"L. Warren Douglas - Simply Human" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglas L Warren)

Atop the gully, the oldster paused to catch his breath and to reflect. Two thousand years, more or less,
and at times like this it seemed like nothing had really changed. Two thousand years after the Fall of Man
there were still dogs, and leather-clad copsтАФhonches, they were called now. Their wide belts still
sagged with leather packets. They were still a-jingle with chains, their garments studded liberally with
silver bosses, their calf-height boots strapped and buckled. He recognized them for what they were:
shiny, timeless tools of intimidation and threat. Even after two thousand unsuccessful years, those cops
were still chasing the last black man on Earth.

Never mind that the steely-eyed Aryan types were only half-men spliced together from the genes of
military policemen and second-rate TV stars who looked good in uniformтАФany uniform, from a Roman
centurion's or a Nazi SS colonel's to an NYPD sergeant's. They were still cops.

Never mind that the polymorphic, mutated hounds had brains twice the size of an Alsatian's. They were
still dogs.

The odds were not much worse than they'd been in Detroit or LA. Those eight honches and all their
relatives were identical in mind as well as physiognomy, with none of the quirks or sparks of creativity
that had made real cops dangerous. What would fool one would fool all the others, and with two
millennia of practice, the old man had learned all the tricks.

Even the hounds were not perfect. They resulted from the chemical mutagens that had poisoned the
planet, not from careful design, and were cancer-ridden from the day they were whelped. Their hides
were ulcerated by desert sunlight and irritated by salty dust, and their clever brains never had time to
learn enough to make them truly deadly. Most lived only two or three years, and none reached five.
While the rest of the world, plants and animals alike, was recovering from the PCBs and DDTs and
polyfluorinated this'n that, the honches' unimaginative breeding programs had preserved their hounds'
imperfections along with their great size and their brains.

Rising stiffly to his feet, the oldster shook the dust from his faded robe. The mystic symbols adorning it
were as old as mankind, and were interspersed with benzene rings, flowchart conventions, and
microcircuitry diagrams. Only an educated man would have recognized any of them, and there had been
none on Earth for over a thousand years. He wrapped the robe over his all-weather Everlon┬оutility suit,
and strode off in search of his mules.

Memo:
KaledrinтАФsomething's wrong with this output. This is no classic myth. Who is this old man? What in the
name of Sapience is a "honch?" Have you been playing games with the biocybes' input again?
(Saphooth, Head Archivist,
Project MYTHIC)

Memo:
Patience, Your Intellect. This is preliminary stuff. Abrovid says that the biocybes are self-calibrating
quasi-organic computers. They need more input, more myths, before they develop the proper algorithms.
(Kaledrin, Senior Editor)



The mules had not strayed far from where he'd hobbled them. One was saddled, and the other bore