"Rajnar Vajra - Passing the Arboli Test" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vajra Rajnar)

gotten me into financial boiling water....
"Tell me more."
She spelled out the details of an arrangement that would solve my
current and many potential future problems. The best part was that I didn't
have to pass the Arboli Test, just survive and stay sane. The temptation was
strong enough to make me forget my itching wrist.
Paravision was such a simple idea.
The technology for putting television images in a virtual reality
headpiece was already available. My idea was to turn these images into a truly
3D picture using standard HDTV transmissions.
First, a computer would identify the important elements of a scene.
Then it would apply a "hierarchy of obstruction" algorithm to determine
element placement. Finally, two separate images would be generated. The one
sent to the left eye would be skewed one way; the right eye would see a
picture skewed the opposite way. Presto: a three-dimensional image taking up
the entire visual field.
Obviously, the major challenge was finding a way to isolate and
identify specific shapes in the visually complex original transmission. Five
years ago, this would've been about two microns short of impossible. Lately,
however, computer pattern-recognition has advanced spectacularly, mostly due
to military applications. I hadn't anticipated much of a problem.
Now, I was almost two and a half _million_ dollars in the red. I'd
borrowed against real properties that were already secretly secured by other
loans. I'd sold phony stock. I'd turned profit reports to my investors into
works of pure fiction. I'd embezzled from my software company, Germ, to feed




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my firmware company, Virtualife. I'd kept the value of Germ up with ...
imaginative bookkeeping.
I'd been a bad, bad boy, busy with plenty of interesting activities --
each one illegal, unethical, and ultimately futile. I still believed in
Paravision and other inventions my company was developing, but I had to admit
that I had a problem.
Ironically, if I'd succeeded by now, I could've paid everyone off
without hurting anyone and no one the wiser. Hell, my investors stood to make
a fortune off Paravision alone. Too bad I'd forgotten the basic inventor's
rule: Everything takes twice as long as it should and costs four times as
much.
I was now staring down the barrel of a long involuntary vacation with a
minimum of freedom, comfort, and privacy.
None of my acts were particularly heinous, but in the USA,
incarceration time is based partly on the "count" system. The more counts, the
more time. I'd get enough counts in at least three of my felonies to lose two
boxing matches.
I can't imagine how the good folks at HIMSA had uncovered my
extracurricular activities; I thought I'd hidden my crimes quite cleverly. It
didn't matter. Too much time had passed and I knew it was only a matter of