Accelerando | Page 6

"You are he who rubberized the Reichstag, yes? With the supercritical
carbon-dioxide carrier and the dissolved polymethoxysilanes?" She claps her hands, eyes
alight with enthusiasm: "Wonderful!"
"He rubberized what?" Manfred mutters in Bob's ear.
Franklin shrugs. "Don't ask me, I'm just an engineer."
"He works with limestone and sandstones as well as concrete; he's brilliant!" Annette
smiles at Manfred. "Rubberizing the symbol of the, the autocracy, is it not wonderful?"
"I thought I was thirty seconds ahead of the curve," Manfred says ruefully. He adds to
Bob: "Buy me another drink?"

"I'm going to rubberize Three Gorges!" Ivan explains loudly. "When the floodwaters
subside."
Just then, a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred's head
and sends clumps of humongous pixilation flickering across his sensorium: Around the
world, five million or so geeks are bouncing on his home site, a digital flash crowd
alerted by a posting from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. "I really came here to
talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I've just been slashdotted. Mind
if I just sit and drink until it wears off?"
"Sure, man." Bob waves at the bar. "More of the same all round!" At the next table, a
person with makeup and long hair who's wearing a dress - Manfred doesn't want to
speculate about the gender of these crazy mixed-up Euros - is reminiscing about wiring
the fleshpots of Tehran for cybersex. Two collegiate-looking dudes are arguing intensely
in German: The translation stream in his glasses tell him they're arguing over whether the
Turing Test is a Jim Crow law that violates European corpus juris standards on human
rights. The beer arrives, and Bob slides the wrong one across to Manfred: "Here, try this.
You'll like it."
"Okay." It's some kind of smoked doppelbock, chock-full of yummy superoxides: Just
inhaling over it makes Manfred feel like there's a fire alarm in his nose screaming danger,
Will Robinson! Cancer! Cancer!. "Yeah, right. Did I say I nearly got mugged on my way
here?"
"Mugged? Hey, that's heavy. I thought the police hereabouts had stopped - did they sell
you anything?"
"No, but they weren't your usual marketing type. You know anyone who can use a
Warpac surplus espionage bot? Recent model, one careful owner, slightly paranoid but
basically sound - I mean, claims to be a general-purpose AI?"
"No. Oh boy! The NSA wouldn't like that."
"What I thought. Poor thing's probably unemployable, anyway."
"The space biz."
"Ah, yeah. The space biz. Depressing, isn't it? Hasn't been the same since Rotary Rocket
went bust for the second time. And NASA, mustn't forget NASA."
"To NASA." Annette grins broadly for her own reasons, raises a glass in toast. Ivan the
extreme concrete geek has an arm round her shoulders, and she leans against him; he
raises his glass, too. "Lots more launchpads to rubberize!"
"To NASA," Bob echoes. They drink. "Hey, Manfred. To NASA?"
"NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a
mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at

the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working
on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we
could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our
thoughts. Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now -
dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working.
We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle
the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes
exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in.
Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb
matter to do the Turing boogie!"
Annette is watching him with interest, but Bob looks wary. "Sounds kind of long-term to
me. Just how far ahead do you think?"
"Very long-term - at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this
market, Bob; if they can't tax it, they won't understand it. But see, there's an angle on the
self-replicating robotics market coming up, that's going to set the cheap launch market
doubling every fifteen months for the foreseeable future, starting in, oh, about two years.
It's your leg up, and my keystone for the Dyson sphere project. It works like this -"
* * *
It's night in Amsterdam, morning in Silicon Valley. Today, fifty thousand human babies
are being born around the world. Meanwhile automated factories in Indonesia and
Mexico have produced another quarter of a million motherboards with processors rated at