"Goonan, Kathleen Ann - The Day The Dam Broke" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goonan Kathleen Ann)

code CT2.1 for automatic fine tuning. I don't know what color or even what form
access to radio waves may take further down the road and therefore I have
prepared this in airborne nan form as well--doubtful, doubtful that it would
ever be breathed by other humans, given my remoteness but if so you will learn
how I battled the Great Midcentury Plague and how I lost, like everyone else I
presume. And, if it's not too far past now for you (this might bounce forever
through the aether), at the end of the broadcast file I'll give you directions
on how to find me, and a map if it is breathed, for I do enjoy visitors. I truly
do. At least I think I do. Please, please come visit me. I toss this into the
air frequently, straight up, without regard for possible vandals for after all I
know more than you do and if I don't surely you are more kind than those who
know less, for I believe that information grows compassion. Allow a young-old
woman her fantasies. I grow basil, by the way, in a little plot outside my cabin
door, and cilantro, and masses of poppies which thrive in the long cool summer.
More clues later. Proceed. Beep! (Sorry, but one gets silly with only a dog for
company, genetically engineered though he may be.)
And speaking of silly, those satellites rained information down upon us like
silly rain, let me tell you, silly because one
couldn't count on them. But you can count on me. Real sourdough bread, and I
grow and grind and boil my own soybeans and make tofu so you see I am the real
article. Protein ahead! Hurry! Turn up the gain and maybe that will help.
At any rate--back to the trip from L.A. to Columbus--my maglev arrived at your
station a week late and I was happy and relieved to get there at all since the
last maglev had been blown up somewhere in eastern Kansas (I learned after I had
left L.A.) and then they gave me the wrong sheets.
They? No. That's imprecise. Yes, I know, and you know that I do, and you will
know more if you continue. But for the benefit of other listeners . . . for
posterity, you know . . .
Oh I know it sounds like a nightmare, what we all dreaded at the time, the wrong
sheets, but it wasn't as bad as it sounds. They pumped me full of Midwesternism.
Those gorgeous clear nansheets with blinking infolights taught me how to grow
corn when the flood tide on the Great Miami River receded and other information
more applicable to my present situation than anything I ever learned in L.A. no
matter how accelerated, and so I can't complain. Those erroneous sheets helped
me survive out here and were I not so cynical might have made me a mystic. They
upped my empathy with the strange outcast population I was coming to help though
the people of Columbus damn well didn't want any help, not from the likes of me,
the nanotech enemy. The sheet-empathy was particularly interesting after living
domed all my life with all the cultural depth of your typical AI, intelligence
incestuous and terribly inward-pointing. So you can see why I love the sky so
much, and why I perch just below a ridgetop, south-facing, away from the
fiercest, coldest winds. My synaptic code was one or two bits off, out of a
billion, but I was sick that day, with a runny nose, so I thought that virus had
something to do with my little history lesson, why I learned about corn and how
my ancestors survived in the deep woods, and the basics of building one's own
radio in the attic as if I were a boy in midcentury Ohio. At least that's what I
thought at the time, and that's why I thought Thurber's vignettes were suddenly
a part of my mind. Now, of course, we know differently. And one of us knew
differently at the time it happened. It all worked out for the best, though; I
don't mind!