"Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Vernor)

RAINBOWS END

To the Internet-based cognitive tools that are changing our lives тАФ Wikipedia, Google, eBay, and the
others of their kind, now and in the future

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful for the advice and help of:

Jeff Allen, David Baxter, Ethan Bier, John Carroll, Randy Carver, Steven Cherry, Connie Fleenor,
Robert Fleming, Peter Flynn, Mike Gannis, Harry Goldstein, Thomas Goodey, Barbara Gordon, Judith
Greengard, Dipak Gupta, Patricia Hartman, Patrick Hillmeyer, Cherie Kushner, Sifang Lu, Sara Baase
Mayers, Keith Mayers, Terry McGarry, Sean Peisert, William Rupp, Peter H. Salus, Mary Q. Smith,
Charles Vestal, Joan D. Vinge, Gabriele Wienhausen, and William F. Wu.

I am very grateful to James Frenkel for the wonderful job of editing he has done with this book. Jim and
Tor Books have been very patient with me in the long process of creating Rainbows End.

Prologue
Dumb Luck and Smart Thinking

The first bit of dumb luck came disguised as a public embarrassment for the European Center for
Defense Against Disease. On July 23, schoolchildren in Algiers claimed that a respiratory epidemic was
spreading across the Mediterranean. The claim was based on clever analysis of antibody data from the
mass-transit systems of Algiers and Naples.

CDD had no immediate comment, but in less than three hours, public-health hobbyists reported similar
results in other cities, complete with contagion maps. The epidemic was at least one week old, probably
originating in Central Africa, beyond the scope of hobbyist surveillance.

By the time CDD got its public-relations act together, the disease had been detected in India and North
America. Worse yet, a journalist in Seattle had isolated and identified the infectious agent, which turned
out to be a Pseudomimivirus. That was about as embarrassing a twist as the public-relations people could
imagine: Back in the late teens, CDD had justified its enormous budget with a brilliant defense against the
New Sunrise cult. The Sunrise Plague had been the second-worst Euro-terror of the decade. Only
CDD's leadership had kept the disaster from spreading worldwide.

The Sunrise Plague had been based on a Pseudomimivirus.

There were still good people at CDD. They were the same specialists who had saved the world in 2017.
They quickly resolved the July 23 issue. Public Relations could now spin a more or less accurate
statement: Yes, this Pseudomimi had evaded the standard announcement protocols. The failure was a
simple software error at the Center's "Current Events" website. And yes, this Pseudomimi might be a
derivative of the Sunrise Plague. Denatured strains of the original, death-optimized, virus continued to
echo around the world, a permanent addition to the background noise of the biosphere. Three had
already been sighted that year, one just five days before, on July 18. Furthermore (and here the
public-relations people regained their usual elan), all such events were subclinical, having essentially no
perceptible symptoms. The Pseudomimiviruses had an enormous genome (well, enormous for a virus,
small for almost anything else). The New Sunrise cult had transformed that genome into a Swiss Army
knife of death, with a tool to counter almost every defense. But without such optimization, the
Pseudomimis were clunky bags of DNA junk. "And so, in conclusion, we at CDD apologize for failing to