Read Accelerando for Free Online Page B

Something tells me you might have heard of it?”
    â€œMoscow.” Bob leans back against the wall. “How did you hear about it?”
    â€œThey phoned me.” With heavy irony: “It’s hard for an upload to stay subsentient these days, even if it’s just a crustacean. Your labs have a lot to answer for.”
    Pamela’s face is unreadable. “Bezier labs?”
    â€œThey escaped.” Manfred shrugs. “It’s not their fault. This Bezier dude. Is he by any chance ill?”
    â€œI—” Pamela stops. “I shouldn’t be talking about work.”
    â€œYou’re not wearing your chaperone now,” he nudges quietly.
    She inclines her head. “Yes, he’s ill. Some sort of brain tumor they can’t hack.”
    Franklin nods. “That’s the trouble with cancer—the ones that are left to worry about are the rare ones. No cure.”
    â€œWell, then.” Manfred chugs the remains of his glass of beer. “That explains his interest in uploading. Judging by the crusties, he’s on the right track. I wonder if he’s moved on to vertebrates yet?”
    â€œCats,” says Pamela. “He was hoping to trade their uploads to the Pentagon as a new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of income tax payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something before feeding it to their sensorium. The old kitten and laser pointer trick.”
    Manfred stares at her, hard. “That’s not very nice. Uploaded cats are a bad idea.”
    â€œThirty-million-dollar tax bills aren’t nice either, Manfred. That’s lifetime nursing-home care for a hundred blameless pensioners.”
    Franklin leans back, sourly amused, keeping out of the crossfire.
    â€œThe lobsters are sentient,” Manfred persists. “What about those poor kittens? Don’t they deserve minimal rights? How about you? How would you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer’s target of the hour is your heart’s desire? How would you like to wake up a thousand times, only to die again? Worse: The kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They’re too fucking dangerous—they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they’ll be too dangerous to have around. They’re prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they’re under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?”
    â€œBut they’re only uploads.” Pamela stares at him. “Software, right? You could reinstantiate them on another hardware platform, like, say, your Aineko. So the argument about killing them doesn’t really apply, does it?”
    â€œSo? We’re going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. I think we need to take a rain check on the utilitarian philosophy before it bites us on the cerebral cortex. Lobsters, kittens, humans—it’s a slippery slope.”
    Franklin clears his throat. “I’ll be needing an NDA and various due-diligence statements off you for the crusty pilot idea,” he says to Manfred. “Then I’ll have to approach Jim about buying the IP.”
    â€œNo can do.” Manfred leans back and smiles lazily. “I’m not going to be a party to depriving them of their civil rights. Far as I’m concerned, they’re free citizens. Oh, and I patented the whole idea of using lobster-derived AI autopilots for spacecraft this morning—it’s logged all over the place, all rights assigned to the FIF. Either you give them a contract of employment, or the whole thing’s off.”
    â€œBut they’re just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for God’s sake! I’m not even sure they are sentient—I mean, they’re, what, a ten-million-neuron network hooked up to a