"Тед Чан. Seventy-Two Letters (72 буквы, Рассказ) (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

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Davies bandaged StrattonТs finger to a splint, assuring him that the
Royal Society would discreetly handle any consequences of the nightТs
events. They gathered the oil-stained papers from StrattonТs office into a
trunk so that Stratton could sift through them at his leisure, away from
the manufactory. By the time they were finished, a carriage had arrived to
take Stratton back to Darrington Hall; it had set out at the same time as
Davies, who had ridden into London on a racing-engine. Stratton boarded
the carriage with the trunk of papers, while Davies stayed behind to deal
with the assassin and make arrangements for the kabbalistТs body.
Stratton spent the carriage ride sipping from a flask of brandy, trying
to steady his nerves. He felt a sense of relief when he arrived back at
Darrington Hall; although it held its own variety of threats, Stratton
knew heТd be safe from assassination there. By the time he reached his
room, his panic had largely been converted into exhaustion, and he slept
deeply.
He felt much more composed the next morning, and ready to begin sorting
through his trunkful of papers. As he was arranging them into stacks
approximating their original organization, Stratton found a notebook he
didnТt recognize. Its pages contained Hebrew letters arranged in the
familiar patterns of nominal integration and factorization, but all the
notes were in Hebrew as well. With a renewed pang of guilt, he realized it
must have belonged to Roth; the assassin must have found it on his person
and tossed it in with StrattonТs papers to be burned.
He was about to set it aside, but his curiosity bested him: heТd never
seen a kabbalistТs notebook before. Much of the terminology was archaic,
but he could understand it well enough; among the incantations and
sephirotic diagrams, he found the epithet enabling an automaton to write
its own name. As he read, Stratton realized that RothТs achievement was
more elegant that heТd previously thought.
The epithet didnТt describe a specific set of physical actions, but
instead the general notion of reflexivity. A name incorporating the
epithet became an autonym: a self-designating name. The notes indicated
that such a name would express its lexical nature through whatever means
the body allowed. The animated body wouldnТt even need hands to write out
its name; if the epithet were incorporated properly, a porcelain horse
could likely accomplish the task by dragging a hoof in the dirt.
Combined with one of StrattonТs epithets for dexterity, RothТs epithet
would indeed let an automaton do most of what was needed to reproduce. An
automaton could cast a body identical to its own, write out its own name,
and insert it to animate the body. It couldnТt train the new one in
sculpture, though, since automata couldnТt speak. An automaton that could
truly reproduce itself without human assistance remained out of reach, but
coming this close would undoubtedly have delighted the kabbalists.
It seemed unfair that automata were so much easier to reproduce than
humans. It was as if the problem of reproducing automata need be solved
only once, while that of reproducing humans was a Sisyphean task, with