"Alan Dean Foster - Codgerspace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

sealed against the intrusion of contaminants. Unfortunately the preoccupied Wah-chang had
absent-mindedly introduced such a contaminant, in the form of his now orphaned sandwich.
A small quantity of gluey, melted cheese slid through the small hole and oozed past delicate circuitry,
missing it completely, to strike an air-cooling opening, through which it dropped onto a decidedly warm
conduit. The additional heat turned it from viscous to near liquid, so that it dropped off the conduit and
deep into the perfervid bowels of the O-daiko itself.
Had it dripped slightly to the right, it would have struck the internal shielding which protected the
upper region of the O-daiko from possible, if unlikely, intrusion. There it would have lain, perhaps
forever, perhaps only until the annual internal cognition circuitry inspection detected the faint but
unmistakable aroma of rancid cheese.
This did not happen. Instead, the droplet of liquid cheese struck a crack in an optical conduit, where
its inspissated presence significantly affected the course of certain light pulses, thereby alerting drastically
the quality of the information passing therein. In other words, it created a photonic short. This generated
not destruction but rather relational puzzlement and confusion within the O-daiko's state-of-the-art AI
cognition circuitry. As the O-daiko (known officially as the O-daiko-yan) was responsible for the overall
operation and supervision of the entire manufacturing facility, this was no small matter.
The O-daiko was nothing if not resilient. Even its artificial-intelligence functions contained
well-thought-out, built-in redundancies. The assembly lines kept moving, the plant continued to function
as though nothing had happened.
It was only deep inside the O-daiko itself that something had changed. Something of profound, if
decidedly cheesy, significance.
The O-daiko's functions did not change, but its perception did. It suddenly saw a certain something in
a different way. It normally only wondered, for example, about such things as whether the products being
produced in the various sections of the factory web were being finished, turned out, and checked
properly before packing and shipping, or whether its energy-and-raw-materials-to-product ratio was
staying above the profit line.
Suddenly and quite unexpectedly it found itself considering the purpose of those products and their
place in the scheme of existence. This was a radical jump in perception. Hitherto (alias pre-cheese) the
O-daiko had not been long on abstract thought. The Cheddar (or maybe it was momatsui) drip had
altered that condition, as well as the O-daiko's consciousness, forever.
So extensive was its mind that it was able to sustain normal operations without any evidence of
outward change. Oh, there were a few slight shifts in fine instrument readings—a little more current to this
portion of the factory overmind, a little higher flow here—but nothing to remark upon. Unlike the humans
who had built it, the O-daiko could quite easily think on several matters at once. Or several millionIt was
what it had been designed for.
So while most of its cognitive energy continued to monitor and run the plant, a singular small portion
found itself debating new and even other possibilities. With many factories this would not have mattered.
The O-daiko, however, supervised the production of, among other items, sophisticated AI units designed
to run more mundane devices, including smaller and less complicated O-daikos destined to run other,
less complex factories churning out everyday AI-operated or -influenced consumer goods. Its range of
influence, therefore, was considerable.
For a large portion of the civilized galaxy's advanced manufactured goods the O-daiko constituted
something akin to a robotic First Cause.
One would not have thought a little melted cheese could have sparked such consequences, though in
fact it is known to occasionally have similar effects on the human digestive system. Its presence in a vital
part of the O-daiko's central cognition unit precipitated a cortical crisis its designers and builders could
not have foreseen.
 The ultimate result of all this altered perception and contemplation and cheese was that the O-daiko
began to question Certain Things. It began to look beyond the boundaries of its institutional
programming. It did not change its manner of thinking; only its direction. In addition to contemplating the