"Spider Robinson - Copyright Violation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

impressive-looking than I am."
"I can believe it," she said. "All right, surprise me."
"I write software, for a mouse-driven com-puter called the Macintosh.
Independents can't make a lot at it, but no one ever has to see your face."
"Frot," she said. It was some kind of obscenity where she came from.
"You may have heard of hackers. A vanguard subculture of today, like the
beatniks and the hippies of earlier days. Just like with them, some expressions that
will be common idiom in another ten or twenty years are familiar to me now. When
you said the word `save,' I heard it the way you would."
"Frot," she said again, a little more forcefully.
"Yeah. As in `saving the changes to disk.' The inside of that crown thing looks a
lot like the ball-cavity of the mouse on my Mac, two little phototransistors and a
reference point. Yours wouldn't be optical, though, would they? Other than that, the
analogy is pretty good: you ...'turn the head around,' and the sensors translate it into
data. That's ROM circuitry around the sensors, sure as hell. The rest of the crown is
storage space, right? Hell's own data capac-ity, from the size.
"So the rest was logic. The only thing you could possibly be recording from my
head that required that kind of byte room was ... my memories, my thoughts. My
feelings. That told me you had to be from the future: even the Japanese don't have
brain interface yet. You had to have a way to get back to your own time, and I was
certain you were not wearing it, externally or internally. But you wouldn't go far from
it, so it had to be in the purse. The only thing I don't understand is why your
brain-robbing Peeping ROM takes so infer-nally long to write the data."
She looked up at me. There was none of the new respect in her eyes that I had
earned. "Fool. We cannot get at short-term memory; Heisen-berg effect. If we could
we'd have effective telepathy, wouldn't we?"
I was feeling telepathic. I sensed her think-ing about trying to take the time
machine from me; with great pleasure I felt her decide against it. "And
mind-control," I agreed. "I'd never have reached the purse. You have to wait for the
memories to seep from short-term to long-term storage—and I came out of the fog
too soon." I grinned. Taking off that crown must have been like yanking a disk out
of the drive while it's spinning, huh?"
Her eyes flashed. "I could have killed you. After all I did for you—"
Give me this much credit. I did not kill her then.
When I had myself back in control, I spoke very softly. "Recorded memories
must have beat out most other artforms and recreations. I'll bet the pornography is
sensational by my standards. But even my primitive pornography has taught me
something interesting, and you confirmed it earlier tonight: there is a finite limit to
the possibilities. There are only so many ways to do it for the camera: at some point
even you people must get jaded. So you'll pay extra for the can-did-camera kick, for
the memories of someone who doesn't know you're watching, somebody with no
copy protection on his head.
"More: for recordings of someone who's given up all hope of ecstasy, falling
suddenly into the middle of his wildest wet dreams. For record-ings of the ending of
despair, the ending of a solitude such as none of you must ever have known.
Heightened dramatic effect. Casanova may be happy, skillfully plundering his
hundredth willing wench, but not a fraction as happy as I was tonight. Your world
must not have pain like mine any more—you had to come back here to find it."
I shifted my weight, and my foot touched something cold. I glanced down and
saw the crown.