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

nights playing in the greatest virtual sandbox yet built. I'd stumbled upon a stack of free travel vouchers. I
put up in U., but I resided elsewhere. I thought: a person might be able to make a life in all that
etherspace.
Each day produced new improbabilities. I searched card catalogs in Kyoto or book reports from
Bombay. German soccer scores and Alaskan aurora sightings filled my office E-mail pouch.
I eavesdropped on international discussion groups, ongoing, inter-active Scheherazades that covered
every imaginable theme from arms control to electronic erotica. Notefile threads split and proliferated in
meiosis. Debates flowed without beginning or end, through tributaries and meanderings, responses to
responses to responses. Inexhaustible protagonists from every time zone posted to the continuous forum
a dozen or more times a day.
Alone in my office, blanketed by the hum of the Center, I felt like a boy happening onto a copy of
the Odyssey in a backwater valley library. I wanted to rush out into the hall and announce my each
discovery. But who could I tell? Those lonely souls who stood most to gain would only shake their
heads, dazed, locked out on every level. Those who had the wherewithal to see what the fuss was about
had already habituated to the inconceivable.
Advanced science, of course, profited enormously from the web. The groups at the Center could
now read journal articles months before they hit print. The data Autobahns had no speed limit. They
plunked one in front of any results on earth before you could read the "Connect." Researchers peered
into colleagues' labs on other continents, in real time. They shared data in 3D, as they gath-ered it.
On all sides of my cubicle, experimenters scoured the nodes. The net reduced duplication of effort
and helped pinpoint crucial results they otherwise might have missed altogether. Instant telemessaging
produced an efficiency that fed back into steeper invention. And in-vention accelerated the universal
linkup.
But the longer I lurked, the sadder the holiday became. People who used the web turned strange. In
public panels, they disguised their sexes, their ages, their names. They logged on to the electronic fray,
adopting every violent persona but their own. They whizzed bi-nary files at each other from across the
planet, the same planet where impoverished villages looked upon a ball-point pen with wonder. The web
began to seem a vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals.
The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger
and faster. When relentless intel-ligence finally completed its program, when the terminal drop box
brought the last barefoot, abused child on line and everyone could at last say anything instantly to
everyone else in existence, it seemed to me we'd still have nothing to say to each other and many more
ways not to say it.
Yet I could not log off. My network sessions, all that fall, grew longer and more frequent. I began to
think of myself in the virtual third person, as that disembodied world-web address:
[email protected].
How long could I show up at the Center and produce nothing of use to anyone? The productivity
problem. The pure-research problem. The inspiration, the blind-trust problem. I could drift without limit
and still not be reprimanded. I had the year gratis. I might do nothing but prime the pump, rest and
recharge, and still I would not ruffle so much as a mite's mood where it camped out on the eyelash of the
emergent digital oversoul.

I meant to milk the new book for as many weeks of touch-up as I could get away with. Past that
point I tried not to speculate. Three times before, the end of a long project had kicked off the start of
another. I'd mastered the art of surviving narrative whiplash. No rea-son, in theory, why I couldn't
regroup again. Go on and work forever.
But this time felt different. This time, after I paid my Pied Piper account, nothing waited for me on the
far side of story's gaping moun-tain. Nothing but irremediable Things As They Are.
What little diversionary work remained I dragged out for all it was worth. Two Kbytes of new text or
four of reasonable revision honorably discharged me of the day. Beyond that, I could indulge my