經典科幻文學:《 基本上無害 Mostly Harmless》 第6章8

‘Kill!’ shouted Ford. He shouted it at his towel.

“殺！”福特忽然放聲大吼，這一聲命令是衝他的毛巾去的。

The towel leapt up out of Harl’s hands.

毛巾從哈爾手裏一躍而起。

This was not because it had any motive force of its own, but because Harl was so startled at the idea that it might. The next thing that startled him was the sight of Ford Prefect hurtling across the desk at him fists first. In fact Ford was just lunging for the credit card, but you don’t get to occupy the sort of position that Harl occupied in the sort of organisation in which Harl occupied it without developing a healthily paranoid view of life. He took the sensible precaution of hurling himself backwards, and striking his head a sharp blow on the rocket-proof glass, then subsided into a series of worrying and highly personal dreams.

倒不是說它自帶了什麼動力激情之類的，只不過哈爾生怕有這種可能性，所以被嚇得丟了魂。第二個驚嚇來自福特.長官，他雙拳向前從桌子上直衝了過來。事實上福特的目標不過是那張信用卡，可你要爬到哈爾這樣的位置，而且是在他待的這種機構裏爬到這樣的位置，那麼你肯定得發展自己對生活的看法，把它打造成一種非常健康的疑神疑鬼。哈爾採取了類似情況中最爲明智的防範措施，也就是說使勁往後一閃。結果他的腦袋狠狠撞上防導彈的玻璃，接着便陷入了一系列焦慮，煩惱，同時非常隱私的夢裏。

Ford lay on the desk, surprised at how swimmingly everything had gone. He glanced quickly at the piece of plastic he now held in his hand – it was a Dine-O-Charge credit card with his name already embossed on it, and an expiry date two years from now, and was possibly the single most exciting thing Ford had ever seen in his life – then he clambered over the desk to see to Harl.

福特趴在桌上，一切都如此順利，他不禁有些吃驚。他飛快地瞄了眼自己抓在手裏的那片塑料——那是張“隨便吃”信用卡，上面已經印上了福特的名字，使用期是兩年。這大概是福特這輩子見過的最讓人激動的東西了——然後他爬到桌子那頭去看哈爾。

He was breathing fairly easily. It occurred to Ford that he might breathe more easily yet without the weight of his wallet bearing down on his chest, so he slipped it out of Harl’s breast pocket and flipped through it. Fair amount of cash. Credit tokens. Ultragolf club membership. Other club memberships. Photos of someone’s wife and family – presumably Harl’s, but it was hard to be sure these days. Busy executives often didn’t have time for a full-time wife and family and would just rent them for weekends.

他的呼吸挺平順。福特想到，如果沒有錢包壓着胸口，他的呼吸應該還可以更平順些。於是他把錢包從哈爾上衣口袋裏抽出來。鈔票，還挺多。幾張信用卡。超高爾夫的會員卡。其他幾種會員卡。某人的老婆孩子的照片——想來多半是哈爾的，但如今這種事情真的很難講。事務繁忙的主管們多半沒時間分給全職的老婆孩子，所以常常是週末租些來了事。

Ha!

哈！

He couldn’t believe what he’d just found.

他簡直不敢相信他看到了什麼。

He slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely exciting piece of plastic that was nestling amongst a bunch of receipts.

一對收據中間夾着張能讓人發瘋的塑料卡，福特慢慢地把它抽了出來。

It wasn’t insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface.

它的長相還不至於讓人激動到發瘋。事實上它看起來挺無趣的。半透明，比信用卡小些，還稍微厚些。把它對着光你就能看見許許多多以全息影像編碼的信息和圖像，看上去似乎就埋在表面底下幾寸，只不過這張卡並沒有幾寸厚可以給你埋就是了。

It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant – a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn’t even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If youwere trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.

這是張“我-真是-我”，竟然把它隨隨便便地丟在錢包裏，哈爾可太不聰明瞭。不過這種傻事是完全可以理解的。如今這世道，隨時都要你用各種各樣的方式確定無疑地證明你的身份，光這個就能讓生活變得極其吃力，更別說你還要面對諸如“作爲一個有意識的理性生物應該如何在一個從認識論上看相當模糊的物質宇宙裏運轉”這種更深層次的存在主義問題。就說提款機吧。提款的人排成長龍，無所事事地等着讀取指紋，掃描虹膜，從脖子後頭的皮膚取樣，然後進行即時（或者說接近即時——在單調乏味的現實裏這一步其實長達六七秒鐘）基因分析，接下來再回答一籮筐佈滿陷阱的問題；有的是關於那些他們自己都不記得有過的親戚，有的是關於他們喜歡的桌布顏色。而這一切不過是因爲你過週末想取點閒錢。如果你是想貸款買輛噴氣式汽車，簽署個導彈協議或者爲整個餐館裏的人買單，事情真的可能演變成一場重大考驗。

Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology’s greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.

於是就有了“我-真是-我”。這裏面記錄着你的每一項資料。你的身體你的生活現在都可以存進一張全能讀取卡，放在錢包裏隨身攜帶，因此也代表了科學技術最最偉大的勝利——它不僅戰勝了它自己，也壓倒了普通人的簡單常識。

Ford pocketed it. A remarkably good idea had just occurred to him. He wondered how long Harl would remain unconscious.

福特把它揣進兜裏。他剛想到一個妙不可言的主意。他琢磨着哈爾能昏迷多久。

‘Hey!’ he shouted to the little melon-sized robot still slobbering with euphoria up on the ceiling. ‘You want to stay happy?’

那個西瓜大小的機器人還在天花板上流着口水。“嘿！”他對這個患了快樂症的傢伙喊道，“想繼續高興嗎？”

The robot gurgled that it did.

機器人咯咯地回答說想。