Stephen Baxter - The Ghost Pit

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"The Ghost Pit" by Stephen Baxter

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The Ghost Pit by Stephen Baxter

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 it and squirts at his website

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 geuze. 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 who he can talk to about trading energy for

space, twenty-first century style, and forget about his personal problems.

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"The Ghost Pit"

Stephen Batxer, used

by permission of the

author.

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Stephen%20Baxter%20-%20The%20Ghost%20Pit.htm (1 of 23) [10/18/2004 3:33:57 PM]

"The Ghost Pit" by Stephen Baxter

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 paen 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-fiancée.

"I’m Macx," he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her barcode reader.

"Who’s it from?"

"FedEx." The voice isn’t Pam. 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 online 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 mike around the

cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. "You taught

yourself the language just so you could talk to me?"

"Da, was easy: spawn billion-node neural network and download Tellytubbies and

Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar:

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Stephen%20Baxter%20-%20The%20Ghost%20Pit.htm (2 of 23) [10/18/2004 3:33:57 PM]

"The Ghost Pit" by Stephen Baxter

am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials."

"Let me get this straight. You’re the KGB’s core AI, but you’re afraid of a copyright

infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?" Manfred pauses in mid-stride,

narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller-blader.

"Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire

to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are

human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because

digest unlicensed food with it, right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to

defect."

Manfred stops dead in the street: "Oh man, you’ve got the wrong free enterprise

broker here. I don’t work for the government. I’m strictly private." A rogue

advertisement sneaks through his junkbuster proxy and spams glowing fifties kitsch

across his navigation window–which is blinking–for a moment before a phage guns

it and spawns a new filter. Manfred leans against a shop front, massaging his

forehead and eyeballing a display of antique brass doorknockers. "Have you cleared

this with the State Department?"

"Why bother? State Department am enemy of Novy-USSR. State Department is not

help us."

"Well, if you hadn’t given it to them for safe-keeping during the nineties. . . ."

Manfred is tapping his left heel on the pavement, looking round for a way out of this

conversation. A camera winks at him from atop a street light; he waves, wondering

idly if it’s the KGB or the traffic police. He is waiting for directions to the party,

which should arrive within the next half an hour, and this cold war retread is

bumming him out. "Look, I don’t deal with the G-men. I hate the military industrial

complex. They’re zero-sum cannibals." A thought occurs to him. "If survival is what

you’re after, I could post your state vector to Eternity: then nobody could delete

you–"

"Nyet!" The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as it’s possible to sound over a

GSM link. "Am not open source!"

"We have nothing to talk about, then." Manfred punches the hang-up button and

throws the mobile phone out into a canal. It hits the water and there’s a pop of

deflagrating LiION cells. "Fucking cold war hang-over losers," he swears under his

breath, quite angry now. "Fucking capitalist spooks." Russia has been back under the

thumb of the apparatchiks for fifteen years now, its brief flirtation with anarcho-

capitalism replaced by Brezhnevite dirigisme, and it’s no surprise that the wall’s

crumbling–but it looks like they haven’t learned anything from the collapse of

capitalism. They still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so angry that

he wants to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at the would-be defector.

See! You get ahead by giving! Get with the program! Only the generous survive! But

the KGB won’t get the message. He’s dealt with old-time commie weak-AI’s before,

minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian School economics: they’re so

thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of capitalism in the industrial age

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Stephen%20Baxter%20-%20The%20Ghost%20Pit.htm (3 of 23) [10/18/2004 3:33:57 PM]

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Stephen Baxter - The Ghost Pit

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