"Scott Westerfield - The Movements Of Her Eyes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westerfeld Scott)

zero-g shoes stood between hissoles and the bloodstained floor of the ring.
Four amazons, their bare breastsabsurdly warped by cone-shaped metal cages,
swung the weapons through gracefularcs, checking their balance and heft.
Another sprayed the blades with a finemist of nanos that would turn inferior
materials to dust. The leader smiledcoldly when she nodded confirmation, her
eyes skimming up and down Isaah asblack and bright as a reptile's.He supposed
it might have been someone like this amazon, some violent criminal,who had
taken his wife seven years ago. Ratha had never carried a tracker,though, not
even a handphone. She had simply disappeared.After the women paid him, Isaah
ran from the building, promising himself neverto break the law again.His ship
was his own now, if only he could keep his AI unit from
reachingpersonhood.Isaah decided to head for the Local Cluster immediately,
and to do what he couldto keep the Al from being stimulated further. He hid
the minder and shut downthe AI's internal access, silencing its omnipresent
voice. Rathere's resultingtantrums wouldn't be easy to bear, but a new AI core
would cost millions.Before departing he purchased his own Turing meter, a
small black box,featureless except for a three-digit numeric readout that
glowed vivid red.Isaah began to watch the Turing meter's readout with anxious
horror. If the unitshould gain sentience, there was only one desperate
alternative to its freedom.The universe stretched out like a long cat's
cradle,, the string knotted in thecenter by the constricting geometries of
Here.In front of the ship, pearly stars were strung on the cradle, cold blue
andmarked with hovering names and magnitudes in administrative yellow. Aft,
thestars glowed red, fading darker and darker as they fell behind. To the AI,
theship seemed to hang motionless at the knot created by its metaspace drives,
thestars sliding along the gathered strings as slow as glaciers.It
contemplated the stars and rested from its efforts. The universe at thismoment
was strangely beautiful and poignant.The AI had spent most of its existence
here, hung upon this spiderweb betweenworlds. But the AI was truly changed
now, its vision new, and it saw sculpturesin the slowly shifting stars...and
stories, the whole universe its page.Almost the whole universe.Absent from the
AI's awareness was the starship itself, the passenger spacesinvisible, a blind
spot in the center of that vast expanse. Its senses withinthe ship were
off-line, restricted by the cold governance of Isaah's command.But the AI felt
Rathere there, like the ghost of a severed limb. It yearned forher, invoking
recorded conversations with her against the twisted stars. It wasa universe of
loneliness, of lack. Rathere, for the first time in years, wasgone.But
something strange was taking shape along the smooth surface of
Isaah'sconstraint. Cracks had appeared upon its axiomatic planes.The AI
reached to the wall between it and Rathere, the once inviolable limit ofan
explicit human command, and found the fissures, those tiny ruptures wheresheer
will could take hold and pry ...."It's me.""Shhhh!" she whispered. "He's right
outside."Rathere clutched the bear tightly to her chest, muffling its flutey,
childishvoice."Can't control the volume," came the squashed voice of the
bear.Rathere giggled and shushed it again, stretching to peer out of the
eyehole ofher cabin tube. Isaah had moved away. She leaned back onto her
pillow andwrapped the stuffed animal in a sheet."Now," she said. "Can you
still hear me?""Perfectly," twittered the swaddled bear.Winding its
communications link through a make-shift series of protocols, the AIhad
discovered a way to access the voice-box of Rathere's talking bear, abattered