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

myriad conversations of public life.
Certain observers did not lose interest. G├╝nberk Braun, like most in the inner circles of the EUIB, had an
enormous (let's be frank: an apprehensive) respect for the power of open intelligence analysis. One of
his teams noticed the Honeyed Nougat Miracle. They considered the discussion. True, the event was
almost surely a mirage. And yet, there were additional questions that could be asked; some were
questions that governments had a special knack for answering.

And that brings us to the second bit of dumb luck. On a whim, Braun called for a fire drill: the analytical
resources of the CDD would be pointed at the public-health significance of the Honeyed Nougat
Miracle. Whatever the practical content of the mystery, this would exercise the Center in the conduct of a
secret, real-time, emergency investigation. At that, it wasn't much crazier than his previous drills. By now,
the brighter of the CDD's specialists were very much in the swing of such festivities. They quickly
generated a thousand conjectures and imagined half a million tests. These would be seeds for the search
trees of the investigation.

Over the next two days, the CDD analysts proceeded down their trees, extending and pruning тАФ all the
time exercising statistical restraint; this sort of work could generate more mirages than the marketing
hobbyists had ever dreamed. Just the topic list would fill an old-time phone book. Here are the good
parts, dramatically arranged:

There was no connection between the buying surge and the honeyed-nougat advert. This conclusion was
not based upon theoretical analysis: CDD showed the advertisement to small response groups. All of the
half-time publicity was similarly tested. One of the stadium displays тАФ an advertisement for a dating
service, which had aired only briefly тАФ caused occasional interest in nougats. (The dating-service advert
was a bit of design-artist excess, its background of intersecting lines a distracting moire pattern.)
Proceeding down the test tree, the dating-service advertisement was played for a number of specialized
audiences. For instance, it had no enhanced effect on persons with antibodies to the July 23
Pseudomimi-virus.

The dating-service advertisement did provoke nougat lust when shown to those who'd been
infected by the earlier, July 18 Pseudomimi, the one that CDD had properly reported.

As a child, G├╝nberk Braun had often daydreamed of how, in an earlier time, he might have prevented the
firebombing of Dresden, or stopped the Nazis and their death camps, or kept Stalin from starving the
Ukraine. On off days, when he couldn't move nations, little G├╝nberk imagined what he might have done
in 1941 December 7 at a radar outpost in Hawaii, or as an American FBI agent in the summer of 2001.

Perhaps all young boys go through such a phase, largely ignorant of historical context, simply wanting to
be savior heroes.

But when Braun considered this latest report, he knew he was in the middle of something as big as his
childhood fantasies. The July 18 Pseudomimi and the advertising at the football match тАФ together they
amounted to an extremely well disguised test of a new weapon concept. In its developed form, such a
weapon would make the Sunrise Plague look like a malignant toy. At the least, biological warfare would
become as precise and surprising as bullets and bombs: slyly infect a population with the slow random
spread of disease, all but undetected, and then bam, blind or maim or kill тАФ singly with an email, or by
the billions with a broadcast, too quickly for any possible "defense against disease."

If Braun had been a CDD person, this discovery would have precipitated immediate alarums to all the
disease defense organizations of the Indo-European Alliance, as well as to the CDC in America and the