Slant by Greg Bear Read Free Book Online
Authors: Greg Bear
entry-level workers, most of them in their late teens and early twenties, going through their first qualification inspections. It's heartbreaking for them, Doctor. It could be a challenge to our whole economy."
"I understand that. Please count me in, and keep me informed."
"Thank you, Dr. Burke. I will."
"And make an arrangement with my office for a personal meeting."
"Thank you." They exchange home sigs. Carrilund smiles sedately and-Mar-tin transfers her to Arnold.
Martin sits lost in thought. He came very close to being CTR himself, years ago; too close to having to face, day after day, for years on end, the prospect of an inner voice that murmurs of confusion and pain and much, much worse.
/ SLANT 33
He has raised his hands, unconsciously, as if to ward off something coming toward him. With another shudder, he drops them to his lap, composes himself, and tells Arnold to send in Mrs. Avril De Johns.
Access to knowledge and information is necessary to a dataflow economy. But it will cost you...
Every single access will cost you. A penny here, a thousand dollars there, a million a year over there somewhere.., subscriptions and encryptions and decryptions. If you haven't already shown yourself to be a part of the flow--if you aren't a student given research dispensation, or already earning your way by turning information into knowledge and that into money and work--the action anatomy of society--it's a tough old world.
Perhaps in discouragement you become one of the disaffected and spend all your federal dole on the more flagrant Yox, drowning yourself in enervating lies. You're allowed, but you're out of the loop. One-way flow is not a game; it's a sucking little death.
--The U,S, Government Digiman on Dataflow Economics, 56r" Revision, 2052
Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither
man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes
data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would soon be useless in a mouse's universe...
--Lloyd Ricardo, Pressed Between Two Flat Seconds:
Preserving the Human Flower
It's not your grandmother's world. It was never your grandmother's world.
Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie
4 THINKER, FEELER
Nathan Rashid gives his fiancee, Ayesha Kale, a tour of Mind Design's most amous inhabitant, Jill.
Nathan is Jill's new chief engineer and friend. He replaced Roger Atkins two years ago, when Atkins became chief administrator for Mind Design's new thinker development.
Nathan headed the team that brought her back from her collapse, and Jill regards him with warm affection. She does not believe he will do anything to
34 GREG BEAR
reduce her functions or alter her present state. After all, it was Nathan who devised the ornate Loop Detail Interrupt that restored her to awareness and full function. Jill trusts him, but she has not told him about the mystery. Nathan and Ayesha stand in a broad cream-colored room with a central riser surrounded by transparent glass plates. On the riser sits a snow-white cube about one meter on a side, attended by three smaller cubes. Nathan is thirty-five, dark-haired, broad-faced, with an immediate, eager, and sometimes mischievous smile. Ayesha is five years older, brown-haired, with large, all-absorbing black eyes and a mouth that seems ready to acknowledge disappointment. The cubes are connected by ribes as well as by direct optical links, which twinkle like blue eyes as they pass through the empty air between. "Is that her?" Ayesha asks. "That's her," Nathan says. "That's all?" Jill sits in warm and cold, feeling neither. Her emotions, as with all of us, do nor seem to come from her particular structures, though she is much more aware of her internal processes. "Most of her is here. Why, disappointed?" Jill's body, if she can be said to have one, is mainly in Del Mar and Palo Alto, California. There are many parts of her less than a few cubic centimeters in size spread through
"I understand that. Please count me in, and keep me informed."
"Thank you, Dr. Burke. I will."
"And make an arrangement with my office for a personal meeting."
"Thank you." They exchange home sigs. Carrilund smiles sedately and-Mar-tin transfers her to Arnold.
Martin sits lost in thought. He came very close to being CTR himself, years ago; too close to having to face, day after day, for years on end, the prospect of an inner voice that murmurs of confusion and pain and much, much worse.
/ SLANT 33
He has raised his hands, unconsciously, as if to ward off something coming toward him. With another shudder, he drops them to his lap, composes himself, and tells Arnold to send in Mrs. Avril De Johns.
Access to knowledge and information is necessary to a dataflow economy. But it will cost you...
Every single access will cost you. A penny here, a thousand dollars there, a million a year over there somewhere.., subscriptions and encryptions and decryptions. If you haven't already shown yourself to be a part of the flow--if you aren't a student given research dispensation, or already earning your way by turning information into knowledge and that into money and work--the action anatomy of society--it's a tough old world.
Perhaps in discouragement you become one of the disaffected and spend all your federal dole on the more flagrant Yox, drowning yourself in enervating lies. You're allowed, but you're out of the loop. One-way flow is not a game; it's a sucking little death.
--The U,S, Government Digiman on Dataflow Economics, 56r" Revision, 2052
Humanism is dead. Animals think, feel; so do machines now. Neither
man nor woman is the measure of all things. Every organism processes
data according to its domain, its environment; you, with all your brains, would soon be useless in a mouse's universe...
--Lloyd Ricardo, Pressed Between Two Flat Seconds:
Preserving the Human Flower
It's not your grandmother's world. It was never your grandmother's world.
Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie
4 THINKER, FEELER
Nathan Rashid gives his fiancee, Ayesha Kale, a tour of Mind Design's most amous inhabitant, Jill.
Nathan is Jill's new chief engineer and friend. He replaced Roger Atkins two years ago, when Atkins became chief administrator for Mind Design's new thinker development.
Nathan headed the team that brought her back from her collapse, and Jill regards him with warm affection. She does not believe he will do anything to
34 GREG BEAR
reduce her functions or alter her present state. After all, it was Nathan who devised the ornate Loop Detail Interrupt that restored her to awareness and full function. Jill trusts him, but she has not told him about the mystery. Nathan and Ayesha stand in a broad cream-colored room with a central riser surrounded by transparent glass plates. On the riser sits a snow-white cube about one meter on a side, attended by three smaller cubes. Nathan is thirty-five, dark-haired, broad-faced, with an immediate, eager, and sometimes mischievous smile. Ayesha is five years older, brown-haired, with large, all-absorbing black eyes and a mouth that seems ready to acknowledge disappointment. The cubes are connected by ribes as well as by direct optical links, which twinkle like blue eyes as they pass through the empty air between. "Is that her?" Ayesha asks. "That's her," Nathan says. "That's all?" Jill sits in warm and cold, feeling neither. Her emotions, as with all of us, do nor seem to come from her particular structures, though she is much more aware of her internal processes. "Most of her is here. Why, disappointed?" Jill's body, if she can be said to have one, is mainly in Del Mar and Palo Alto, California. There are many parts of her less than a few cubic centimeters in size spread through
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