"Greg Egan - Diaspora" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

In Konishi, every home-born citizen was grown from a mind seed, a string of instruction codes like a
digital genome. The first mind seeds had been translated from DNA nine centuries before, when the
polis founders had invented the Shaper programming language to re-create the essential processes of
neuroembryology in software. But any such translation was necessarily imperfect, glossing over the
biochemical details in favor of broad, functional equivalence, and the full diversity of the flesher
genome could not be brought through intact. Starting from a diminished trait pool,
with the old DNA-based maps rendered obsolete, it was crucial for the conceptory to chart the
consequences of new variations to the mind seed. To eschew all change would be to risk stagnation; to
embrace it recklessly would he to endanger the sanity of every child.
The Konishi mind seed was divided into a billion fields: short segments, six bits long, each containing a
simple instruction code. Sequences of a few dozen instructions comprised shaper-s: the basic
subprograms employed during psychogenesis. The effects of untried mutations on fifteen million
interacting shapers could rarely he predicted in advance; in most cases, the only reliable method would
have been to perform every computation that the altered seed itself would have performed ... which was
no different from going ahead and rowing the seed, creating the mind, predicting nothing_ The
conceptory 's accumulated knowledge of its craft took the form of a collection of annotated maps of the
Konishi mind seed. The highest-level maps were elaborate, multidimensional structures, dwarfing the
seed itself by orders of magnitude. But there was one simple map which the citizens of Konishi had used
to gauge the conceptory 's progress over the centuries; it showed the billion fields as lines of latitude,
and the sixty-tour possible instruction codes as meridians. Any individual seed could be thought of as a
path which zig-zagged down the map from top to bottom, singling out an instruction code for every field
along the way.
Where it was known that only one code could recd to successful psychogenesis, every route on the map
converged on a lone island or a narrow isthmus, ocher against ocean blue. These infrastructure fields
built the
basic mental architecture every citizen had in common, shaping both the mind's overarching design and
the fine details of vital subsystems.
Elsewhere, the map recorded a spread of possibilities: a broad landmass, or a scattered archipelago. Trait
fields offered a selection of codes, each with a known effect oil the mind's detailed structure, with
variations ranging from polar extremes of innate temperament or aesthetics down to minute differences
in neural architecture less significant than the creases on a flesher's palm. They appeared in shades of
green as wildly contrasting or as flatly indistinguishable as the traits themselves.
The remaining fields-where no changes to the seed had yet been tested, and no predictions could he
made--were classified as indeterminate. Here, the one tried code, the known landmark, was shown as
gray against white: a mountain peak protruding through a hand of clouds which concealed everything to
the east or west of it. No more detail could be resolved from afar; whatever lay beneath the clouds could
only he discovered firsthand.
Whenever the conceptory created an orphan, it set all the benignly mutable trait fields to valid codes
chosen at random, since there were no parents to mimic or please. Then it selected a thousand
indeterminate fields, and treated them in much the same fashion: throwing a thousand quantum dice to
choose a random path through terra incognita. Every orphan was an explorer, sent to map uncharted
territory.
And every orphan was the uncharted territory itself.

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The conceptory placed the new orphan seed in the middle of the womb's memory, a single strand of
information suspended in a vacuum of zeroes. The seed meant nothing to itself; alone, it might as well