Accelerando

by Charles Stross

  “Indeed not. But it’s true: Since the 1980s, it has been possible—in principle—to resolve resource allocation problems algorithmically, by computer, instead of needing a market. Markets are wasteful: They allow competition, much of which is thrown on the scrap heap. So why do they persist?”

  Manfred shrugs. “You tell me. Conservativism?”

  Gianni closes the book and puts it back on the shelf. “Markets afford their participants the illusion of free will, my friend. You will find that human beings do not like being forced into doing something, even if it is in their best interests. Of necessity, a command economy must be coercive—it does, after all, command.”

  “But my system doesn’t! It mediates where supplies go, not who has to produce what—”

  Gianni is shaking his head. “Backward chaining or forward chaining, it is still an expert system, my friend. Your companies need no human beings, and this is a good thing, but they must not direct the activities of human beings, either. If they do, you have just enslaved people to an abstract machine, as dictators have throughout history.”

  Manfred’s eyes scan along the bookshelf. “But the market itself is an abstract machine! A lousy one, too. I’m mostly free of it—but how long is it going to continue oppressing people?”

  “Maybe not as long as you fear.” Gianni sits down next to the renderer, which is currently extruding the inference mill of the analytical engine. “The marginal value of money decreases, after all: The more you have, the less it means to you. We are on the edge of a period of prolonged economic growth, with annual averages in excess of twenty percent, if the Council of Europe’s predictor metrics are anything to go by. The last of the flaccid industrial economy has withered away, and this era’s muscle of economic growth, what used to be the high-technology sector, is now everything. We can afford a little wastage, my friend, if that is the price of keeping people happy until the marginal value of money withers away completely.”

  Realization dawns. “You want to abolish scarcity, not just money!”

  “Indeed.” Gianni grins. “There’s more to that than mere economic performance; you have to consider abundance as a factor. Don’t plan the economy; take things out of the economy. Do you pay for the air you breathe? Should uploaded minds—who will be the backbone of our economy, by and by—have to pay for processor cycles? No and no. Now, do you want to know how you can pay for your divorce settlement? And can I interest you, and your interestingly accredited new manager, in a little project of mine?”

  The shutters are thrown back, the curtains tied out of the way, and Annette’s huge living room windows are drawn open in the morning breeze.

  Manfred sits on a leather-topped piano stool, his suitcase open at his feet. He’s running a link from the case to Annette’s stereo, an antique stand-alone unit with a satellite Internet uplink. Someone has chipped it, crudely revoking its copy protection algorithm: The back of its case bears scars from the soldering iron. Annette is curled up on the huge sofa, wrapped in a kaftan and a pair of high-bandwidth goggles, thrashing out an internal Arianespace scheduling problem with some colleagues in Iran and Guyana.

  His suitcase is full of noise, but what’s coming out of the stereo is ragtime. Subtract entropy from a data stream—coincidentally uncompressing it—and what’s left is information. With a capacity of about a trillion terabytes, the suitcase’s holographic storage reservoir has enough capacity to hold every music, film, and video production of the twentieth century with room to spare. This is all stuff that is effectively out of copyright control, work-for-hire owned by bankrupt companies, released before the CCAA could make their media clampdown stick. Manfred is streaming the music through Annette’s stereo—but keeping the noise it was convoluted with. High-grade entropy is valuable, too . . .

  Presently, Manfred sighs and pushes his glasses up his forehead, killing the displays. He’s thought his way around every permutation of what’s going on, and it looks like Gianni was right: There’s nothing left to do but wait for everyone to show up.

  For a moment, he feels old and desolate, as slow as an unassisted human mind. Agencies have been swapping in and out of his head for the past day, ever since he got back from Rome. He’s developed a butterfly attention span, irritable and unable to focus on anything while the information streams fight it out for control of his cortex, arguing about a solution to his predicament. Annette is putting up with his mood swings surprisingly calmly. He’s not sure why, but he glances her way fondly. Her obsessions run surprisingly deep, and she’s quite clearly using him for her own purposes. So why does he feel more comfortable around her than he did with Pam?

  She stretches and pushes her goggles up. “Oui?”

