《Orphanogenesis 》作者： - Greg Egan【EPUB】

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Orphanogenesis by Greg Egan Konishi polis Earth 23 387 025 000 000 CST15 May 2975 11:03:17.154 UT T he conceptory was non-sentient software as ancient as Konishi polis itself. Its main purposewas to enable the citizens of the polis to create offspring: a child of one parent or two ortwenty — formed partly in their own image partly according to their wishes and partly bychance. Sporadically though every teratau or so the conceptory created a citizen with noparents at all. In Konishi every home-born citizen was grown from a mind seed a string ofinstruction codes like a digital genome. The first mind seeds had been translated from DNA ninecenturies before when the polis founders had invented the Shaper programming language torecreate the essential processes of neuroembryology in software. But any such translation wasnecessarily imperfect glossing over the biochemical details in favour of broad functionalequivalence and the full diversity of the flesher genome could not be brought through intact.Starting from a diminished trait pool with the old DNA-based maps rendered obsolete it wascrucial for the conceptory to chart the consequences of new variations to the mind seed. Toeschew all change would be to risk stagnation to embrace it recklessly would be to endangerthe sanity of every child. The Konishi mind seed was divided into a billion fields: shortsegments six bits long each containing a simple instruction code. Sequences of a few dozeninstructions