Accelerando | Page 9

next
ice age. As for the money thing, I am reproductively fit - just not within the parameters of
the outgoing paradigm. Would you be happy about the future if it was 1901 and you'd
just married a buggy-whip mogul?"
Her fingers twitch, and his ears flush red; but she doesn't follow up the double entendre.
"You don't feel any responsibility, do you? Not to your country, not to me. That's what
this is about: None of your relationships count, all this nonsense about giving intellectual
property away notwithstanding. You're actively harming people you know. That twelve
mil isn't just some figure I pulled out of a hat, Manfred; they don't actually expect you to
pay it. But it's almost exactly how much you'd owe in income tax if you'd only come
home, start up a corporation, and be a self-made -"
"I don't agree. You're confusing two wholly different issues and calling them both
'responsibility.' And I refuse to start charging now, just to balance the IRS's spreadsheet.
It's their fucking fault, and they know it. If they hadn't gone after me under suspicion of
running a massively ramified microbilling fraud when I was sixteen -"
"Bygones." She waves a hand dismissively. Her fingers are long and slim, sheathed in
black glossy gloves - electrically earthed to prevent embarrassing emissions. "With a bit
of the right advice we can get all that set aside. You'll have to stop bumming around the
world sooner or later, anyway. Grow up, get responsible, and do the right thing. This is
hurting Joe and Sue; they don't understand what you're about."
Manfred bites his tongue to stifle his first response, then refills his coffee cup and takes

another mouthful. His heart does a flip-flop: She's challenging him again, always trying
to own him. "I work for the betterment of everybody, not just some narrowly defined
national interest, Pam. It's the agalmic future. You're still locked into a pre-singularity
economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn't a problem
anymore - it's going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and
we can borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy!
They even found signs of smart matter - MACHOs, big brown dwarfs in the galactic halo,
leaking radiation in the long infrared - suspiciously high entropy leakage. The latest
figures say something like seventy percent of the baryonic mass of the M31 galaxy was
in computronium, two-point-nine million years ago, when the photons we're seeing now
set out. The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is a probably about a trillion times
bigger than the gap between us and a nematode worm. Do you have any idea what that
means?"
Pamela nibbles at a slice of crispbread, then graces him with a slow, carnivorous stare. "I
don't care: It's too far away to have any influence on us, isn't it? It doesn't matter whether
I believe in that singularity you keep chasing, or your aliens a thousand light-years away.
It's a chimera, like Y2K, and while you're running after it, you aren't helping reduce the
budget deficit or sire a family, and that's what I care about. And before you say I only
care about it because that's the way I'm programmed, I want you to ask just how dumb
you think I am. Bayes' Theorem says I'm right, and you know it."
"What you -" He stops dead, baffled, the mad flow of his enthusiasm running up against
the coffer dam of her certainty. "Why? I mean, why? Why on earth should what I do
matter to you?" Since you canceled our engagement, he doesn't add.
She sighs. "Manny, the Internal Revenue cares about far more than you can possibly
imagine. Every tax dollar raised east of the Mississippi goes on servicing the debt, did
you know that? We've got the biggest generation in history hitting retirement and the
cupboard is bare. We - our generation - isn't producing enough skilled workers to replace
the taxpayer base, either, not since our parents screwed the public education system and
outsourced the white-collar jobs. In ten years, something like thirty percent of our
population are going to be retirees or silicon rust belt victims. You want to see seventy
year olds freezing on street corners in New Jersey? That's what your attitude says to me:
You're not helping to support them, you're running away from your responsibilities right
now, when we've got huge problems to face. If we can just defuse the debt bomb, we
could do so much - fight the aging problem, fix the environment, heal society's ills.
Instead you just piss away your talents handing no-hoper Eurotrash get-rich-quick
schemes that work, telling Vietnamese zaibatsus what to