"Archform - Beauty - 02 - Flash" - читать интересную книгу автора (Modesitt L E)

"He's in Bozem today, but he'll be back tonight. Some tailings reclamation project."
"And you? Are you still working for that health policy place?"
Aliora offered a syrupy smile. "That's the nicest thing you've said about the Health Policy Centre."
"I suppose you'll eventually convert me. I just don't think universal state-paid health care will ever work. That was one of the things that brought down the CommonocracyЧ"
"Don't call it that. At least, call it the so-called Commonocracy. It was a republic, the United States of America."
"Whatever you call it," I pointed out, "it was a commonocracy, not a republic or a democracy. At the end, there was no check on the untrammelled mob rule, and the mob refused to understand that when the majority of the populace pays for nothing, that majority will offer no support, because they have no true interestЧ"
"Jonat... I think I know where you stand..."
"I have to remind you sometimes."
"You've reminded me. Thursday night? At seven?"
"I'll be there." I made sure I was still smiling until we delinked. Then I went back to the information on the Centre for Societal Research.

Chapter 4

With the development and increasing sophistication of personal filters, embedding became both a commercial and financial necessity for the consumer and technical goods producing industries. While individual household nanetic formulators have proved economically infeasible in their present stage of development, a combination of factors in the mid- to late twenty-first century resulted in the radical restructuring of personal/household use goods. The key factors were the industrial use of nanoassembly, the comparatively inexpensive delivery of critical space-mined raw materials, the imperatives of environmental maintenance, and the widespread use of personal pricer systems with full access to the worldlink.
In practical terms, the result was the effective trifurcation of the marketplace. Consumer commodities essentially became: (1) fungible, where the only differences were in price, shipping costs, and delivery dates; (2) semifungible, where the fungibility was impacted by quantifiable specifications; and (3) discretionary, as determined by prodplacing link-impacted demand.
High-level commercial pricers, as well as personal pricers, reduced the producers of fungibles to the comparative handful of long-established multilateral resulting in a comparatively stable price structure...
Discretionary goods, on the other hand, continued to exhibit wide and often unpredictable levels of demand, and rapidly changing prices...

Overview excerpt, Chapter 3
World Economics
Austen Halton, D.Ec.
Bozem, NorAm, 2215 A.D.

Chapter 5

I've always loved mornings, especially early fall mornings, when the air was crisp and cool, and I didn't sweat so much when I ran. On Wednesday, I finished breakfast just before sunrise, so that I could work in my five kay jog along the greenbelt paths to the north of the residential complex that holds the house. Wednesdays, I took the higher route. My shirt was soaked by the time I trotted back up the curving path to the rear of the house thirty-five minutes later. I pushed the middle two kays, and then gradually slowed so that the last thousand meters were almost a cooldown. Aliora kept telling me that I should be keeping the time well under thirty minutes, but she wasn't the one running up and down hills at close to two thousand meters above sea level. She also wasn't following the run with a half hour weight and exercise session.
I kept blotting sweat from my forehead when I got back upstairs from the weight room, as I automatically checked the gatekeeper. No one had linked while I had been outЧexercise and weight work counted as "out," as a matter of principle.
Once cooled down more and got cleaned up and dressed, I went over all the material the system had pulled up on Tan Uy-Smythe and the Centre for Societal Research before I got to work on finishing the analysis for Reya and PowerSwift.
Not only did Uy-Smythe hold a doctorate from Southern University, but he had been both a Hoover Fellow and an intern for Prasek Charic, when Charic had been the NorAm Executive. Quite a combinationЧa conservative thinkjar fellow and an intern for the most liberal PD executive in years.
The Centre was equally distinguished, founded some thirty years earlier in Denv, with a significant initial endowment from the Pan-Social Trust. I'd never heard of that trust, but I didn't usually deal with foundations or trusts. My clients were interested in maximizing their capitalistic earnings. They probably wouldn't get into doing good for society until they realized that they were still going to die, nanetic medicine and revitalizing therapies notwithstanding.
The Centre's list of publications and scholarly works was lengthy. The titles were descriptive ... and seemingly well within the Centre's NorAm charter. None exactly jumped out from the projections at me, and I plodded through the titles: Trends in Multigenerational Cultural Transmission; Micro-Economic Impacts of Genetic Improvement; Socio-Economic Implications of User Taxes; Observed Limits to Cultural Assimilation; Cultural Impacts of Macro-Economic Policymaking... From what I could tell, the authors all had equally impeccable academic and professional qualifications, and that bothered me as well. My own credentials, while including a doctorate from Darden, certainly didn't match those of the Centre's listed authors and scholars, and I'd never published anythingЧ unless you counted hundreds of reports to clients over the past eight years. Personal inadequacy wasn't why I was troubled. It might have been why I felt diminished, but there was ... something ... about the publications and their subjects.
I tried a key subject matter listing search, and followed that with one based on political viewpoints, and another by publication date patterns, and even one by the academic institutions from which the various authors had received degrees. The system couldn't find a single meaningful correlation. That didn't mean there wasn't one, just that I hadn't framed the inquiries well enough to find one.
More in-depth research on the Centre would have to wait. I'd done enough diligence to cover my ass, and more than enough for not having even signed a retainer or a confidentiality agreement, and I needed to finish the PowerSwift analyses for Reya. I hoped I could do that before Methroy linked and started questioning me about the report I'd sent off on ErrorOne. PPI wasn't going to be happy about my findings, or my recommendations, but then, Methroy had come to me because they were getting trashed. That was because they were handling product placement in the same old comfortable and tired way, and the viewers had caught on and were dismissing the PPI prods. Methroy had just finished the first round of placements based on my analyses, and initial results were promising.
In what I did, I had to convey bad news at times, and some of the multis preferred to shoot the messenger, rather than face the facts. I'd found that it didn't help to be too soothing in those situations. Diplomatic, yes, but not conciliatory. That sort of client politicking just wasted my time and made them madder in the long run, and I lost credits both ways then.
Dismissing PPI and Methroy, I called up the raw analyses on the PowerSwift prodplacements. Just for PowerSwift, weЧmy proprietary system and IЧwere surveying more than two hundred product positions in six hours of erothrillers. I'd developed my system out of self-defense. The nets spread forth hour after hour of holo-projected, nonstop, rezpop backgrounded, semierotic, mechanical plot action thrillers, or some other variety of sex and violence, or romance and sex, or romance and violence, taking up 95 percent of the available bandwidth. No one, I was convinced, could be surrounded by that and retain any semblance of lucidity and sanity. So, I'd reduced the placements to algorithms based on projection position relative to the central focus, added an additional correlation to the two or three rezchords that hyped the productЧeffectively a commercial leitmotif. Wagner doubtless would have shuddered at the usageЧand the fact that commercial law provided copyright protection to resonance-based proprietary leitmotifs. Then, I'd added another series of algorithms that assessed various cancellation effects. Dierk called it pseudoscience. He was half-fascinated, and half-appalled, that the system worked. I had to tweak it now and again, but it worked, and nothing that anyone else did came nearly so close to my results in measuring product placement effectiveness.
The PowerSwift line encompassed formulators, cookers, and a range of home conveniences, all emblazoned with the intertwined and stylized P/S logo. I didn't own any, but I'd have bet that Reya Decostas didn't, either.
I dug into the PowerSwift data and ended up working straight through until one-fifteen, when I set everything aside, tied a black cravat in place, and donned a black jacket. In green and black, I left the house and walked the four hundred meters down to the maglev station that would take me to southeast Denv, where the Centre for Societal Research was located. I could have driven the Altimus, but private transportation for a single individual wasn't considered a deductible business expense, not under the NorAm tax code, and the Revenue Audits would have caught that in a flash. It was stupid, like a lot of government regs. I could also have hired a commercial shuttle, even as the sole passenger, and deducted the entire expense, but I couldn't drive myself and write off the cost, although it would have been cheaper.
So I stood in the September sunlight, waiting on the platform for the maglev. An older woman, older because her features were too fine and her clothes too tasteful for her to be young, stood five meters or so to the south of me. That there were only two of us waiting was to be expected in the middle of the day. At twenty before two, a flash of silver from the north preceded the local maglev, and in less than a minute, I was seated inside the shuttle, still thinking about the PowerSwift study results. There hadn't been that much variation in effectiveness in three years, almost as if Sokolof/HaysЧthey were the media advisers for P/SЧhad reached peak efficiency. I didn't know of any other prodplacing with greater effectiveness, but I was glad that it was their problem and not mine.
The trip south was quiet and quick, and the woman who had gotten on with me got off at the Old Capitol station. More passengersЧjust a fewЧgot on at every station on the outbound legs south to Castlepine. My stop was well short of that, and about a third of those in my car got off with me. The station gates flicked open as I stepped toward them, following a handful of young tech-types. The Centre was only about three long blocks west of the NorthTech station. Above the low roofs of the complex, as always, Mount Evans stood out, in the middle of the horizon, with but a few traces of early snow.
The structure that held the Centre had to be over a century old, because the brick was the darkish red that marked the period, darkened further by time. Outside was a simple sign, loss than a meter in length and no more than a third in height, white bronze lettering standing out from the solid blackened bronze background. All it gave were four namesЧthe Centre for Societal Research was at the bottom.
I walked up the replica cobblestones, an anachronism that I wasn't about to call to Uy-Smythe's attention, and stepped inside the entry foyer. The guard inside was a virty. In his crisp uniform that would never need cleaning or pressing, he smiled warmly. "Might I ask your destination, sir?"
"Director Tan Uy-Smythe at the Centre for Societal Research. I'm Jonat deVrai, and I have a two-thirty appointment."
"Yes, sir. Let me check."
After a moment, he said. "He's expecting you, Dr. deVrai. His office is on the upper level on the north end." With that, the stainless steel gate to his rightЧa gate that would have stopped a maglev at full accelerationЧ opened.
"Thank you." Simulation or not, I still believed in manners. I also was impressed by the salutation. I didn't use "doctor," nor was it listed on my casual professional communications, but Uy-Smythe or his staff had tracked that down.
The inside of the building had been modernizedЧwith ramps and indirect high-impact, low-energy lightingЧand I made my way up to the northwest corner. The outer office was paneled in white oak, a formulated reproduction, I was certain, but Uy-Smythe had a real receptionist, at least my age. Her smile was pleasant, her eyes wary.
"Jonat deVrai." I offered my professional smile.
"Dr. Uy-Smythe is expecting you, sir."
Following her eyes and gesture I stepped into the corner office, also paneled, with a south wall comprised entirely of bookshelves, shelves that were filled with bound volumes. I'd wondered whether the holo background when Uy-Smythe had linked me had been projected or real. Now, I knew.
"Dr. deVrai." He stood beside the conference table, and his voice was deeper in person, but he was smaller than I'd thought. I was a good head and a half taller, but I'm bigger than most people. That helps, as people have always known, but more than you'd think in a profession like mine.