"David Langford - New Hope for the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Langford David)

New Hope for the Dead
DAVID LANGFORD
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)

David Longford (www.ansible.co.uk,) lives in Reading, England. He publishes the fanzine Ansible,
the tabloid newspaper of SF andfandom, which wins Hugo Awards, and is also excerpted as a
monthly column in Interzone, and online at www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-archives/Ansible. He is the most
famous humorous writer infandom todayтАФsee his book He Do the Time Police in Different VoicesтАФ
and keeps winning best fan writer Hugo Awards. He is an indefatigable book reviewer (some of
his reviews are collected in The Complete Critical Assembly, Up Through an Empty House of Stars:
Reviews and Essays 1980-2002, and The SEX Column and Other Misprints). For the last decade he
has been publishing short SF of generally high quality, collected in Different Kinds of Darkness.

"New Hope for the Dead" appeared in Nature, the distinguished journal of science, that revived
its one-page short fiction feature, Futures, in 2005. We think it is significant for the SF field that
such a feature exists in such a place. This story is about the rewards and punishments of the
electronic afterlife.

Hello, Mr. Hormel, this is your hosting system at Nirvana Infomatics. We apologize for interrupting your
regular afterlife, but unfortunately the message is urgent. Otherwise we would not have intruded on your
VR sex athletics competition.

We are sorry to hear that you were going for a new high score. Nevertheless the message is urgent.

In accordance with your contract for postmortem uploading and long-term maintenance as an
Electronic-Golem Artificial Neurosystem or EGAN, we regret to inform you that your trust fund is not
performing adequately. This is a result of global economic problems, arising from the continuing states of
emergency in Iraq, Iran, Korea, France and the US Pacific Northwest.

To put it briefly, your current investment yield is no longer covering the monthly payments for full
enjoyment of this digital afterlife.

You are quite correct to invoke the emergency insurance terms laid down in Clause 12 of your
antemortem agreement. Unfortunately, our finance department has already taken the full potential claim
into account.

Yes, the world economy truly is in appalling shape. Otherwise we would not be forced to mention the
provisions of Clause 9, "Special Circumstances, Penalties and Termination."

But in the words of the classic novelтАФDon't Panic! Several alternative plans are available for financially
challenged and differently solvent entities in our care.

The simplest scheme is what our client-advisers amusingly call "being dead for tax reasons." Maintaining
your full activity as an EGAN requires continuing exabyte-scale storage capacity and very substantial
24/7 processor power. We can enormously reduce the associated expenses by storing you in static,
compressed Zip format for reactivation in a time of better economic weather.

Yes, it is true that we cannot guarantee a major future upturn. Shares can, alas, not only go down but
plunge and even plummet. Yes, it is possible that current issues such as global warming, fossil-fuel
exhaustion and scrotty abuse may conceivably reduce our technological capacity to a level where stored