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

old toy she slept with.It had defied Isaah, its master. Somehow, it had broken
the first and foremostRule."Tell me again about the statues, darling," Rathere
whispered.They talked to each other in the coffin-sized privacy of Rathere's
cabin, theirconspiracy made farcical by the toy's silly voice. The AI retold
theiradventures with vivid detail; it had become quite a good storyteller.And
it allowed Rathere to suggest changes, making herself bolder with
eachretelling.They kept the secret from Isaah easily.But the tension on the
little ship built.Isaah tested the AI almost daily now, and he swung between
anger and protests ofdisbelief as its Turing Quotient inched upward toward
sentience.Then, a few weeks out from home, a tachyon disturbance arose around
the ship.Even though the storm threatened to tear them apart, the AI's spirits
soared inthe tempest. It joined Rathere's roller-coaster screams as she ogled
theeonblasts and erashocks of mad time through the ship's viewing helmet.After
the storm, Isaah found that the Turing meter's readout had surged to 0.94.His
disbelieving groan was terrible. He shut down the AI's external and
internalsensors completely, wresting control of the vessel from it. Then he
uncabled thehardlines between the AI's physical plant and the rest of the
ship, utterlysevering its awareness of the outside world.The bear went silent,
as did the ship's astrogation panel.Like some insane captain lashing himself
to the wheel, Isaah took manual controlof the ship. He forced Rathere to help
him attach an artificial gland ofstimarol to his neck. The spidery, glistening
little organ gurgled as itmaintained the metabolic level necessary to pilot
the craft through the exoticterrain of metaspace. Its contraindications
politely washed their hands ofanyone foolish enough to use the stimarol for
more than four days straight, butIsaah insisted he could perservere for the
week's travel that remained. Soon,the man began to cackle at his controls, his
face frozen in a horrible rictus ofdelight.Rathere retreated to her cabin,
where she squeezed and shook the doll, beggingit in frantic whispers to speak.
Its black button eyes seemed to glimmer with atrapped, pleading intelligence.
Her invisible mentor gone, Rathere had neverbefore felt so helpless. She stole
a handful of sleeping pills from the medicalsupplies and swallowed them,
weeping until she fell asleep.When she awoke on the third day after the storm,
she found that the bear's furhad grown a white mange from the salinity of her
tears. But her head wasstrangely clear."Don't worry," she said to the bear.
"I'm going to save you."Finally Rathere understood what her father intended to
do. She had known for along time that her friendship with the AI disturbed
him, but had categorizedIsaah's worries alongside his reticence when older
boys hung around too long:unnecessary protectiveness. It was even a kind of
jealousy, that a ship AI wascloser to her than Isaah had ever been. But now in
her father's drugged smileshe saw the cold reality of what Isaah planned: to
pith the growing intelligenceof her minder, not just arrest or contain it like
some inappropriate advance.For the AI to remain a useful servant on another
journey, still property, safefrom legally becoming a person, it would have to
be stripped of its carefullyconstructed models of her, their mutual intimacies
raped, their friendshipoverwritten like some old and embarrassing diary
entry.Her father meant to murder her friend.And worse, it wouldn't even be
murder in the eyes of the law. Just a propertydecision, like pruning an
overgrown hedge or spraying lethal nanos on anincursion of weeds. If only she
could bring the AI up a few hundredths of apoint on the Turing Scale. Then, it
would be a Mind, with the full legalprotection to which any sentient was