"Dennis Danvers - Circuit of Heaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Danvers Dennis)

16 Jonathan and nemo were sitting on…

17 Hollywood cemetery looked a lot…

Epilogue

About the Author

Praise

Other Books by Dennis Danvers

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue
NEWMAN ROGERS HAD BEEN ERRATIC LATELY, DESPONDENT, flying into a rage over
nothing, working into the wee hours of the morning. His coworkers would often find him sleeping on the
sofa in the waiting room when they came into work in the morning, or even slumped over his computer.
He was brilliant, a genius perhaps, but he was only one member of a team working to develop artificial
intelligence and was not thought to be indispensable. Whatever he was working on so compulsively—he
didn’t share it with the rest of the team—soon prompted him to cease work altogether on the job he was
hired to do. Management was concerned.

And then, on a mid-December afternoon in 2020, he was fired for calling his supervisor an idiot. He was
thirty-nine, well thought of until recently, but under the terms of his contract he couldn’t work on artificial
intelligence research for any other firm for a period of two years, even though every other firm would only
be interested in him for such research.

None of this seemed to concern him, however. He holed up in his apartment and continued to work,
hacking his former employer’s system late at night. A few months after his dismissal, he published an
obscure paper demonstrating, with a string of elegant proofs, that artificial intelligence was impossible. He
added, however, in a modest concluding paragraph, that it might be possible to digitize human personality
and, building on techniques already in use in medicine and virtual reality simulations, transfer the
personality to another organism, or even to another, more durable, medium altogether.

While competing theorists flung themselves at his proofs like a pack of skilled dogs, a small group of
wealthy and aging businessmen contacted him and offered to finance his research. Suddenly he found
himself in charge of a team of researchers with almost limitless resources. In 2030, the first practical
application of his work, the transfer of the identity of a ninety-seven-year-old owner of a large insurance
company into the quick-grown clone of a healthy young man, was performed with complete success.
Even young men eventually die, however, and Newman was encouraged to continue developing a more
durable medium for human intelligence.

To help finance this venture, his backers, over his objections, marketed Constructs—humans made from
portions of several different personalities implanted into a cloned body—as servants and laborers. To
overcome customers’ uneasiness with what some described as the new slavery, the clones, with