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

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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?"
"What selection parameters are there?"
A menu appeared on the flatscreen of the phone:
[1] Geographic
[2] Socioeconomic
[3] Ethnic
[4] Aesthetic
[5] Political
[6] Emotional
I hesitated, then hit 6. The rest was easy enough; I just filled in the profile
requirements as if I was describing myself.
The charge was one thousand dollars. I typed in the number of the French Fries
purchasing account, and the list was downloaded into the phone. I copied it onto
a floppy disk, then erased it from the memory.



You sang:
Here you are again
Caring about the wrong things, again
Everyone else makes mistakes, I know
But at least they make THE RIGHT ONES
Every day, I saw children half my age walking the streets of Kings Cross,
surviving on food scraps, fighting each other for the privilege of selling
themselves to the tourists. Every day, I read of the deaths of hundreds of
thousands of people -- in famines, in civil wars, and the latest genocidal
psychodramas, designed to bolster the delicate egos of the most powerful nations
on Earth.
But I was powerless to change any of that. So I just closed my eyes and dreamt
about love.
And a dream was all it would ever be. The truth was, I'd always known I was
nothing, no one: an object in the shape of a human, not to be mistaken for the
real thing.
The wonder of it was, I kept on existing, day after day, year after year. I woke