"Robinson, Spider - Callahan's Legacy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

And after he was done and we finished applauding and commenting and petting him, and so forth, we all spent a while chatting with the Internet. Not chatting on the Internet. Chatting with the Internet...with its self-generated Artificially Intelligent avatar, whom my true love Zoey had named Solace, and who had for several months now been manifesting herself, at infrequent intervals, through the house's souped-up Mac H (augmented with camera and microphone). The chat was of a fairly standard type: we tried to think of Turing Tests that Solace couldn't pass-and she tried out a few Turing Tests of her own on us.
Like I say; a pretty routine night, for us-at Mary's Place. It was nearly ten o'clock before anything I'd classify as weird happened.


Solace had just aced our latest homebrewed Turing Test, a speech recognition homonym-discriminator devised by Doc Webster. This consisted of correctly displaying onscreen, as the Doc dictated it, without perceptible pause for thought-the following nonsense sentence:

"I was musing on the Muse under some yews outside S.M.U.'s museum, as I'm used to doing, when a kitten's musical mews drew me into the museum's mews, which some use-damn youse-to- sniff mucilage for amusement."

This is, of course, just an extended variation on Heinlein's classic construct, "Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through," that is, a sentence designed to confound just about any imaginable speech-recognition system short of a human brain or functional equivalent. As far as I'm concerned; software capable of grokking that all six of Heinlein's different-sounds are, spelled identically, or that the single repeating sound in the Doc's sentence can and must be semantically interpreted thirteen different ways, is software that meets my criteria for sentience, whether its neurons are wet or dry. (What matter if said sentience consists of "nothing more than" a large sheaf of complex algorithtms. I don't know about you, but a good half the human beings I run into on the street are, or seem to be, on automatic pilot: navigating by a series of prestored algorithms, clumsy primitive rules of thumb. Can't see that it makes any difference whether the algorithms are expressed by meat, machine, or Martian.) As the last words of the Doc's test sentence appeared onscreen, correctly spelled, a mild cheer went up from those ten or fifteen patrons who were paying attention.
I'd like to pause there for just a second and preen, if I may. I think I have a right to be a little proud: at age forty-five, I ran the kind of bar where a live, realtime chat with the Net come alive was not necessarily the most interesting thing in the room. Over at the opposite end of the house from the sparkling fireplace, for example, Ev and Don were playing tictac-toe with smoke rings for an appreciative crowd of onlookers-don't ask me how Don can blow an X; all I can tell you is they seem very happy with each other-and in another corner of the house, the Darts Championship of the Universe (a weekly ritual) was in progress; the Lucky Duck had agreed to accept as handicaps both a blindfold and the tying of both hands behind his back, and nonetheless was clearly going to seize the crown from Tommy Janssen, the reigning champion; it was just a matter of time. His luck was with him, you see.
But I digress.
As I was saying, Solace successfully displayed that silly sentence (in thirty-six-point Benguiat font on her fourteeninch monitor, if you're a computer weenie. And by the way, did you know that nanotechnology fans are known as "teeny weenies?") as fast as Doe Webster could say it, and was applauded by something like a dozen onlookers. "Way to go, Solace," Long~Drink McGonnigle called out.
"Thank you, Phil," Solace said. Ever since we had decided that Solace was more of a she than a he, she had spoken aloud to us-through the stereo speakers I'd hooked up to the Mac II in a warm contralto, not unlike Zoey's.
"Hell," the Drink went on, "these days there's probably Ph.D.s in English who couldn't spell that sentence correctly. Even I might have had to hesitate a second.or two, here and there."
"These days there are Ph.D.s in English who can't spell 'Ph.D.,'" Tanya Latimer said gloomily, and her husband Isham nodded agreement.
Marty Matthias spoke up. "My grade twelve students at St. Dominic's all did rotten on the last exam I gave them. So to try and cheer them, up a little, I told them the inspirational story of how Albert Einstein himself failed math when he was in school, right? A hand goes up in the back of the room. 'Mr. Matthias,' he says, not kidding, honestly puzzled, 'I don't get it. If he was so iousy in school and everything.. . how come they called him "Einstein"?'"
There were cries of horror, outrage and protest. But no disbelief.
"I didn't know what to say. I stood there with my mouth open until the bell rang."
Doc Webster sighed. "It's the 'Tood and Janey' effect," he announced.
"The which?" Long-Drink asked.
"Creeping---no, galloping-illiteracy. The township repaired the sidewalks in my neighborhood recently, poured fresh concrete, you know? Naturally kids with popsicle sticks condensed out of the ether, to immortalize themselves with. . . uh . -. concrete poetty." Groans. "Well sir, right in front of my house, where I have to look at it every time I go out, there is now inscribed a large heart, within which lie the dread words, 'TOOD AND JANEY'
"Huh?" chorused half a dozen people at once.
"I know the world has gotten weird lately," the Doc went on, "but I still don't believe we've reached the point where any set of parents would name their son 'Tood.' I'm forced to conclude that young Todd can't spell his own fucking name." This brought shocked laughter. "Old enough to be horny for Janey, mind you, and the boy can't spell his name. Miracle he got hers right; her mom must have sewn name tags onto her underwear." That got even more laughter.
Long~Drmnk shook his head. "How much you want to bet her name is Jeanie?" he asked, and the laughter redoubled.
