by Brezhnevite dirigisme, and it’s no surprise that the wall’s crumbling — but it looks like they haven’t learned anything from the collapse of capitalism. They still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so angry that he wants to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at the would-be defector.
Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he’s going to patent next.
Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employee’s travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush jacket has sixty four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines who he’s never met. Law firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy does he patent a lot — although he always signs the rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project.
In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he’s the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e- business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain — not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki maths borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he’s the bastard spawn of Bill Gates byway of the Pope.
Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with wacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.
There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock — he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current. The Internal Revenue Service is investigating him continuously because they don’t believe his lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And there exist items that no money can’t buy: like the respect of his parents. He hasn’t spoken to them for three years: his father thinks he’s a hippie scrounger and his mother still hasn’t forgiven him for dropping out of his down-market Harvard emulation course. His fiancee 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 globe trying to persuade open source entrepreneurs to come home and go commercial 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, if it wasn’t for the dead kittens one of their followers — he presumes it’s one of their followers — 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. 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 Edinburgh. NASA still can’t put a man on the moon. Russia has reelected 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 government is outraged at the Baby Bills — who have automated their legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries, IPO’ing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that by the time the injunctions are signed the targets don’t exist anymore.
Welcome to the twenty-first century.
The permanent floating meatspace party has taken over the back of De Wildemann’s, a three hundred year old brown cafe with a beer menu 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 jetlag 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 Stallmanite!” 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 berlinnerweise, 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: lots of neurotransmitter precursors, 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 capacitative transfer bug on it, and all the handshake vCard’s that have visited the bar in the past three hours are queueing for attention. The air is full of bluetooth as he scrolls through a dizzying mess of public keys.
“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 the bar notices him for the first time, staring with suddenly wide eyes: nearly spills his Coke in a mad rush for the door.
“Be my guest,” says the guy with the dreads. Manfred slides the chair open then realizes that the other guy — immaculate double-breasted suit, sober tie, crew-cut — is a girl. Mr. Dreadlock nods. “You’re Macx? I figured it was about time we met.”
“Sure.” Manfred holds out a hand and they shake. Manfred realizes the hand belongs to Bob Franklin, a Research Triangle startup monkey with a vc track record, lately moving into micromachining and space technology: he made his first million two decades ago and now he’s a specialist in extropian investment fields. Manfred has known Bob for nearly a decade via a closed mailing list. The Suit silently slides a business card across the table; a little red devil brandishes a trident at him, flames jetting up around its feet. He takes the card, raises an eyebrow: “Annette Dimarcos? I’m pleased to meet you. Can’t say I’ve ever met anyone from Arianespace marketing before.”
She smiles, humorlessly; “that is convenient, all right. I have not the pleasure of meeting the famous venture altruist before.” Her accent is noticeably Parisian, a pointed reminder that she’s making a concession to him just by talking. Her camera earrings watch him curiously, encoding everything for the company channels.
“Yes, well.” He nods cautiously. “Bob. I assume you’re in on this ball?”
Franklin nods; beads clatter. “Yeah, man. Ever since the Teledesic smash it’s been, well, waiting. If you’ve got something for us, we’re game.”
