Asimov's Science Fiction 10-11/2001

by Dell Magazines

  * * *

  A short train journey later, Manfred checks into a hotel in Milton Keynes. He watches the sun set from his bedroom window, an occlusion of concrete cows blocking the horizon. The room is functional in an overly naturalistic kind of way, rattan and force-grown hardwood and hemp rugs concealing the support systems and concrete walls behind. He sits in a chair, gin and tonic at hand, absorbing the latest market news and grazing his multichannel feeds in parallel. His reputation is up 2 percent for no obvious reason today, he notices; odd, that. When he pokes at it he discovers that everybody's reputation—everybody, that is, who has a publicly traded reputation—is up a bit. It's as if the distributed internet reputation servers are feeling bullish about integrity. There's a global honesty bubble brewing.

  Manfred frowns, then snaps his fingers. The suitcase rolls toward him. “Who do you belong to?” he asks.

  “Manfred Macx,” it replies, slightly bashfully.

  “No, before me.”

  “I don't understand that question.”

  He sighs. “Open up.”

  Latches whir and retract: the hard-shell lid rises toward him and he looks inside to confirm the contents.

  The suitcase is full of noise.

  * * *

  It's night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore's law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 1027 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 1023 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 1023 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system's installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIP per gram threshold. Beyond that, singularity: a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is now down to double-digit months....

  Aineko curls on the pillow beside Manfred's head, purring softly as his owner dreams uneasily. The night outside is dark: vehicles operate on autopilot, running lights dipped to let the Milky Way shine down upon the sleeping city. Their quiet, fuel-cell powered engines do not trouble Manfred's sleep. The robot cat keeps sleepless watch, alert for intruders: but there are none, save the whispering ghosts of Manfred's metacortex, feeding his dreams with their state vectors.

  The metacortex—a distributed cloud of software agents that surrounds him in netspace—is as much a part of Manfred as the society of mind that occupies his skull; his thoughts migrate into it, spawning new agents to research new experiences, and at night they return to roost and share their knowledge.

  Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.

  Manfred is dreaming of an alchemical marriage. She waits for him at the altar in a strapless black gown, the surgical instruments gleaming in her gloved hands. “This won't hurt a bit,” she explains as she adjusts the straps. “I only want your genome; the extended phenotype can wait until ... later.” Blood-red lips, licked: a kiss of steel, then she presents the income-tax bill. “You're quite extraordinary, you know: with a thousand more like you, we could abolish the budget deficit, bring back the cold war, let the good times roll again.”

  There's nothing accidental about this dream. As he experiences it, microelectrodes in his hypothalamus trigger sensitive neurons. Revulsion and shame flood him at the sight of her face, the sense of his vulnerability. Manfred's metacortex, in order to facilitate his divorce, is trying to decondition his strange love. It has been working on him for weeks, now—but still he craves her whiplash touch, the humiliation of his wife's control, the sense of helpless rage at her unpayable taxes, demanded with interest.

  Aineko watches him from the pillow, purring continuously. Retractable claws knead the bedding, first one paw then the next. Aineko is full of the ancient feline wisdom she uploaded into him when mistress and master were exchanging data and bodily fluids. Aineko is more cat than robot these days. Aineko knows that Manfred is experiencing nameless neurasthenic agonies, but really doesn't give a shit about that as long as the power supply is clean and there are no intruders.

  Aineko curls up and joins Manfred in sleep, dreaming of laser-guided mice.

  * * *

  Manfred is jolted awake by the hotel room phone shrilling for attention.

  “Hello?” he asks, fuzzily.

  “Manfred Macx?” It's a human voice, with a gravelly east-coast accent.

  “Yeah?” Manfred struggles to sit up. His mouth feels like the inside of a tomb and his eyes don't want to open.

  “My name is Alan Glashwiecz, of Smoot, Sedgwick Associates. Am I correct in thinking that you are the Manfred Macx who is a director of a company called, uh, agalmic dot holdings dot root dot one eight four dot ninety-seven dot A-for-able dot B-baker dot five, incorporated?”

  “Uh.” Manfred blinks and rubs his eyes. “Hold on a moment.” When the retinal patterns fade he pulls on his glasses and powers them up. “Just a second now.” Browsers and menus ricochet through his sleep-laden eyes. “Can you repeat the company name?”

  “Sure.” Glashwiecz repeats himself patiently. He sounds as tired as Manfred feels.

  “Um.” Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object hierarchy. It's flashing for attention. There's a priority interrupt, an incoming lawsuit that hasn't propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. “I'm afraid I'm not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical contractor with non-executive power, reporting to the president, but frankly this is the first time I've ever heard of this company. However, I can tell you who's in charge if you want.”

  “Yes?” The attorney sounds almost interested. Manfred figures it out; the guy's in New Jersey, it must be about three in the morning over there.