  “I was just thinking.” He smiles. “Three days and you haven’t told me what I should be doing with myself, yet.”

  She pulls a face. “Why would I do that?”

  “Oh, no reason. I’m just not over—” He shrugs uncomfortably. There it is, an inexplicable absence in his life, but not one he feels he urgently needs to fill yet. Is this what a relationship between equals feels like? He’s not sure. Starting with the occlusive cocooning of his upbringing and continuing through all his adult relationships, he’s been effectively—voluntarily—dominated by his partners. Maybe the anti-submissive conditioning is working, after all. But if so, why the creative malaise? Why isn’t he coming up with original new ideas this week? Could it be that his peculiar brand of creativity is an outlet, that he needs the pressure of being lovingly enslaved to make him burst out into a great flowering of imaginative brilliance? Or could it be that he really is missing Pam?

  Annette stands up and walks over, slowly. He looks at her and feels lust and affection, and isn’t sure whether or not this is love. “When are they due?” she asks, leaning over him.

  “Any—” The doorbell chimes.

  “Ah. I will get that.” She stalks away, opens the door.

  “You!”

  Manfred’s head snaps round as if he’s on a leash. Her leash: But he wasn’t expecting her to come in person.

  “Yes, me,” Annette says easily. “Come in. Be my guest.”

  Pam enters the apartment living room with flashing eyes, her tame lawyer in tow. “Well, look what the robot kitty dragged in,” she drawls, fixing Manfred with an expression that owes more to anger than to humor. It’s not like her, this blunt hostility, and he wonders where it came from.

  Manfred rises. For a moment he’s transfixed by the sight of his dominatrix wife, and his—mistress? conspirator? lover?—side by side. The contrast is marked: Annette’s expression of ironic amusement a foil for Pamela’s angry sincerity. Somewhere behind them stands a balding middle-aged man in a suit, carrying a folio: just the kind of diligent serf Pam might have turned him into, given time. Manfred musters up a smile. “Can I offer you some coffee?” he asks. “The party of the third part seems to be late.”

  “Coffee would be great, mine’s dark, no sugar,” twitters the lawyer. He puts his briefcase down on a side table and fiddles with his wearable until a light begins to blink from his spectacle frames. “I’m recording this, I’m sure you understand.”

  Annette sniffs and heads for the kitchen, which is charmingly manual but not very efficient; Pam is pretending she doesn’t exist. “Well, well, well.” She shakes her head. “I’d expected better of you than a French tart’s boudoir, Manny. And before the ink’s dry on the divorce—these days that’ll cost you, didn’t you think of that?”

  “I’m surprised you’re not in the hospital,” he says, changing the subject. “Is postnatal recovery outsourced these days?”

  “The employers.” She slips her coat off her shoulders and hangs it behind the broad wooden door. “They subsidize everything when you reach my grade.” Pamela is wearing a very short, very expensive dress, the kind of weapon in the war between the sexes that ought to come with an end-user certificate: But to his surprise it has no effect on him. He realizes that he’s completely unable to ev
aluate her gender, almost as if she’s become a member of another species. “As you’d be aware if you’d been paying attention.”

  “I always pay attention, Pam. It’s the only currency I carry.”

  “Very droll, ha-ha,” interrupts Glashwiecz. “You do realize that you’re paying me while I stand here listening to this fascinating byplay?”

  Manfred stares at him. “You know I don’t have any money.”

  “Ah.” Glashwiecz smiles. “But you must be mistaken. Certainly the judge will agree with me that you must be mistaken—all a lack of paper documentation means is that you’ve covered your trail. There’s the small matter of the several thousand corporations you own, indirectly. Somewhere at the bottom of that pile there has got to be something, hasn’t there?”

  A hissing, burbling noise like a sackful of large lizards being drowned in mud emanates from the kitchen, suggesting that Annette’s percolator is nearly ready. Manfred’s left hand twitches, playing chords on an air keyboard. Without being at all obvious, he’s releasing a bulletin about his current activities that should soon have an effect on the reputation marketplace. “Your attack was rather elegant,” he comments, sitting down on the sofa as Pam disappears into the kitchen.

