Accelerando (11 page)

Gianni taps his balding temple with a knuckle like a walnut. “Most people spend little time inside their heads. They don't understand how you live. They're like medieval peasants looking in puzzlement at the troubadour. This system you invent, for running a planned economy, is delightful and elegant: Lenin's heirs would have been awestruck. But it is not a system for the new century. It is not
human
.”

Manfred scratches his head. “It seems to me that there's nothing human about the economics of scarcity,” he says. “Anyway, humans will be obsolete as economic units within a couple more decades. All I want to do is make everybody rich beyond their wildest dreams before that happens.” A pause for a sip of coffee, and to think,
One honest statement deserves another.
“And to pay off a divorce settlement.”

“Ye-es? Well, let me show you my library, my friend,” he says, standing up. “This way.”

Gianni ambles out of the white living room with its carnivorous leather sofas and up a cast-iron spiral staircase that nails some kind of upper level to the underside of the roof. “Human beings aren't rational,” he calls over his shoulder. “That was the big mistake of the Chicago School economists, neoliberals to a man, and of my predecessors, too. If human behavior was logical, there would be no gambling, hmm? The house always wins, after all.” The staircase debouches into another airy whitewashed room, where one wall is occupied by a wooden bench supporting a number of ancient, promiscuously cabled servers and a very new, eye-wateringly expensive solid volume renderer. Opposite the bench is a wall occupied from floor to ceiling by bookcases: Manfred looks at the ancient, low-density medium and sneezes, momentarily bemused by the sight of data density measured in kilograms per megabyte rather than vice versa.

“What's it fabbing?” Manfred asks, pointing at the renderer, which is whining to itself and slowly sintering together something that resembles a carriage clockmaker's fever dream of a spring-powered hard disk drive.

“Oh, one of Johnny's toys—a micromechanical digital phonograph player,” Gianni says dismissively. “He used to design Babbage engines for the Pentagon—stealth computers. (No van Eck radiation, you know.) Look.” He carefully pulls a fabric-bound document out of the obsolescent data wall and shows the spine to Manfred: “
On the Theory of Games,
by John von Neumann. Signed first edition.”

Aineko meeps and dumps a slew of confusing purple finite state automata into Manfred's left eye. The hardback is dusty and dry beneath his fingertips as he remembers to turn the pages gently. “This copy belonged to the personal library of Oleg Kordiovsky. A lucky man is Oleg:
He bought it in 1952, while on a visit to New York, and the MVD let him to keep it.”

“He must be—” Manfred pauses. More data, historical time lines. “Part of GosPlan?”

“Correct.” Gianni smiles thinly. “Two years before the central committee denounced computers as bourgeois deviationist pseudo-science intended to dehumanize the proletarian. They recognized the power of robots even then. A shame they did not anticipate the compiler or the net.”

“I don't understand the significance. Nobody back then could expect that the main obstacle to doing away with market capitalism would be overcome within half a century, surely?”

“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 evaluate 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.