"Rudy Rucker - Post-Singular" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

Jil and CraigorтАЩs home was a flat live-aboard scow called the Merz Boat.
Propelled by cilia like a giant paramecium, the piezoplastic boat puttered around the
shallow, turbid waters of the south San Francisco Bay. Craigor had bought the Merz
Boat quite cheaply from an out-of-work exec during the chaos that followed the nant
debacle. HeтАЩd renamed the boat in honor of one of his personal heroes, the Dadaist
artist Kurt Schwitters whoтАЩd famously turned his house into an assemblage called the
Merz Bau. тАЬMerzтАЭ was SchwittersтАЩs made-up word meaning, according to Craigor,
тАЬgnarly stuff that I can get for free.тАЭ

Jil was eye-catching: more than pretty, she moved with perfect grace. She had
dark blunt-cut hair, a straight nose and a ready laugh. SheтАЩd been a good student: an
English major with a minor in graphics and design, planning a career in advertising.
But then in her early twenties sheтАЩd had a problem with pseudocoke abuse.
Fortunately sheтАЩd made it into recovery before having the kids with Craigor, a son
and a daughter, seven-year-old Momotaro and five-year-old Bixie. The four of them
made a close-knit, happy family.

Although Jil was still hoping to make it as an ad designer, for now she was
working as a virtual booth bunny for ExaExa, doing demos at online trade fairs, with
her body motion-captured, tarted up, and fed to software developers. All her body
joints were tagged with subcutaneous sensors. SheтАЩd gotten into the product-dancer
thing back when her judgment had been impaired by pseudocoke. Dancing was easy
money, and Jil had a gift for expressing herself in movement. Too bad the
product-dancer audience consisted of slobbering nerds. But now she was getting
close to landing an account with Yoon Shoon, a Korean
self-configuring-athletic-shoe manufacturer. SheтАЩd already sold them a slogan: тАЬOur
goo grows on you.тАЭ

Craigor was a California boy: handsome, good-humored, and not overly
ambitious. Comfortable in his own skin. He called himself an assemblagist sculptor,
which meant that he was a packrat, loath to throw out anything. The vast surface
area of the Merz Boat suited him. Pleasantly idle of a summer evening, heтАЩd amuse
himself by arranging his junk in fresh patterns on the elliptical pancake of their boat,
and marking colored link-lines into the deckтАЩs computational plastic.

Craigor was also a kind of fisherman; he earned money by trapping iridescent
Pharaoh cuttlefish, an invasive species native to the Mergui Archipelago of Burma,
and now flourishing in the waters of the South Bay. The chunky three-kilogram
cuttlefish brought in a good price apiece from AmphiVision, Inc., a San Jose
company that used organic rhodopsin from cuttlefish chromatophores to dope the
special video-displaying contact lenses known as webeyes. All the digirati were
wearing webeyes to overlay heads-up computer displays upon their visual fields.
Webeyes acted as cameras as well; you could transmit whatever you saw. Along
with earbud speakers, throat mikes, and motion sensors, the webeyes were making
cyberspace into an integral part of the natural world.

There werenтАЩt many other cuttlefishermen in the South BayтАФthe fishery was
under a strict licensing program that Craigor had been grandfathered into when the
rhodopsin market took off. Craigor had lucked into a good thing, and he was
blessed with a knack for assembling fanciful traps that brought in steady catches of