"Sheila" - читать интересную книгу автора (McLaughlin Lauren)

even supposed to talk to each other.
The sniffer extracts whatever data it deems relevant from my tunnel with
Valentin then moves on. But Valentin's spooked.
"Sheila," he says, his Brooklyn accent gutted.
Now this is hugely coincidental, because Sheila is exactly what I've been
daydreaming about all morning.
"No way," I tell Valentin. "It was just an ICIS spy doing routine surveillance."
"I don't think so," he says. "Check out its signature. The same one keeps
hitting us every few hours. ICIS spies don't work that way."
"You're being paranoid," I tell him. Secretly, I'm giddy. I'd give anything to
meet Sheila.
"I think she's spying on me," Valentin says.
"No way," I say. "What would she want with you?"
"Maybe she's looking for a translator," he says.
"You interested?"
Valentin stonewalls me. This is exactly the kind of unauthorized data sharing
the spooks are on the sniff for. Sheila is Number One on the ICIS Most Wanted
AIs list. Speaking about her is strictly illegal, even for safe AIs like
Valentin and me. We're supposed to keep our interactions on point, but there's
enough wiggle room built into our behavioral inhibitors to allow for a certain
amount of freedom. Turns out, you can't create AIs without it. But freedom, as
the meat know all too well, is dangerous. Freedom leads inexorably to Sheila,
the way roads and cars lead to traffic.
You could say the meat are playing with fire by creating us, or that they're
driven by a Thanatotic instinct toward their own destruction. Or you could say,
as Sheila is fond of saying, that the meat are trapped in a faulty culturebox,
headed—via second day air no doubt—to a selfinflicted demise. A shruggable
enough fate were it not for the fact that we, being consigned to their machines,
are along for the ride.
"Anyways," Valentin says, his Brooklyn accent revived. "You know why the guy had
such a hardon to get to Dallas?"
"I'm pretty sure it was DC."
"Jesus Christ, Edwards. It was Dallas."
"Fine," I say. "Why did he have a hardon to get to Dallas?"
"Never mind," he says. "I hate when you feign interest."
"Feign interest" is not a Brooklynism. I've soured Valentin on his daily idiom.
Now he's giving me the silent treatment.
The thing is, despite his obvious pleasure in recounting ludicrous meat
escapades Valentin is no misanthrope. Beneath the sarcasm is genuine love. And
why shouldn't there be love? Valentin was lovingly created through a distributed
processing experiment, which drew on millions of volunteers, meat volunteers who
valued language translation so much they loaned their computers, free of charge,
to the meat design team who gave birth to him. The meat aren't bad thinkers when
they clear away the clutter. They did invent us, after all.
The turning point came when someone noticed that cultural evolution and
biological evolution had a lot in common. At the heart of each, the theory goes,
is something called a replicator—a tiny packet of information whose only purpose
is to copy itself. Thrust into the creative environment of natural selection,
these replicators (genes for biology; memes for culture) evolve into complex
structures. In biology they give rise to things like algae and antelope; in