  Malice—revenge for waking him up—sharpens Manfred's voice. “The president of agalmic.holdings.root.184.97.AB5 is agalmic.holdings. root.184.97.201. The secretary is agalmic.holdings.root.184.D5, and the chair is agalmic.holdings.root.184.E8.FF. All the shares are owned by those companies in equal measure, and I can tell you that their regulations are written in Python. Have a nice day, now!” He thumps the bedside phone control and sits up, yawning, then pushes the do-not-disturb button before it can interrupt again. After a moment, he stands up and stretches, then heads to the bathroom to brush his teeth, comb his hair, and figure out where the lawsuit originated and how a human being managed to get tangled up in his web of robot companies.

  * * *

  While he's having breakfast in the hotel restaurant, Manfred decides that he's going to do something unusual for a change: he's going to make himself temporarily rich. This is a change because Manfred's normal profession is making other people rich. Manfred is an agalmic entrepreneur, a specialist in giving good ideas away for free to people who can do things with them. Manfred doesn't believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition—his world is too fast and information-dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games. However, his current situation calls for him to do something radical: something like making himself a temporary billionaire so he can blow off his divorce settlement in an instant, an octopus escaping a predator by vanishing in a cloud of its own ink.

  Pam is chasing him partially for ideological reasons—she wants to harness his powerhouse to the creaking bandwagon of her fedgov employers, an asset to the nation—but also because she feels that she owns him, and the last thing any self-respecting dom can tolerate is rejection by her slave. Pam is a born post-neoconservative, a member of the first generation to grow up after the close of the American century. Driven by the need to fix the decaying federal system before it collapses under a mound of Medicare bills and decaying infrastructure, she's willing to use self-denial, entrapment, predatory mercantilism, dirty tricks, any tool th
at boosts the bottom line. She doesn't understand Manfred, jetting around the world on free airline passes, making strangers rich, somehow never needing money. She can see his listing on the reputation servers, hovering around thirty points above IBM: all the metrics of integrity, effectiveness, and goodwill value him above even that most fundamentalist of open-source computer companies. And she knows he craves her tough love, wants to give himself to her completely. So why is he running away?

  The reason he's running away is entirely more ordinary. Their unborn daughter, frozen in liquid nitrogen, is an unimplanted ninety-six-hour-old blastula. Pam's bought into the whole Parents for Traditional Children parasite meme. PTC are germ-line recombination refuseniks: they refuse to have their children screened for fixable errors. If there's one thing that Manfred really can't cope with, it's the idea that nature knows best—even though that isn't really the point she's making. One steaming fight too many and he kicked back, off to traveling fast and footloose, spinning off new ideas like a memetic dynamo and living on the largesse of the new paradigm. File for divorce on grounds of irreconcilable ideological differences. No more whiplash-and-leather sex.

  * * *

  Before he hits the TGV for Rome, Manfred takes time to visit a model airplane show: it's a good place to be picked up by a CIA stringer, and besides, DIY spy drones are hot shit this decade. Add microtechnology, cameras, and neural networks to balsa-wood flyers and you've got the next generation of military stealth flyer. The gig is happening in a decaying edge-of-town supermarket that rents out its shop floor for events like this; its emptiness is a sign of the times, ubiquitous broadband and expensive gas. (The robotized warehouse next door is, in contrast, frenetically busy, packing parcels for home delivery. Whether they telecommute or herd in meatspace offices, people still need to eat.)

  Today, the food hall is full of people. Eldritch ersatz insects buzz menacingly along the shining empty meat counters without fear of electrocution: big monitors unfurled above the deli display cabinets show a weird, jerky view of a three-dimensional nightmare, painted all the synthetic colors of radar. The feminine hygiene galley has been wheeled back to make room for a gigantic plastic-shrouded tampon five meters long and sixty centimeters in diameter—a microsat launcher and conference display, plonked here by the show's sponsors in a transparent attempt to talent-spot the up-and-coming engineering geeks.

  Manfred's glasses zoom in and grab a particularly fetching Fokker triplane that buzzes at face height through the crowd: he pipes the image stream up to one of his web sites in real time. The Fokker pulls up in a tight Immelman turn beneath the dust-shrouded pneumatic cash tubes that line the ceiling, then picks up the trail of an F-104G. Cold War Luftwaffe and Great War Luftwaffe dart across the sky in an intricate game of tag. Manfred's so busy tracking the warbirds that he nearly trips over the fat white tube's launcher-erector.

  “Eh, Manfred! More care, s'il vouz plait!”

  He wipes the planes and glances round. “Do I know you?” he asks politely.

  “Amsterdam, two years ago.” The woman in the double-breasted suit raises an eyebrow at him and his social secretary remembers her for him, whispers in his ear.

  “Annette, from, Arianespace marketing?” She nods and he focuses on her. Still dressing in the last-century retro mode that confused him the first time they met, she looks like a Kennedy-era secret service man: cropped bleached crew-cut like an angry albino hedgehog, pale blue contact lenses, black tie, narrow lapels. Her earrings are cameras, endlessly watching. “I remember. That cafe in Amsterdam. What brings you here?”

