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

subroutines, same location, same days.
Suddenly Allan was hit with a memory. So vivid, so visceral, it almost seemed as if he no
longer stood in the middle of a frantic metropolitan airport but instead was in the cool woods
behind the house where he'd grown up, lying on his back on a carpet of pine needles. Billy
Goldman, his best friend, lay beside him, both of them gazing upward at the sun-dabbled
branches lacing the sky, smelling the sweet tangy pines, and Billy saying, "Why would anyone
want to kiss a girl? Yuuccckkk!"
Now, where had that come from? Astonished, Allan shook his head to clear it. The mind
was a strange thing. Tossing in the unrelated, the pointless, the unprofitable, the irrelevant.
The distracting.
By the time he reached Boston, he had a headache no pills could touch.


He arrived at Novation in a foul mood. Sanderson met him nervously. "This way, Mr. Haller,
we'll go right to Prime-Eight Two, unless you want some, um, coffee, or maybe -- "
"No. Let's go."
Sanderson walked past Prime-Eight One without turning his head, but Allan stopped to
study the robots. It seemed to him that they gathered their chips a little more smoothly, with
less fumbling. He thought he even saw Processed Corn start forward, then swerve abruptly to
miss crashing into Ocean Spray Cacheberries. They were starting to cooperate.
Prime-Eight Two, on the other hand, looked no different. The bots stood motionless on the
complex terrain. Allan and Sanderson stood outside the enclosure, Sanderson fidgeting. "Chip
fall in seven minutes. We don't want to alter the schedule, you know, because even though
then you wouldn't have to wait, you wouldn't really be seeing the exact same phenomenon
we've been observing, so it isn't -- "
"I understand," Allan said. "I can wait."
But he had to do something to fill in seven minutes, besides intimidating Sanderson. The
heavy data fire meant he couldn't access his meshNet. Instead, Allan repeated to himself the
personal-notes tablet on his son's Twenty-Two. He had accessed the tablet from the plane,
telling himself that parental duty outweighed teenage privacy.
Age of Reason ... Age of Reason ... Information Age ... Age of Reasoning ... Enlightenment?
No no no ... Start again Stone Age Iron Age Bronze Age ... no no NO NO it's here someplace
-- TO DO: do sections 84-86 homework for Tuesday find three examples of igneous rock buy
mom a birthday present ... AGE OF REASON ... The girl I saw in the park was not wearing
underwear!!!!!! ... Age of Reason --
The robots behind the plastic wall lumbered into position, a moment before chips scattered
from the ceiling. "They've learned to cut the anticipation pretty fine," Sanderson said. Allan
didn't reply. He watched as the bots efficiently gathered all the chips. They seemed no faster
than before, but no slower either. His meshNet had gone dead, presumably from the bots'
intense occupation of all available bandwidths to the Net. What exactly were they
downloading? And what use were their biochip brains making of it? They didn't need the Net's
vast libraries of information to gather chips efficiently.
"Have you traced their download sources yet?"
"Some of them," Sanderson said. He didn't look at Allan, and his tone was evasive. "Watch
-- here it comes."
But what "came" was ... nothing. Literally. The robots dumped all the chips into their
bucket, held in the graspers of Techs/Mex Chili, and then went motionless.
Sanderson began to talk very fast. "They've been doing that for twenty-four hours now.
Gathering the chips the way they're programmed to, but then just not depositing them
through the wall. Nobody's tinkered with their programming. They just ... don't do it."