"Paul Di Filippo - What's Up Tiger Lily" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

What's Up Tiger Lily?
a novelette
by Paul Di Filippo
Writing "hard SF" is a challenge I don't visit upon myself often enough. Conceiving of new technologies
and then rigorously and creatively extrapolating their impact on society is, of course, the quintessential
science-fictional game. But as Bruce Sterling mentioned to me recently, "This is damn hard work!" The
composition of this story inched ahead at a snail's pace until I fully visualized all the implications of Bash
Applebrook's invention.

I'm particularly proud of one sentence here: "The station door hobermanned open." Ever since Robert
Heinlein wrote "The door dilated," SF authors have striven to emulate this blend of concision and
cognitive estrangement. With my sentence--a reference to the Hoberman curtains employed at the most
recent Winter Olympics--I felt I was contributing my little tile to the grand SF mosaic.



What's Up Tiger Lily?
1.
Duck Soup
The first indication received by Bash Applebrook that all was not right with his world happened over
breakfast on the morning of Tuesday, June 25th, 2029.

The newspaper he was reading turned into a movie screen.

Bash was instantly jerked out of his fascination with the current headline (MERCOSUR FREETER
MAKES SPINTRONICS BREAKTHRU!). His jagged reaction caused some Metanomics Plus
nutrishake to spill from his cup onto the tabletop, where it was quickly absorbed.

Looking at the clock on the wall--a display made of redacted fish scales whose mutable refractiveness
substituted for ancient LEDs --as if to reassure himself that he hadn't been thrown entirely out of the
timestream, Bash sought to gain some perspective on this alarming occurrence.

In itself, this transformation of his newspaper boded no ill. Such things happened millions of times daily
around the globe, thanks to proteopape. And since Bash himself was the much-lauded, much-rewarded
inventor of proteopape, he was positively the last person in the world to be astounded by the medium's
capacity for change.

There was only one problem.

Bash had not instructed his newspaper to swap functions.

This impulsive, inexplicable toggling by his highly reliable newspaper scared Bash very much. Proteopape
simply did not do such things. Eleven years ago, Bash had first engineered the substance with
innumerable safeguards, backups and firewalls specifically intended to prevent just such herky-jerky
transitions. In all the time since, there had been no recorded instances of proteopape malfunctioning, out
of billions of uses. Even when sustaining up to seventy-five percent damage, proteopape continued to
maintain functionality. (Beyond such limits, proteopape would just shut down altogether.) The miracle
material that had transformed so much of the twenty-first century's media landscape simply did not crash.

And if proteopape were suddenly to develop a glitch-- Well, imagining the immense and catastrophic