"Jeff VanderMeer - Ghost in the Machine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vandermeer Jeff)

Ghost in the Machine
a short story
by Jeff VanderMeer
Foreword
"Ghost in the Machine" is one of the first complete stories I ever wrote. I remember writing the initial draft
when I was 15 or 16. I was so happy to have completed it, since so many stories back then remained
fragments. Over the next six or seven years, I continued to hone it and to cut back on the sentimentality in
parts of the story. Over time, too, I began to wonder about this place called Dayton Central, and what
I-wire freighters were, among other things. Using "Ghost" as a springboard I brainstormed a time in the
future of that story when Dayton Central became "Veniss" and civilization had retreated to a series of
technologically-advanced city-states. From "Ghost" sprang the novella "Balzac's War", the story "A
Heart for Lucretia", and my latest novel Veniss Underground, excerpted on this site as "Quin's Shanghai
Circus". "Ghost" still holds up for me today because the emphasis is clearly on the characters and their
reactions to the situations in the story. And I'm fond of it because it ushered in this whole series of stories.


Ghost in the Machine
Thanks to science, the suspect idea of a soul inhabiting a body -- "the ghost in the machine" -- will itself
soon give up the ghost. But not all versions of the idea that you are something distinct from your purely
physical body are so vulnerable to ridicule.
- The Mind's Eye (Hoffstadler/Dennett, 1981)

From the Great Hall's marble throne, where the fireplace's heat cannot reach me, I watch simules pass in
review. The Red Queen's smile is tragic as cherry blossoms, muted lights shining through her crimson
dress. Her eyes glide past me, the expression of remorse, sorrow, unchanged when she disappears
around a corner. A little bald man replaces her, tiptoeing toward me. This particular hologram has never
acknowledged me, as even the most primitive simules are taught. I wonder if this means he has free will
-- not much, but enough to make the solimind hiccup. Sweat beads his face, hairline wrinkles
foreshadowing an old age he will never reach. Somehow his actions reek of furtiveness. Now that he is
dead, he has only Martel to fear.



I hear the purr of Martel's hover as it enters the drive.

The hover stops; Martel gets out: the crunch of boots on gravel. Laughter. Then the sound, softer this
time, of a second person. This will be the girl -- it is her laughter I hear. Their voices are muffled as they
walk to the door. I whisper the access code and it opens.

They enter giggling, both drunk. The woman? Brunette, plump, green-eyed, tall. Martel has always
picked mistresses of the same physical description. While he himself ages grayer and grayer despite the
ministrations of psychewitch and autodoc. Still, his face retains some spark, a hint of shallow mischief
overlaid with worry lines.

I wait by the open French windows, as Martel and the woman walk into the sitting room. The silver
contrail of an intersystem freighter, I-wire guided, rips a swath across the stars. Martel has told me that
when I was a child, space travel was new. There were no I-wires and accidents were common. Now
ships explore the galaxy...I cannot remember my childhood. I do not know my birth date.

The trail fades and the stars shine again. Once, Martel has told me, I dreamed (did I dream?) of traveling