"Paul Di Filippo - The Reluctant Book" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

Under the influence of various old-fashioned agents (chemicals,
enyzmes,
herbs, hormones, proteins, nutrients and drugs, administered by the
librarians through a combination of recipe and guesswork), as well as
through the instrument of dendritic relinkers (impossibly tiny units
operating in the bloodstream according to onboard algorithms), the
brains
of the books would shuffle and mutuate selected portions of their
contents
in a wild manner no artificial intelligence could duplicate. Outputting
the new semiotic units resulted, nine-hundred and ninety-nine times out
of
a thousand, in sheer gibberish. But the aleatory point-one percent of
worthwhile new information led down strange and curious paths.
A final procedure, undertaken when the librarian desired to rely on the
evolutionary wisdom of sexual recombination, consisted of breeding two
books. Neural changes were reverse-transcribed into the sperm or egg
cells
of a book, and the brain of the offspring consequently encoded the
random
reshuffling between parents, offering a new launching point into
uncharted
information-space. (Although juvenile books took about two years to
come
fully online neurally.)
The books had no conscious access to the texts they held. No corpus
callosum connected their isolated twin hemispheres. Their individual,
private mental life took place all on one competent side of their
severed
brains (protected from the various text-modifying reagents by arterial
filters), while the textual work went on unmonitored in the other half.
A
small inviolate interpretive nucleus in the textual half (several
hundred
thousand neurons) hooked into the book's hearing and speech circuits,
responding to verbal librarian commands and handling basic operating
systems functions.
But having no direct access to the contents of one half of their skulls
did not mean that the books could not sense in a subliminal manner
whether
 things were going well or not in the hidden arena. After all, the
textual
side of their brains lived off the shared bookish metabolism as much as
did the conscious half, and various feedback loops such as the enteric
system remained as grounds where the two halves could exchange wordless
data.
Being wiped left a book devastated.
Canto had not felt this way since leaving his publisher. In fact, he
had
never really felt this way at all. In his faraway youth, some five