  “Why—” her wave takes in the entirety of the show—"this talent show, of course.” An elegant shrug and a wave at the orbit-capable tampon. “We're hiring this year. If we re-enter the launcher market, we must employ only the best. Amateurs, not time-servers, engineers who can match the very best Singapore can offer.”

  For the first time, Manfred notices the discreet corporate logo on the flanks of the booster. “You out-sourced your launch vehicle fabrication?”

  Annette explains with forced casualness: “Hotels were more profitable, this past decade. The high-ups, they cannot be bothered with the rocketry, no? Things that go fast and explode, they are passé, they say. Diversify, they say. Until—” Her expression says it all. Manfred nods; her earrings are recording everything she says, due-dilligence monitoring.

  “I'm glad to see Europe re-entering the launcher business,” he says seriously. “It's going to be very important when the nanosystems conformational replication business gets going for real. A major strategic asset to any corporate entity in the field; even a restaurant chain.”

  Her laugh sounds like glass bells chiming. “And yourself, mon cher? What brings you to the Confederacion? You must have a deal in mind.”

  “Well.” It's Manfred's turn to shrug. “I was hoping to find a CIA agent, but there don't seem to be any here today.”

  “That is not surprising,” Annette says resentfully. “The CIA think the space industry, she is dead. Fools!” She continues for a minute, enumerating the many shortcomings of the Central Intelligence Agency with vigor and a distinctly Parisian rudeness. “They are become almost as bad as AP and Reuters since they go public,” she finishes. “All these wire services! And they are, ah, stingy. The CIA does not understand that good news must be paid for at market rates if freelance stringers are to survive. They are to be laughed at. It is so easy to plant disinformation on them....” By way of punctuation a remarkably maneuverable miniature ornithopter swoops around her head, does a double-backflip, and dives off in the direction of the liquor display.

  An Iranian woman wearing a backless leather minidress and a nearly transparent scarf barges up and demands to know how much the micro-booster costs to buy; she is dissatisfied with Annette's attempt to direct her to the manufacturer's WAP site, and Annette looks distinctly flustered by the time the woman's boyfriend—a dashing young air force pilot—shows up to escort her away. “Tourists,” she mutters, before noticing Manfred, who is staring off into space with fingers twitching. “Manfred?”

  “Uh—what?”

  “I have been on this shop floor for six hours, and my feet, they kill me.” She takes hold of his left arm. “If I say to you I can write for the CIA wire service, will you take me to a restaurant and buy me dinner and tell me what it is you want to say?”

  * * *

  Welcome to the second decade of the twenty-first century; the second decade in human history when the intelligence of the environment has shown signs of rising to match human demand.

  The news from around the world is distinctly depressing this evening. In Maine, guerrillas affiliated with Parents for Traditional Children announce they've planted logic bombs in pre-natal clinic gene scanners, making them give random false positives when checking for hereditary disorders: the damage so far is six abortions and fourteen class action lawsuits.

  The International Convention on Performing Rights is holding a third round of crisis talks in an attempt to stave off the final collapse of music licensing. On the one hand, hard-liners representing the Copyright Control Association of America are pressing for restrictions on duplicating the altered emotional states associated with specific media performances: as a demonstration that they mean business, two “software engineers” in California have been kneecapped, tarred, feathered, and left for dead under placards accusing them of reverse-engineering movie plot-lines using avatars of dead and out-of-copyright stars.

  On the opposite side of the fence, the Association of Free Artists are demanding the right to perform music in public without a recording contract, and are denouncing the CCAA as being a tool of Mafiya apparachiks who have bought it from the moribund music industry in an attempt to go legit. FBI Director Leonid Kuibyshev responds by denying that the Mafiya is a significant presence in the United States.

  A marginally intelligent email virus masquerading as an IRS audit has caused havoc throughout America, garnishing an estimated eight
y billion dollars in confiscatory tax withholdings into a numbered Swiss bank account. A different email virus is busy hijacking people's bank accounts, sending 10 percent of their assets to the previous victim and then mailing itself to everyone in the current mark's address book: a self-propelled pyramid scheme in action. Oddly, nobody is complaining much. While the mess is being sorted out, business IT departments have gone to standby, awaiting an expected wave of mutant corporation tax demands.

  Tipsters are warning of an impending readjustment in the over-inflated reputations market, following revelations that some u-media gurus have been hyped past all realistic levels of credibility, and the consequent damage to the junk bonds market in integrity.

  The EC council of independent heads of state have denied plans for another attempt at eurofederalisme, at least until the economy rises out of its current slump. Three extinct species have been resurrected in the past month; unfortunately, endangered ones are now dying off at a rate of one a day. And a group of militant anti-frankenfood campaigners are being pursued by Interpol after they announced that they have spliced a metabolic pathway for cyanogenic glycosides into maize seedcorn destined for human-edible crops. No deaths as yet, but having to test breakfast cereal for cyanide is really going to dent consumer trust.

  About the only people who're doing well right now are the uploaded lobsters—and the crusties aren't even remotely human.