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

every additional generation increasing the complexity of the name required.
And abruptly Stratton realized that he didnТt need a name that
redoubled physical complexity, but one than enabled lexical duplication.
The solution was to impress the ovum with an autonym, and thus induce a
foetus that bore its own name.
The name would have two versions, as originally proposed: one used to
induce male foetuses, another for female foetuses. The women conceived
this way would be fertile as always. The men conceived this way would also
be fertile, but not in the typical manner: their spermatozoa would not
contain preformed foetuses, but would instead bear either of two names on
their surfaces, the self-expression of the names originally born by the
glass needles. And when such a spermatozoon reached an ovum, the name
would induce the creation of a new foetus. The species would be able to
reproduce itself without medical intervention, because it would carry the
name within itself.

He and Dr. Ashbourne had assumed that creating animals capable of
reproducing meant giving them preformed foetuses, because that was the
method employed by nature. As a result they had overlooked another
possibility: that if a creature could be expressed in a name, reproducing
that creature was equivalent to transcribing the name. An organism could
contain, instead of a tiny analogue of its body, a lexical representation
instead.
Humanity would become a vehicle for the name as well as a product of
it. Each generation would be both content and vessel, an echo in a
self-sustaining reverberation.
Stratton envisioned a day when the human species could survive as long
as its own behavior allowed, when it could stand or fall based purely on
its own actions, and not simply vanish once some predetermined life span
had elapsed. Other species might bloom and wither like flowers over
seasons of geologic time, but humans would endure for as long as they
determined.
Nor would any group of people control the fecundity of another; in the
procreative domain, at least, liberty would be restored to the individual.
This was not the application Roth had intended for his epithet, but
Stratton hoped the kabbalist would consider it worthwhile. By the time the
autonymТs true power became apparent, an entire generation consisting of
millions of people worldwide would have been born of the name, and there
would be no way any government could control their reproduction. Lord
Fieldhurst--or his successors--would be outraged, and there would
eventually be a price to be paid, but Stratton found he could accept that.
He hastened to his desk, where he opened his own notebook and RothТs
side by side. On a blank page, he began writing down ideas on how RothТs
epithet might be incorporated into a human euonym. Already in his mind
Stratton was transposing the letters, searching for a permutation that
denoted both the human body and itself, an ontogenic encoding for the
species.