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

next. . . they want to close the smoking room and make us a 100 per cent
tobacco-free workplace. Hmm. Next.

Forwarded e-mail: headers bearing the spoor of a thousand mail servers, from
Addis-Ababa to Ulan Bator. Before it had entered our internal mail network it had
travelled from Taiwan to Rochester nj, then to UCB in the Bay Area, then via a
mailing list to all points; once in-company it had been bounced to everyone in
engineering and management by the first recipient, Eric the Canary. (Eric is the
departmental plant. Spends all the day web-dozing for juicy nuggets of new
information if you let him. A one-man wire service: which is why I always ended up
finishing his jobs.)

I skimmed the message, then read it again. Blinked. This kind of stuff is heavy on the
surreal number theory: about as digestible as an Egyptian mummy soaked in tabasco
sauce for three thousand years. Then I poked at the web page the theorem was on.

No response тАФ server timed out.

Someone or something was hitting on the web server with the proof: I figured it had
to be all the geeks who'd caught wind of the chain letter so far. My interest was up,
so I hit the "reload" button, and something else came up on screen.

Lots of theoremsтАФlooked like the same stuff as the e-mail, only this time with some
fun graphics. Something tickled my hindbrain then, and I had to bite my lip to keep
from laughing. Next thing, I hit the print button and the inkjet next to my desk began
to mutter and click. There was a link near the bottom of the page to the author's
bibliography, so I clicked on that and the server threw another "go away, I'm busy"
error. I tugged my beard thoughtfully, and instead of pressing "back" I pressed
"reload".

The browser thought to itself for a bitтАФthen a page began to appear on my screen.
The wrong page. I glanced at the document title at the top and froze:

THE PAGE AT THIS LOCATION HAS BEEN WITHDRAWN. Please enter your
e-mail address if you require further information.

Hmm.

As soon as the printout was finished, I wandered around to the photocopier next
door to the QA labs and ran off a copy. Faxed it to a certain number, along with an
eyes up note on a yellow Post-it. Then I poked my head around into the QA lab
itself. It was dingy in there, as usual, and half the cubicles were empty of human life.
Nobody here but us computers; workstations humming away, sucking juice and
meditating on who-knew-what questions. (Actually, I did know: they were mostly
running test harnesses, repetitively pounding simulated input data into the programs
we'd so carefully built, in the hope of making them fall over or start singing "God
Save the King".) The efficiency of code was frequently a bone of contention
between our departments, but the war between software engineering and quality
assurance is a long-drawn-out affair: each side needs the other to justify its survival.