"Charles Stross - Antibodies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

ANTIBODIES
Charles Stross

Although he made his first sale back in 1987, it's only recently
that British writer Charles Stross has begun to make a name for
himself as a writer to watch in the new century ahead, with a
sudden burst in the last couple of years of quirky, inventive,
high-bit-rate stories such as "A Colder War", "Bear Trap",
"Dechlorinating the Moderator", and "Toast: A Con Report" in
markets such as Interzone, Spectrum SF, Osyssey, Strange
Plasma, and New Worlds. In the fast-paced and innovative
story that follows, he demon-strates that although you can
carefully set a warning alarm, by the time it goes off, it may be
almost too late to do anything about it.

Charles Stross is also a regular columnist for the monthly magazine Computer
Shopper. Coming up is his first collection, Toast, and Other Burned Out Futures.
He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

****

EVERYONE REMEMBERS WHERE they were and what they were doing when a
member of the great and the good is assassinated. Gandhi, the Pope, ThatcherтАФif
you were old enough you remembered where you were when you heard, the
ticker-tape of history etched across your senses. You can kill a politician but their
ideas usually live on. They have a life of their own. How much more dangerous,
then, the ideas of mathematicians ?

I was elbow-deep in an eviscerated PC, performing open heart surgery on a diseased
network card, when the news about the travelling salesman theorem came in. Over
on the other side of the office John's terminal beeped, notification of incoming mail.
A moment later my own workstation bonged.

"Hey, Geoff! Get a load of this!"

I carried on screwing the card back into its chassis. John is not a priority interrupt.

"Someone's come up with a proof that NP-complete problems lie in P! There's a
posting in comp.risks saying they've used it to find an O*(n 2) solution to the
travelling salesman problem, and it scales! Looks like April First has come early this
year, doesn't it?"

I dropped the PC's lid on the floor hastily and sat down at my workstation. Another
cubed-sphere hypothesis, another flame war in the math newsgroupsтАФor something
more serious? "When did it arrive?" I called over the partition. Soroya, passing my
cubicle entrance with a cup of coffee, cast me a dirty look; loud voices aren't
welcome in open-plan offices.

"This just in," John replied. I opened up the mailtool and hit on the top of the list,
which turned out to be a memo from HR about diversity awareness training. No,