"Paul Preuss - Venus Prime 1 - Breaking Strain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preuss Paul)

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 ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S VENUS PRIME: VOLUME I


No wonder the cop had suspected her of being non-R. He was right, of courseтАУonly one agency held her
registrationтАУbut right for the wrong reasons, and sheтАЩd have to do something about those reasons
quickly.

She washed her face, splashing it repeatedly with icy water until she was wide awake. Then she left to
find the nearest information booth.

She slipped into the booth and peered at the blank flatscreen. Here, on this little flat plate and mounded
keyboard, was light-speed access to anyone on Earth or in space who wished to be accessible (access to
persons who didnтАЩt want to be accessible took a bit longer). Here was access to vast libraries of data
(access to protected data took a bit longer). Here were the means of making or securing loans, paying
debts, investing, wagering, buying every imaginable kind of legal goods or services, or just giving
money away (other kinds of goods, services, and transactions took a bit longer). All that was required of
the client was a valid I.D. sliver and sufficient credit in a registered account.

Sparta no longer had the sliver she had stolen, having deliberately dropped it in the snow outside the
door of the mountain tavern, for she had no intention of leaving a trail of illicit transactions behind her.
But in the intimate privacy of an information boothтАУthe sort of privacy only a place surrounded by
crowds could provideтАУher lack of a sliver was not an immediate concern.

Like the long struggle between people who design armor and people who design armor-piercing
projectiles, the long struggle between people who design software and people who want to penetrate it
was an endless evolutionary spiral. In these days of the late 21st century, fiddling with open-access
programs wasnтАЩt easy, even for those with inside knowledge.

Yet it was another of the things Sparta was sure she had been trained forтАУto what purpose, she could not
remember. With fingerprobes thrust deep into the sliverport she was able to bypass the keyboard and
taste the flavor of the system directly. . . .

Alas, there are no glittering informationscapes, no pretty crystal structures of data, no glowing nodes of
inference and signification. There are no pictures in the electricityтАУnor in the lightтАУexcept as encoded,
and such pictures as there are must be filtered through crude external analogue devices, steerable beams,
glowing phosphors, excited diodes, writhing liquid magnetized suspensions, the raster. But although
there are no pictures in the electricity, there are relationships. There are patterns, harmonics,
conformations.

Datastreams are numbers, huge numbers of huge numbers, huger numbers of lesser numbers, a virtual
infinity of bits. To attempt to visualize even part of the stream is beyond the capacity of any general-
purpose system ever evolved. Smell and taste are different. Feel is different. The sense of harmony is
different. All are acutely sensitive to pattern, and because there are higher-process analogues of these
patterns, it is possible for some people to savor numbers. Calculating prodigiesтАУgeniuses, and more
frequently idiots savantsтАУoccur naturally in every age; to create one purposely requires a prodigious

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 ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S VENUS PRIME: VOLUME I