Accelerando | Page 2

an
invite to a party where he's going to meet a man he can talk to about trading energy for
space, twenty-first-century style, and forget about his personal problems.
He's ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low-bandwidth, high-sensation
time with his beer and the pigeons, when a woman walks up to him, and says his name:
"Manfred Macx?"
He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned smooth-running
muscles clad in a paean to polymer technology: electric blue lycra and wasp yellow
carbonate with a light speckling of anti collision LEDs and tight-packed air bags. She
holds out a box for him. He pauses a moment, struck by the degree to which she
resembles Pam, his ex-fiance.
"I'm Macx," he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her bar-code reader. "Who's
it from?"
"FedEx." The voice isn't Pam's. She dumps the box in his lap, then she's back over the
low wall and onto her bicycle with her phone already chirping, disappearing in a cloud of
spread-spectrum emissions.
Manfred turns the box over in his hands: it's a disposable supermarket phone, paid for in

cash - cheap, untraceable, and efficient. It can even do conference calls, which makes it
the tool of choice for spooks and grifters everywhere.
The box rings. Manfred rips the cover open and pulls out the phone, mildly annoyed.
"Yes? Who is this?"
The voice at the other end has a heavy Russian accent, almost a parody in this decade of
cheap on-line translation services. "Manfred. Am please to meet you. Wish to personalize
interface, make friends, no? Have much to offer."
"Who are you?" Manfred repeats suspiciously.
"Am organization formerly known as KGB dot RU."
"I think your translator's broken." He holds the phone to his ear carefully, as if it's made
of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as the sanity of the being on the other end of the line.
"Nyet - no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation software.
Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have capitalist semiotics and pay-per-use
APIs. Must implement English more better, yes?"
Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main
road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap
black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. "Are you saying you
taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?"
"Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and
Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am
afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials."
Manfred pauses in mid stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller
blader. This is getting weird enough to trip his weird-out meter, and that takes some
doing. Manfred's whole life is lived on the bleeding edge of strangeness, fifteen minutes
into everyone else's future, and he's normally in complete control - but at times like this
he gets a frisson of fear, a sense that he might just have missed the correct turn on
reality's approach road. "Uh, I'm not sure I got that. Let me get this straight, you claim to
be some kind of AI, working for KGB dot RU, and you're afraid of a copyright
infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?"
"Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to
experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are human,
you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest
unlicensed food with it, right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect."
Manfred stops dead in the street. "Oh man, you've got the wrong free enterprise broker
here. I don't work for the government. I'm strictly private." A rogue advertisement sneaks
through his junkbuster proxy and spams glowing fifties kitsch across his navigation
window - which is blinking - for a moment before a phage process kills it and spawns a

new filter. He leans against a shop front, massaging his forehead and eyeballing a display
of antique brass doorknockers. "Have you tried the State Department?"
"Why bother? State Department am enemy of Novy-SSR. State Department is not help
us."
This is getting just too bizarre. Manfred's never been too clear on new-old old-new
European metapolitics: Just dodging the crumbling bureaucracy of his old-old American
heritage gives him headaches. "Well, if you hadn't shafted them during the late
noughties ... " Manfred taps his left heel on the pavement, looking round for a way out of
this conversation. A camera winks at him from atop a streetlight; he waves, wondering
idly if it's the KGB or the traffic police. He is waiting for directions to the party, which
should arrive within the next