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eBook Category: Science Fiction Nebula Award(R) Nominee, Hugo Award Nominee
eBook Description: "Lobsters" introduces us to the permanently wired Manfred Macx, a youthful, self-assured (and self-doubting) cultural purveyor, the world's first "Venture Altruist," out to prove the validity of Win-Win synergistic scenarios while engaging in exotic drugs and sexual experimentation against a near future socio-political backdrop. Fleeing his dominatrix ex-wife, shifting world economies, trading his image on the "reputations market," and inventing extropianistic technologies are all in a day's work.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Asimov's, 2000
Fictionwise Release Date: June 2002

814 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [127 KB], eReader (PDB) [50 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [39 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [34 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [80 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [111 KB], hiebook (KML) [106 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [66 KB], iSilo (PDB) [32 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [41 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [55 KB]
Words: 10877
Reading time: 31-43 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

If this had been written twenty years ago, it would have been hailed as a masterpiece, the equal of Vernor Vinge's "True Names" and William Gibson's NEUROMANCER. As is, it has a slightly quaint fell in this post-cyberpunk world, but it's still a remarkable piece of work, and quite deservedly appeared on many "Year's Best" lists in 2002. -Robert J. Sawyer, Fictionwise Recommender

"I once heard NPR film critic Tom Shales refer to a movie as "so far over the top it makes all previous attempts at wretched excess seem like timid understatement." Shales should have saved his bons mots for "Lobsters." Charles Stross' story of free enterprise broker Manfred Macx rolls every post-cyberpunk theme in speculative fiction into one giant morass of New-New Economy biztalk, Euroweirdness, felching straws, and virtual crustaceans. In a word, this story rules. With a blinding buzz. There's a tale of love and bondage, and some interplanetary exploration lurking underneath all the flash-bangs going off, lending good bones to the distracting digital chameleon skin. It ain't deep, but it's world-spanning wide, and it's a hell of a ride. Just strap in tight and make a note of the nearest emergency exits before you read"--Jay Lake, Tangent Online (Learn more about Tangent Online, the Internet's leading SF&F short fiction review website)

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.

"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 reposess 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-SSSR. 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 hangup 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 thoroughly hypnotised 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.