"John Varley - Steel Beach" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

. . and so what? If you want a nuts-and-bolts story, there have been many
written about the events I will describe. Or you could always read the
instruction manual.
Maybe the nanobot stuff could have come out, but I will also deal with
the central technological conundrum of our time: that undeniably sentient,
great big spooky pile of crystalline gray matter, wonderful humanitarian,
your friend and mine, the Central Computer. That was unavoidable, but I
will say it once and you'd do well to remember it: I am not a tech. The
things I have to say about matters cybernetic should be taken with an
asteroid-sized tablet of sodium chloride. Literally thousands of texts have
been written concerning how what happened happened, and why it can't
happen again, to any degree of complexity you're capable of handling, so I
refer the interested reader to them, and good riddance. But I will divulge to
you a secret, because if you've come this far with me I can't help but like
you: take what those techs say with a grain of salt, too. Nobody knows
what's going on with the CC.
So I've told you what kind of story this isn't. Well, what is it?
That's always harder to say. I thought of calling it How I Spent the
Bicentennial Year, but where's the sex in that? Where's the headline appeal?
I could have called it To The Stars! That remains to be seen, and it will be
my intention throughout not to lie to you.
What I was afraid it was when I began was the world's longest suicide
note. It's not: I survived. Damn! I just gave away the ending. But I would
hope the more astute of you had already figured that one out.
All I can promise you is that it's a story. Things do happen. But people
will behave in unrepentantly illogical ways. Mammoth events will remain
resolutely off-stage. Dramatic climaxes will fizzle like wet firecrackers.
Questions will go unanswered. An outline of this story would be a sorry
thing to behold; any script doctor in the world could instantly suggest dozens
of ways to spruce it up. Hey, have you tried outlining your own life lately?
I will be the most illogical character of them all. I will miss
opportunities where I could have made a difference, do the wrong thing, and
just generally sleepwalk through some critical events in my life. I'm sorry,
and I hope you all do better than I have, but I wonder if you will. I will
ramble and digress. If Walter couldn't get me to stop doing that, no one
could. I will inject bits of my rag-tag personal philosophy; I am an
opinionated son of a bitch, or bitch, as the case may be, but when things
threaten to get too heavy I will inject some inappropriate humor. Though
anything one writes will have a message, I will not try too hard to sell mine
to you, partly because I'm far from sure what it is.
But you can relax on one account: this is not a metaphorical story. I
will not turn into a giant cockroach, nor will I perish in existential despair.
There's even some rock 'em sock 'em action, for those of you who wandered
in from the Saturday Matinee. What more could you ask?
So you've been warned. From here on in, you're on your own.
#
The tube capsule back to King City was a quarter full. I used the time to
try to salvage something from the wasted afternoon. Looking around me, I
saw that all my colleagues were busy at the same task. Eyes were rolled up,
mouths hung open, here and there a finger twitched. It had to be either a day