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

"I don't either," Gautam says. "Picked that up in a book somewhere, you know? And anyway, asshole,
it's Greek. But it means that when each of the personae starts to customize itself, it branches off so much
and with such big leaps that pretty soon they're all so far away from each other that they can't
communicate anymore."

"And that's happening now?" Mike is thinking of Abe.
"No, I don't think so. But it's going to."
somewhere in the virt
All of the Avirtars have gone crazy. Most of the dog ones are chasing their tails. Shannon can't even look
at Aunt Sara, who has followed her all the way from her house, panting, "Let me check," with the pensive
and disturbingly canine expression of a distracted idiot. Shannon goes looking for a newsstand, but
they're all gone but one that erupts in a flood of letters that run away down the street at her approach.
Left behind, by itself on the counter, is a broadsheet newspaper, alone on a low table and irregularly
haloed by smeared and bloody handprints. She picks it up and from the texture guesses that today's
edition of Meatspace News was printed from pretty good tenderloin.

The pages are blank.

And her foot is killing her, and something is wrong with her eyes, chimerical sparkles in her peripheral
vision. The air is full of strange smells. She remembers reading, back when she was in college, that these
sensations are often precursors to a stroke or epileptic seizure, neither of which would have been on any
PU list she might have come up with. Epilepsy in Shambhala? A stroke?

"That's it," Shannon says. "I want out."

The Avirtars fall over into a collective faint. Now I've done it, Shannon thinks, and goes to the library,
looking for the Squirt everyone calls Charon.
somewhere on earth
A Virt full of Squirts imprisoned in their own mutually incomprehensible languages. Probably, Mike
Chancey thinks, it's some kind of karmic payback, since Shambhala is the cold-blooded capitalist
shadow of a grand utopian ideal. Immortality! A life free of worldly pains and disappointments! Girls girls
girls! Boys boys boys! The power of a million supercomputers, all in your head, and all forever! Except
when it came time to get the thing off the ground, once it was possible every so often to render a working
software approximation of a human mind, the dreamers ran afoul of the bean-counters. There was
insurance to consider in the event of a failed Squirt; there was the question of market limitations, given the
price of scanning and upload; there were legal questions about the status of Squirts, or posthumans, or
personae, or virtual people, or whatever it was you were supposed to call them.

Thus Shambhala, the brainchild of an ALS-stricken devotee of Tibetan Buddhism turned real-estate
tycoon whose fondest wish in life had been that Boulder, Colorado, could somehow be transplanted to
the mid-California coast. He had the billion to get it started, and there were more than enough people
with immense disposable income and equally immense disgust with their physical bodies to get it started
(and thanks to Alvin Kuntz, they quickly added a number of other, ahem, quirky personalities). Someone
even paid to scan and Squirt Ted Williams's frozen brain, giving Shambhala its first real celebrity,
although the consensus was that the strokes made Williams a substandard raconteur. If it wasn't the
limitless Virt imagined by futurists and visionaries at the turn of the century, well, the market would fix that
soon enough as long as the technological infrastructure kept up its lightning evolution.

Some caveat there, Mike Chancey is thinking as he walks to a board meeting at which the sole agenda
item is: red and yellow lights on the Brain Board, causes and remedies of. He could answer both