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

streamlined process, with no human intervention required? From the probes buried
in a random sample of twenty thousand representative skulls, to the construction
of the virtual bands (down to mock biographies, and all the right birthmarks and
tattoos), to the synthesis of photorealist computer-animated videos, accessible
for a suitable fee ... the music industry had finally achieved its
long-cherished goal: cutting out everyone but the middleman.
The system spewed out pap. People paid to hear it. Nothing had changed.
In 2008, I was sixteen years old, working in a fast-food franchise in Sydney's
decaying red light district, scraping the fat off disassembled hamburger
grillers with lukewarm water in the early hours of the morning. I lived alone,
not quite starving on what I had left after paying the rent, too shy and
misanthropic to take in a flatmate. Let alone a lover.
I was woken at four o'clock one Sunday afternoon, when the woman from Azciak
called. I don't know what possessed me to let her in; usually I just waited in


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silence for doorknockers to go away. She didn't look much older than I was, and
her uniform wasn't all that different from mine -- but it fit a great deal
better, and at least they didn't make her wear a fucking baseball cap.
I said, "Why should I let you put your shit inside my head?"
"So you can participate more fully in democracy." She'd been on a training
course on the Gold Coast.
"Democracy is a placebo." I'd read graffiti in Darlinghurst.
"We'll pay you twenty dollars a week."
"Forget it."
"Hard currency: US dollars, yen, euros -- whatever you like."
I signed.
I spent a day in hospital; they didn't need to cut me open, but the scanning
equipment they used, as they threaded the microelectrodes through the blood
vessels of my brain, was bigger than my entire flat. Then, under local
anaesthetic, they slipped the interface chip into a shallow incision at the back
of my neck.
When the engineers arrived to plug their little black box into my phone, they
discovered that I didn't have one, so they ended up paying for that, as well.
Once a day, the black box interrogated the chip ultrasonically, downloading
whatever it had gleaned about my opinions in the preceding twenty-four hours,
then passed the data on to the central computer.
Surprise: my contribution to the Azciak Polls didn't tip any geopolitical
scales. The parliament of whores kept fawning to the Great Powers, cutting
spending and raising prices whenever the IMF said jump, voting as required in
the UN each time another Third World country had to be bombed into submission. I
served Amazonian beef and Idaho potatoes to the cheerful, shaven-headed
psychopaths from the USS Scheisskopf when they flooded Kings Cross on R & R,
dressed in their pigeon-shit-speckled camouflage, looking for something to fuck
that wasn't full of shrapnel, just for a change.
I was one of twenty thousand people whose every desire was accessed and analysed
day by day, cross-tabulated and disseminated to the most powerful decision