  Glashwiecz nods. “The idea was one of my interns’,” he says. “I don’t understand this distributed denial of service stuff, but Lisa grew up on it. Something about it being a legal travesty, but workable all the same.”

  “Uh-huh.” Manfred’s opinion of the lawyer drops a notch. He notices Pam reappearing from the kitchen, her expression icy. A moment later Annette surfaces carrying a jug and some cups, beaming innocently. Something’s going on, but at that moment, one of his agents nudges him urgently in the left ear, his suitcase keens mournfully and beams a sense of utter despair at him, and the doorbell rings again.

  “So what’s the scam?” Glashwiecz sits down uncomfortably close to Manfred and murmurs out of one side of his mouth. “Where’s the money?”

  Manfred looks at him irritably. “There is no money,” he says. “The idea is to make money obsolete. Hasn’t she explained that?” His eyes wander, taking in the lawyer’s Patek Philippe watch, his Java-enabled signet ring.

  “C’mon. Don’t give me that line. Look, all it takes is a couple of million, and you can buy your way free for all I care. All I’m here for is to see that your wife and daughter don’t get left penniless and starving. You know and I know that you’ve got bags of it stuffed away—just look at your reputation! You didn’t get that by standing at the roadside with a begging bowl, did you?”

  Manfred snorts. “You’re talking about an elite IRS auditor here. She isn’t penniless; she gets a commission on every poor bastard she takes to the cleaners, and she was born with a trust fund. Me, I—” The stereo bleeps. Manfred pulls his glasses on. Whispering ghosts of dead artists hum through his earlobes, urgently demanding their freedom. Someone knocks at the door again, and he glances around to see Annette walking toward it.

  “You’re making it hard on yourself,” Glashwiecz warns.

  “Expecting company?” Pam asks, one brittle eyebrow raised in Manfred’s direction.

  “Not exactly—”

  Annette opens the door and a couple of guards in full SWAT gear march in. They’re clutching gadgets that look like crosses between digital sewing machines and grenade launchers, and their helmets are studded with so many sensors that they resemble 1950s space probes. “That’s them,” Annette says clearly.

  “Mais oui.” The door closes itself, and the guards stand to either side. Annette stalks toward Pam.

  “You think to walk in here, to my pied-à-terre, and take from Manfred?” She sniffs.

  “You’re making a big mistake, lady,” Pam says, her voice steady and cold enough to liquefy helium.

  A burst of static from one of the troopers. “No,” Annette says distantly. “No mistake.”

  She points at Glashwiecz. “Are you aware of the takeover?”

  “Takeover?” The lawyer looks puzzled, but not alarmed by the presence of the guards.

  “As of three hours ago,” Manfred says quietly, “I sold a controlling interest in agalmic.holdings.root.1.1.1 to Athene Accelerants BV, a venture capital outfit from Maastricht. One dot one dot one is the root node of the central planning tree. Athene aren’t your usual VC, they’re accelerants—they take explosive business plans and detonate them.” Glashwiecz is looking pale—whether with anger or fear of a lost commission is impossible to tell. “Actually, Athene Accelerants is owned by a shell company owned by the Italian Communist Party’s pension trust. The point is, you’re in the presence of one dot one dot one’s chief operations officer.”

  Pam looks annoyed. “Puerile attempts to dodge responsibility—”

  Annette clears her throat. “Exactly who do you think you are trying to sue?” she asks Glashwiecz sweetly. “Here we have laws about unfair restraint of trade. Also about foreign political interference, specifically in the financial affairs of an Italian party of government.”

  “You wouldn’t—”

  “I would.” Manfred brushes his hands on his knees and stands up. “Done, yet?” he asks the suitcase.

  Muffled beeps, then a gravelly synthesized voice speaks. “Uploads completed.”

  “Ah, good.” He grins at Annette. “Time for our next guests?”

  On cue, the doorbell rings again. The guards sidle to either side of the door. Annette snaps her fingers, and it opens to admit a pair of smartly dressed thugs. It’s beginning to get crowded in the living room.

  “Which one of you is Macx?” snaps the older one of the two thugs, staring at Glashwiecz for no obvious reason. He hefts an aluminum briefcase. “Got a writ to serve.”

