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

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