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

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That's progress for you, I suppose. Twenty years ago, when the Japanese first recorded the personality of an orangutan onto a thousand or so terabytes of ROM, the device they used was the size of a small car. Now you can put it in a suitcase. I presume one day you'll be able to carry it around in your pocket.
There is, apparently, still no way round the trauma of the procedure. The electrochemical stimulation involved either kills the subject outright or leaves them severely brain-damaged. For this reason the technique is either used on people who are going to die anyway, or—in the case of a number of states in America—as a penalty for capital crimes. Personality distillation. Cracking. Instead of electrocuting people, now they just record their personalities and file them.

We had a cracker at school once, brought in on loan as part of a science project. Being the curious type I took the advantage of a free period and popped down to the lab for a look.

The hardware was uninteresting, just an everyday hologram console plugged into a couple of featureless little boxes, and it produced the image of a ten-year-old Danish girl who had been dying of leukemia. Her father was a rich industrialist, and, rather than lose his little girl altogether, he had had her cracked.

It was impossible to tell that this was, in effect, a monstrously sophisticated recording. To all intents and purposes, I was speaking to a real little girl, as if we were having a viewphone conversation. The girl's English was excellent but accented; she hadn't been able to speak English originally, but a secondary language program had been added to the cracker.

We talked for a long time. So long that I missed my next teaching period. I can't, however, remember exactly what we talked about, only that it was one of the more compelling and upsetting experiences of my life. If I had been the little girl's father, I think I would rather have let her die naturally.




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"It's the Holy Grail, sort of. Biology and technology combined."
We were sitting in the lobby at the Barbican Center. There was a concert of English folk music on in the big auditorium, and Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on Greensleeves was coming from the speakers distributed around the room. Hey had ceased to talk technology or biology. Now he was talking necromancy, stuff from a faery-land ruled entirely by intelligences that were neither wholly organic nor wholly inorganic.

"I was in Arizona last week," he said. "They've developed this little robot about the size of a speck of dust. You can't even see it without a microscope. Powers itself by tapping into the electrical potential of muscle fibers. They use free-electron lasers to sculpt them out of bits of silicon-chitin hybrid."

"Sounds terrific." I gazed around the empty lobby. One of the Center's staff was moving between the tables clearing coffee cups and glasses left by concertgoers during the interval.

"Only about a gigabyte of onboard memory, of course, but it doesn't have to be very bright. You could inject a few thousand into a bloke's bloodstream and they'd just go round and round unplaquing his arteries."

"What about rejection?"

He waved rejection away. "You give them coats of mimetic protein and the body thinks they belong there."

"Of course." I lit a cigar.

"I really hate London," he said, squinting about him.

"What?"

"London. It's fucking horrible. I don't know how you can live here."

I thought about it. "No," I said finally. "No, neither do I."

He looked to his left. A few meters away, Michael, his bodyguard, was reading a Barbican events program while at the same time watching the waiter clearing up. He'd balked at letting us sit out by the Lakeside—all those balconies and windows overlooking us, perfect for sniper fire. Michael took his job very seriously.

"Look at that wanker," Hey said. "Company man from the chromosomes up. They clone them, you know. Grow them in vats. Hasn't a fucking free-thinking cell in his body."

I looked at Hey, but it was impossible to tell if he was kidding or not.