"David Brin - Reality Check" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

particular musical tradition. Powerful economic factors encourage early composers to explore
this invention-space before others can, using up the best and simplest melodies. Later
generations will attribute this musical fecundity to genius, not the sheer luck of being first.
The same holds for all forms of creativity. The first teller of a Frankenstein story won
plaudits for originality. Later, it became a clichщ.
What does this have to do with the mighty race?
Having clawed their way from blunt ignorance to planetary mastery, they abruptly faced
an overshoot crisis. Vast numbers of their kind strained their world's carrying capacity. While
some prescribed retreating into a mythical, pastoral past, most saw salvation in creativity.
They passed generous copyright and patent laws, educated their youth, taught them
irreverence toward tradition and hunger for the new. Burgeoning information systems spread
each innovation, fostering experimentation and exponentiating creativity. They hoped that
enough breakthroughs might thrust their species past the looming crisis, to a new eden of
sustainable wealth, sanity and universal knowledge!
Exponentiating creativity... universal knowledge.
A few of them realized that those words, too, were clues.

Have you wakened yet?
Some never do. The dream is so pleasant: to extend a limited sub-portion of yourself into
a simulated world and pretend for a while that you are blissfully less. Less than an omniscient
being. Less than a godlike descendant of those mighty people.
Those lucky people. Those mortals, doomed to die, and yet blessed to have lived in that
narrow time.
A time of drama.
A time when they unleashed the Cascade -- that orgiastic frenzy of discovery -- and used
up the most precious resource of all. The possible.

The last of their race died in the year 2174, with the failed last rejuvenation of Robin
Chen. After that, no one born in the Twentieth Century remained alive on Reality Level Prime.
Only we, their children, linger to endure the world they left us. A lush, green, placid world we
call The Wasteland.
Do you remember now? The irony of Robin's last words before she died, bragging over the
perfect ecosystem and decent society -- free of all disease and poverty -- that her kind
created for us after the struggles of the mid-Twenty-First Century? A utopia of sanity and
knowledge, without war or injustice.
Do you recall Robin's final plaint as she mourned her coming death? Can you recollect how
she called us "gods," jealous over our immortality, our instant access to all knowledge, our
machine-enhanced ability to cast thoughts far across the cosmos?
Our access to eternity.
Oh, spare us the envy of those mighty mortals, who died so smugly, leaving us in this
state!
Those wastrels who willed their descendants a legacy of ennui, with nothing, nothing at all
to do.

Your mind is rejecting the wake-up call. You will not, or cannot, look into your blind spot
for the exit protocols. It may be that we waited too long. Perhaps you are lost to us.
This happens more and more, as so much of our population wallows in simulated,
marvelously limited sub-lives, where it is possible to experience danger, excitement, even
despair. Most of us choose the Transition Era as a locus for our dreams -- around the end of
the last millennium -- a time of suspense and drama, when it looked more likely that humanity