"Greg Egan - Closer (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

sufficient. I knew what she expected from me, I knew how not to hurt her. We had
arguments, we had fights, but there must have been some kind of underlying
stability, because in the end we always chose to stay together. Her happiness
mattered to me, very much, and at times I could hardly believe that I'd ever
thought it possible that all of her subjective experience might be fundamentally
alien to me. It was true that every brain, and hence every jewel, was unique -
but there was something extravagant in supposing that the nature of
consciousness could be radically different between individuals, when the same
basic hardware, and the same basic principles of neural topology, were involved.

Still. Sometimes, if I woke in the night, I'd turn to her and whisper,


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inaudibly, compulsively, "I don't know you. I have no idea who, or what, you
are." I'd lie there, and think about packing and leaving. I was alone, and it
was farcical to go through the charade of pretending otherwise.
Then again, sometimes I woke in the night, absolutely convinced that I was
dying, or something else equally absurd. In the sway of some half-forgotten
dream, all manner of confusion is possible. It never meant a thing, and by
morning I was always myself again.
When I saw the story on Craig Bentley's service - he called it "research," but
his "volunteers" paid for the privilege of taking part in his experiments - I
almost couldn't bring myself to include it in the bulletin, although all my
professional judgement told me it was everything our viewers wanted in a thirty
second techno-shock piece: bizarre, even mildly disconcerting, but not too hard
to grasp.
Bentley was a cyberneurologist; he studied the Ndoli Device, in the way that
neurologists had once studied the brain. Mimicking the brain with a neural-net
computer had not required a profound understanding of its higher-level
structures; research into these structures continued, in their new incarnation.
The jewel, compared to the brain, was of course both easier to observe, and
easier to manipulate.
In his latest project, Bentley was offering couples something slightly more
up-market than an insight into the sex lives of slugs. He was offering them
eight hours with identical minds.
I made a copy of the original, ten-minute piece that had come through on the
fibre, then let my editing console select the most titillating thirty seconds
possible, for broadcast. It did a good job; it had learnt from me.
I couldn't lie to Sian. I couldn't hide the story, I couldn't pretend to be
disinterested. The only honest thing to do was to show her the file, tell her
exactly how I felt, and ask her what she wanted.
I did just that. When the HV image faded out, she turned to me, shrugged, and
said mildly, "Okay. It sounds like fun. Let's try it."
Bentley wore a T-shirt with nine computer-drawn portraits on it, in a
three-by-three grid. Top left was Elvis Presley. Bottom right was Marilyn
Monroe. The rest were various stages in between.
"This is how it will work. The transition will take twenty minutes, during