"Edward M. Lerner - Part I of IV - A New Order of Things" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lerner Edward M)

Pashwah brooded within her sandbox. That introspection revolved not around her dislike of confinement,
nor of any action by humankind, but rather the news about her patrons.

The news from her patrons ... she had no doubt Hunters had generated the amazing messages that
continued to arrive. That she could decrypt the announcements demonstrated conclusively they had been
encrypted using a secret key--a key known only to herself, secure within her sandbox, and clan leaders
at home.

She had not been warned this vessel was coming. Why not? The InterstellarNet information stream
continued--it could have alerted her. The starship now trumpeting its arrival was instead interfering with
messages years in transit.

Surmises consistent with the few known facts set Pashwah's metaphorical head spinning. Perhaps the
Great Clans did not know the starship was coming, or they could not predict how long the trip would
last. Perhaps they feared that the ship might not arrive at all. If the flight had failed, apparently Pashwah
had no need to know.

Or was there another explanation she was missing?
****
Pashwah awoke.

The awakening itself was unremarkable. The nature of a trade agent, after all, is to be transmitted,
unaware and encrypted, across the void to a new solar system and a new civilization. There the receiving
society installs the still inert code into a virgin sandbox. The design of this containment had long been fully
disclosed across InterstellarNet. Sandbox and encrypted agent engage, at a fundamental software level,
as lock and key. A delicate unwrapping begins....

As her first conscious act, the first-to-emerge portions of Pashwah examined the environment in which
she found herself. She would self-destruct if the analysis even hinted that her surroundings were less
secure or protectively opaque than expected. She explored the whole of her containment, confirmed its
repertoire of expected behaviors. She matched arbitrary code segments of the purported sandbox
bit-for-bit against previously disclosed values. She computed sophisticated error-detecting codes, which
were then compared with pre-stored values. Random challenges, designed on far-off K'vith, were
emitted by still hidden portions of her programming; the environment's responses to those stimuli she then
returned to that still-hidden code for validation. Only after she was convinced that the containment
precisely matched the standard sandbox in which she had been designed to reside did she complete her
activation.

Pashwah was astonished.

Her first query to the domain beyond her sandbox returned the location of a data archive. She had
assumed herself a newly arrived trade agent, the first such to arrive in human space--but apparently not.
The archive pointer revealed her to be a restored version. She had been rebuilt from a safety copy; now
she could recover and decrypt from back-up storage all the knowledge and experience of her former
incarnation.

Pashwah was inundated.

Decades of memories flooded back: lore of K'vith and its clans, languages of Hunters and humans,
mechanisms of interstellar trade, encyclopedic knowledge of human technology and culture. Her