"CLARKE, Arthur C. - Odyssey 4 - 3001 The Final Odyssey" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clarke Arthur C)

Of course, he would be immune to such temptations! He would use this marvellous tool to learn more about the world of the Fourth Millennium, and to acquire in minutes new skills that would otherwise take years to master. Well - he might, just occasionally, use the Braincap purely for fun...

He had come to the edge of the forest, and was looking out across a wide river. Without hesitation, he walked into it, and felt no alarm as the water rose over his head. It did seem a little strange that he could continue breathing naturally, but he thought it much more remarkable that he could see perfectly in a medium where the unaided human eye could not focus. He could count every scale on the magnificent trout that went swimming past, apparently oblivious to this strange intruder...

Then, a mermaid- Well he had always wanted to meet one, but he had assumed that they were marine creatures. Perhaps they occasionally came upstream - like salmon, to have their babies? She was gone before he could question her, to confirm or deny this revolutionary theory.

The river ended in a translucent wall; he stepped through it on to the face of a desert, beneath a blazing sun. Its heat burned him uncomfortably - yet he was able to look directly into its noonday fury. He could even see, with unnatural clarity, an archipelago of sunspots near one limb. And - this was surely impossible - there was the tenuous glory of the corona, quite invisible except during total eclipse, reaching out like a swan's wings on either side of the Sun.

Everything faded to black: the haunting music returned, and with it the blissful coolness of his familiar room. He opened his eyes (had they ever been closed?) and found an expectant audience waiting for his reaction.

'Wonderful!' he breathed, almost reverently. 'Some of it seemed - well, realer than real!'

Then his engineer's curiosity, never far from the surface, started nagging him.

'Even that short demo must have contained an enormous amount of information. How's it stored?'

'In these tablets - the same your audio-visual system uses, but with much greater capacity.'

The Brainman handed Poole a small square, apparently made of glass, silvered on one surface; it was almost the same size as the computer diskettes of his youth, but twice the thickness. As Poole tilted it back and forth, trying to see into its transparent interior, there were occasional rainbow-hued flashes, but that was all.

He was holding, he realized, the end product of more than a thousand years of electro-optical technology - as well as other technologies unborn in his era. And it was not surprising that, superficially, it resembled closely the devices he had known. There was a convenient shape and size for most of the common objects of everyday life -knives and forks, books, hand-tools, furniture... and removable memories for computers.

'What's its capacity?' he asked. 'In my time, we were up to a terabyte in something this size. I'm sure you've done a lot better.'

'Not as much as you might imagine - there's a limit, of course, set by the structure of matter. By the way, what was a terabyte? Afraid I've forgotten.'

'Shame on you! Kilo, mega, giga, tera... that's ten to the twelfth bytes. Then the petabyte - ten to the fifteenth - that's as far as I ever got.'

'That's about where we start. It's enough to record everything any person can experience during one lifetime.'

It was an astonishing thought, yet it should not have been so surprising. The kilogram of jelly inside the human skull was not much larger than the tablet Poole was holding in his hand, and it could not possibly be as efficient a storage device - it had so many other duties to deal with.

'And that's not all,' the Brainman continued. 'With some data compression, it could store not only the memories - but the actual person.'

'And reproduce them again?'

'Of course; straightforward job of nanoassembly.'

So I'd heard, Poole told himself - but I never really believed it.

Back in his century, it seemed wonderful enough that the entire lifework of a great artist could be stored on a single small disk. And now, something no larger could hold - the artist as well.



7
Debriefing



'I'm delighted,' said Poole, 'to know that the Smithsonian still exists, after all these centuries.'