"Egan, Greg - Worthless" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

peace and harmony, about strength and empowerment, waiting to hear you sing
about my pathetic, irrelevant life. And I think you know how sweet it was, to
hear just one voice of acceptance, just one voice of affirmation, just one voice
-- at last -- that rang true for me.
And on those sleepless afternoons when I lay alone, creating myself out of
nothing, treading water with words, my thoughts no longer came echoing back to
me, proof of my insanity. I knew exactly who I was speaking to, now, in the
conversation that defined me.
I was speaking to you.



"The Loneliest Night of the Year" came in at number six, with a bullet. Not bad,
my friend. Half a dozen more hits soon followed, knocking your human competitors
right out of the charts. The patronising arseholes now claim that this was all
some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, that people bought whatever the Azciak
computers churned out, simply because they knew it "had to be" what they wanted
-- even if, in fact, it wasn't. That's not what they said at the time, of
course; their sycophantic paeans to your "freshness" and "candour" and "bleak
audacity" ran for pages.
I saw "you" one night, on the jukebox screen -- rendered, plausibly enough, as
four young men with guitars, bass, and drums. If I'd fed a dollar into the
machine, I could have had a printout of their "life stories"; for five, an
autographed portrait of the band, the signatures authentic and unique; for ten,
the same with a dedication. I didn't, though. I watched them for a while; their
expressions ranged from distraction to faint embarrassment -- the way some human
musicians look, when they know that you know they're only miming.
So forgive me if I didn't buy the tacky merchandise -- but I saved up my Azciak
payments and bought a second-hand CD player, and I hunted down a music shop
which stocked your albums on "obsolete" disks, for a quarter of the price of the
fashionable new ROMs.
Of course I thought I'd helped shape you. You sang about my life. I couldn't
have written a bar of the music, a word of the lyrics, myself -- but I knew the
computers could take care of those technical details. The wires in my head
weren't there to extract any kind of talent; they were there to uncover my
deepest needs.
And they'd succeeded.
At the same time, I couldn't let myself believe that I'd somehow conjured you up
on my own, because -- apart from the preposterous vanity of it -- if I had, then
I was still doing nothing but talking to myself. In any case, surely one person,
alone, could never have swayed the populist Azciak software. Among the twenty
thousand participants in the poll, there had to be others -- hundreds, at least
-- for whom your words rang true as they did for me.
I phoned the woman who'd signed me up. "Oh no, we couldn't possibly give you any
names," she said. "All our data is strictly confidential."
At work, in a five-minute mid-shift break, I snuck into the manager's office and
called another branch of the Azciak organisation. The voice that replied sounded
human to me, but the icon flagging a sales simulacrum lit up.
"You want to buy a direct mailing list? What selection parameters did you have
in mind?"