"Wait, I got a topper," Tommy Janssen said. The Lucky Duck had just finished skunking him at darts-tossing all five shots with his teeth and then punting them into the bullseye, with his own eyes closed-and Tommy had naturally gravitated to the nearest source of laughter to soothe his wounds. "I was in the men's room .down at the library, and I was reading the graffiti on the wall of the stall, - to iass the time, right? And at first I was bummed out, because all the ones I saw were racist. But then a pattern began to emerge, and I cheered up a little. The first one I saw said, 'Pakis' suck' . . but the author had spelled 'Pakis' P-A-K-I-S-apostophe. The next one read, 'KKK-the clan is back,' only 'clan' was spelled with a c instead of a k! But the third one was the best: he was trying to say, 'Death to anyone wearing a turban'.. . but the last word was spelled T-U-R-B-I-N-E!" By now people were whooping. "Which as far as I know lets out everybody but Mickey Finn, and maybe the Terminator. So the bad news is, racistt~ is on the rise. . . but the good news is, they're even stupider than ever!" The laughter became applause, and a number of empty glasses sailed across the room and met in the fireplace with a musical sound.
I think it was about then that I first noticed the newcomer enter my bar.
I remember wondering if a barrage of flying glasses was going to put him off. Newcomers to Mary's Place-and we don't get many, for I don't advertise, and there's no sign outside-sometimes take a while to dope out that all the silicon shells are ending up in the fireplace. But this guy seemed to take a rain of glasses in stride. It even seemed to tickle him. I liked him for that.
He was about fifty or so, close on to six foot, clean-shaven with short gray hair (which was dry; the rain must have stopped outside), dressed casual and cheap-save for an exceptionally fine pair of boots that looked like some kind of exotic endangered lizard's skin. When I saw their heels I revised my estimate of his height downward by several inches. Since he carried an acoustic-guitar case, I took him for a fellow musician, who had heard about Mary's Place through the folkies' grapevine.
He must have observed a couple of toasts being made, as he covered the distance from the door to the bar. I believe Doc Webster started it, toasting, "To the American educational system, God bless it," and flinging his empty glass into the fire. And then Tommy stepped up and replaced him at the chalk line, said, "Literates:-next on Oprah," drained his own beer, and unloaded his own empty into the flames. ~nyway, by the time the new guy bellied up to-the bar, he seemed from his expression to have intuitively grasped the essential nature of our most central custom-and! could see he approved of it. More points for alertness and class. "What'll it be, friend?" I said, going through that silly little ritual of pretending to polish the bartop in front of him.
"A cold day in Hell before I find another bar as interesting as this one," he said agreeably. (I agreed with him, anyway.) "Not many innkeepers let you smash your glass in their hearth anymore these days." He held up his guitar case. 'Okay if! set this thing on the bar a minute?"
It was a big case, but there was ample room. "Sure. Let me mop up.some of the spills and circles for you-"
"No need," he said, and set the case down on the bar. "I won't be needing the case much longer."
I was finding him as interesting as he found my bar. "Why not?" I asked him.
He was fumbling with the latches. "I intend to empty it for good." He got the last one open and lifted the lid. It blocked my view of whatever was in the case, and I wrestled with the question of whether it would be polite-or prudent-to shift my position a little and sneak a glance over the opened lid. What kind of guitar was this man proposing to destroy? Or was that a machine gun in there?
Standing behind him, Noah Gonzalez suddenly did a double-take then made it a triple, gaping at the open case. That decided me. But before I could move forward, the stranger plucked something from the case, took it at either end with his fingertips, and snapped it taut.
It was, or appeared to be, a one-hundred-dollar bill.
Noah nudged his nearest neighbor, Suzy Maser, directed her attention to the stranger and his guitar case, and Suzy did what may have been the first qoadruple-take I've ever seen.
A crisp new hundred-dollar bill, it looked to be: he folded it lengthwise and it took a crease between his fingernails. He folded one corner over to meet the central crease, then did the same with the resulting new corner. Then he repeated the procedure with the opposite corner. By now Noah and Suzy were no longer the only ones staring.
I glanced over the lid. That entire jumbo guitar case was packed with what seemed to be genuine U.S. currency, all of it-or at least all the ones visible on top of each banded stack-crisp starchy hundred-dollar bills. I knew less than an innkeeper probably really ought to know about spotting counterfeit money, but these looked pretty good to me. My intuition told me they were genuine. I couldn't estimate the total; but something told me it would have the word "million" in it somewhere, quite possibly in the plural.
I looked back up at the stranger. He had folded one raked outer edge back to meet the central crease, and was doing the same with the other. Maybe half my customers were discreetly watching now; the bu2z of conversation faltered.
By the time I had allowed myself to believe that I was watching a man make a paper airplane out of a hundreddollar bill, he had it airworthy. He grinned briefly at me, turned around to face the fireplace, and let fly.
The bill soared gracefully across the room. By the time it arrived at the hearth, most of the eyes in the Place were tracking it. It was damned -well aimed. The sudden updraft over the flames made it try to climb up the chimney, but too abruptly: it stalled, rolled out, and angered into a chunk of birch, falling over and bursting into flame.
All eyes traveled back to the stranger. I guess he'd been confident of his aim he was already halfway through the next C-note/airplane..

