Accelerando

The resident backs into the hostel: 'Well then, come in, sit yeself down and tell me all about it.'

Macx bounces into the room with his brain wide open to a blizzard of pie charts and growth curves, documents spawning in the bizarre phase-space of his corporate management software. 'I've got a deal you're not going to believe,' he reads, gliding past notice boards upon which Church circulars are staked out to die like exotic butterflies, stepping over rolled-up carpets and a stack of laptops left over from a jumble sale, past the devotional radio telescope that does double duty as Mrs. Muirhouse's back-garden bird bath. 'You've been here five years and your posted accounts show you aren't making much money – barely keeping the rent up. But you're a shareholder in Scottish Nuclear Electric, right? Most of the church funds are in the form of a trust left to the church by one of your congregants when she went to join the omega point, right?'

'Er.' The minister looks at him oddly. 'I cannae comment on the church eschatological investment trust.

Why d'ye think that?'

They fetch up, somehow, in the minister's office. A huge, framed rendering hangs over the back of his threadbare office chair: the collapsing cosmos of the End Times, galactic clusters rotten with the Dyson spheres of the eschaton falling toward the big crunch. Saint Tipler the Astrophysicist beams down from above with avuncular approval, a ring of quasars forming a halo around his head. Posters proclaim the new Gospel: COSMOLOGY IS

BETTER THAN GUESSWORK, and LIVE FOREVER WITHIN MY LIGHT CONE. 'Can I get ye anything? Cup of tea? Fuel cell charge point?' asks the minister.

'Crystal meth?' asks Macx, hopefully. His face falls as the minister shakes his head apologetically. 'Aw, dinnae worry, Ah wis only joshing.' He leans forward: 'Ah know a' aboot yer plutonium futures speculation,' he hisses. A finger taps his stolen spectacles in an ominous gesture: 'These dinnae just record, they think. An' Ah ken where the money's gone.'

'What have ye got?' the minister asks coldly, any indication of good humor flown. 'I'm going to have to edit down these memories, ye bastard. I thought I'd forgotten all about that. Bits of me aren't going to merge with the godhead at the end of time now, thanks to you.'

'Keep yer shirt on. Whit's the point o' savin' it a' up if ye nae got a life worth living? Ye reckon the big yin's nae gonnae unnerstan' a knees up?'

'What do ye want?'

'Aye, well,' Macx leans back, aggrieved. Ah've got -' He pauses. An expression of extreme confusion flits over his head. 'Ah've got lobsters,' he finally announces. 'Genetically engineered uploaded lobsters tae run yer uranium reprocessing plant.' As he grows more confused, the glasses' control over his accent slips: 'Ah wiz gonnae help yiz oot ba showin ye how ter get yer dosh back whir it belong…' A strategic pause: 'so ye could make the council tax due date. See, they're neutron-resistant, the lobsters. No, that cannae be right. Ah wiz gonnae sell ye somethin' ye cud use fer' – his face slumps into a frown of disgust – ' free?'

Approximately thirty seconds later, as he is picking himself up off the front steps of the First Reformed Church of Tipler, Astrophysicist, the man who would be Macx finds himself wondering if maybe this high finance shit isn't as easy as it's cracked up to be. Some of the agents in his glasses are wondering if elocution lessons are the answer; others aren't so optimistic.

* * *

Getting back to the history lesson, the prospects for the decade look

mostly medical.

A few thousand elderly baby boomers are converging on Tehran for

Woodstock Four. Europe is desperately trying to import eastern European

nurses and home-care assistants; in Japan, whole agricultural villages lie

vacant and decaying, ghost communities sucked dry as cities slurp

people in like residential black holes.

A rumor is spreading throughout gated old-age communities in the

American Midwest, leaving havoc and riots in its wake: Senescence is

caused by a slow virus coded into the mammalian genome that evolution

hasn't weeded out, and rich billionaires are sitting on the rights to a

vaccine. As usual, Charles Darwin gets more than his fair share of the

blame. (Less spectacular but more realistic treatments for old age -

telomere reconstruction and hexose-denatured protein reduction – are

available in private clinics for those who are willing to surrender their

pensions.) Progress is expected to speed up shortly, as the fundamental

patents in genomic engineering begin to expire; the Free Chromosome

Foundation has already published a manifesto calling for the creation of

an intellectual-property-free genome with improved replacements for all

commonly defective exons.

Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are

well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology

matures, death – with its draconian curtailment of property and voting

rights – will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.

For a small extra fee, most veterinary insurance policies now cover

cloning of pets in the event of their accidental and distressing death.

Human cloning, for reasons nobody is very clear on anymore, is still

illegal in most developed nations – but very few judiciaries push for

mandatory abortion of identical twins.

Some commodities are expensive: the price of crude oil has broken

eighty Euros a barrel and is edging inexorably up. Other commodities are

cheap: computers, for example. Hobbyists print off weird new processor

architectures on their home inkjets; middle-aged folks wipe their

backsides with diagnostic paper that can tell how their cholesterol levels

are tending.

The latest casualties of the march of technological progress are: the high-

street clothes shop, the flushing water closet, the Main Battle Tank, and

the first generation of quantum computers. New with the decade are

cheap enhanced immune systems, brain implants that hook right into the

Chomsky organ and talk to their owners through their own speech

centers, and widespread public paranoia about limbic spam.

Nanotechnology has shattered into a dozen disjoint disciplines, and

skeptics are predicting that it will all peter out before long. Philosophers

have ceded qualia to engineers, and the current difficult problem in AI is

getting software to experience embarrassment.

Fusion power is still, of course, fifty years away.

* * *

The Victorians are morphing into goths before Manfred's culture-shocked eyes.

'You looked lost,' explains Monica, leaning over him curiously. 'What's with your eyes?'

'I can't see too well,' Manfred tries to explain. Everything is a blur, and the voices that usually chatter incessantly in his head have left nothing behind but a roaring silence. 'I mean, someone mugged me. They took -'

His hand closes on air: something is missing from his belt.

Monica, the tall woman he first saw in the hospital, enters the room. What she's wearing indoors is skintight, iridescent and, disturbingly, she claims is a distributed extension of her neuroectoderm. Stripped of costume-drama