"Rudy Rucker - The Imitation Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

THE IMITATION GAME—Rudy Rucker

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Rudy Rucker has worked as a mathematics professor, a software engineer,
a computer science professor, an artist and a writer. He’s published
twenty-nine books, including a non-fiction book on the meaning of
computers: The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul. He has been known
to say everything is made of gnarl. He publishes an online SF zine called
Flurb. He’s currently writing a cyberpunkish trilogy of novels in which
nanotechnology changes everything. He’s currently finishing the second of
the series, Hylozoic. The first in the series, Postsingular, appeared from
Tor in Fall, 2007, and is also available for free download on the web. See
Rudy’s portal, rudyrucker.com, for more info.

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It was a rainy Sunday night, June 6, 1954. Alan Turing was walking down
the liquidly lamp-lit street to the Manchester train station, wearing a long
raincoat with a furled umbrella concealed beneath. His Greek paramour
Zeno was due on the 9pm coach, having taken a ferry from Calais. And, no,
the name had no philosophical import, it was simply the boy’s name. If all
went well, Zeno and Alan would be spending the night together in the
sepulchral Manchester Midland travelers’ hotel—Alan’s own home nearby
was watched. He’d booked the hotel room under a pseudonym.

Barring any intrusions from the morals squad, Alan and Zeno
wouldsetoffbrightandearlytomorrowforalovelyweekoftramping across the
hills of the Lake Country, free as rabbits, sleeping in serendipitous inns.
Alan sent up a fervent prayer, if not to God, then to the deterministic
universe’s initial boundary condition.

“Let it be so.”

Surely the cosmos bore no distinct animus towards homosexuals,
and the world might yet grant some peace to the tormented, fretful gnat
labeled Alan Turing. But it was by no means a given that the assignation
with Zeno would click. Last spring, the suspicious auth-orities had deported
Alan’s Norwegian flame Kjell straight back to Bergen before Alan even saw
him.
 It was as if Alan’s persecutors supposed him likely to be teaching his
men top-secret code-breaking algorithms, rather than sensually savoring
his rare hours of private joy. Although, yes, Alan did relish playing the tutor,
and it was in fact conceivable that he might feel the urge to discuss those
topics upon which he’d worked during the war years. After all, it was no one
but he, Alan Turing, who’d been the brains of the British cryptography team