"James P. Hogan - Martian Knightlife" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

to destinations by engines producing thrust of some kind. Even though the engines might use nuclear
fission or fusion, accelerated ions, or in some research that was going on, experimental antimatter, the
technologies were all variants on a theme that in essence hadnтАЩt changed for centuries. The time was
surely ripe for a breakthrough into something totally different.
Major innovations seldom come as a total surprise, confined to one place. When the state of
knowledge is such that the right time is approaching, specialists talk among themselves, journals and
news media pick up the topic, and public anticipation is usually solidly established before anything
actually happens. The general familiarity in concept of aircraft, space travel, and nuclear energy long
before they became realities were cases in point. Advances in quantum physics and high-power
computation had led to much popular speculation that a longstanding, but hitherto seldom seriously
entertained, favorite of fiction might soon become fact: teleportationтАФthe dematerialization of an
object from one place, and its reappearance, after transmitting the information to reconstitute it,
somewhere else.
The bonanza payoff waiting to be made was by the trans-Solar System communications-carrier
giants, who already had most of the essential equipment in place and stood to put the regular
spacelines virtually out of business. Hence, with the kind of financial resources and influence that
they commanded, it was not really a coincidence that for a long time the ground for general public
acceptance had been prepared by spectacles of teleporting heroes becoming virtually a standard prop
in futuristic movies, regular coverage in books and documentaries, and a procession of generously
rewarded experts giving readers and audiences scientific reasons why the information pattern defined
a personality, and reassuring them that its transference from one host configuration of matter to
another would pose no break in identity.
 A lot of sunsiders were in the race to come up with the first demonstration technology, which
would immediately be worth billions. The snag they were consistently running into, however, was the
gigantic amount of computation involved in scanning an object at anywhere near the resolution
necessary to be believably capable of reconstructing the originalтАФencoding a human to the atomic
level, for instance, was estimated as requiring somewhere in the order of ten to the thirty-secondтАУ
power bits, which would take millions of centuries to transmit. Various shortcuts were being
investigated, which attempted to exploit the Uncertainty Principle and other effects which implied
that averaging procedures could be used which make the precise derivation of quantum detail
unnecessary, but the short answer was that the problem remained mind-boggling.
Quantonix Researchers Reg., however, were following an approach that was different, and as far
as Kieran knew, unique. Using a package of results purchased from an earlier outfit that had gone
defunct, their process took advantage of the information implicit in an organismтАЩs DNA as a shortcut
to directing most of its structural assembly. Hence, in a way that seemed paradoxical to some, they
could reconstitute a biological object, but because there were no convenient instruction sets that
implicitly defined how it should go together, they couldnтАЩt apply the process (yet?) to an inanimate
one. Over the preceding months, Quantonix had announced successful trials with a progression of
unicells, mosses, plant parts, invertebrates, insects, duplicated rats that could still run mazes that the
originals had learned, and a chimp that retained its repertoire of acquired skills. The obvious next step
was to do it with a human, and the buzz going around the circles of those who kept close to the
subject was not about тАЬifтАЭ but тАЬwhenтАЭ it would happen. From what June was saying the experiment
had been conducted successfully using Dr. Leo Sarda, whom Kieran knew to be the principal scientist
on the TX Project and effectively the developer of the technology.
As was often the case with sunsiders, Quantonix hadnтАЩt attempted to keep its work a close secret.
The idea, after all, was to attract potential buyers who possessed the resources to develop a
marketable product, and having a number of competing prospects in the know as to what was going
on both shortened the timescale and raised the likely price of an eventual deal. At the same time, the
object was not to become a feature of the general mass-media circus, which reveled in
sensationalizing the wild and preposterous and usually represented a fast way to getting a far-out but