Charlie Stross trans-Singular Ity book

http://www.accelerando.org/

free EBook http://www.accelerando.org/book/

started out as "Lobsters!" story

excerpt z2005-09-20- Stross Accelerando Resimulated

technical companion http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Accelerando_Technical_Companion

Manfred Macx 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 (Universal Inbox). 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.

The divested Micro Soft divisions have automated their legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries, IPO-ing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that, by the time the windfall tax demands are served, the targets don't exist anymore, even though the same staff are working on the same software in the same Mumbai cubicle farms. (Network Economy)

One of his e-mail accounts is halfway to the moon with automatic messages, companies with names like agalmic.holdings.root.8E.F0 screaming for the attention of their transitive director. Each of these companies - and there are currently more than sixteen thousand of them, although the herd is growing day by day - has three directors and is the director of three other companies. Each of them executes a script in a functional language Manfred invented; the directors tell the company what to do, and the instructions include orders to pass instructions on to their children. In effect, they are a flock of Cellular Automata, like the cells in Conway's [Game Of Life], only far more complex and powerful. Manfred's companies form a programmable grid. Some of them are armed with capital in the form of patents Manfred filed, then delegated rather than passing on to one of the Free Foundations. Some of them are effectively nontrading, but occupy directorial roles. Their corporate functions (such as filing of accounts and voting in new directors) are all handled centrally through his company-operating framework, and their trading is carried out via several of the more popular [B2B] enabler dot-coms. Internally, the companies do other, more obscure load-balancing computations, processing [Resource Allocation] problems like a classic state Central Planning system. None of which explains why fully half of them have been hit by lawsuits in the past twenty-two hours.

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