"Richard Powers - Galatea 22" - читать интересную книгу автора (Powers Richard)

Transparent man-machine interfaces. Control of protein folding. High-def, digital contrition.
The building teemed with job descriptions: theorists, experimen-talists, technicians, magicians.
Someone here had a probe attached to every conceivable flicker. One wing swarmed with scientists who
proclaimed their transcendence over engineering. Another housed en-gineers who didn't even
acknowledge the distinction. What one floor banished bred like mold in a nearby quarter.
The Center was big. So big I lost my office twice in the first month, the way you lose a rental in an
airport parking garage. Sheer size was the Center's chief virtue. Even the embarrassment of talking to the
same colleague twice faded in a place so huge. In such an expanse, I hoped, one year would be too brief
for me to be of any but passing interest to anyone.
What's more, the complex opened onto virtual space, through a spreading network backbone. I had
an office with my name on the door, and a computer cabled into the world web. No one suspected that I
had no research group, that I could not tell a field-responsive polymer from a spin glass. I came and went
in awful freedom, a complete impostor.
I found the dress-up weirdly pleasant, knowing I could go home nightly to a house both empty and
rented. For a long time, I must have been aspiring to just this. Immaculate and cold-booted, a resi-dent
alien. Just passing through the old alma mater.
The Center had much to recommend it. Its doors knew me from a distance. They clicked open at the
command of an infrared pass card that I didn't even need to take out of my wallet. I flipped backside to
sensors, mandrill style. Anyone reading this by accident or nos-talgia a hundred years from now will have
to take my word for the novelty.
The parabolic front foyer concentrated sound. I liked to stand at the focus and hear the rush of my
own breath, the throb of blood coursing through my veins. I listened to my body's roar, sounding for all
the world like a message left on an answering machine by someone who died later that day.
I tinkered at my new novel, ticking at the machine keys with my door closed and the fluorescent lights
doused. My office reveled in state-of-the-art, clean-room efficiency. The perfect place to tuck my
millennial bedtime story in for the night. I'd click a radio button on my screen and eighteen months of
work waited for me by the time I hiked upstairs to the network laser.
I browsed the world web. I fished it from my node on a building host that served up more megabits a
second than I could request. By keying in short electronic addresses, I connected to machines all over
the face of the earth. The web: yet another total disorientation that became status quo without anyone
realizing it.
The snap of a finger, a satellite uplink, and I sat conversing with a mainframe in my old coal-mining
ex-hometown seven time zones away. I could read the evensong schedule from off a digital valet in
Cambridge, download Maurya painting, or make a Cook's tour of New Zealand. In seconds, I could
scroll through dinner menus in lan-guages I could not even identify. From my chair in the virgin Center, I
revisited every city I'd ever spent time in and hundreds I would never get around to visiting in this life.
The town had been knitted into a loose-weave, global network in my absence. The web seemed to
be self-assembling. Endless local investigations linked up with each other like germs of ice crystal merging
to fill a glass pane.
The web overwhelmed me. I found it easier to believe that the box in Pakistan I chatted with was
being dummied up in the other end of the building. I didn't know how my round-the-world jaunts were
being billed, or if they were billed at all.
For a while, I felt a low-grade thrill at being alive in the moment when this unprecedented thing
congealed. But after weeks of jet-setting around the hypermap, I began to see the web as just the latest
term in an ancient polynomial expansion. Each nick on the time line spit out some fitful precursor.
Everyone who ever lived had lived at a moment of equal astonishment.
The web had been a long while in linking up. It, too, was just a stopgap stage in a master plan drawn
up on the back of the brain's envelope. A bit of improvised whittling, forever a step shy. A provi-sional
pontoon in that rough pencil sketch for final triumph over space and time.
I explored the world's first network in embryo. After days of dis-appearing children, I spent my