From Accelerando, page 335, by Charles Stross:
Some activities superficially familiar to you are merely stupid and should be avoided for your safety, although they are not illegal as such. These include: giving your bank account details to the son of the Nigerian Minister of Finance; buying title to bridges, skyscrapers, spacecraft, planets, or other real assets; murder; selling your identity; and entering into financial contracts with entities running Economics 2.0 or higher.
Good advice never goes out of style.
I was on the MAX this morning when I read the above paragraph and laughed out loud. It’s a good thing the MAX is a moving Wall-Mart at the best of times. My non sequitur outburst was drowned out by the loud mumblings of the grubby homeless guy in the middle of the train who smelled vaguely of Colt 45 and stale cheese.
Actually, there was no homeless guy then. It’s a measure of the level of acceptance to strange behavior that no one looked up when I laughed. There HAS been grubby homeless people who smell vaguely of Colt 45 and stale cheese on the MAX in the past, as I’m sure there will be in the future. Their behavior has run the gamut from merely silent to overtly loud and obnoxious. For those of us who can be considered regular MAX commuters, one fairly clean and clean cut guy laughing out loud to a book he’s reading is Iowa normal.
The book itself is incredibly good. I highly recommend it to you if you like the sort of science fiction that takes nanotechnology and artificial intelligence and stretches it beyond recognizability. I’ve read plenty of books where people augment themselves through artificial implants and genetic manipulation, but this one turns it up to 11. If you’ve read any William Gibson, or Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash or The Diamond Age, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, well, you have a lot of catching up to do, don’t you.
I won’t mince words here, even I found it to be a serious mind fuck at times. I actually started reading it last August and had to put it down because the ideas were just so OUT THERE. Yet, at the same time, the place where the ideas started from were based in the technology we all take for granted NOW that the dichotomy of normalcy / weirdness in the story made me feel like I was thinking in two directions at once. In fact, I KNOW I was thinking in two directions at once.
That quote from the book comes near the end and is part of a FAQ to individuals who have been re-simulated or resurrected into artificial habitats that float on Saturn’s upper atmosphere. There is no other place to go, the inner planets have been deconstructed to provide raw computing power to the Matrioshka brain that now exists where Earth used to be.
Yeah. I know. Gives you pause to think that people think of this stuff. Blame it on the Vinge Singularity.