"Egan, Greg - TAP" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)
A TAP user could interpret a standard VR sensorium -- but there was, deliberately, no provision for interacting in the conventional way with a nonexistent environment. Immersive VR implants temporarily paralysed the organic body and diverted motor impulses from the brain into a fully computerized somatic model: a virtual body which could function as part of the virtual environment -- subject to the environment's rules. In contrast, a TAP user's idea of interaction was more along the lines of rethinking the whole sensorium and spitting it back out, or responding with something entirely different -- arguing with the whole premise, instead of passively accepting it. A VR user had little choice but to suspend disbelief, or quit -- a full-sense environment, surreal or not, was always compelling -- but a TAP user could deal with the same kind of information with as much or as little detachment as he or she desired. Words in TAP -- which included the entire sensorium-descriptor vocabulary of VR -- could evoke images ten thousand times more vivid and precise than the densest poetic English ... or they could be held at arm's length and scrutinized dispassionately, as easily as any English-speaker could contemplate the phrase "a flash of blinding radiance" or "the overpowering stench of ammonia" without experiencing anything of the kind. In the jargon of the implant's designers -- English words, predating TAP itself -- every TAP word could be scanned (understood analytically), or played (experienced subjectively) -- or interpreted in a manner lying anywhere at all between those two extremes.
In one respect, though, TAP could be more immersive than the most authoritarian VR: it could induce emotional states directly. VR was confined to pure sense data (albeit often manipulative in the extreme), but in Total Affect Protocol there were words for <
The user's power to keep the language at a distance remained, of course -- and the TAP word for <
Still, although the literature was blithely reassuring on this point, in the end it came down to a question of trusting the manufacturers and the regulators. I didn't doubt that, in theory, a TAP chip could be designed which was no more likely than the unmodified human brain to strike the user dead if the word for <
Grace Sharp had been the oldest of the ninety thousand TAP speakers on the planet, and reputedly one of the most proficient -- but whether proficiency implied more risk, from a greater vocabulary, or less, due to better control of the language, I couldn't say.
By half past seven, I'd had enough of wading through papers on distortion-free affect-compression algorithms. I closed the office and headed for the station.
I could still smell the day's heat wafting up from Victoria Road, but there was a faint hint of a breeze from the east. The gaudy advertizing holograms never looked quite as tacky at dusk as they did at dawn, although the colours were just as washed-out; maybe it was really all down to the mood on the streets. A few sweat-stained commuters were still on their way home, radiating palpable relief -- and a few freshly laundered revellers were already arriving, full of hopeful energy. Somehow, dawn in Kings Cross never looked hopeful.
I passed a gaggle of saffron-robed monks from the Darlinghurst Temple, out hunting for alms, on the other side of the street. James didn't seem to be among them -- though it was hard to tell: they all looked interchangeable to me, and my strongest memories of him didn't encompass the terminal, shaven-headed stage. Even when I recalled the night he announced that he was leaving me and Mick for a life devoted to selfless contemplation -- "There's no point arguing, Kath," he'd explained, with an expression of transcendent smugness, "I'm not enslaved by the illusions of language anymore." -- even then, strangely enough, I pictured him as he'd looked ten years before. Buddhism had been growing ever more fashionable throughout the country for most of my lifetime -- taking the place of retreating Christianity, as if the "vacuum" left behind needed to be filled by something equally absurd -- but in the last ten years the Federal government had started supporting the monasteries in a big way, with a program of "community spiritual development" grants. Maybe they were hoping to save on social security payments.
I hesitated outside the station, thinking: A single TAP word could capture this moment -- perfectly encoding my entire sensorium, and everything I'm thinking and feeling. A word I could speak, write, recall. Study at a distance -- scan -- or play, relive completely. Inflect and modify. Quote exactly (or not) to the closest friend or the most distant stranger.
I had to admit that it was a deeply unsettling notion: a language which could encompass, if not the universe itself, then everything we could possibly experience of it. At any given moment, there were "only" ten to the power three thousand subjectively distinguishable states of the human brain. A mere ten thousand bits of information: quite a mouthful, encoded as syllables -- but only a millisecond flash in infrared. A TAP user could effectively narrate his or her entire inner life, with one hundred percent fidelity, in real time. Leopold Bloom, eat your heart out.
I boarded the southbound train, the skin on the back of my neck still tingling. The carriage was packed, so I stood strap-hanging with my eyes closed, letting the question spin in the darkness of my skull: Who, or what, killed Grace Sharp? Work was never something I could switch on and off -- and unless I reached the stage where part of me was thinking about the case every waking moment, the chances were I'd make no progress at all.
Helen Sharp believed in some faceless conspiracy against TAP as a first language, driven by sheer linguistic xenophobia -- though the real opposition might also be motivated, in part, by perfectly valid concerns about the unknown developmental consequences for a child growing up with TAP.
