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

"No, Dad, I must think big from now on."

"We have a range of outsize chairs that don't look enormous, so they're flattering to fatties."

"I'll never be a fatty, Dad. Maybe next time, but not this time. I just can't afford to sympathise. I'm not
going into Limbo!"
Limbo, of course, was what happened if you couldn't clear off most of an inherited debt with the L-T
Bank during your lifetime. Black mark on your bar code. The A.I. delayed your reappearance. This was
because, now that the economy had been restructured by reincarnation, negative interest and
anti-inflation applied to an unpaid debt in between lives. So the debt reduced. But a big debt might take
centuries to reduce to zero, and you'd want to pack in as many lives as possible ... until what? Nobody
knew, though one day the human race might mutate into something else, or die out.

Numerous debts did remain unpaid at death, consequently Limbo served to limit the population
somewhat. Arguably, the A.I. had devised a way to maintain a kind of utopia on Earth, quite unpredicted
by doom-mongers who once bleated that an A.I. might be a tyrant or an exterminator of Homo Sapiens.
And since nobody needed a heaven any longerтАФat least probably not for the next few million
yearsтАФreligions apart from Buddhism had tended to die out, which was utopian too.

Pity about pets. According to the A.I. even the pets with the most personality weren't barcodable.
Would have been nice to know that your dead parrot was squawking anew somewhere. Some people
had tried giving a healthy bank account to a cat or dog on its last legs, but this didn't cause a barcode.
Winsum, losesum, as the saying goes.

Of course that begged the question of what about chimps. Just two per cent genetic difference from
people; why shouldn't chimps have souls? And what about prehumans such as Neanderthals? Well, it
seemed you had to be able to speak lucidly to have a soul. Telling ourselves the story of ourselves is how
identity is firmed upтАФthat requires a capacity for complex language. Likewise, for harbouring a soul.

Hey, what about the small number of souls that must have existed ten thousand years ago, and the big
number now? Well, there are plenty of unused souls in the ghostlike alternative realities which cling like a
cloud around the one actuality.

A soul is a ghost that gets a body, and then it's permanently actual. The A.I. had proved this, though the
proof was a very long one.

Some people had suggested that an A.I. couldn't emerge unless it had some sort of body to interact
directly with the worldтАФrelying on algorithms wouldn't be sufficient. Well, in a way the A.I. had
everybody, every body. Maybe barcoding everybody's soul was the only way an A.I. could
emergeтАФparticipatorily.
****
Incidentally, what year was it when the lady from the bank visited the Robinsons? 210 ABC, After
Bar-Coding, that's when. Some people still said 210 AAI, After Artificial Intelligence, but тАЬAy Ay AyeтАЭ
sounded a bit like an outcry, and there was nothing to cry out about. ABC was much simpler.

Life in general hadn't changed all that much in the previous couple of centuries. Of course cheap flights
around the world were a thing long gone, but hell, in your next life you might be living in Paris or Tahiti
and in this life virtual travel was cheap, consequently physical tourism was no lossтАФon the contrary,
nowadays the poor of the planet didn't envy the prosperous getting suntans on their patch. In fact rancour
at global inequalities had greatly diminished, because in the long run everyone might get their turn as