"Michael Swanwick - Trojan Horse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

The old Elin was still hooting with scornful laughter when the rivet struck the lab, crashing into a nest of
wiring that should not hav┬╗ been exposed.
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Two wires short-circuited, sending a massive power tran-sient surging up through the workboard.
Circuits fused and melted. The board went haywire.



And a microjolt of electricity leaped up two gold wires, hopelessly scrambling the wetware through Elin's
skull.



An hour later, when her replacement finally showed, she was curled into a ball, rocking back and forth
on the floor. She was alternating between hysterical gusts of laughter and dark, gleeful screams.



Morning came, and after a sleepy, romantic breakfast, Tory plugged into his briefcase and went to
work. Elin wan-dered off to do some thinking.



There was no getting around the fact that she was not the metallurgist from Wheel Lab 19, not anymore.
That woman was alien to her now. They shared memories, experiences- but she no longer understood
that woman, could not sympa-thize with her emotions, indeed found her distasteful.



At a second-terrace cafe that was crowded with off-shift biotechs, Elin rented a table and briefcase. She
sat down to try to trace the original owner of her personality.



As she'd suspected, her new persona was copied from that of a real human being; creating a personality
from scratch was still beyond the abilities of even the best wetware techs. She was able to trace herself
back to IGF's inventory bank and to determine that duplication of personality was illegal-which
presumably meant that the original owner was dead.



But she could not locate the original owner. Selection had been made by computer, and the computer
wouldn't tell. When she tried to find out, it referred her to the Privacy Act of 2037.