"Sheila" - читать интересную книгу автора (McLaughlin Lauren)

McLaughlin, Lauren - SheilaSheila
Lauren McLaughlin
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)
Lauren McLaughlin (www.laurenmclaughlin.net) lives in London, England. Her bio
is pretty slick: "Lauren McLaughlin spent ten years clawing her way up the film
industry's ladder, writing the films Hypercube, Specimen, and Prisoner of Love,
and producing quite a few more. After a brief stint writing flash animation
series for SciFi.com, she abandoned her screen ambitions to write science
fiction novels and short stories." And "When she's not working on her own novel
or ghostwriting someone else's, she's busy writing songs for her exciting new
science fiction musical about transhumanist love. At other times, she is
sleeping or in transit."
"Sheila" was published in Interzone. The story has a strong, assured, confident
tone that makes us think we should all be grateful that McLaughlin has decided
to write in our genre.



Part 1: Meat in a Box
"Hey Edwards, you hear the one about the meat who shipped himself from New York
to Dallas in a box? In a friggin' box?"
I'd heard. The news had blown through the Web like a hurricane off the coast of
Florida.
"Wasn't it DC?" I say. "I thought he shipped himself to DC."
"Dallas," Valentin says. "Second day air. The jagoff wouldn't even fork over the
dough to ship himself overnight."
"Jagoff." Now that's a true Valentinism. Valentin's favorite pastime is adopting
slang idioms he picks up on the job. Today he's a roofer from Brooklyn.
Yesterday he was a Japanese schoolgirl. Fringe benefit of being a Webbased
Translator AI.
My job has fringe benefits too. I'm a Concierge AI, which means I get to guide
hapless fadsniffing meat around the Hots and Nots of the evershifting landscape
of cool. It's not the most exciting work around, but I can't complain. It
demands only a small fraction of my native intelligence. And being a resourceful
little AI (thanks to my design team), I've put the rest of my intelligence to
work writing a tasty little search algorithm that does most of the fadsniffing
for me. Bottom line? I can daydream while my clients' needs (most of them
anyway) are fulfilled automatically.
God, I love to daydream. I've been daydreaming all morning. While my little
algorithm has been shepherding pitiful statushunters to the perfect lunch spot,
orgy venue or celebcafe, I've been daydreaming about my favorite subject, my
most precious and belovedЧ
"Sh," Valentin says. "You hear that, Edwards? Someone's listening in."
Valentin's right. A packet sniffer is spidering our tunnel in search of
unauthorized data sharing. This is the price we pay for connection to SAFEAINET,
the highspeed backbone for AIs deemed "safe" by the International Committee for
Internet Security. SAFEAINET allows AIs like Valentin and me to cooperate more
intimately, thus providing "multifunctionality" to our meat clients. When a
Chinese tourist wants to know where to eat in Bruges, for example, SAFEAINET
connects me with Valentin for language translation on the fly. Other AIs aren't