Zwilag: a story of the uncanny скачать в хорошем качестве

Zwilag: a story of the uncanny

This is the 10th in the series "Weird Tales Told by a Dubliner" by Turlough Conmee. "Zwilag" Our hero is haunted by rumours and conspiracy theories on the Internet to the effect that the Oligarchy that rules the world and provides entertainment to the masses has taken to buying up the brains of on-line storytellers when they die and keeping them in suspended animation so they will keep on telling stories in their own voices till kingdom come. He decides to investigate himself. His search leads him to a sinister place called Zwilag on the outskirts of Zurich. There he meets Bezovich, one of the richest oligarchs in the world, who informs him that Zwilag doesn't exist. In fact, the Oligarchy has just established a corpus of all stories and all storytellers' voices and has used it to train a machine to make up endless new stories on its own. Our hero challenges the Oligarch to produce a machine-generated story imitating him that is as good as one of his own. After a contest of storytelling, the Oligarch has to admit the human product is better, and should be allowed to continue. "Zwilag" is in fact a bureaucratic acronym for "Zwischenlager" or "intermediate storage depot", used in Switzerland to designate underground warehouses containing nuclear waste. It eerily recalls the use of similar acronyms based on the word "Lager" ("store", but also "camp") by the Nazis and Soviets to designate prison camps of various sorts. On the two embedded stories... The machine-generated one borrows predictably from "The rats in the walls" and is packed with Lovecraftian commonplaces. That said, the human-improvised story borrows the ending of Poe's "Facts in the case of Monsieur Valdemar", even quoting from it! Theme tune: Sad Horror Music by TheoJT -- https://freesound.org/s/510950/ #ghoststories #audiobook #aistorytelling #humanstories