The Before Short Story Series. Part 1 - стр. 12
Hiromi looked at her daughter, ‘Ayaka, do you understand what I am talking about?’
‘Mummy, as far as I get it, before people would die much earlier and they didn’t have enough time to do their job the right way.’
‘Because?’
’They didn’t always make the right choice when they were children.’
‘So it is, Ayaka.’
‘So Grandma started breaking her back when she was born in our family?’
‘Grandma took on her father’s job, being a rice farmer in the fields that used to belong to our family.’
‘Daddy says Grandma would break her back from morning to evening.’
‘Ayaka, Daddy meant that Grandma worked a lot—in the field as well—helping to harvest the crops.’
‘Mummy, is it that Grandma also made a mistake when making her decision?’
‘No, dear. Our grandparents did not have the kind of possibilities that we have today with the PAX. Grandma was helping her family, taking on her father’s job, her grandfather’s, and so on. Grandma didn’t have a choice there, Ayaka. But you do have a choice. The PAX prepares high-probability scenarios to forecast in which fields you have the most chances to succeed and to do the most for the society—having access to the entirety of the world’s knowledge, and also having studied carefully your possibilities and intellectual potential. Do you see it, Ayaka?’
‘Yes, I do. The PAX will tell me what to do.’
‘The PAX will give you options. It will suggest you the fields in which you could do your best. It knows who, when, and where is doing whichever job. It also knows what issues are important now and which ones will be so in the future—by analysing the datasets it has—and it creates and carefully studies your personal profile. By getting all this information together into a strictly structured picture, into a single system of interdependencies, the computer is able to offer you a precise answer to one of the crucial questions in our lives—the one of why we are here in this world.
Hiromi was looking at her daughter, ‘I wonder if she understands what I am trying to tell her…’
‘But the final decision is up to you. Whatever you will do in your life, whichever way you will choose, the choice is yours, and yours alone, Ayaka.’
Pax
‘Look Beg, there’s one more thing that I’ve been thinking about,’ Jordan was going on with a weekly meeting on current issues. ‘I would like to work from home for a couple of weeks, so I don’t think I will be there in the office. I feel the solution is already at my fingertips, you see? I just need a little more to reach it. It is nearly there in my hands, so I don’t want to be distracted by quarrels with coworkers. And the other guys here will feel easier in my absence. At least for a while’