"Charles de Lint - Spirits in the Wires" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Lint Charles)

Me.
A stranger.
But I knew every inch of that faceтАФthe blue eyes, the shape of the nose and lips, the way
the blonde hair fell in a sleepy tangle on either side of it.
I swung my feet to the floor and stood up. I pulled the flannel nightie I was wearing over my
head and faced the mirror again.
I knew this body as well.
Me.
Still a stranger.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. Plucking the nightie from the floor, I hugged it to my
chest.
An odd notion came into my head. I had a sudden impression of some other place, a
pixelated realm that lay somewhere in cyberspaceтАФthat mysterious borderland of electrons
and data pulses that exists in between all the computers that make up the World Wide Web.

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/de%20Lint,%20Charles%20-%20Spirits%20in%20the%20Wires%20(v1.0).html (10 of 346)8-12-2006 23:50:50
SPIRITS IN THE WIRES by Charles de Lint


I could almost see this deep forest of sentences and words secreted in a nexus of the Web,
and as I did, I sensed some enormous entity swelling up out of it, a leviathan of impossible
proportions that had no physical presence, but it did have a vast and incomprehensible soul.
The thought came to me that I was a piece of that entity. That I had been broken off from
it, born there in that forest of words and sent away. That I was separate, but also still a part
of that other. That it had made me up through some curious technopagan ritual, given me
flesh and then set me free to make a life for myself in the world beyond the endless reaches
of cyberspace.
I know. It sounds like science fiction. And maybe it was. But it was magic, too. How else can
you explain a computer program that was self-aware? Some voodoo spirit, itself made of
nothing but ones and zeros, that was able to create a living being out of neurons and
electricity and air and send it off into the world to be its own being.
The island of calm IтАЩd sensed before whispered to me through this whirlpool of disquiet and
speculation.
In a normal person, it said, what you are experiencing would be considered madness.
But I already knew I wasnтАЩt normal. I wasnтАЩt even sure I was a person.
Finally, I lay back down on the bed and closed my eyes.
Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe when I woke up in the morning IтАЩd remember my life. IтАЩd
be myself and just shake my head as I went about my morning, dimly recalling the very
strange dream IтАЩd had the night before.


But in the morning, nothing had really changed. Only the force of what I was feeling had.
I could see normally as soon as I opened my eyes. The sensations of disassociation and
confusion IтАЩd experienced in the middle of the night were still there, but they werenтАЩt as
intense.
This time I was able to get up and get as far as the door of the bedroom. I looked down the
hallway into familiar/unfamiliar territory. I/my body had to peeтАФbut it was something I
only knew from the pressure in my bladder. I knew the mechanics of how I would do it. I
knew where to go, to lift the lid, and sit down. But I couldnтАЩt seem to call up one memory of
the actual experience. The only real, tactile memories I had were of waking last night.