"Mary Rosenblum - Search Engine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenblum Mary)

motivated it… that you could only guess at.

What would Avi's profile look like?

No way to know. Avi's break had been a back cutter.

Aman closed the door and listened to the unit lock it behind him.

He carried his groceries the few scant blocks to his own modest condo tower. No music came on with
the lights. No cat, just Danish furniture and an antique Afghani carpet knotted by the childhood fingers of
women who were long dead now. He put the food away, stuck a meal in the microwave, and thought
about pouring himself another beer. But the stout he'd drunk with Jimi buzzed in his blood like
street-grade amphetamine. He smiled crookedly, thinking of his grandfather, a devout man of Islam, and
his lectures about the demon's blood, alcohol. It felt like demon's blood tonight. The microwave chimed.
Aman set the steaming tray on the counter to cool, sat down cross-legged on the faded wool patterns of
crimson and blue, and blinked his bioware open.

His AI had been working on the profile. It presented him with five options. Aman settled down to review
the runner's profile first. It wasn't all a matter of data. You could buy a search AI, and if that was all there
was to it, Search Engine Inc. wouldn't be in business. Intuition mattered —the ability to look beyond the
numbers and sense the person behind them. Aman ran through the purchases, the candy bars, the vid
downloads for the lonely times, the gifts that evoked the misty presence of the girlfriend, the hope of love
expressed in single, cloned roses, in Belgian chocolate, and tickets in pairs. They came and went, three of
them for sure. He worried about his weight, or maybe just his muscles for a while, buying gym time and
special foods.

Someone died. Aman noted the payments for flowers, the crematorium, a spike in alcohol purchases for
about three months. And then… the break. Curious, Aman opened another file from the download the
suit had given him, read the stats. Daren had been a contract birth—the new way for men to have
children. Mom had left for a career as an engineer on one of the orbital platforms. Nanny, private school.
The flowers had been for Dad, dead at 54 from a brain aneurysm.

He had joined the Gaiists after his father had died.

Unlike Avi, who hadn't waited.

Aman looked again at the five profiles the Al had presented. All featured organic, wild harvest, natural
fiber purchasing profiles. Three were still local. One had recently arrived in Montreal, another in the
Confederacy of South America, in the state of Brazil. Aman scanned the data. That one. He selected one
of the local trio. The purchases clustered northeast of the city in an area that had been upscale suburb
once, was a squalid cash-worker settlement now. He was walking. Couldn't use mass transit without a
chip and didn't have access to a vehicle, clearly. Naive. Aman let his breath out slowly. Frightened. A
little kid with his head under the sofa cushions, thinking he was invisible that way. He wondered
sometimes if he could find Avi. It would be a challenge. His son knew how he worked. He knew how to
really hide.

Aman had never looked.

On a whim, he called up the AI's flag from his earlier search. It had flagged the woman who had died,
who had probably been a live-in friend or lover. This time, the AI presented him with clustered drug