"Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow - Jury Service" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

the edges of his mind, as if—
"You don't remember me, do you?" asks his companion.
"Alcohol has this effect on me at times," Huw confesses in a grateful rush. "I've got an awful memory—"
"The name's Bonnie," says the man. "You spent most of the early hours trying to cop a feel by convincing me that Nietzsche was responsible for
global cooling." Huw stares at him and feels something in his head do an uneasy flip-flop: yes, the resemblance is clear, this is the woman he
was talking to last night. " 's amazing what a good bathroom can do in the way of cellular redifferentiation surgery these days, you know?" the
bald guy—Bonnie?—continues. Then he winks at Huw with what Huw realizes, to his horror, is either lascivious intent or broad and filthy-minded
humor. "How's your hangover? Are you up to picking things up where we left off?"
"Aaaugh," says Huw, as the full force of the post-party cultural hangover hits him between the eyes, right beneath the biohazard trefoil, and the
coffee hits his stomach. "Need fresh air now …"

·····

The next morning, Huw wakes up more gently. Awakened by sunlight, but this time in his own bed. He yawns and sits up, pauses for a moment
to get his bearings, then ventures down the comfortably unchanging stairs to retrieve his post. The dusty tiles in his vintage late-nineteenth-
century terrace house are cold beneath his bare feet. A draft leaks around the ill-fitting outer door, raising gooseflesh on his bare legs. Two-
thirds of the mail is spam, which goes straight on the recycle-before-reading pile, but there's also a genuine letter, complete with a stamp on the
envelope. Ink on paper—someone took the trouble to communicate with him personally, putting dumb, thrax-prone matter in motion to make a
point.
He rips the envelope open with a cracked fingernail. He reads: your application for international triage jury service has been provisionally
accepted. To activate your application, present this letter in person to …
He carries the letter through into the kitchen, puts it on the table so he can keep an eye on it as he eats. He barely notices the morning chill as
the battered Red Crescent surplus food processor barfs up a lukewarm cup of Turkish coffee, a vague facsimile of scrambled eggs, and an even
vaguer pastiche of bacon. Today is Huw's big day. He's been hoping for this day for months.
Soon, he'll get to say what he thinks about some item of new technology—and they'll have to listen to him.

·····

Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.
Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity
well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a
dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun. Except for the solitary lighthouse beam that perpetually tracks the Earth in its
orbit, the system from outside resembles a spherical fogbank radiating in the infrared spectrum; a matrioshka brain, nested Dyson orbitals built
from the dismantled bones of moons and planets.
The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander
nostalgiawise. When that happens, it casually spams Earth's RF spectrum with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify
whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems.
A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's always someone who'll take a bite from the forbidden Cox Pippin.
There's always someone whom evolution has failed to breed the let's-lick-the-frozen-fencepost instinct out of. There's always a fucking geek
who'll do it because it's a historical goddamned technical fucking imperative.
Whether the enlightened, occulting smartcloud sends out its missives as pranks, poison or care-packages is up for debate. Asking it to explain
its motives is roughly as pointful as negotiating with an ant colony to get it to abandon your kitchen. Whatever the motive, humanity would be
much better off if the Cloud would evolve into something so smart as to be uninterested in communicating with meatpeople.
But until that happy day, there's the tech jury service: defending the earth from the scum of the post-singularity patent office.

·····

After breakfast, Huw pulls on jeans, boots, and shirt. He locks the front door carefully behind himself and tells his bicycle to unbolt itself from the
rusting red drainpipe that stains the brick side of his house with green moss. He pedals uncertainly to the end of the road, then eases out into
traffic, sneering as the omnipresent web of surveillance routes the peoplemovers around him.