"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Crunchers, Inc." - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

After all, EISH had a point that most people sympathized with: Every life had
value. Sometimes the value was as small as giving a plastic horse to a child you’d
never see again. Sometimes the value was being the person everyone ran to in a crisis
(Edith would have to see if that somehow made it into her file—a white mark to
counteract the black). Sometimes the value was in living the perfect American
life—2.5 children, a dog, a house, too much credit, and perfect attendance at the
marginally useful job.

This sentimental view, which even she had some sympathy with, appealed to
everyone whose life hadn’t exactly gone the way he’d planned. The person who
woke up at forty, realizing that he wasn’t going to get the chance to buy
enhancements that would make him a star quarterback (those were age-limited to the
under-thirty crowd, no matter what your innate talent level) or that he wasn’t going to
be a wunderkind in any subject because wunderkinds all died before they turned
forty, usually of some self-inflicted something or other.

EISHies, as she called them, gave succor to the hopeless, hope to the fearful,
and pap to everyone else. They simply didn’t understand the way the world had to
work.

“Yup,” Conrad said. “They got the chair. I’m going to have to boost the
scans again. They put a low energy chip into this thing. It must’ve been working on
him for weeks before he finally blew.”

Blew. That was a term. Actuarial Engineers went through a battery of personal
tests, showing that they lacked the kind of sentimental bent that made EISH appeal
to most people. AEs were as close as people got to being robots themselves, or so
personnel had told Edith after the fifth AE blew his cool and left.

People who got hired by Crunchers, Inc., which was a branch of Number
Crunchers, Inc., a branch of Statistical and Numerical Services, Inc., a branch
of—well, she couldn’t remember, not that she had to. She’d only gone to the third
level when she’d been applying here.

Suffice to say that the job of Crunchers, Inc., and companies like this, was to
assist decision-makers in those hardest of hard decisions.

The ones that involved life and death.

Rather than applying a standard of morality that varied from person to person
or township to township, Crunchers, and companies like it, made certain that
decisions occurred on a level playing field.

Each American life (someday, the bigwigs hoped, each life) would be reduced
to a series of positives and negatives. The intrinsic value of the human being—not
just his political clout and financial worth (although those factored in; no one could
ignore the way that money talked, even now), but his value to society, how much has
he contributed in a variety of measures—as a teacher, as a valued member of his
own community, as a giver of advice. Is he a good parent? Have his children grown
to become equally valued members of the society or are they in