"Hutchinson, Dave - Tir-na-nOg" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hutchinson Dave)

Even at sixteen, awkward and apparently composed entirely of right angles, he had a menagerie of weird enthusiasms, anything from quartz clocks to Celtic legend. One night, in the very Television Room where Benedict and I now watch the news, he and I sat up late with our first cigarettes in the light of a Sony color television whose horizontal hold kept flipping, and he told me the story of Cuchullainn.
Cuchullainn was the greatest of the Celtic heroes. In his last battle, mortally wounded, he strapped himself to a pillar so that he could die standing up, sword in hand. Nobody dared go near him until a raven landed on his shoulder, and Cuchullainn went to Tir-na-nOg.

"Tee what?" I coughed.

"Tir-na-nOg," he said. "The Land of the Young. The Celtic Valhalla. Where the heroes go." He looked sad. "The only problem is that you have to be dead to go there." He stubbed out his cigarette, waved a hand absently through the smoke as he stared at the television. "I'm not sure I like that."




· · · · ·


It was the interactives that led him into artificial intelligence in the first place. He was never satisfied with them. He was always saying that the other characters in the programs weren't truly autonomous. They operated to a fixed set of logical rules, and anybody bright enough to figure out the rules could beat the game every time. In a true interactive, he said, the characters would be illogical, petty, greedy, fearful, plain stupid. Just like real people, in other words.
At first he had this little Telefunken console that used an induction headset to broadcast the computer's neural impulses into his brain. Later, when the money started to come in, he flew to Basel and had a permanent neural tap installed at the base of his skull so he wouldn't have to use the induction set any more, but he still found even the most sophisticated interactive a little simpleminded. He was always going on about how he wanted to write the perfect interactive, something truly crafty.

By that time, the gawky uncomfortable adolescent had experienced a late blossoming into a tall, good-looking, self-assured young man, famous at twenty-five for his thesis on machine intelligence. He'd been called "the new Turing," a polymath of outstanding ability, and it was all I could do to stop myself creeping up behind him and sticking an ice pick into that bloody socket in the back of his head.

He laughed. "That really lacks imagination."

"Well of course it does," I said sourly into my beer.

He laughed again. "That's what I like about you, Monkey. You're totally prosaic."

"Would it actually do anything?" I asked, curious. "If I did stick something into that thing?"

He looked thoughtful, put his hand to the back of his head and ran his fingers over the tap's tiny dustcover. "It would hurt," he admitted after a moment.

I sniggered and took a swig of beer. "Totally prosaic, eh?"

"You'd also be buried under writs and lawsuits from the company," he went on. "Did you know that the Mona Lisa and I are worth precisely the same as each other, for insurance purposes?"

"How nice for you both."

We were sitting in the lounge bar of a quite appalling pub off the Cromwell Road. Our positions had reversed; where once he had lived in London and I had come to visit him, now I lived in London and he came infrequently to visit me. He always chose the pub, and it was always a bad choice, as if he had access to some Bad Pub Guide or something.

This particular one was very empty, a huge room with stained threadbare carpet and extremely distressed bentwood furniture, the chairs upholstered with scarred patched velour of an indeterminate fudge color that might once have been red or gold, it was impossible to tell.

It was also very dark in here, this being a season of brownouts. Things weren't helped by half the windows being broken, the holes filled in with badly-cut bits of plywood. Through one of the surviving panes I watched a police traffic team gather round the burned-out wreck of a VW methane conversion across the road.

We were in this awful place for two reasons. The first reason was that it was Hey's thirty-eighth birthday (and, by extension, the day before my thirty-eighth birthday.)

The second reason was that Hey had just become a father. Or rather the little Anglo-German corporation he worked for had just become a father. The child spoke four languages and liked to watch old Roadrunner cartoons. It was the size of a family car and it was named ALDERMAN.

"I used to think AI was Artificial Insemination before I met ALDERMAN!" Hey guffawed, a gag which must already have grown old and died in the lab where he worked. The pub's horse-faced landlord watched us with no discernible sense of humor from behind his scarred bar.

It was difficult for Hey not to talk shop, even though I understood less than a third of the things he told me. He was already talking about moving on. He had helped to break the ground on artificial intelligence. Anything that came afterwards would be Development, Utilization, work for the busy half-bright people who think up uses for miracles.

Now he was talking about some madness involving biotechnology. That was where the future lay, bacteria that excreted room-temperature superconductors, programmable polysaccharides that behaved like separate animal cells under some circumstances and like long-chain polymers under others, things that went up into orbit as packets of white powder and came back from the European Spacelab as semiorganic compounds Nature only considered in her worst nightmares.