"Rudy Rucker - Chu and the Nants" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

Chu and the Nants by Rudy Rucker
The author's most recent appearance in our pages was with his October/November 2005 Thought
Experiment, "Adventures in Gnarly Computation," which was based on his latest nonfiction book, The
Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. Rudy has written twenty-seven science fiction and popular science
books. His latest novel, Math-ematicians in Love, is due from Tor in the fall. Rudy was an early
cyberpunk, and often writes SF in a realistic style that he characterizes as transreal. Inspired by Charles
Stross's Accelerando, Rudy is currently writing a novel involving the computational Singularity described
in "Chu and the Nants."

Little Chu was Nektar's joy and her sorrow. The four-year-old boy was winsome, with a chestnut cap of
shiny brown hair, long dark eyelashes, and a tidy mouth. Chu allowed Nektar and her husband to cuddle
him, he'd smile now and then, and he understood what they said--if it suited his moods. But he wouldn't
talk in recognizable words.

The doctors had pinpointed the problem as an empathy deficit, a type of autism resulting from a
crescent-shaped flaw in the upper layer of Chu's cingulate cortex. This hardware flaw prevented Chu
from being able to see other people as having minds and emotions separate from his own.

"I wonder if Chu thinks we're toons," said Nektar's husband Ond, a pear-shaped man with thinning
blonde hair. "We're here to entertain him. Why talk to the screen?" Ond was an engineer working for
Nantel, Inc., and among strangers he could seem kind of autistic himself. But he was warm and friendly
within the circle of his friends and immediate family. They were walking to the car after another visit to the
doctor, big Ond holding little Chu's hand.

"Maybe Chu feels like we're all one," said Nektar. She was a beautiful young woman with round cheeks,
full lips, guileless eyes, and long kinky light-brown hair. "Maybe Chu imagines that we automatically
know what he's thinking." She reached back to adjust the bushy ponytail that floated behind her head like
a cloud.

"How about it, Chu?" said Ond, lifting the boy up and giving him a kiss. "Is Mommy the same as you? Or
is she a machine?"

"Ma chine ma chine ma chine," said Chu, probably not meaning anything by it. He often parroted phrases
he heard, sometimes chanting a single word for a whole day.

"What about the experimental treatment the doctor mentioned?" said Nektar, looking down at her son,
an asterisk of wrinkles knit into her rounded brow. "The nants," she continued. "Why wouldn't you let me
tell the doctor that you work for Nantel, Ond? I think you bruised my shin."

Nants were bio-mimetic self-reproducing nanomachines being developed in the Nantel labs--for several
years now there'd been news-stories about nants having a big future in medical apps. The doctor had
suggested that a swarm of properly programmed nants might eventually be injected into Chu to find their
way to his brain-scar and coax the neurons into growing the needed patch.

"I don't like arguing tech with normals," said Ond, still carrying Chu in his arms, his voice a little sullen
because it broke his heart to see Nektar worry. "It's like mud-wrestling a cripple. The stories about
medical nant apps are hype and spin and PR, Nektar. Nantel pitches that line of bullshit so the feds don't
outlaw our research. The reality is that we'll never be able to program nants in any purposeful,
long-lasting, high-level way. All we can do is give the individual nants a few starting rules. The nant
swarms develop their own Wolfram-irreducible emergent hive-mind behaviors. We'll never really control