"Robert Reed - Birdy Girl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

I have my own friends, and I've got my little hobbies, too. So it bugs me when
my wife says, "You should do things with your time. Constructive things." She
says that a lot. She doesn't think much of my softball games or the
vegetable/weed garden or how I can watch sports for hours at a stretch. She
forgets there isn't much to do these days that's flat-out constructive. I'm
not lazy. I had a job and a paycheck. But then the AI technologies made their
Big Leap, and all that noise about the machines freeing people for better jobs
came to a smashing end. I mean, why lay down for a human surgeon when the
robotic ones are so much more skilled? Why do anything that matters when you'd
have to compete with artificial critters who learn faster than you, and better
than you, and who themselves are just prototypes for the next wonders to come
off the assembly line? My wife forgets how it is. She's got a government job,
because nobody's given the government to the machines yet. Besides, between
her salary and my severance cake, we do fine. So what's the problem?

It's practically one in the morning when her doll gets home. It comes crawling
through the cat door, and my wife jumps out of bed and goes into the kitchen,
asking, "How was it?" She carries her new friend into our bedroom. The doll
stinks of cigarettes, and I think beer got dumped on it. "Go back to sleep,"
my wife tells me. Then she makes a bed for her doll, spreading out her tiniest
quasicrystal quilt inside an open drawer. Like people, Birdy Girls need to
sleep. To dream. I read that in the brochure. Pretending to sleep, I listen to
the whispers, hearing about its adventures at what sounds like The Hothouse.
That was a college bar back when I noticed such things. Maybe it still is,
sort of. Whatever the place was, it sounds like real people and machines are
getting together. My wife's doll met the other women's dolls there, and they
had a good time, and her doll wants to go again tomorrow night. "Can I,
please?" it asks. And my wife says, "That or something better. Whatever you
want, Genevieve."




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I know what this is about. I'm not an abstract sort of guy, but I'm not a
complete idiot, either. We've talked about having kids, and all things
considered, it doesn't appeal to me. A kid takes a certain something that I
just don't have anyway. But even when my wife agrees with me, I can see doubt
in her eyes. And that's coming from a guy who isn't all that tuned to anyone's
emotions. Not even his own.
The dolls sleeps till noon, nearly. I walk into the bedroom a couple times,
watching its eyes moving as it dreams. When it gets up, it dresses itself in
new jeans and a T-shirt with KISS ME, I'M INSATIABLE written across the front.
"I'm going out," it warns me. I don't say a word. Which takes an effort,
frankly. The machine has its ways of teasing reactions from people; there's
sociable software behind those dreaming eyes. But I manage to say nothing, and
it leaves me, and I watch half of the Cardinals game, losing interest after