Accelerando | Page 4

his down-market Harvard emulation course.
(They're still locked in the boringly bourgeois twen-cen paradigm of college-career-kids.)
His fiance and sometime dominatrix Pamela threw him over six months ago, for reasons
he has never been quite clear on. (Ironically, she's a headhunter for the IRS, jetting all
over the place at public expense, trying to persuade entrepreneurs who've gone global to
pay taxes for the good of the Treasury Department.) To cap it all, the Southern Baptist
Conventions have denounced him as a minion of Satan on all their websites. Which
would be funny because, as a born-again atheist Manfred doesn't believe in Satan, if it
wasn't for the dead kittens that someone keeps mailing him.
* * *
Manfred drops in at his hotel suite, unpacks his Aineko, plugs in a fresh set of cells to
charge, and sticks most of his private keys in the safe. Then he heads straight for the
party, which is currently happening at De Wildemann's; it's a twenty-minute walk, and
the only real hazard is dodging the trams that sneak up on him behind the cover of his

moving map display.
Along the way, his glasses bring him up to date on the news. Europe has achieved
peaceful political union for the first time ever: They're using this unprecedented state of
affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas. The Middle East is, well, it's just as bad as
ever, but the war on fundamentalism doesn't hold much interest for Manfred. In San
Diego, researchers are uploading lobsters into cyberspace, starting with the
stomatogastric ganglion, one neuron at a time. They're burning GM cocoa in Belize and
books in Georgia. NASA still can't put a man on the moon. Russia has re-elected the
communist government with an increased majority in the Duma; meanwhile, in China,
fevered rumors circulate about an imminent rehabilitation, the second coming of Mao,
who will save them from the consequences of the Three Gorges disaster. In business
news, the US Justice Department is - ironically - outraged at the Baby Bills. The divested
Microsoft divisions have automated their legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries,
IPOing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange, so
fast that, by the time the windfall tax demands are served, the targets don't exist anymore,
even though the same staff are working on the same software in the same Mumbai
cubicle farms.
Welcome to the twenty-first century.
The permanent floating meatspace party Manfred is hooking up with is a strange attractor
for some of the American exiles cluttering up the cities of Europe this decade - not
trustafarians, but honest-to-God political dissidents, draft dodgers, and terminal
outsourcing victims. It's the kind of place where weird connections are made and crossed
lines make new short circuits into the future, like the street cafes of Switzerland where
the pre Great War Russian exiles gathered. Right now it's located in the back of De
Wildemann's, a three-hundred-year old brown cafe with a list of brews that runs to
sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale beer. The air is thick with the
smells of tobacco, brewer's yeast, and melatonin spray: Half the dotters are nursing
monster jet lag hangovers, and the other half are babbling a Eurotrash creole at each other
while they work on the hangover. "Man did you see that? He looks like a Democrat!"
exclaims one whitebread hanger-on who's currently propping up the bar. Manfred slides
in next to him, catches the bartender's eye.
"Glass of the Berlinerweisse, please," he says.
"You drink that stuff?" asks the hanger-on, curling a hand protectively around his Coke.
"Man, you don't want to do that! It's full of alcohol!"
Manfred grins at him toothily. "Ya gotta keep your yeast intake up: There are lots of
neurotransmitter precursors in this shit, phenylalanine and glutamate."
"But I thought that was a beer you were ordering ..."
Manfred's away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels the more popular
draught items in from the cask storage in back; one of the hipper floaters has planted a
contact bug on it, and the vCards of all the personal network owners who've have visited

the bar in the past three hours are queuing up for attention. The air is full of
ultrawideband chatter, WiMAX and 'tooth both, as he speed-scrolls through the dizzying
list of cached keys in search of one particular name.
"Your drink." The barman holds out an improbable-looking goblet full of blue liquid with
a cap of melting foam and a felching straw stuck out at some crazy angle. Manfred takes
it and heads for the back of the split-level bar, up the steps to a table where some guy
with greasy dreadlocks is talking to a suit from Paris. The hanger-on at