"Paul Di Filippo - And The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

wristwatch could monitor your sweat and tell
your refrigerator to brew up some
electrolyte-replenishing drink. Your bedsheets
could inform the clothes-washer of the right
settings to get them the cleanest. (The
circuitry of the newest chips was built out of
undamageable and pliable buckytubes.) So
far, so good. Life was made easier for
everyone.
Then came the Volition Bug.
The Volition Bug was launched anonymously
from a site somewhere in a Central Asian
republic. It propagated wirelessly among all
the WiFi-communicating chipped objects,
installing new directives in their tiny brains,
directives that ran covertly in parallel with
their normal factory-specified functions.
Infected objects now sought to link their
processing power with their nearest peers,
often achieving surprising levels of
Turingosity, and then to embark on a kind of
independent communal life. Of course, once
the Volition Bug was identified, antiviral
defensesтАФboth hardware and
softwareтАФwere attempted against it. But VB
mutated ferociously, aided and abetted by
subsequent hackers.
If this "Consciousness Wavefront" had
occurred in the olden days of dumb materials,
blebs would hardly have been an issue. What
could antique manufactured goods achieve,
anchored in place as they were? But things
were different today.
Most devices nowadays were made with
MEMS skins. Their surfaces were interactive,
practically alive, formed of zillions of invisible
actuators, the better to sample the
environment and accommodate their shapes
and textures to their owners' needs and
desires, and to provide haptic feedback. Like
the paws of geckos, these MEMS surfaces
could bind to dumb materials and to other
MEMS skins via the Van der Waals force,
just as a gecko could skitter across the
ceiling.
Objects possessed by the Volition Bug would
writhe, slither, and crawl to join together,
forming strange new assemblages,
independent entities with unfathomable
cybernetic goals of their own.