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

--Internetopedia
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Until the starship's unexpected appearance, the Snakes were but one of ten ET species splitting Art's
attention. When Snake-related matters came to the fore, they were usually tied to what was, after all, the
core ICU mission: commerce. They dealt with specific trade-worthy technologies or the bits-and-bytes
of InterstellarNet operations. He had never before needed to understand K'vith and its civilization--which
turned the sprint to Jupiter into a cram session.

More than a century of interspecies communications had amassed a staggering quantity of information.
Art found himself struggling to get his arms around so much knowledge. Well, if there was one thing he
did know, it was systems engineering. Maybe he could use that.

Electronic engineers devise electronic circuitry, gengineers tailor biological organisms, civil engineers
design bridges and dams and space habitats, software engineers write programs, and so on--but systems
engineers mostly do not create systems.

Mostly they ask questions.

What are all the functions a system must perform, and are there tradeoffs between those functions? What
other systems will this system interact with, and what is the nature of the interactions? Who will use the
system, and how foolish are the users against whom this system will be proofed? How reliable must the
system be, how will that reliability be achieved, and how will the system behave when, all efforts to the
contrary, some pieces break? The only thing other engineers found worse than these interminable
questions was deploying a system and then realizing that the questions should have been asked.

Once again, Art had a headful of questions. How, exactly, had all this data about the Snakes been
collected? Which sources were validated? What were the trends, contradictions, and omissions?

He had been awake for forty hours straight, but he wasn't yet nearly exhausted enough to sleep in his
coffin-sized cabin. He went into the galley for a snack.

"Quit muttering and clanking," Eva said, without refocusing on the real world. Something atonal and
syncopated leaked from her earbuds: Snake music. "I'm working."

"Sorry." He wasn't. Talking sometimes helped him think. "Do you find what you need in the ship's
library?"

Sighing, she swiveled her chair to face him. "If it wasn't uploaded before we broke Earth orbit, it's
unknown. If there's something you can't find--what do you expect me to do?"

"That was no idle complaint," Art said. "Look, we have access to supposedly the best and latest
information about the Snakes, a civilization we've been in contact with since long before any of us were
born. Why is what we know about them little more than a primer?"

Keizo, who had been studiously ignoring them both, perked up. Art needed no more encouragement. "A
big part of my ICU job involves InterstellarNet trade representatives. From working with AI agents, ET
and homegrown, I know how agents interact with their host societies. Among the most basic things an
agent does is data mining--researching the public 'net of its host species. Why buy what is in the public
domain?"