"Zelazny, Roger - The Force that Through The Circuit Drives The Current" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

“Yes,” Tom said, glancing at the indicators, “it’s a bonus, all right. Look at that slop flow, will you! If the unit holds up through this, we’ve scored all the way around.”

“I think it will. It seems to have stabilized itself. That brain is actually functioning. I could almost feel those little tunnel junction neuristors working, forming their own interconnections as I operated it. Apparently, I fed it sufficient activity, it took in sufficient data… It formed its own paths. It did—learn. When the quake started, it took independent action. It almost doesn’t really need me now.”

“Except to teach it something new, for whatever we want it to do next.”

Dan nodded, slowly.

“Yes——Still, you wonder what it’s teaching itself, now that it’s in control for a time. That was a peculiar feeling—when I realized it had finally come into its equivalent of awareness. When it made its own decision to adjust to that first tiny shock. Now, watching it control its own situation… It knows what it’s doing.”

“Look! You can actually see those damn eddies! It’s doing around fifty-five miles an hour, and that slop is still going faster. —Yeah, that must really have been something, feeling it take over that way.”

“It was quite strange. Just when it happened, I felt as if I were— touching another awareness, I guess that’s the best way to put it. It was as if a genuine consciousness had suddenly flickered into being beside my own, down there, and as if it were aware of me, just for a second. Then we went our own ways. I think the neuropsych boys and the cyberneticists were right. I think we’ve produced an artificial intelligence.”

“That’s really frosting on my turbidity cake,” Tom said, taking notes. “It was actually a Swiss guy, back in the nineteenth century, who first guessed at turbidity currents, to explain how mud from the Rhone got way out in Lake Geneva—did you see that!? Tore a hunk right off the side! Yeah, that’s a great little gimmick you’ve got. If it makes it down to the plains, I want some cores right away. We’ve got plenty of recent samples, so it ought to be able to give us the depth of sediment deposit from this slide. Then maybe you could send it back up to where it was, for some comparison cores with the ones it was just taking. I—”

“I wonder what it thinks about itself—and us?”

“How could it know about us? It only knows what you taught it, and whatever it’s learning now.”

“It felt me there, right at the end. I’m sure of it.”

Tom chuckled.

“Call that part of its religious upbringing, then. If it ever gets balky, you can thunder and lightning at it. —Must be doing close to sixty now!”

Dan finished his coffee.

“I just had a bizarre thought,” he said, moments later. “What if something were doing the same thing to us—controlling us, watching the world through our senses—without our being aware of it?”

Tom shrugged.

“Why should they?”

“Why are we doing it with the unit? Maybe they’d be interested in turbidity currents on this sort of a planet—or of our experiments with devices of this sort. That’s the point. It could be anything. How could we tell?”

“Let me get you another cup of coffee, Dan.”

“All right, all right! Forgive the metaphysics. I was just so close to that feeling with the unit… I started picturing myself on the teleslave end of things. The feeling’s gone now, anyhow.”

==========

“Voic, what is it?”

Voic released the querocube and lufted toward Doman.

“That one I was just fiding—it came closer than any of them ever did before to recognizing my presence!”

“Doubtless because of the analogous experience with its own fide. Interesting, though. Let it alone for a while.”