The serious media favoured a simple failure of technology; several worthy editorials had rewritten the Sharp case as a cautionary tale about the need for improved quality control in biomedical engineering. Meanwhile, the tabloids had gleefully embraced the idea of the <
And it was still possible that Grace Sharp had simply had a heart attack, all by herself. No assassins, no fatal poetry, no glitch.
So far, I could only agree with the coroner: I wasn't prepared to rule anything out.
By the time I arrived home, Mick had already eaten and retreated to his room to play Austro-Hungarian Political Intrigues in Space. He'd been running the scenario for almost six months, along with a dozen friends -- some in Sydney, some in Beijing, some in Sao Paulo. They'd graciously let me join in once, as a minor character with an unpronounceable name, but I'd become terminally bored after ten minutes and engineered my own death as swiftly as possible. I had nothing against role-playing games, per se ... but this was the most ludicrous one I'd encountered since Postmodernism Ate My Love Child. Still, every twelve-year-old needed something truly appalling to grow out of -- something to look back on in a year's time with unconditional embarrassment. The books I'd read, myself (and adored, at the time) had been no better.
I knocked on his door, and entered. He was lying on his bed with the headset on and his hands above his head, making minimalist gestures with both control gloves: driving a software puppet body which had no sense of touch, or balance, or proprioception. He was moving its limbs with actions which had nothing to do with moving his own ... but he was seeing and hearing everything through the puppet's eyes and ears.
Most of the studies I'd read had suggested that the earlier a child took up VR (headset-and-glove, of course, not implant-based), the fewer side-effects it had on real-life coordination and body image. The skills of moving real and virtual bodies didn't seem to compete for limited neural resources; they could be learnt in parallel, as easily as two languages. Only adults got confused between the two (and did better with VR implants, which let them pretend they were using their physical bodies). The research suggested that an hour a day in VR was no more harmful than an hour a day of any other equally unnatural activity: violin practice, ballet, karate.
I still worried, though.
The room monitor flagged my presence. At a convenient break in the action, Mick slipped off the headset to greet me, doing his best to hide his impatience.
I said, "School?"
He shrugged. "Bland-out. Work?"
His face lit up. "Resonant! What class weapon?"
"Unkind words."
"┐Que?"
"It's a joke." I almost started to explain, but it didn't seem fair to hold up the other players. "You'll quit at nine, okay? I don't want to have to check on you."
"Mmmm." Deliberately noncommittal.
I said calmly, "I can program it, or you can stick to the rules voluntarily. It's your choice."
He scowled. "It's no choice, if it makes no difference."
"Very profound. But I happen to disagree." I walked over to him and brushed the hair from his eyes; he gave me his I-wish-you-wouldn't-but-you're-forgiven-this-time look.
Mick said suddenly, "Unkind words? You mean Grace Sharp?"
I nodded, surprised.
"Some guru last week was prating about her TAPping herself to death." He seemed greatly amused -- and it struck me that "guru" was several orders of magnitude more insulting than anything I would have dared to say in front of my mother, at his age. At least put-downs were getting more elegant; my generation's equivalents had relied almost exclusively on references to excrement or genitalia. Mick and his contemporaries weren't at all prudish -- they just found the old scatological forms embarrassingly childish.
I said, "You don't believe in the <
"Not some banana skin land mine you make yourself, by accident."
I pondered that. "But if it exists at all, don't you think it'd be easier to fight if it came from outside, than if you stumbled on it in your own thoughts?"
He shook his head knowingly. "TAP's not like that. You can't invent random words in your head -- you can't try out random bit-patterns. You can imagine things, you can free-associate, but ... not all the way to death, without seeing it coming."
I laughed. "So when did you read up on this?"
"Last week. The story sounded flash, so I went context mining." He glanced at his terminal and made some slight hand movements; a cluster of icons for Universal Resource Locators poured into an envelope with my name on it, which darted into the outgoing mail box. "References."
"Thanks. I wasted the whole afternoon -- I should have come home early and picked your brains instead." I was only half joking.
I sat on the edge of the bed. "If she didn't stumble on the word herself, though ... I don't see how anyone could have spoken it to her: as far as the police could tell, she'd had no visitors -- or communications -- for hours. And if someone broke into the apartment, they left no trace."
"How about ... ?" Mick gestured with one gloved thumb at the shelf above his bed.
"What?" I parsed the clutter of objects slowly. "Ah."
He'd set up an IR link with his friend Vito, who lived in an apartment block across the park; they could exchange data twenty-four hours a day without either family paying a cent to the fibre barons. The collimated beam of the five-dollar transceiver passed effortlessly through both their bedroom windows.
"You think someone outside the apartment ... shot her in the palm with a <
"Maybe. Split the fee, if I'm right?"
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