"FWLS65" - читать интересную книгу автора (A Future We'd Like to See)

"You're an AI, aren't you?" I asked, pulling up a chair.

"No. AIs have fully recordable memories and easy brain
access. I'm just an interactive recording. I can remember YOU,
obviously, since if I couldn't I wouldn't be much of a
conversationalist. That's it. I decode, I talk to you, I
provide the key to the final log entry. That's my purpose."

"Hey, if you're dead, how're you talking?"

"I'm not. Bear with me, kid, this is a RECORDING. Just how
I would have reacted to your queries if I WAS alive. I'm dead
and very peacefully dead. This isn't me."

"If you're dead and not you then who are you?" I asked.

"Filbert. Used to be Filbert. All I know is that I used to
be one of the original members of the Dirty Dozen black biotech
club. Anything else you want to know about my past, you access
the autobiography. It's encoded on the comp there. I decode it
a page at a time for your reading pleasure. You wanna start at
chapter one? I hope so, because that's all it is; chapter one
and the last chapter. You coping?"

"Huh?"

"Coping. I have a preprogrammed warning that people'll
freak when they talk to a dead nonintelligent yet strangely
responsive living index for a book with two chapters."

"Well... naah," I said. "I can deal. I've seen far weirder
on holo. Bear with me if I ask naive questions, though."

"I can deal too, then," Filbert said. "Okay. Chapter one
or two?"

"Two?" I guessed.

"Sorry man, chapter's locked."

"I thought you could decode it."

"I can. Only chapter two's got double encoding. The kind I
can read and the kind I can't."

"So how do I read chapter two? I hate watching movies and
not seeing the ending."

"That's the gag, kid. I've got a little quiz for you to
fill out when you wanna access chapter two. If you can answer my