Accelerando
PART 1: Slow Takeoff
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."
– Edsger W. Dijkstra
Chapter 1: 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 the shot, and squirts it at his weblog 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 gueuze. 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 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.
These are the very first parts of the Accelerando novel.
A novel about #Science #Fiction #SciFi, #Transhumanism and some "foreign" concepts of living in the #far #future. ;)
Legal info:
A novel by Charles Stross
Copyright © Charles Stross, 2005
Published by
Ace Books, New York, July 2005, ISBN 0441012841
Orbit Books, London, August 2005, ISBN 1841493902
Copyright © Charles Stross, 2005.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
You are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work under the following conditions:
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.
If you are in doubt about any proposed reuse, you should contact the author via: www.accelerando.org.
