She bends down and thoughtfully places another cardboard box containing an uploaded kitten
right outside it. Then she returns to her suite to make arrangements for the alchemical wedding.




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Stross/Accelerando




Chapter 2: Troubadour




Three years later, Manfred is on the run. His gray-eyed fate is in hot pursuit, blundering after him through
divorce court, chat room, and meetings of the International Monetary Emergency Fund. It's a merry dance he leads
her. But Manfred isn't running away, he's discovered a mission. He's going to make a stand against the laws of
economics in the ancient city of Rome. He's going to mount a concert for the spiritual machines. He's going to set
the companies free, and break the Italian state government.
In his shadow, his monster runs, keeping him company, never halting.
***
Manfred re-enters Europe through an airport that's all twentieth-century chrome and ductwork, barbaric in
its decaying nuclear-age splendor. He breezes through customs and walks down a long, echoing arrival hall,
sampling the local media feeds. It's November, and in a misplaced corporate search for seasonal cheer, the
proprietors have come up with a final solution to the Christmas problem, a mass execution of plush Santas and
elves. Bodies hang limply overhead every few meters, feet occasionally twitching in animatronic death, like a war
crime perpetrated in a toy shop. Today's increasingly automated corporations don't understand mortality, Manfred
thinks, as he passes a mother herding along her upset children. Their immortality is a drawback when dealing with
the humans they graze on: They lack insight into one of the main factors that motivates the meat machines who feed
them. Well, sooner or later we'll have to do something about that, he tells himself.
The free media channels here are denser and more richly self-referential than anything he's seen in President
Santorum's America. The accent's different, though. Luton, London's fourth satellite airport, speaks with an
annoyingly bumptious twang, like Australian with a plum in its mouth. Hello, stranger! Is that a brain in your
pocket or are you just pleased to think me? Ping Watford Informatics for the latest in cognitive modules and cheesy
motion-picture references. He turns the corner and finds himself squeezed up against the wall between the baggage
reclaim office and a crowd of drunken Belgian tractor-drag fans, while his left goggle is trying to urgently tell him
something about the railway infrastructure of Columbia. The fans wear blue face paint and chant something that
sounds ominously like the ancient British war cry, Wemberrrly, Wemberrrly, and they're dragging a gigantic virtual
tractor totem through the webspace analogue of the arrivals hall. He takes the reclaim office instead.