Charles Stross - Lobsters

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 50.98KB 19 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

This ebook is published by

Fictionwise Publications

www.fictionwise.com

Excellence in Ebooks

Visit www.fictionwise.com to find more titles by this and other top authors in Science Fiction, Fantasy,

Horror, Mystery, and other genres.

Fictionwise

www.Fictionwise.com

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies

of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email,

floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International

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 through his realtime glasses, grabs a pigeon, crops it and squirts at his website

to show he's arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realises; 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 litre 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 secenery. 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.

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-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. 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 personalise interface, make friends, no?

Have much to offer."

“Who are you?” Manfred repeats suspiciously.

“Am organisation 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, tenous as the sanity of the being on the other end of the line.

“Nyet—no, sorry. Am apologise 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: 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.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Charles Stross - Lobsters.pdf

共19页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Charles Stross - Lobsters

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: