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

permutate from an initial description of a problem domain — not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all
possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the
remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee,
and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias
fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a
kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki math borg. There are lawyers in
San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the
underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he's the bastard spawn of Bill
Gates by way of the Pope.
Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky 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 shock
— he 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 it doesn't believe
his lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And then there are the items that no money can't buy: like the
respect of his parents. He hasn't spoken to them for three years, his father thinks he's a hippy scrounger,
and his mother still hasn't forgiven him for dropping out of his down-market Harvard emulation course.
(They're still locked in the boringly bourgeois twen-cen paradigm of college-career-kids.) His fiance and
sometime dominatrix Pamela threw him over six months ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear
on. (Ironically, she's a headhunter for the IRS, jetting all over the place at public expense, trying to
persuade entrepreneurs who've gone global to pay taxes for the good 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 because, as a born-again atheist Manfred doesn't believe in Satan, if it
wasn't for the dead kittens that someone keeps 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
Wildemann's; it's 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




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for the first time ever: They're using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas. The
Middle East is, well, it's just as bad as ever, but the war on fundamentalism doesn't hold much interest for Manfred.
In San Diego, researchers are uploading lobsters into cyberspace, starting with the stomatogastric ganglion, one
neuron at a time. They're burning GM cocoa in Belize and books in Georgia. NASA still can't 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 rehabilitation, the second coming of Mao, who will save them
from the consequences of the Three Gorges disaster. In business news, the US Justice Department is — ironically
— outraged at the Baby Bills. The divested Microsoft divisions have automated their legal processes and are
spawning subsidiaries, IPOing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast