Accelerando

by Charles Stross

  Annette closes her eyes. “I don’t remember. No.” She holds up a hand. “Open mike. I streamed you into a file and cut, cut out the bits about me.” She opens her eyes and shakes her head. “What was I on?”

  “You don’t know either?”

  He stands up, and she walks over and throws her arms around him. “I was on you,” she murmurs.

  “Bullshit.” He pulls away, then sees how this upsets her. Something is blinking for attention in his glasses; he’s been off-line for the best part of six hours and is getting a panicky butterfly stomach at the idea of not being in touch with everything that’s happened in the last twenty kiloseconds. “I need to know more. Something in that report rattled the wrong cages. Or someone ratted on the suitcase exchange—I meant the dispatch to be a heads-up for whoever needs a working state planning system, not an invitation to shoot me!”

  “Well, then.” She lets go of him. “Do your work.” Coolly: “I’ll be around.”

  He realizes that he’s hurt her, but he doesn’t see any way of explaining that he didn’t mean to—at least, not without digging himself in deeper. He finishes his croissant and plunges into one of those unavoidable fits of deep interaction, fingers twitching on invisible keypads and eyeballs jiggling as his glasses funnel deep media straight into his skull through the highest bandwidth channel currently available.

  One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic messages, companies with names like agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0 screaming for the attention of their transitive director. Each of these companies—and there are currently more than sixteen thousand of them, although the herd is growing day by day—has three directors and is the director of three other companies. Each of them executes a script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors tell the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass instructions on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of cellular automata, like the cells in Conway’s Game of Life, only far more complex and powerful.

  Manfred’s companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed with capital in the form of patents Manfred filed, then delegated rather than passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them are effectively nontrading, but occupy directorial roles. Their corporate functions (such as filing of accounts and voting in new directors) are all handled centrally through his company-operating framework, and their trading is carried out via several of the more popular B2B enabler dot-coms. Internally, the companies do other, more obscure load-balancing computations, processing resource-allocation problems like a classic state central planning system. None of which explains why fully half of them have been hit by lawsuits in the past twenty-two hours.

  The lawsuits are . . . random. That’s the only pattern Manfred can detect. Some of them allege patent infringements; these he might take seriously, except that about a third of the targets are director companies that don’t actually do anything visible to the public. A few lawsuits allege mismanagement, but then there’s a whole bizarre raft of spurious nonsense: suits for wrongful dismissal or age discrimination—against companies with no employees—complaints about reckless trading, and one action alleging that the defendant (in conspiracy with the prime minister of Japan, the government of Canada, and the Emir of Kuwait) is using orbital mind-control lasers to make the plaintiff’s pet Chihuahua bark at all hours of day and night.

  Manfred groans and does a quick calculation. At the current rate, lawsuits are hitting his corporate grid at a rate of one every sixteen seconds—up from none in the preceding six months. In another day, this is going to saturate him. If it keeps up for a week, it’ll saturate every court in the United States. Someone has found a means to do for lawsuits what he’s doing for companies—and they’ve chosen him as their target.

  To say that Manfred is unamused is an understatement. If he wasn’t already preoccupied with Annette’s emotional state and edgy from the intrusion, he’d be livid—but he’s still human enough that he responds to human stimuli first. So he determines to do something about it, but he’s still flashing on the floating gun, her cross-dressing cool.

  Transgression, sex, and networks, these are all on his mind when Glashwiecz phones again.

  “Hello?” Manfred answers distractedly; he’s busy pondering the lawsuit bot that’s attacking his systems.

  “Macx! The elusive Mr. Macx!” Glashwiecz sounds positively overjoyed to have tracked down his target.

  Manfred winces. “Who is this?” he asks.

  “I called you yesterday,” says the lawyer. “You should have listened.” He chortles horribly. “Now I have you!”

  Manfred holds the phone away from his face, like something poisonous. “I’m recording this,” he warns. “Who the hell are you and what do you want?”

  “Your wife has retained my partnership’s services to pursue her interests in your divorce case. When I called you yesterday it was to point out without prejudice that your options are running out. I have an order, signed in court three days ago, to have all your assets frozen. These ridiculous shell companies notwithstanding, she’s going to take you for exactly what you owe her. After tax, of course. She’s very insistent on that point.”

  Manfred glances round, puts his phone on hold for a moment. “Where’s my suitcase?” he asks Aineko. The cat sidles away, ignoring him. “Shit.” He can’t see the new luggage anywhere. Quite possibly it’s on its way to Morocco, complete with its priceless cargo of high-density noise. He returns his attention to the phone. Glashwiecz is droning on about equitable settlements, cumulative IRS tax demands—that seem to have materialized out of fantasy with Pam’s imprimatur on them—and the need to make a clean breast of things in court and confess to his sins. “Where’s the fucking suitcase?” He takes the phone off hold. “Shut the fuck up, please, I’m trying to think.”

  “I’m not going to shut up! You’re on the court docket already, Macx. You can’t evade your responsibilities forever. You’ve got a wife and a helpless daughter to care for—”

  “A daughter?” That cuts right through Manfred’s preoccupation with the suitcase.

  “Didn’t you know?” Glashwiecz sounds pleasantly surprised. “She was decanted last Thursday. Perfectly healthy, I’m told. I thought you knew; you have viewing rights via the clinic webcam. Anyway, I’ll just leave you with this thought—the sooner you come to a settlement, the sooner I can unfreeze your companies. Goodbye.”

  The suitcase rolls into view, coyly peeping out from behind Annette’s dressing table. Manfred breathes a sigh of relief and beckons to it; at the moment, it’s easier to deal with his Plan B than dawn raids by objectivist gangsters, Annette’s sulk, his wife’s incessant legal spamming, and the news that he is a father against his will. “C’mon over here, you stray baggage. Let’s see what I got for my reputation derivatives . . .”

  Anticlimax.

  Annette’s communiqué is anodyne; a giggling confession off camera (shower-curtain rain in the background) that the famous Manfred Macx is in Paris for a weekend of clubbing, drugging, and general hell-raising. Oh, and he’s promised to invent three new paradigm shifts before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about the creation of Really Existing Communism by building a state central planning apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all of market economics, solving the calculation problem. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun, and he wants to hear the screams from the Chicago School.

  Try as he may, Manfred can’t see anything in the press release that is at all unusual. It’s just the sort of thing he does, and getting it on the net was why he was looking for a CIA stringer in the first place.

  He tries to explain this to her in the bath as he soaps her back. “I don’t understand what they’re on about,” he complains. “There’s nothing that tipped them off—except that I was in Paris, and you filed the news. You did nothing wrong.”


  “Mais oui.” She turns round, slippery as an eel, and slides backward into the water. “I try to tell you this, but you are not listening.”

  “I am now.” Water droplets cling to the outside of his glasses, plastering his view of the room with laser speckle highlights. “I’m sorry, Annette, I brought this mess with me. I can take it out of your life.”

  “No!” She rises up in front of him and leans forward, face serious. “I said yesterday. I want to be your manager. Take me in.”

  “I don’t need a manager; my whole thing is about being fast and out of control!”

  “You think you do not need a manager, but your companies do,” she observes. “You have lawsuits, how many? You cannot the time to oversee them spare. The Soviets, they abolish capitalists, but even they need managers. Please, let me manage for you!”

  Annette is so intense about the idea that she becomes visibly aroused. He leans toward her, cups a hand around one taut nipple. “The company matrix isn’t sold yet,” he admits.

  “It is not?” She looks delighted. “Excellent! To who can this be sold, to Moscow? To SLORC? To—”

  “I was thinking of the Italian Communist Party,” he says. “It’s a pilot project. I was working on selling it—I need the money for my divorce, and to close the deal on the luggage—but it’s not that simple. Someone has to run the damn thing—someone with a keen understanding of how to interface a central planning system with a capitalist economy. A system administrator with the experience of working for a multinational corporation would be perfect, ideally with an interest in finding new ways and means of interfacing the centrally planned enterprise to the outside world.” He looks at her with suddenly dawning surmise. “Um, are you interested?”

  Rome is hotter than downtown Columbia, South Carolina, over Thanksgiving weekend; it stinks of methane-burning Skodas with a low undertone of cooked dog shit. The cars are brightly colored subcompact missiles, hurtling in and out of alleyways like angry wasps: Hot-wiring their drive-by-wire seems to be the national sport, although Fiat’s embedded-systems people have always written notoriously wobbly software.

  Manfred emerges from the Stazione Termini into dusty sunlight, blinking like an owl. His glasses keep up a rolling monologue about who lived where in the days of the late Republic. They’re stuck on a tourist channel and won’t come unglued from that much history without a struggle. Manfred doesn’t feel like a struggle right now. He feels like he’s been sucked dry over the weekend: a light, hollow husk that might blow away in a stiff breeze. He hasn’t had a patentable idea all day. This is not a good state to be in on a Monday morning when he’s due to meet the former Minister for Economic Affairs, in order to give him a gift that will probably get the minister a shot at higher office and get Pam’s lawyer off his back. But somehow he can’t bring himself to worry too much: Annette has been good for him.

  The ex-minister’s private persona isn’t what Manfred was expecting. All Manfred has seen so far is a polished public avatar in a traditionally cut suit, addressing the Chamber of Deputies in cyberspace, which is why, when he rings the doorbell set in the whitewashed doorframe of Gianni’s front door, he isn’t expecting a piece of Tom of Finland beefcake, complete with breechclout and peaked leather cap, to answer.

  “Hello, I am here to see the minister,” Manfred says carefully. Aineko, perched on his left shoulder, attempts to translate: It trills something that sounds extremely urgent. Everything sounds urgent in Italian.

  “It’s okay. I’m from Iowa,” says the guy in the doorway. He tucks a thumb under one leather strap and grins over his moustache. “What’s it about?” Over his shoulder: “Gianni! Visitor!”

  “It’s about the economy,” Manfred says carefully. “I’m here to make it obsolete.”

  The beefcake backs away from the door cautiously—then the minister appears behind him. “Ah, signore Macx! It’s okay, Johnny, I have been expecting him.” Gianni extends a rapid welcome, like a hyperactive gnome buried in a white toweling bathrobe. “Please come in, my friend! I’m sure you must be tired from your journey. A refreshment for the guest if you please, Johnny. Would you prefer coffee or something stronger?”

  Five minutes later, Manfred is buried up to his ears in a sofa covered in buttery white cowhide, a cup of virulently strong espresso balanced precariously on his knee, while Gianni Vittoria himself holds forth on the problems of implementing a postindustrial ecosystem on top of a bureaucratic system with its roots in the bullheadedly modernist era of the 1920s. Gianni is a visionary of the left, a strange attractor within the chaotic phase-space of Italian politics. A former professor of Marxist economics, his ideas are informed by a painfully honest humanism, and everyone—even his enemies—agrees that he is one of the greatest theoreticians of the post-EU era. But his intellectual integrity prevents him from rising to the very top, and his fellow travelers are much ruder about him than his ideological enemies, accusing him of the ultimate political crime—valuing truth over power.

  Manfred had met Gianni a couple of years earlier via a hosted politics chat room; at the beginning of last week, he sent him a paper detailing his embeddable planned economy and a proposal for using it to turbocharge the endless Italian attempt to reengineer its government systems. This is the thin end of the wedge: If Manfred is right, it could catalyze a whole new wave of communist expansion, driven by humanitarian ideals and demonstrably superior performance, rather than wishful thinking and ideology.

  “It is impossible, I fear. This is Italy, my friend. Everybody has to have their say. Not everybody even understands what it is we are talking about, but that won’t stop them talking about it. Since 1945, our government requires consensus—a reaction to what came before. Do you know we have five different routes to putting forward a new law, two of them added as emergency measures to break the gridlock? And none of them work on their own unless you can get everybody to agree. Your plan is daring and radical, but if it works, we must understand why we work—and that digs right to the root of being human, and not everybody will agree.”

  At this point Manfred realizes that he’s lost. “I don’t understand,” he says, genuinely puzzled. “What has the human condition got to do with economics?”

  The minister sighs abruptly. “You are very unusual. You earn no money, do you? But you are rich, because grateful people who have benefited from your work give you everything you need. You are like a medieval troubadour who has found favor with the aristocracy. Your labor is not alienated—it is given freely, and your means of production is with you always, inside your head.” Manfred blinks; the jargon is weirdly technical-sounding but orthogonal to his experience, offering him a disquieting glimpse into the world of the terminally future-shocked. He is surprised to find that not understanding itches.

  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?”