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

"Rubberizing the symbol of the, the autocracy, is it not wonderful?"
"I thought I was thirty seconds ahead of the curve," Manfred says ruefully. He adds to Bob: "Buy me
another drink?"
"I'm going to rubberize Three Gorges!" Ivan explains loudly. "When the floodwaters subside."
Just then, a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred's head and sends clumps
of humongous pixilation flickering across his sensorium: Around the world, five million or so geeks are bouncing
on his home site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. "I really
came here to talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I've just been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit
and drink until it wears off?"
"Sure, man." Bob waves at the bar. "More of the same all round!" At the next table, a person with makeup
and long hair who's wearing a dress — Manfred doesn't want to speculate about the gender of these crazy mixed-up
Euros — is reminiscing about wiring the fleshpots of Tehran for cybersex. Two collegiate-looking dudes are
arguing intensely in German: The translation stream in his glasses tell him they're arguing over whether the Turing
Test is a Jim Crow law that violates European corpus juris standards on human rights. The beer arrives, and Bob
slides the wrong one across to Manfred: "Here, try this. You'll like it."
"Okay." It's some kind of smoked doppelbock, chock-full of yummy superoxides: Just inhaling over it
makes Manfred feel like there's a fire alarm in his nose screaming danger, Will Robinson! Cancer! Cancer!. "Yeah,
right. Did I say I nearly got mugged on my way here?"
"Mugged? Hey, that's heavy. I thought the police hereabouts had stopped — did they sell you anything?"
"No, but they weren't your usual marketing type. You know anyone who can use a Warpac surplus
espionage bot? Recent model, one careful owner, slightly paranoid but basically sound — I mean, claims to be a
general-purpose AI?"
"No. Oh boy! The NSA wouldn't like that."
"What I thought. Poor thing's probably unemployable, anyway."
"The space biz."
"Ah, yeah. The space biz. Depressing, isn't it? Hasn't been the same since Rotary Rocket went bust for the



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second time. And NASA, mustn't forget NASA."
"To NASA." Annette grins broadly for her own reasons, raises a glass in toast. Ivan the extreme concrete
geek has an arm round her shoulders, and she leans against him; he raises his glass, too. "Lots more launchpads to
rubberize!"
"To NASA," Bob echoes. They drink. "Hey, Manfred. To NASA?"
"NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer,
aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a
biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem
instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts.
Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now — dumb all over! Just measure the
MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure
them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor
nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains,
Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!"
Annette is watching him with interest, but Bob looks wary. "Sounds kind of long-term to me. Just how far
ahead do you think?"