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

Manfred stops dead in the street. "Oh man, you've got the wrong free enterprise broker here. I don't work for
the government. I'm strictly private." A rogue advertisement sneaks through his junkbuster proxy and spams
glowing fifties kitsch across his navigation window — which is blinking — for a moment before a phage process
kills it and spawns a new filter. He leans against a shop front, massaging his forehead and eyeballing a display of
antique brass doorknockers. "Have you tried the State Department?"
"Why bother? State Department am enemy of Novy-SSR. State Department is not help us."
This is getting just too bizarre. Manfred's never been too clear on new-old old-new European metapolitics:
Just dodging the crumbling bureaucracy of his old-old American heritage gives him headaches. "Well, if you hadn't
shafted them during the late noughties ... " Manfred taps his left heel on the pavement, looking round for a way out
of this conversation. A camera winks at him from atop a streetlight; he waves, wondering idly if it's the KGB or the
traffic police. He is waiting for directions to the party, which should arrive within the next half hour, and this Cold
War retread Eliza-bot is bumming him out. "Look, I don't deal with the G-men. I hate the military-industrial
complex. I hate traditional politics. They're all zero-sum cannibals." A thought occurs to him. "If survival is what
you're after, you could post your state vector on one of the p2p nets: Then nobody could delete you —"
"Nyet!" The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as it's possible to sound over a VoiP link. "Am not
open source! Not want lose autonomy!"
"Then we probably have nothing to talk about." Manfred punches the hang-up button and throws the mobile
phone out into a canal. It hits the water, and there's a pop of deflagrating lithium cells. "Fucking Cold War hangover
losers," he swears under his breath, quite angry, partly at himself for losing his cool and partly at the harassing
entity behind the anonymous phone call. "Fucking capitalist spooks." Russia has been back under the thumb of the
apparatchiks for fifteen years now, its brief flirtation with anarchocapitalism replaced by Brezhnevite dirigisme and
Putinesque puritanism, and it's no surprise that the wall's crumbling — but it looks like they haven't learned
anything from the current woes afflicting the United States. The neocommies still think in terms of dollars and
paranoia. Manfred is so angry that he wants to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at the would-be defector:
See! You get ahead by giving! Get with the program! Only the generous survive! But the KGB won't get the
message. He's dealt with old-time commie weak-AIs before, minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian School
economics: They're so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of global capitalism that they can't surf the
new paradigm, look to the longer term.
Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he's going to patent next.
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Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational consumer
protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return
for services rendered. He has airline employee's travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having
worked for an airline. His bush jacket has sixty-four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four
per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb
clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines he's never met. Law firms handle his
patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy, does he patent a lot — although he always signs the
rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project.
In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he's the guy who patented the business practice of
moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing
encumbrances. He's the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can