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"The Dog Said Bow-Wow" by Michael Swanwick
"The Dog Said Bow-Wow" by Michael Swanwick
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The Dog Said Bow-Wow by Michael Swanwick
Manfred’s on the road again, making strangers rich.
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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,
Copyright
"The Dog Said Bow-
Wow" Copyright ©
2002 by Michael
Swanwick, used by
permission of the
author.
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"The Dog Said Bow-Wow" by Michael Swanwick
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-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
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"The Dog Said Bow-Wow" by Michael Swanwick
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.
"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
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"The Dog Said Bow-Wow" by Michael Swanwick
thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of capitalism in the industrial age
that they can’t surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term.
Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he’s going to
patent next.
Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational
consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a
Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employee’s
travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His
bush jacket has sixty four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per
pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media
Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines
who he’s never met. Law firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis,
and boy does he patent a lot–although he always signs the rights over to the Free
Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project.
In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he’s the guy who patented the business
practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property
regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He’s the guy who patented using
genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial
description of a problem domain–not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all
possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are
illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the
legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in
Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of
crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a
kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki maths
borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is
an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there
are communists in Prague who think he’s the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of
the Pope.
Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with wacky
but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He
does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash;
money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.
There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of
future shock–he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of
AV content every day just to stay current. The Internal Revenue Service is
investigating him continuously because they don’t believe his lifestyle can exist
without racketeering. And there exist items that no money can’t buy: like the respect
of his parents. He hasn’t spoken to them for three years: his father thinks he’s a
hippie scrounger and his mother still hasn’t forgiven him for dropping out of his
down-market Harvard emulation course. His fiancée and sometime dominatrix
Pamela threw him over six months ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear on.
(Ironically, she’s a headhunter for the IRS, jetting all over the globe trying to
persuade open source entrepreneurs to come home and go commercial for the good
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"The Dog Said Bow-Wow" by Michael Swanwick
of the Treasury department.) To cap it all, the Southern Baptist Conventions have
denounced him as a minion of Satan on all their websites. Which would be funny, if
it wasn’t for the dead kittens one of their followers–he presumes it’s one of their
followers–keeps mailing him.
Manfred drops in at his hotel suite, unpacks his Aineko, plugs in a fresh set of cells
to charge, and sticks most of his private keys in the safe. Then he heads straight for
the party, which is currently happening at De Wildemann’s; it’s a twenty minute
walk and the only real hazard is dodging the trams that sneak up on him behind the
cover of his moving map display.
Along the way his glasses bring him up to date on the news. Europe has achieved
peaceful political union for the first time ever: they’re using this unprecedented state
of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas. In San Diego, researchers are
uploading lobsters into cyberspace, starting with the stomatogastric ganglion, one
neuron at a time. They’re burning GM cocoa in Belize and books in Edinburgh.
NASA still can’t put a man on the moon. Russia has re-elected the communist
government with an increased majority in the Duma; meanwhile in China fevered
rumors circulate about an imminent re-habilitation, the second coming of Mao, who
will save them from the consequences of the Three Gorges disaster. In business
news, the US government is outraged at the Baby Bills–who 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
injunctions are signed the targets don’t exist any more.
Welcome to the twenty-first century.
The permanent floating meatspace party has taken over the back of De
Wildemann’s, a three hundred year old brown café with a beer menu that runs to
sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale beer. The air is thick with
the smells of tobacco, brewer’s yeast, and melatonin spray: half the dotters are
nursing monster jetlag hangovers, and the other half are babbling a eurotrash creole
at each other while they work on the hangover. "Man did you see that? He looks like
a Stallmanite!" exclaims one whitebread hanger-on who’s currently propping up the
bar. Manfred slides in next to him, catches the bartender’s eye.
"Glass of the berlinnerweise, please," he says.
"You drink that stuff?" asks the hanger-on, curling a hand protectively around his
Coke: "man, you don’t want to do that! It’s full of alcohol!"
Manfred grins at him toothily. "Ya gotta keep your yeast intake up: lots of
neurotransmitter precursors, phenylalanine and glutamate."
"But I thought that was a beer you were ordering. . . ."
Manfred’s away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels the more
popular draught items in from the cask storage in back; one of the hipper floaters has
planted a capacitative transfer bug on it, and all the handshake vCard’s that have
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