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

"Does it matter?"

She blew on her coffee then took a sip. "Not really. Damn it, Bob, I really had high
hopes for this world-line. They seemed to be doing so well for a revelatory
Christian-Islamic line, despite the post-Enlightenment mind-set. Especially
MicrosoftтАФ"

"Was that one of ours?" She nodded.

"Then it was a master-stroke. Getting everybody used to exchanging macro-infested
documents without any kind of security policy. Operating systems that crash
whenever a microsecond timer overflows. And all those viruses!"

"It wasn't enough." She stared moodily out the window as the train began to slide
out of the station, into the London night. "Maybe if we'd been able to hook more
researchers on commercial grants, or cut funding for pure mathematics a bit
furtherтАФ"

"It's not your fault." I laid a hand across her wrist. "You did what you could."

"But it wasn't enough to stop them. Durant was just a lone oddball researcher; you
can't spike them all, but maybe we could have done something about him. If they
hadn't nailed him flat."

"There might still be time. A physics package delivered to the right address in
Maryland, or maybe a hyper-virulent worm using one of those buffer-overrun attacks
we planted in the IP stack Microsoft licensed. We could take down the internet тАФ"

"It's too late." She drained her coffee to the bitter dregs. "You think the Echelon
mob leave their SIGINT processor farms plugged into the internet? Or the RSV, for
that matter? Face it, they probably cracked the same derivative as Durant a couple of
years ago. Right now there may be as many as two or three weakly superhuman AIs
gestating in government labs. For all I know they may even have a timelike oracle in
the basement at Lawrence Livermore in the States; they've gone curiously quiet on
the information tunnelling front lately. And it's trans-global. Even the Taliban are on
the web these days. Even if we could find some way of tracking down all the covert
government CRYPTO-AI labs and bombing them we couldn't stop other people
from asking the same questions. It's in their nature. This isn't a culture that takes 'no'
for an answer without asking why. They don't understand how dangerous achieving
enlight-enment can be."

"What about Mallet's work?"

"What, with the bible bashers?" She shrugged. "Banning fetal tissue transplants is all
very well, but it doesn't block the PCR-amplification pathway to massively parallel
processing, does it? Even the Frankenstein Food scare didn't quite get them to ban
recombinant DNA research, and if you allow that it's only a matter of time before
some wet lab starts mucking around encoding public keys in DNA, feeding them to
ribosomes, and amplifying the output. From there it's a short step to building an