"David G. Hartwell - Years best sf 11" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hartwell David G)

So, it was a creepy setup. So, they were doing nasty things to children. I know that's all bad stuff, I'm no
moral cripple. But I also knew that it wasn't moral outrage that would attract the high bidders. No, what
they'd want to know was: what were the capabilities of this colony? What edge did their enhanced
mental powers give them? And what did they plan to do with that power?

I left it to the Coordinator Group to figure that all out. They had the background on the colony's
founders, and the data on what sort of mind you could expect to result from extreme abuse of sophont
silk. I sent off my data with my usual contract to Coordinator HQ on Mercury. My job here was done.

Here's the thing about orbits. When you leave someone behind, you still share the same orbit around the
Sun until you do a burn. To save fuel, you coast in a bit or out a bit and speed up or slow down, and you
gradually drift apart. The whole setup is hell on dramatic exits. You're still looking at the people you
walked out on for days afterward.

I still had the ugly lump that was JAFR on my radar map when the call came in from my ombudsman in
the Coordinator Group. No twoway conversations out here, of course. I was fifteen light hours away
from the headquarters on Mercury. But then again, no conversation with Seymour Gladstone was
twoway, even when he was in the same room.

"Nice report, cowboy," he said without preamble. "Where do you find these people? I mean, a little
sophont silk here and there is all well and good, but eeeeewww! Anyway, we had our top analyst dig

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 Jarpe, Matthew - City of Reason

through your datadump and all the other dirt we've got on these Better Way people. Turns out they come
from Titan, just like those poor schmucks out at City of Reason. But wait, it gets better!" He leered.

"City of Reason was founded by a mathematician named Right Finegold. Chair of the Institute for
Introspection in the Graduate School of Abstract Sciences in the College of Higher Thought of Titan
University." He said this last in a singsong voice while reading off a datapad. He tossed the pad on his
desk and leaned into the camera for a conspiratorial whisper that was completely unnecessary and very
like Seymour. "There was a Scandal. It had all the ingredients of a classic: sex, money, and cognitive
enhancements. Finegold's Institute was collaborating with the Experimental Cognition Department,
writing the software that would run on enhanced human minds, and things went wrong."

I paused the playback, made myself a sandwich, and got comfortable for the rest of the message. Should
have done that when I first saw Seymour's face on the screen.

"Experimental Cognition planted a spy, a cute little girl type, to steal some mind templates. She seduced
a grad student, then an assistant professor, and apparently then Finegold himself. She extracted a lot of
free code before she was finally caught and linked back to Ex Cog.

"Well, you know how Titan politics are. Turns out, Ex Cog had a bigger budget and more pull with the
Deans, so Finegold gets the ouster. He packs up a few loyalists and he goes Homesteader. They've got a
pretty good outfit, judging by their startup package. I'd give them a good ten more years before they
come crawling back or die out.

"So meanwhile back on Titan, the legislature starts to get antsy about all this posthuman business, and a