"Paul Di Filippo - And The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

tumbler toward the half-opened door through
which Cody had been about to depart.
I squealed like a rabbit and jerked back out of
Cody's embrace, and she said, "Kaz,
what—?"
Then she spotted the bleb—and laughed!
She bent over and scooped up the creature.
Without any hesitation, she tore its legs off,
the Van der Waals forces producing a distinct
velcro-separating noise as the MEMS surfaces
parted.
"Well, I guess we'll have to keep all the glasses
in the kitchen from now on. It's cute though,
isn't it, how your toothbrush and mine knew
how to cooperate so well."
I squeezed out a queasy laugh. "Heh-heh,
yeah, cute …"



·····


I worked for Aunty, at their big headquarters
next to the Pentagon. After six years in
Aunty's employment, I had reached a fairly
responsible position. My job was to ride herd
on several dozen freelance operatives working
out of their homes. These operatives in their
turn were shepherds for a suite of
semi-autonomous software packages. At this
lowest level, where the raw data first got
processed, these software agents kept busy
around the clock, monitoring the nation's
millions of audiovideo feeds, trolling for
suspicious activities that might threaten
homeland security. When the software caught
something problematic, it would flag the
home-operator's attention. The freelancer
would decide whether to dismiss the alarm as
harmless; to investigate further; to contact a
relevant government agency; or to kick up the
incident to my level for more sophisticated
and experienced parsing, both human and
heuristic.
Between them, the software and
home-operators were pretty darn efficient,
handling ninety-nine percent of all the feed. I
dealt with that one percent of problematic
cases passed on from my subordinates, which