  “You’d be the CCAA?” asks Manfred.

  “You bet. If you’re Macx, I have a restraining order—”

  Manfred raises a hand. “It’s not me you want,” he says. “It’s this lady.” He points at Pam, whose mouth opens in silent protest. “Y’see, the intellectual property you’re chasing wants to be free. It’s so free that it’s now administered by a complex set of corporate instruments lodged in the Netherlands, and the prime shareholder as of approximately four minutes ago is my soon-to-be-ex-wife Pamela, here.” He winks at Glashwiecz. “Except she doesn’t control anything.”

  “Just what do you think you’re playing at, Manfred?” Pamela snarls, unable to contain herself any longer. The guards shuffle: The larger, junior CCAA enforcer tugs at his boss’s jacket nervously.

  “Well.” Manfred picks up his coffee and takes a sip. Grimaces. “Pam wanted a divorce settlement, didn’t she? The most valuable assets I own are the rights to a whole bunch of recategorized work-for-hire that slipped through the CCAA’s fingers a few years back. Part of the twentieth century’s cultural heritage that got locked away by the music industry in the last decade—Janis Joplin, the Doors, that sort of thing. Artists who weren’t around to defend themselves anymore. When the music cartels went bust, the rights went for a walk. I took them over originally with the idea of setting the music free. Giving it back to the public domain, as it were.”

  Annette nods at the guards, one of whom nods back and starts muttering and buzzing into a throat mike. Manfred continues. “I was working on a solution to the central planning paradox—how to interface a centrally planned enclave to a market economy. My good friend Gianni Vittoria suggested that such a shell game could have alternative uses. So I’ve not freed the music. Instead, I signed the rights over to various actors and threads running inside the agalmic holdings network—currently one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-five companies. They swap rights rapidly—the rights to any given song are resident in a given company for, oh, all of fifty milliseconds at a time. Now understand, I don’t own these companies. I don’t even have a financial interest in them anymore. I’ve deeded my share of the profits to Pam, here. I’m getting out of the biz. Gianni’s suggested something rather more challenging for me
to do instead.”

  He takes another mouthful of coffee. The recording Mafiya goon glares at him. Pam glares at him. Annette stands against one wall, looking amused. “Perhaps you’d like to sort it out between you?” he asks. Aside, to Glashwiecz: “I trust you’ll drop your denial of service attack before I set the Italian parliament on you? By the way, you’ll find the book value of the intellectual property assets I deeded to Pamela—by the value these gentlemen place on them—is somewhere in excess of a billion dollars. As that’s rather more than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of my assets, you’ll probably want to look elsewhere for your fees.”

  Glashwiecz stands up carefully. The lead goon stares at Pamela. “Is this true?” he demands. “This little squirt give you IP assets of Sony Bertelsmann Microsoft Music? We have claim! You come to us for distribution or you get in deep trouble.”

  The second goon rumbles agreement. “Remember, dose MP3s, dey bad for you health!”

  Annette claps her hands. “If you would to leave my apartment, please?” The door, attentive as ever, swings open. “You are no longer welcome here!”

  “This means you,” Manfred advises Pam, helpfully.

  “You bastard!” she spits at him.

  Manfred forces a smile, bemused by his inability to respond to her the way she wants. Something’s wrong, missing, between them. “I thought you wanted my assets. Are the encumbrances too much for you?”

  “You know what I mean! You and that two-bit euro-whore! I’ll nail you for child neglect!”

  His smile freezes. “Try it, and I’ll sue you for breach of patent rights. My genome, you understand.”

  Pam is taken aback by this. “You patented your own genome? What happened to the brave new communist, sharing information freely?”

  Manfred stops smiling. “Divorce happened. And the Italian Communist Party happened.”

  She turns on her heel and stalks out of the apartment bravely, tame attorney in tow behind her, muttering about class action lawsuits and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The CCAA lawyer’s tame gorilla makes a grab for Glashwiecz’s shoulder, and the guards move in, hustling the whole movable feast out into the stairwell. The door slams shut on a chaos of impending recursive lawsuits, and Manfred breathes a huge wheeze of relief.