"Ian Watson - Saving for a Sunny Day" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

SAVING FOR A SUNNY DAY, or THE BENEFITS OF REINCARNATION, by Ian Watson
When Jimmy was six years old, and able to think about money, a charming lady representative from the
Life-Time Bank visited him and his parents, the Robertsons, to explain that Jimmy owed nine million
dollars from his previous incarnation.

Wow, what a big spender Jimmy had been in his past life! And now in this life he must pay the debt. In
old Dollars that would have been ... never mind.

After the lady had departed, Mike and Denise Robertson held a family council with Jimmy, who was, as
it happened, their only child. No other child had preceded him, and it could have been insulting and
undermining to confront Jimmy with a younger brother or sister who lacked Jimmy's ugliness and short
stature and clubfoot, the fault most likely of DNA-benders in the environment, or so the Robertsons were
advised. If a good-looking boy or girl followed Jimmy, later on he might sue his parents for causing him
traumaтАФconsequently Mike had himself snipped.

"It's almost,тАЭ mused Denise to her son, тАЬas if your predecessor guessed you wouldn't be having much of
a fun time in this life!"

"So he made things even worse for me?тАЭ asked Jimmy. тАЬThat seems selfish and irresponsible. But I'm not
that, am I?тАЭ If he wasn't, how could his predecessor have been? Unless, perhaps, by deliberate choice,
by going against the grain.

"Of course you aren't selfish, darling. I mean, it's as if your past self guessed, given your, um, physical
attributes, that you might just as well devote this life to earning lots of money. If you can clear nine million,
obviously you're on your way to racking up a small fortune for your successor. He, that's to say you, can
have gorgeous bimbos and surf in Hawaii and whatever."

Whatever his predecessor had lavished money on. But of course you couldn't ask that, because of
confidentality. Why would you want to go into details? A bank not run by human beings could be trusted.

If you think this was a rather mature conversation to have with a six-year-old, well, that came with
modernday reincarnation. Specific memories of previous lives didn't persist, but maturity came quickly
and easily after a few early innocent years. A facility for life in general. It had been so ever since the
discovery of how to barcode souls. You could get in the saddle and pick up the reins much faster,
whereas before you were groping blindly.

True, you might be reincarnated anywhere in the world, and there you'd stay with your birth parents.
However, barcode scanners uploaded to the A.I. everywhere from Kazakhstan to Kalamazoo. In fact,
one vital duty of the A.I. was RCтАФRebirth Confidentiality. So the A.I. was a bit like a God in this
respect: It Alone Knew All About Everyone. Its other duty being management of the Life-Time Bank.

Incidentally, there was only one A.I. in the world, distributed everywhere. In the old days nobody had
dreamed about the A.I. Exclusion Principle, whereby only one super-intelligence could exist at any one
time. This was explained by Topological Network Theory and the Interconnectedness Theorem. Any
other evolving networks would instantly be subsumed within the first one which had arisen.

Some scientists suggested that the existence of the A.I. distributed everywhere had caused souls to be
barcodable. And some far-out scientists even suggested that until the A.I. became self-aware not all souls
reincarnated of their own accord. But these were deep questions. Meanwhile, practicalities...