"David Langford - Different Kinds of Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Langford David)

didn't ever happen outside the classroom. So it came as a surprise to the Club
when things started getting interesting in, of all places, a maths class.
Mr Whitcutt was quite old, somewhere between grandfather and retirement
age, and didn't mind straying away from the official maths course once in a
while. You had to lure him with the right kind of question. Little Harry Steen
-- the chess and wargames fanatic of the class, and under consideration for
the Club -- scored a brilliant success by asking about a news item he'd heard
at home. It was something to do with 'mathwar', and terrorists using things
called blits.
'I actually knew Vernon Berryman slightly,' said Mr Whitcutt, which
didn't seem at all promising. But it got better. 'He's the B in blit, you
know: B-L-I-T, the Berryman Logical Imaging Technique, as he called it. Very
advanced mathematics. Over your heads, probably. Back in the first half of the
twentieth century, two great mathematicians called Goedel and Turing proved
theorems which ... um. Well, one way of looking at it is that mathematics is
booby-trapped. For any computer at all, there are certain problems that will
crash it and stop it dead.'
Half the class nodded knowingly. Their home-made computer programs so
often did exactly that.
'Berryman was another brilliant man, and an incredible idiot. Right at
the end of the twentieth century, he said to himself, "What if there are
problems that crash the human brain?" And he went out and found one, and came
up with his wretched "imaging technique" that makes it a problem you can't
ignore. Just _looking_ at a BLIT pattern, letting in through your optic
nerves, can stop your brain.' A click of old, knotty fingers. 'Like that.'
Jonathan and the Club looked sidelong at each other. They knew
something about staring at strange images. It was Harry, delighted to have
stolen all this time from boring old trig., who stuck his hand up first. 'Er,
did this Berryman look at his own pattern, then?'
Mr Whitcutt gave a gloomy nod. 'The story is that he did. By accident,
and it killed him stone dead. It's ironic. For centuries, people had been
writing ghost stories about things so awful that just looking at them makes
you die of fright. And then a mathematician, working in the purest and most
abstract of all the sciences, goes and brings the stories to life....'
He grumbled on about BLIT terrorists like the Deep Greens, who didn't
need guns and explosives -- just a photocopier, or a stencil that let them
spray deadly graffiti on walls. According to Whitcutt, TV broadcasts used to
go out 'live', not taped, until the notorious activist Tee Zero broke into a
BBC studio and showed the cameras a BLIT known as the Parrot. Millions had
died. It wasn't safe to look at anything these days.
Jonathan had to ask. 'So the, um, the special kind of dark outdoors is
to stop people seeing stuff like that?'
'Well ... yes, in effect that's quite right.' The old teacher rubbed
his chin for a moment. 'They brief you about all that when you're a little
older. It's a bit of a complicated issue.... Ah, another question?'
It was Khalid who had his hand up. With an elaborate lack of interest
that struck Jonathan as desperately unconvincing, he said, 'Are all these BLIT
things, er, really dangerous, or are there ones that just jolt you a bit?'
Mr Whitcutt looked at him hard for very nearly the length of a
beginner's ordeal. Then he turned to the whiteboard with its scrawled