Athene Accelerants is owned by a shell company owned by the Italian Communist Party's pension trust. The point is, you're in the presence of one dot one dot one's chief operations officer.'
Pam looks annoyed. 'Puerile attempts to dodge responsibility -'
Annette clears her throat. 'Exactly who do you think you are trying to sue?' she asks Glashwiecz sweetly.
'Here we have laws about unfair restraint of trade. Also about foreign political interference, specifically in the financial affairs of an Italian party of government.'
'You wouldn't -'
'I would.' Manfred brushes his hands on his knees and stands up. 'Done, yet?' he asks the suitcase.
Muffled beeps, then a gravelly synthesized voice speaks. 'Uploads completed.'
'Ah, good.' He grins at Annette. 'Time for our next guests?'
On cue, the doorbell rings again. The guards sidle to either side of the door. Annette snaps her fingers, and it opens to admit a pair of smartly dressed thugs. It's beginning to get crowded in the living room.
'Which one of you is Macx?' snaps the older one of the two thugs, staring at Glashwiecz for no obvious reason. He hefts an aluminum briefcase. 'Got a writ to serve.'
'You'd be the CCAA?' asks Manfred.
'You bet. If you're Macx, I have a restraining order -'
Manfred raises a hand. 'It's not me you want,' he says. 'It's this lady.' He points at Pam, whose mouth opens in silent protest. 'Y'see, the intellectual property you're chasing wants to be free. It's so free that it's now administered by a complex set of corporate instruments lodged in the Netherlands, and the prime shareholder as of approximately four minutes ago is my soon-to-be-ex-wife Pamela, here.' He winks at Glashwiecz. 'Except she doesn't control anything.'
'Just what do you think you're playing at, Manfred?' Pamela snarls, unable to contain herself any longer.
The guards shuffle: The larger, junior CCAA enforcer tugs at his boss's jacket nervously.
'Well.' Manfred picks up his coffee and takes a sip. Grimaces. 'Pam wanted a divorce settlement, didn't she? The most valuable assets I own are the rights to a whole bunch of recategorized work-for-hire that slipped through the CCAA's fingers a few years back. Part of the twentieth century's cultural heritage that got locked away by the music industry in the last decade – Janis Joplin, the Doors, that sort of thing. Artists who weren't around to defend themselves anymore. When the music cartels went bust, the rights went for a walk. I took them over originally with the idea of setting the music free. Giving it back to the public domain, as it were.'
Annette nods at the guards, one of whom nods back and starts muttering and buzzing into a throat mike.
Manfred continues. 'I was working on a solution to the central planning paradox – how to interface a centrally planned enclave to a market economy. My good friend Gianni Vittoria suggested that such a shell game could have alternative uses. So I've not freed the music. Instead, I signed the rights over to various actors and threads running inside the agalmic holdings network – currently one million, forty-eight thousand, five hundred and seventy-five companies. They swap rights rapidly – the rights to any given song are resident in a given company for, oh, all of fifty milliseconds at a time. Now understand, I don't own these companies. I don't even have a financial interest in them anymore. I've deeded my share of the profits to Pam, here. I'm getting out of the biz, Gianni's suggested something rather more challenging for me to do instead.'
He takes another mouthful of coffee. The recording Mafiya goon glares at him. Pam glares at him. Annette stands against one wall, looking amused. 'Perhaps you'd like to sort it out between you?' he asks. Aside, to Glashwiecz: 'I trust you'll drop your denial of service attack before I set the Italian parliament on you? By the way, you'll find the book value of the intellectual property assets I deeded to Pamela – by the value these gentlemen place on them – is somewhere in excess of a billion dollars. As that's rather more than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of my assets, you'll probably want to look elsewhere for your fees.'
Glashwiecz stands up carefully. The lead goon stares at Pamela. 'Is this true?' he demands. 'This little squirt give you IP assets of Sony Bertelsmann Microsoft Music? We have claim! You come to us for distribution or you get in deep trouble.'
The second goon rumbles agreement: 'Remember, dose MP3s, dey bad for you health!'
Annette claps her hands. 'If you would to leave my apartment, please?' The door, attentive as ever, swings open: 'You are no longer welcome here!'
'This means you,' Manfred advises Pam helpfully.
'You bastard,' she spits at him.
Manfred forces a smile, bemused by his inability to respond to her the way she wants. Something's wrong, missing, between them. 'I thought you wanted my assets. Are the encumbrances too much for you?'
'You know what I mean! You and that two-bit Euro-whore! I'll nail you for child neglect!'
His smile freezes. 'Try it, and I'll sue you for breach of patent rights. My genome, you understand.'
Pam is taken aback by this. 'You patented your own genome? What happened to the brave new communist, sharing information freely?'
Manfred stops smiling. 'Divorce happened. And the Italian Communist Party happened.'
She turns on her heel and stalks out of the apartment bravely, tame attorney in tow behind her, muttering about class action lawsuits and violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The CCAA lawyer's tame gorilla makes a grab for Glashwiecz's shoulder, and the guards move in, hustling the whole movable feast out into the stairwell. The door slams shut on a chaos of impending recursive lawsuits, and Manfred breathes a huge wheeze of relief.
Annette walks over to him and leans her chin on the top of his head. 'Think it will work?' she asks.
'Well, the CCAA will sue the hell out of the company network for a while if they try to distribute by any channel that isn't controlled by the Mafiya. Pam gets rights to all the music, her settlement, but she can't sell it without going through the mob. And I got to serve notice on that legal shark: If he tries to take me on he's got to be politically bullet-proof. Hmm. Maybe I ought not to plan on going back to the USA this side of the singularity.'
'Profits,' Annette sighs, 'I do not easily understand this way of yours. Or this apocalyptic obsession with singularity.'
'Remember the old aphorism, if you love something, set it free? I freed the music.'
'But you didn't! You signed rights over -'
'But first I uploaded the entire stash to several cryptographically anonymized public network filesystems over the past few hours, so there'll be rampant piracy. And the robot companies are all set to automagically grant any and every copyright request they receive, royalty-free, until the goons figure out how to hack them. But that's not the point. The point is abundance. The Mafiya can't stop it being distributed. Pam is welcome to her cut if she can figure an angle – but I bet she can't. She still believes in classical economics, the allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Information doesn't work that way. What matters is that people will be able to hear the music
– instead of a Soviet central planning system, I've turned the network into a firewall to protect freed intellectual property.'
'Oh, Manfred, you hopeless idealist.' She strokes his shoulder. 'Whatever for?'
'It's not just the music. When we develop a working AI or upload minds we'll need a way of defending it against legal threats. That's what Gianni pointed out to me…'
He's still explaining to her how he's laying the foundations for the transhuman explosion due early in the next decade when she picks him up in both arms, carries him to her bedroom, and commits outrageous acts of tender intimacy with him. But that's okay. He's still human, this decade.
This, too, will pass, thinks the bulk of his metacortex. And it drifts off into the net to think deep thoughts elsewhere, leaving his meatbody to experience the ancient pleasures of the flesh set free.
Chapter 3: Tourist
