“Hmm.” The Teledesic satellite cluster was killed by cheap balloons and slightly less cheap high-altitude solar-powered drones with spread-spectrum laser relays. “The depression’s got to end some time: but,” a nod to Annette from Paris, “with all due respect, I don’t think the break will involve one of the existing club carriers.”
“Arianespace is forward-looking. We face reality. The launch cartel cannot stand. Bandwidth is not the only market force in space. We must explore new opportunities. I personally have helped us diversify into submarine reactor engineering, microgravity nanotechnology fabrication, and hotel management.” Her face is a well-polished mask as she recites the company line: “we are more flexible than the American space industry….”
Manfred shrugs. “That’s as may be.” He sips his Berlinerweisse slowly as she launches into a long, stilted explanation of how Arianespace is a diversified dot com with orbital aspirations, a full range of merchandising spin- offs, Bond movie sets, and a promising motel chain in French Guyana. Occasionally he nods.
Someone else sidles up to the table; a pudgy guy in an outrageously loud Hawaiian shirt with pens leaking in abreast pocket, and the worst case of ozone-hole burn Manfred’s seen in ages. “Hi, Bob,” says the new arrival. “How’s life?”
“’S good.” Franklin nodes at Manfred; “Manfred, meet Ivan MacDonald. Ivan, Manfred. Have a seat?” He leans over. “Ivan’s a public arts guy. He’s heavily into extreme concrete.”
“Rubberized concrete,” Ivan says, slightly too loudly. “Pink rubberized concrete.”
“Ah!” He’s somehow triggered a priority interrupt: Annette from Ariannespace drops out of marketing zombiehood, sits up, and shows signs of possessing a non-corporate identity: “you are he who rubberized the Reichstag, yes? With the supercritical carbon dioxide carrier and the dissolved polyme-thoxysilanes?” She claps her hands: “wonderful!”
“He rubberized
Franklin shrugs. “Limestone, concrete, he doesn’t seem to know the difference. Anyway, Germany doesn’t have an independent government any more, so who’d notice?”
“I thought I was thirty seconds
“I’m going to rubberize Three Gorges!” Ivan explains loudly.
Just then a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred’s head and sends clumps of humongous pixellation 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 make-up 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 super-oxides: just inhaling over it makes Manfred feel like there’s a fire alarm in his nose screaming
“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 AI? Recent model, one careful owner, slightly paranoid but basically sound?”
“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; he raises his glass, too. “Lots of launch pads 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. 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!”
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 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 more than ten petaflops — about an order of magnitude below 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 AI’S 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, Aineko mewls for attention and strops her head against his ankle. He bends down and pets her, sheds 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 hammer-blow 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 that run 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 in whose Cartesian theater 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 them forth to buy clothing. His glasses remind him that he’s six hours behind the moment and needs to catch up urgently; his teeth ache in his gums and his tongue feels like a forest floor that’s been visited with Agent
