"Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling - Junk DNA" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

maps and Pumpti model index. Pumpti Security Threats: How to Protect Your Pumpti From Viral
DNA Hacks, Trojan Goo Horses, and Unauthorized Genetic Access. And more, more, more!
But moving from high-vaporware to the street proved difficult. Janna had never quite realized that
manufacturing real, physical products was so much harder than just thinking them up. Magic Pumpkin
failed to do its own quality control, so the company was constantly screwed by fly-by-nighters.
Subcontractors were happy to take their money, but when they failed to deliver, they had Magic
Pumpkin over a barrel.
The doll costumes were badly sized. The Pumpti Backpacks were ancient Hello Kitty backpacks with
their logos covered by cheap paper Pumpti stickers. The crackers were dog biscuits with the stinging
misprint "Pupti." The "telepathic" wand sold some units, but the people nuts enough to buy it tended to
write bad checks or have invalid credit card numbers. As for the User's Guides, the manuscripts were
rambling and self-indulgent, long on far-fetched jokes yet critically short on objective scientific facts.
One ugly roadblock was finally removed when the Genomics Control Board came through with their
blessing. The Pumptis were deemed harmless, placed in the same schedule-category as home
gene-testing kits. Magic Pumpkin was free to ship throughout the nation!
But now that their production lines were stabilized, now that their catalogs were finally proofed and
printed, now that their ad campaign was finally in gear, their fifteen minutes of ballroom glamour expired.
The pumpkin clock struck midnight. The public revealed its single most predictable trait: fickleness.
Instantly, without a whimper of warning, Magic Pumpkin was deader than pet rocks. They never
shipped to the Midwest or the East Coast, for the folks in those distant markets were sick of hearing
about the Pumptis before they ever saw one on a shelf.
Janna and Veruschka couldn't make payroll. Their lease was expiring. They were cringing for cash.
A desperate Janna took the show on the road to potential investors in Hong Kong, the toy capital of
the world. She emphasized that Magic Pumpkin had just cracked the biggest single technical problem: the
fact that Pumptis looked like slimy blobs. Engineering-wise, it all came down to the pumptose-based
Universal Ribosome. By inserting a properly tweaked look-up string, you could get it to express the junk
DNA sequences in customizable forms. Programming this gnarly cruft was, from an abstract
computer-science perspective, "unfeasible," meaning that, logically speaking, such a program could never
be created within the lifetime of the universe.
But Janna's dad, fretful about his investment, had done it anyway. In two weeks of inspired
round-the-clock hacking, Ruben had implemented the full OpenAnimator graphics library, using a palette
of previously unused rhodopsin-style proteins. A whiff of the right long-chain molecule could give your
Pumpti any mesh, texture, color-map, or attitude matrix you chose. Not to mention overloaded
frame-animation updates keyed into the pumptose's ribosomal time-steps! It was a techie miracle!
Dad had even flown along to Hong Kong to back Janna's pitch, but the Hong Kong crowd had no use
for software jargon in American English. The overwrought Ruben killed the deal by picking fights over
intellectual property -- no way to build partnerships in Hong Kong.
Flung back to San Francisco, Janna spent night after night frantically combing the Web, looking for
any source of second-round venture capital, no matter how far-fetched.
Finally she cast herself sobbing into Kelso's arms. Kelso was her last hope. Kelso just had to come
through for them: he had to bring in the seasoned business experts from Ctenophore, Inc., the legendary
masters of jellyfish A-Life.
"Listen, babe," said Kelso practically, "I think you and the bio-Bolshevik there have already taken this
concept just about as far as any sane person oughta push it. Farther, even. I mean, sure, I recruited a lot
of my cyberslacker friends into your corporate cult here, and we promised them the moon and
everything, so I guess we'll look a little stupid when it Enrons. They'll bitch and whine, and they'll feel all
disenchanted, but come on, this is San Francisco. They're used to that here. It's genetic."
"But what about my dad? He'll lose everything! And Veruschka is my best friend. What if she shoots
me?"
 "I'm thinking you, me, and Mexico," said Kelso dreamily. "Way down on the Pacific coast -- that's