Accelerando | Page 7

more than ten petaflops - about an order of magnitude below the lower bound on the
computational capacity of a human brain. Another fourteen months and the larger part of
the cumulative conscious processing power of the human species will be arriving in
silicon. And the first meat the new AIs get to know will be the uploaded lobsters.
Manfred stumbles back to his hotel, bone-weary and jet-lagged; his glasses are still
jerking, slashdotted to hell and back by geeks piggybacking on his call to dismantle the
moon. They stutter quiet suggestions at his peripheral vision. Fractal cloud-witches ghost
across the face of the moon as the last huge Airbuses of the night rumble past overhead.
Manfred's skin crawls, grime embedded in his clothing from three days of continuous
wear.
Back in his room, the Aineko mewls for attention and strops her head against his ankle.
She's a late-model Sony, thoroughly upgradeable: Manfred's been working on her in his
spare minutes, using an open source development kit to extend her suite of neural
networks. He bends down and pets her, then sheds his clothing and heads for the en suite
bathroom. When he's down to the glasses and nothing more, he steps into the shower and
dials up a hot, steamy spray. The shower tries to strike up a friendly conversation about
football, but he isn't even awake enough to mess with its silly little associative
personalization network. Something that happened earlier in the day is bugging him, but
he can't quite put his finger on what's wrong.

Toweling himself off, Manfred yawns. Jet lag has finally overtaken him, a velvet
hammerblow between the eyes. He reaches for the bottle beside the bed, dry-swallows
two melatonin tablets, a capsule full of antioxidants, and a multivitamin bullet: Then he
lies down on the bed, on his back, legs together, arms slightly spread. The suite lights dim
in response to commands from the thousand petaflops of distributed processing power
running the neural networks that interface with his meatbrain through the glasses.
Manfred drops into a deep ocean of unconsciousness populated by gentle voices. He isn't
aware of it, but he talks in his sleep - disjointed mumblings that would mean little to
another human but everything to the metacortex lurking beyond his glasses. The young
posthuman intelligence over whose Cartesian theatre he presides sings urgently to him
while he slumbers.
* * *
Manfred is always at his most vulnerable shortly after waking.
He screams into wakefulness as artificial light floods the room: For a moment he is
unsure whether he has slept. He forgot to pull the covers up last night, and his feet feel
like lumps of frozen cardboard. Shuddering with inexplicable tension, he pulls a fresh set
of underwear from his overnight bag, then drags on soiled jeans and tank top. Sometime
today he'll have to spare time to hunt the feral T-shirt in Amsterdam's markets, or find a
Renfield and send it forth to buy clothing. He really ought to find a gym and work out,
but he doesn't have time - his glasses remind him that he's six hours behind the moment
and urgently needs to catch up. His teeth ache in his gums, and his tongue feels like a
forest floor that's been visited with Agent Orange. He has a sense that something went
bad yesterday; if only he could remember what.
He speed reads a new pop-philosophy tome while he brushes his teeth, then blogs his web
throughput to a public annotation server; he's still too enervated to finish his pre-breakfast
routine by posting a morning rant on his storyboard site. His brain is still fuzzy, like a
scalpel blade clogged with too much blood: He needs stimulus, excitement, the burn of
the new. Whatever, it can wait on breakfast. He opens his bedroom door and nearly steps
on a small, damp cardboard box that lies on the carpet.
The box - he's seen a couple of its kin before. But there are no stamps on this one, no
address: just his name, in big, childish handwriting. He kneels and gently picks it up. It's
about the right weight. Something shifts inside it when he tips it back and forth. It smells.
He carries it into his room carefully, angrily: Then he opens it to confirm his worst
suspicion. It's been surgically decerebrated, brains scooped out like a boiled egg.
"Fuck!"
This is the first time the madman has gotten as far as his bedroom door. It raises worrying
possibilities.
Manfred pauses for a moment, triggering agents to go hunt down arrest statistics, police
relations, information on corpus juris, Dutch animal-cruelty laws. He isn't sure whether to

dial two-one-one on the archaic voice phone or let it ride. Aineko, picking up his angst,
hides under the dresser