"David Brin - Lungfish" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

Ursula frowned. "Don't be morbid, Gavin. Those are unfinished interstellar probes,
destroyed ages ago before they could be launched. We have no idea whether they were
sentient machines like you, or just tools, like this ship. You of all people should know better
than to go around anthropomorphizing alien artifacts."
Gavin's grimace was an android's equivalent of a sarcastic shrug. "If I use 'morbid' imagery,
whose fault is it?"
"What do you mean?" Ursula turned to face him.
"I mean you organic humans faced a choice, a hundred years ago, when you saw that
'artificial' intelligence was going to take off and someday leave the biological kind behind.
"You could have wrecked the machines, but that would have halted progress.
"You could have deep-programmed us with 'Fundamental Laws of Robotics'," Gavin sniffed.
"And had slaves far smarter than their masters.
"But what was it you organics finally did decide to do?"
Ursula knew it was no use answering, not when Gavin was in one of his moods. She
concentrated on piloting Hairy Thunderer closer to the asteroid.
"What was your solution to the problem of smart machines?" Gavin persisted. "You chose
to raise us as your children, that's what you did. You taught us to be just like you, and even
gave most of us humaniform bodies!"
Ursula's last partner -- a nice old 'bot and good chess player -- had warned, her when he
retired, not to hire an adolescent Class-AAA android fresh out of college. They could be as
difficult as any human teenager, he cautioned.
The worst part of it was that Gavin was right once again.
Despite genetic and cyborg improvements to the human animal, machines still seemed
fated to surpass biological men. For better or worse the decision had been made to raise
Class-AAA androids as human children, with all the same awkward irritations that implied.
Gavin shook his head in dramatic, superior sadness, exactly like a too-smart adolescent
who properly deserved to be strangled.
"Can you really object when I, a man-built, manlike android, anthropomorphize? We only
do as we've been taught, mistress."
His bow was eloquently sarcastic.
Ursula said nothing. It was hard, at times, to be entirely sure humanity had made the right
decision after all.
Below, across the face of the ravaged asteroid, stretched acres of great-strutted
scaffolding -- twisted and curled in ruin. Within the toppled derricks lay silent ranks of
shattered, unfinished starships, wrecked perhaps a hundred million years ago.
Ursula felt sure that theirs were the first eyes to look on this scene since some awful
force had wrought this havoc.
The ancient destroyers had to be long gone. Nobody had yet found a star machine even
close to active. Still, she took no chances, making certain the weapons console was vigilant.
The sophisticated, semi-sentient unit searched, but found no energy sources, no
movement among the ruined, unfinished star probes below. Instruments showed nothing but
cold rock and metal, long dead.
Ursula shook her head. She did not like such metaphors. Gavin's talk of "murdered babies"
didn't help one look at the ruins below as potentially profitable salvage.
It would not help her other vocation, either... the paper she had been working on for
months now... her carefully crafted theory about what had happened out here, so long ago.
"We have work to do," she told her partner. "Let's get on with it."
Gavin pressed two translucent hands together prayerfully. "Yes, Mommy. Your wish is my
program." He sauntered away to his own console and began deploying their remote exploration
drones.