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

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."
"You've never seen data like this," Skaka promised, and strode faster to make up for the
lost time.
 He never had seen data like this.
Each of the two identical "learning environments" was huge, two point three acres, circled
by a clear plastic wall and furnished with gray platforms at various heights and angles, steps
and ramps and pot-holes, mini-mazes and obstacles that could be reconfigured from outside
the enclosures. The environments looked like monochromatic miniature-golf courses that had
undergone an earthquake. In the first enclosure were eight of the tin-can robots, moving