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

You don't want to hear.
It's you.



My life was not transformed. I still wiped McVomit off the toilet floors every
night, still fished the syringes out of the bowls (too buoyant to flush -- and
if they weren't removed quickly, people reused them). I still stared at the
couples walking hand in hand in front of me; still lingered behind them for a
step or two, in the hope that something radiating out from their bodies would
penetrate my own icy flesh.
But I bought myself a radio, and I waded through all the saccharine lies about
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


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