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

Or maybe the soul lurked in the rolled-up micro-dimensions demanded by string theory; and that's where
the alternative realities hung out. A couple of dozen bits of string side by side look quite like a barcode.
In using the term barcode, the A.I. might have been aiming for a populist touch. You could readily
imagine a barcode, as on a can of carrots, even an invisible one which only revealed itself at a certain
wavelength. People wouldn't want to visualize their souls as rolled up bits of string, like fluff in a tiled
kitchen collecting up against a skirting board.

Jimmy's general theory pointed towards the micro-dimensions explanation. But alternatively, it also
pointed to the junk DNA in everyone's genetic code which seems to have no purpose whatever. Maybe
the thick and thin lines of a barcode corresponded to varying lengths of junk interrupting those stretches
of DNA which did something useful. Jimmy coined the name knuj for junk which, in reverse of previous
dismissive opinion, coded not for proteins and enzymes, but for soul. However, by what means would a
newly-deceased individual's knuj become the knuj of a new human embryo thousands of miles away?
Maybe topologyтАФthe branch of geometry concerned with connectednessтАФcould explain this. Or maybe
not. Maybe a new vision of topology was needed, such as a distributed A.I. might understand intuitively,
being all over the place but well-connected.
Jimmy launched himself into topology.

Topologically, his deformed body was just as good as anyone else's. Topologically it had the same
connectedness as junior league champion Marvin's, or even Tamara's. Jimmy wrote a poem, тАЬThe
Consolations of Topology."
****
Puberty arrived a little late for Jimmy, causing him to view Tamara in a hormonal light.

She was so bird-brained, though really, didn't the same apply by comparison to all of his peers? He
downloaded relief magazines filled with acrobatic nudes, but found his thoughts straying to the geometry
of leg over neck, for example. Finally he achieved satisfaction from a photo of Duchamp's Nude
Descending a Staircase, the woman's successive movements all depicted simultaneously. After this,
ordinary girls seemed pretty flat.
****
At the age of thirteen Jimmy experienced a revelation equivalent to Copernicus doing away with the
epicycles of Ptolemy as a way of explaining planetary motion. His revelation was that there were no
souls; there were only barcodes attached to people's identities. There was no reincarnation. The A.I. had
invented reincarnation as a way of utopianizing, or at least improving, the world. Redistributing wealth,
getting rid of organized religion, and whatnot. So why the fuck should Jimmy be crippled with debt as
well as having quite a crippled body? Was that to spur him on? To what end?

He spent half an afternoon staring at the Wyandotes, Cochins, Leghorns, and Australorps milling around
over the way. He had become an A-A.I.ist, a disbeliever in the A.I., a bit like an Atheist but different.

Hang on, but how come the world's children had become so precocious if they weren't benefitting from a
previous existence, all details of which were nevertheless a mystery to them? Could it be that history of
the human race was falsified in this regard, with the exception of infant Jesus maybe? And maybe
Caligula?

The Leghorns and Cochins and Wyandotes and Australorps intermingled. Green and mosaic and silver
lace, and red combs nodding.

Of a sudden the answer came to Jimmy.