“Very well,” Surplus said. “But when we do,
“My feeling is that the time has passed in which SF, in its predictive mode, can successfully utter jeremiads and point out the hazards in the road ahead. This has now become a pointless act from which all meaning has been drained, for the simple fact that the road ahead is almost nothing
Charles Stross
Lobsters
“Lobsters” is about the freedom that comes from continuous, disruptive change, the effort of societal structures to resist that change, and the human elan that attempts to evade constriction.
The fatal moment for a CP hero is when he has children. There are few children in CP stories, and fewer families. Heaven forbid that you might father or bear a child.
Whereas ?80s CP sees the marketplace as a destructive force, Stross is in tune with a ?90s embrace of entrepreneurial capitalism. The future is bright — even for digital lobsters.
Manfred’s on the road again, making strangers rich.
It’s a hot summer Tuesday and he’s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops it and squirts at his website to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: he’s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.
He wonders who it’s going to be.
Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij ’t IJ, watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter of lip-curlingly sour geuze. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. A couple of punks — maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar — are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. A tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge windmill overhead cast long cool shadows across the road. The windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is waiting for an invite to a party where he’s going to meet a man who he can talk to about trading energy for space, twenty-first century style, and forget about his personal problems.
He’s ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low bandwidth high sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when a woman walks up to him and says his name: “Manfred Macx?”
He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned smooth-running muscles clad in a paen to polymer technology: electric blue lycra and wasp-yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti-collision LEDS and tight-packed air bags. She holds out a box for him. He pauses a moment, struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam, his ex-fiancee.
“I’m Macx,” he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her barcode reader. “Who’s it from?”
“FedEx.” The voice isn’t Pam. She dumps the box in his lap, then she’s back over the low wall and onto her bicycle with her phone already chirping, disappearing in a cloud of spread-spectrum emissions.
Manfred turns the box over in his hands: it’s a disposable supermarket phone, paid for in cash: cheap, untraceable and efficient. It can even do conference calls, which makes it the tool of choice for spooks and grifters everywhere.
The box rings. Manfred rips the cover open and pulls out the phone, mildly annoyed. “Yes, who is this?”
The voice at the other end has a heavy Russian accent, almost a parody in this decade of cheap online translation services. “Manfred. Am please to meet you; wish to personalize interface, make friends, no? Have much to offer.”
“Who are you?” Manfred repeats suspiciously.
“Am organization formerly known as KGB dot RU.”
“I think your translator’s broken.” He holds the phone to his ear carefully, as if it’s made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as the sanity of the being on the other end of the line.
“Nyet — no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation software.
Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have capitalist semiotics and pay-per-use APIs. Must implement English more better, yes?”
Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. “You taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?”
“Da, was easy: spawn billion-node neural network and download
“Let me get this straight. You’re the KGB’S core AI, but you’re afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?” Manfred pauses in mid-stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided rollerblader.
“Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect.”
Manfred stops dead in the street: “Oh man, you’ve got the wrong free enterprise broker here. I don’t work for the government. I’m strictly private.” A rogue advertisement sneaks through his junkbuster proxy and spams glowing fifties kitsch across his navigation window — which is blinking — for a moment before a phage guns it and spawns a new filter. Manfred leans against a shop front, massaging his forehead and eyeballing a display of antique brass doorknockers. “Have you cleared this with the State Department?”
“Why bother? State Department am enemy of Novy-USSR. State Department is not help us.”
“Well, if you hadn’t given it to them for safe-keeping during the nineties….” Manfred is tapping his left heel on the pavement, looking round for a way out of this conversation. A camera winks at him from atop a street light; he waves, wondering idly if it’s the KGB or the traffic police. He is waiting for directions to the party, which should arrive within the next half an hour, and this cold war retread is bumming him out. “Look, I don’t deal with the G- men. I hate the military industrial complex. They’re zero-sum cannibals.” A thought occurs to him. “If survival is what you’re after, I could post your state vector to Eternity: then nobody could delete you — ”
“Nyet!” The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as it’s possible to sound over a GSM link. “Am not open source!”
“We have nothing to talk about, then.” 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 LiION cells.