The general reaction was unanimous. Once people were satisfied that he had torched the bill intentionally, and meant to continue doing so for a while, they politely looked away and went back about their own business. The noise level in the robm went back up to normal.
Oh, no doubt many of them discussed the stranger but did so in politely hushed tones, without any unseemly gawking or pointing. I stared at the guy closely, but I had professional obligations. I figure if a man comes - into my bar and starts setting cash on fire, I have a moral duty to assure myself that he isn't drunk before I decide whether to sell him liquor. I'm much better at detecting drunkenness than I am at detecting counterfeit money, and it was clear to me that while he was not cold sober, neither was he near bombed enough to call for intervention. "Want any help with that, cousin?" I asked.
Our combined reaction-or rather, lack of it-delighted him as much as our glass-smashing custom had. "Why, thanks," he said, and gestured for me to help myself.
I signaled Tom Hauptman, my backup bartender, to take over the job of keeping everybody else's glasses refilled. He nodded and went to work with the industry you'd expect of a former minister. So I busted the paper tape off another stack of hundreds and fashioned the top bill into a paper airplane. When I had it done, I set it close to the newcomer's hand and built another. Soon we had sorted it into a system: I made the planes and he launched them. The only attention anyone else paid was to make sure they didn't wander into his line of fire. His aim was impressive. Before too long he had to pause and wait for the pile of crashed C-planes to burn down a bit, so that new arrivals wouldn't spill out ontp the floor.
"This is really nice of you," he said. "This was going to be my last attempt before I gave up the whole idea. The last three places I tried this, people got very upset."
I nodded. "I can see how that could be. Riots have started over less."