"Kress, Nancy - Steamship Soldier on the Information Front" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

"Same thing," Cathy said, and for just a moment her cheerfulness faltered.
"Okay," Allan said. "Don't worry."
"You on your way to Novation?" Cathy of course received constant updates of his schedule, as he did of hers. Although she had fewer updates; even consulting attorneys as good as she was sometimes stayed in the same city for as long as three days. "Novation is the biorobot company, isn't it?"
"Yeah," Allan said. "Patti's pushing it pretty strong. But frankly, I don't have much faith in radical tech that makes this many extravagant claims. Promise the moon, deliver a rusty asteroid. I don't expect to be impressed."
"That's my man. Make 'em work for it. Love you."
"Love you, too," Allan said. The Cathy icon vanished from his meshNet.
"Two minutes until your first scheduled stop," his watch said.
Perfect.
* * * *
Allan was wrong. He might not have expected to be impressed with Novation, but, almost against his will, he was.
As soon as he entered the unprepossessing concrete-block building, he could feel the data rush. Vibrating, racing, dancing. Whatever made a place blaze on the very edge of the information front, this place had it.
His contact entered the lobby just as Allan did. On top of the moves. She was an Indian woman in her late thirties, dressed in khaki slacks and a red shirt. All her movements were quick and light. Her black eyes shone with intelligence.
"Allan. I'm Skaka Gupta, Chief Scientist at Novation." Although of course Allan already knew that, plus everything relevant about her career, and she knew that he knew. "Welcome to our Biorobotics Unit."
"Thank you."
"Would you like a max-effish print-out of our current status?" A courtesy only; Novation's official profile would have been supplied to his firm yesterday. With an update this morning, if anything had changed overnight. And she'd know he'd prefer the figures and projections put together by his own people, in which the official profile was only one factor.
"No, thank you." Allan smiled. "But I am very eager to see your work directly."
"Then let's do that." She smiled back, completely sure of herself. Or of her work. Allan hoped it was of her work; he could sniff genuine success here. It smelled like money.
"Let me babble about the basics," Skaka said, "and you jump in with questions when you want to. We're passing through the biolab now, where we build the robots. Or, rather, start them growing."
Behind a glass wall stood rows of sterile counters, each monitored by automated equipment. A lone technician, dressed in white scrubs and mask, worked at a far counter. Allan said, "Let me test my understanding here. Your robot bodies are basic mass-ordered cylinders, with electro-field intercommunication, elevation-climbing limbs, and the usual sensors."
"That's right. We'll see them in a minute -- they look like upended tin cans with four skinny clumsy legs and two skinny clumsy arms. But their processing units are entirely innovative. Each circuit board you see here, in each clear box, is being grown. We start with textured silicon plate etched with logic circuits, and then seed them with fetal neurons, grown on synthetic peptides. The fetal tissue used comes from different sources. The result is that even though the circuit scaffolds are the same, the neurons spin out different axons and dendrites. And since fetal brains always produce more neurons than they ultimately need, different ones atrophy on different boards. Each processor ends up different, and so the robots are subtly different too."
Allan studied the quiet, orderly lab. Skaka merely waited. Finally he said, "You're not the only company exploring this technique."
"No, of course not. But we've developed significant new variations -- significant by several orders of magnitude. Proprietary, of course, until you've bought in."
_Until_, not _if_. Allan liked that.
"The proof of just how different our techniques are lies right ahead. This way to the primate house."
"Monkeys?" Allan said, startled. This had _not_ been in the pre-reading.
Skaka, walking briskly, grinned over her shoulder. "P-r-i-m-e E-i-g-h-t House. It's a joke. Currently we have eight robots in each of two different stages of development. Both groups are in learning environments modeled on the closed-system forests once used with chimps. Follow me."
She led him out of the lab, down a long windowless corridor. Half-way, Allan's tie-tack beeped twice.
"Excuse me, Skaka, is the men's room -- "
"Right through that door."
Inside, Allan flipped over his tie tack. The PID icon for Charlie had completely stopped vibrating. Immediately Allan phoned his son.
"Charlie? Where are you?"
"What do you mean, where am I? It's Friday, right? I'm at school."
"In ..."
"In Aspen."
"Why aren't you in Denver?"
"Not this week, Dad, remember?"
Allan hadn't. Mrs. Canning's tutorial schedule for the kids' real-time educational experiences was complex, although of course Allan could have accessed it on his meshNet. Maybe he should have. But Charlie's physical location wasn't the issue.
"What are you doing in Aspen, son? Right now?"
"Nothing."
Allan pushed down his annoyance. Also his concern. Charlie -- so handsome, so smart, twelve years old -- spent an awful lot of time doing nothing. Just sitting in one room or another, staring into space. It wasn't normal. He should be out playing soccer, exploring the Net, teasing girls, racing bikes. Even reading would be more productive than this passive staring into nothing.
Allan said, "Where's Mrs. Canning? Why is she letting you do nothing? We don't pay her for that, you know."
"She thinks I'm writing my essay about the archeological dig we did in the desert."
"And why aren't you writing it?"
"I will ... look, Dad, I gotta go now. See you next week. Love you."
"But Charlie -- "
The phone went dead.
Should he call back? When Charlie got like this, he often didn't answer. Got like _what_? What was wrong with a kid who just turned himself off and sat, like a lump of bacon fat?
Nothing. Nothing was wrong with his son.
"Allan? Everything all right?" Skaka, rapping discreetly on the men's room door. Christ, how long had Allan been staring at the motionless Charlie icon on his PID? Too long. The schedule would be all shot to hell.
"Fine," he said, striding into the corridor. "Sorry. Now let's see the Prime Eight house."