"Peter Watts & Derryl Murphy - Mayfly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

Jeannie had never been a ‘project’. She was his as much as the Goravecs’. Maybe more.

But even Stavros still didn’t know what it was really like for her. He wondered if it was physically
possible for anyone to know. When Jean Goravec slipped the leash of her fleshly existence, she awoke
into a reality where the very laws of physics had expired.

It hadn’t started that way, of course. The system had booted up with years of mundane, real-world
environments on file, each lovingly rendered down to the dust motes. But they’d been flexible, responsive
to the needs of any developing intellect. In hindsight, maybe too flexible. Jean Goravec had edited her
personal reality so radically that even Stavros’ mechanical intermediaries could barely parse it. This little
girl could turn a forest glade into a bloody Roman coliseum with a thought. Unleashed, Jean lived in a
world where all bets were off.

A thought-experiment in child abuse: place a newborn into an environment devoid of vertical lines. Keep
her there until the brain settles, until the wiring has congealed. Whole assemblies of pattern-matching
retinal cells, aborted for lack of demand, will be forever beyond recall. Telephone poles, the trunks of
trees, the vertical aspects of skyscrapers — your victim will be neurologically blind to such things for life.

So what happens to a child raised in a world where vertical lines dissolve, at a whim, into circles or
fractals or a favorite toy?

We’re the impoverished ones, Stavros thought. Next to Jean, we’re blind.

He could see what she started with, of course. His software read the patterns off her occipital cortex,
translated them flawlessly into images projected onto his own tactical contacts. But images aren’t sight,
they’re just… raw material. There are filters all along the path: receptor cells, firing thresholds,
pattern-matching algorithms. Endless stores of past images, an experiential visual library to draw on.
More than vision, sight is , a subjective stew of infinitesimal enhancements and corruptions. Nobody in
the world could interpret Jean’s visual environment better than Stavros Mikalaides, and he’d barely been
able to make sense of those shapes for years.

She was simply, immeasurably, beyond him. It was one of the things he loved most about her.

Now, mere seconds after her father had cut the cord, Stavros watched Jean Goravec ascend into her
true self. Heuristic algorithms upgraded before his eyes; neural nets ruthlessly pared and winnowed
trillions of redundant connections; intellect emerged from primordial chaos. Namps-per-op dropped like
the heavy end of a teeter-totter: at the other end of that lever, processing efficiency rose into the
stratosphere.

This was Jean. They have no idea, Stavros thought, what you’re capable of.

She woke up screaming.

“It’s all right, Jean, I’m here.” He kept his voice calm to help her calm down.

Jean’s temporal lobe flickered briefly at the input. “Oh, God,” she said.

“Another nightmare?”
“Oh, God.” Breath too fast, pulse too high, adrenocortical analogs off the scale. It could have been the
telemetry of a rape.