"Alex Irvine - Shambhala" - читать интересную книгу автора (Irvine Alexander C)

of the office building he privately thinks of as the Brainpan, looking for Gautam, his Nerd-in-Chief.
Gautam is in his office, head down on his desk, arms crossed over his head as if he's expecting an
airstrike. "Gautam," Mike says. "Give it to me straight."
"It's too horrible," Gautam says.

"It's only going to get worse if you don't tell me."

Gautam looks up at Mike with the empty light of existential crisis in his eyes. "I kept it going," he says,
"but the only way I could do it was to slow time waaay down in there. At least I think I did. Mike, I
can't...." He buries his face again and speaks into his desktop.

Mike's heart goes out to him. Gautam has the worst case of Squirt Envy anybody in the Brainpan has
ever seen, but he also suffers the misfortune of being a rare genius in exactly the right job for both his
rarity and his genius. This is a misfortune because Gautam was brought up with a sense of obligation to
his fellow human beings, which means that while he wants the Squirt more than anything in the world, he
also believes that he owes it to humanity to sacrifice this desire in order to keep the Virt running for
everyone else. So. It's a sad case. But right now Mike needs the optimally functional Gautam, not the
despairing Gautam, so he says, "Gautam. Goddammit. What is going on?"

"They're ... it's all figurative, Mike," Gautam says without picking up his head. "The disruptions triggered
some kind of self-defense reaction. The Virt couldn't run all of its ABCs in every case, so it went for,
like, approximations, and then it jumped from there to some weird kind of emergent metaphorical
shorthand. It's crazy. I don't get it. And whenever I try to pop diagnostics in there, I get personae coming
out talking like William Blake or Rumi or somebody. All this visionary crap." A sound like a sob comes
up from the desktop. "I just had a conversation with a persona who thought he was the prophet Elijah."

That can't be good, Mike thinks. "What did it say?"

"I think it was quoting from some Sufi text, I don't know, I lost track." Gautam looks up suddenly, as if a
problem has occurred to him. He likes problems if the first step toward a solution is apparent. "You
know what," he says. "I specced out something like this a long time ago."

"Is that right," Mike says.

"Yeah," Gautam says, and is suddenly glum again. "I was trying out an idea about using figuration, you
know, to give Virtizens a common background, baseline cultural literacy, trying to code not just the facts
but, you know, modes of thinking." Realizing that he's about to run beyond the boundaries of Mike's
understanding, he reels himself back in. "But when I ran the sims, once that started to happen, this kind of
death spiral occurs. The figuration gets more and more abstruse, more cognitive distance between vehicle
and tenor, you know? Then nobody knows what anyone else is talking about."

Mike has understood every individual word, but he is not at all certain that he's followed the train of
Gautam's thought. "Ah," he says.

"So it's weird," Gautam says. "You start out trying to give everyone a similar sort of cultural or ontological
syntax, and the code pivots back on itself and everyone is in their own idios kosmos, totally cut off. No
koinos kosmos."

"Gautam," Mike says. "I don't know any Hindi."