Accelerando | Page 3

half hour, and this Cold War retread Eliza-bot is bumming
him out. "Look, I don't deal with the G-men. I hate the military-industrial complex. I hate
traditional politics. They're all zero-sum cannibals." A thought occurs to him. "If survival
is what you're after, you could post your state vector on one of the p2p nets: Then nobody
could delete you -"
"Nyet!" The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as it's possible to sound over a VoiP
link. "Am not open source! Not want lose autonomy!"
"Then we probably have nothing to talk about." Manfred punches the hang-up button and
throws the mobile phone out into a canal. It hits the water, and there's a pop of
deflagrating lithium cells. "Fucking Cold War hangover losers," he swears under his
breath, quite angry, partly at himself for losing his cool and partly at the harassing entity
behind the anonymous phone call. "Fucking capitalist spooks." Russia has been back
under the thumb of the apparatchiks for fifteen years now, its brief flirtation with
anarchocapitalism replaced by Brezhnevite dirigisme and Putinesque puritanism, and it's
no surprise that the wall's crumbling - but it looks like they haven't learned anything from
the current woes afflicting the United States. The neocommies still think in terms of
dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so angry that he wants to make someone rich, just to
thumb his nose at the would-be defector: See! You get ahead by giving! Get with the
program! Only the generous survive! But the KGB won't get the message. He's dealt with
old-time commie weak-AIs before, minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian
School economics: They're so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of global
capitalism that they can't surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term.
Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he's going to patent
next.
* * *
Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational
consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish
sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employee's travel rights
with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush jacket has
sixty-four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per pocket, courtesy of an

invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing
comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines he's never met. Law firms
handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy, does he patent a lot -
although he always signs the rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions
to their obligation-free infrastructure project.
In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he's the guy who patented the business practice
of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order
to evade licensing encumbrances. He's the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to
patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain -
not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third
of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become
illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are
patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting
for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate
Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki math
borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an
economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are
communists in Prague who think he's the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope.
Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with whacky but
workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does
this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is
a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.
There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of
future shock - he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV
content every day just to stay current. The Internal Revenue Service is investigating him
continuously because it doesn't believe his lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And
then there are the items that no money can't buy: like the respect of his parents. He hasn't
spoken to them for three years, his father thinks he's a hippy scrounger, and his mother
still hasn't forgiven him for dropping out of