Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when one of the great and the good is assassinated. You can kill a politician, but their ideas usually live on. They have a life of their own. How much more dangerous, then, the ideas of mathematicians? The announcement of the solution to the traveling salesman problem heralds the imminent destruction of humanity. No more salesman; no more problem. The story begins when a computer programmer is notified by RSS feed that all NP-complete problems lie in P, and thus computer encryption is forever compromised. Knowing the disaster for what it is, he flees, but with this being such a hard take-off, he might not make it.
Stross' ideas are hard, cold, pure, and funny, but it is his storytelling - the effectiveness of the complete tale - that elevates his ideas into science-fiction excellence. Stross goes from alpha to omega faster than you can guess, and in so doing delivers a solid entry into SF's growing dialogue about the Singularity. "Antibodies" brings to mind Isaac Asimov's similarly elegant short story "Living Space".
