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

anthropomorphize. Please refrain from attributing human feelings and
emotions to me. I am a Praxcelis unit."
"Oh." Maggie reached out tentatively with one hand, and touched the
monitor screen. The contrast was startling; the thin, wrinkled, blue-veined
hand, and the clear, unreflective, slightly dull viewscreen. She pulled her
hand back quickly. "Look, Praxcelis...."
...Praxcelis activated its visual monitors. The possibility flitted through
its circuits that Mrs. Archer hadn't actually meant for it to activate its
scanning optics, and was dismissed. Praxcelis was starved for data. The
images that flooded in through the various house scanners were
fascinating. So; furniture, walls, windows, fireplace, stove, refrigerator,
stasis bubble, these objects all had references in Praxcelis' ROM. There
were two objects in the room in which Praxcelis' central multiprocessor
was located which radiated heat in infrared; so, thought Praxcelis, that's
what Mrs. Archer looks like.
"...I need to buy some groceries. I'm going to have to use you for that.
My debit cards were invalidated years ago when I wouldn't take an
infocard, and now they won't let me pay with checks."
Praxcelis said, "Certainly." The monitor lit with a sharp glow. Its
images were bright and laser-edged. On the monitor appeared a list of
food types; Produce, Dairy, Dry Goods, Bakery, Pre-produced Meals,
Liquor, Miscellaneous.
The process of ordering went slowly, as Maggie was unused to using the
Praxcelis unit; but nonetheless it was much faster than had she actually
gone shopping herself.
She frowned, though, as the screen image faded to gray, all of her
purchases electronically wiped away. "I wish I could have a receipt for
this," she muttered.
One large module of the Praxcelis unit, some forty by eighty
centimeters, moved.
Maggie jumped in surprise. "Oh, my." She recovered her composure
quickly, though, and bent over to look at what the module had extruded.
It was a receipt. Exactly similar, in every detail, to the receipt that the
supermarket made out for her when she went shopping personally. Maggie
looked at the monitor, as though it were in the space behind the monitor
that the person Praxcelis actually existed. "Praxcelis," she whispered,
"how did you do that?"
Praxcelis said, in its calm, emotionless voice, "The module which
produced that receipt is a material processor. It is capable of reproducing
any document of reasonable size, in any of sixteen million colors."
Maggie looked from the receipt to the monitor, then back to the
receipt. She smiled, a smile of joy. "Can you...reproduce bigger things?"
"That would depend upon the size of the object to be copied."
"A book?"
Maggie wondered if Praxcelis hesitated; "What is a book?"
Maggie got up abruptly, went into her study, and returned with her
copy of The Arabian Nights. She placed the book, still closed, on the
scanning platform.
There was a brief humming noise. Praxcelis said, "I am capable of
reproducing this object to five nines of significant detail. In one area the