ACCELERANDO
***********

A NOVEL BY CHARLES STROSS

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. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned
smooth-running muscles clad in a paean to polymer technology: electric blue
lycra and wasp yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti collision LEDs
and tight-packed air bags. She holds out a box for him. He pauses a moment,
struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam, his ex-fiance.


"I'm Macx," he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her bar-code
reader. "Who's it from?"


"FedEx." The voice isn't Pam's. She dumps the box in his lap, then she's back
over the low wall and onto her bicycle with her phone already chirping,
disappearing in a cloud of spread-spectrum emissions.


Manfred turns the box over in his hands: it's a disposable supermarket phone,
paid for in cash - cheap, untraceable, and efficient. It can even do conference
calls, which makes it the tool of choice for spooks and grifters everywhere.


The box rings. Manfred rips the cover open and pulls out the phone, mildly
annoyed. "Yes? Who is this?"


The voice at the other end has a heavy Russian accent, almost a parody in this
decade of cheap on-line translation services. "Manfred. Am please to meet you.
Wish to personalize interface, make friends, no? Have much to offer."


"Who are you?" Manfred repeats suspiciously.


"Am organization formerly known as KGB dot RU."


"I think your translator's broken." He holds the phone to his ear carefully, as
if it's made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as the sanity of the being on the
other end of the line.


"Nyet - no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation software.
Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have capitalist semiotics and
pay-per-use APIs. Must implement English more better, yes?"


Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk
along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat