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

Steamship Soldier
on the Information Front (v1.1)

Nancy Kress, 1997


Just before the plane touched down at Logan, Allan Haller gave one last check to the PID
on the back of his tie-tack. Good. Intense vibration in the Cathy icon, superintense in
Suzette, and even Charlie showed acceptable oscillation. No need to contact any of them,
that would save time. Patti and Jon, too -- their icons shivered and thrilled at nearly top
speed. And three minutes till landing.
"My, look at what you have there," said his seatmate pleasantly. A well-rounded
grandmotherly sort, she'd been trying to engage him in conversation since La Guardia. "What
sort of gadget is that, might I ask?"
No, Allan almost said, because what ground could possibly be gained? But then he looked at
her again. Expensive jacket, good haircut, Gucci bag. Certainly money, but probably not
entrepreneurial -- rich old women tended to safe and stodgy investments. Still, what could he
lose? Two and a half-minutes until landing, and speculative capital, as he well knew, was
sometimes found in very odd places.
"It's a PID -- a personal-icon display," he said to Grandma Money. "It shows the level of
electronic interaction going on with my family -- my wife Cathy here, my son and daughter on
these two icons -- and of my two chief business associates. Each of them is wired with a
WIPE, a 'weak interactive personal electronic field' in various items of clothing that
communicate with each other through a faint current sent through their bodies. Then all
interactions with other electronic fields in their vicinity are registered in their WIPES and sent
wireless to each other's PIDs. I can tell, for instance, by how much the Cathy icon is vibrating
that she's probably working at her terminal -- lots of data going through her icon. Suzette is
probably playing tennis -- see, her icon is superoscillating the way WIPE fields do when
they're experiencing fast-motion physical interference, and Charlie here -- "
"You send electric current through your children's bodies?" Grandma Money sounded
horrified.
"It isn't dange -- "
"All the time? And then you Big-Brother them? All the time?"
Allan flipped down the tie-tack. Well, it had been worth a skirmish, as long as the time
talking to her would have been downtime anyway. With a slight bump, the plane made contact
with the runway.
"Don't they ... well, I don't mean to be rude, but doesn't your family object to -- "
But Allan was already moving down the aisle toward the jetway, from the forward seat he'd
had booked precisely because it was the first to disembark. By the time the other passengers
were reaching for their overhead luggage, he was already in the airport, moving fast, talking
into his phone.
"Jon, what have you got?"
"A third prospect. Out in Newton; the car company will do the max-efficient route. The
company is Figgy Pudding, the product is NewsSort. It goes through the whole Net looking for
matches to key words, then compares the news items with ones the user has liked in the past
and pre-selects for him -- the usual statistical-algorithm gig. But they're claiming ninety-three
percent success rate."
"Pretty good, if it's true."
"Worth a skirmish," Jon said, in New York. "That's all in Boston." He hung up.
Allan didn't break stride. "Figgy Pudding" -- the cutesy name meant the talent was old, left