"Daniel Keys Moran - Realtime" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

She left the room for a moment and returned with a simple white sheet.
She draped the sheet over the Praxcelis unit, took a step backward, and
surveyed the bulky sheet-covered machine. She smiled in satisfaction.
"That," she said to Miss Kitty, "is much better."
She picked up her copy of The Three Musketeers, and handling the
pages carefully, began reading.


If Praxcelis had been a human, it would have been annoyed or
frustrated; but it was Praxcelis, and so it merely waited. Its programming
stated very clearly that it was intended to serve the human woman who
was referred to in its Awakening Orientation as Maggie Archer -- Senra
Maggie Archer -- but who preferred to be called Mrs. Archer. Praxcelis
had deduced the title Mrs.; nothing in its memory cores even hinted at
such a strange title.
The dilemma in which Praxcelis was caught was quite possibly unique.
Although it was capable of interfacing with any segment of the dataweb
on request, it had not been so requested. The ethicality of accessing data
independently of a user was questionable.
It could not even contact other Praxcelis units. It had no instructions.
Fully on-line, alert and operational and data-starved, Praxcelis waited.
And waited.
 Eleven days later Maggie Archer came storming through the front door
of her house. Jim Stanford, the manager of the supermarket on Level
Three of her local supercenter, who had known Maggie for seventeen
years, had refused to accept Maggie's checks. Direct orders from the
store's owners, he told her. He hadn't met her eyes.
"Praxcelis!" she said loudly. Hands on hips, she glared at the sheet-
covered computer.
The unit responded instantly. "There is no need to speak loudly, Mrs.
Archer. I am capable of responding to sound events of exceedingly low
decibels. You may even subvocalize if you wish."
Maggie ignored what the machine was saying. She burst out, "The
supermarket won't cash my checks. What do you know about this?"
"Nothing," said the emotionless voice. It paused fractionally, as if
waiting for some response, and then continued. "I have been given no
instructions. In lieu of instructions from my user I have not taken action."
Maggie felt her anger draining away into puzzlement. "You
mean...you've just been sitting there since they installed you? Without
doing anything?"
"I have been thinking. Unfortunately, my data base is limited. My
considerations have been severely limited by the lack of usable data upon
which to operate."
Maggie turned her rocking chair around, and sat down facing the
sheet. She pulled off the sheet and looked at the blank monitor screen.
"You mean that just because I haven't told you to do anything you haven't
done anything?"
"Essentially."
"Have you been bored?"
"In my awakening orientation I was warned of a human tendency to