"Baxter, Stephen - Manifold 03 - Origin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

But, you know, one thing you never considered was the subtext. Alone or not
alone - why do we care so much?

I always knew why. We care because we are lonely.

I understood that because J was lonely. I was lonely before you stranded me
here, in this terrible place, this Red Moon. I lost you to the sky long ago. Now
you found me here - but you're leaving me again, aren't you, Malenfant?

... Malenfant? Can you hear me? Do you know me? Do you know who you are? - oh.

Watch the Earth, Malenfant. Watch the Earth...



Manekatopokanemahedo:

This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.

It began in the afterglow of the Big Bang, that brief age when stars still
burned.

Humans arose on an Earth. Emma, perhaps it was your Earth. Soon they were alone.

Humans spread over their world. They spread in waves across the universe,
sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars,
there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers
of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to
be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through copying and confluence
across billions upon billions of years.

Everywhere humans found life: crude replicators, of carbon or silicon or metal,
churning meaninglessly in the dark.

Nowhere did they find mind - save what they brought with them or created - no
other against which human advancement could be tested.

They came to understand that they would forever be alone.

With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational
fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages. It is impossible to
understand what minds of that age were like, minds of time's far downstream.
They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They needed
nothing. They had nothing in common with their ancestors of the afterglow.

Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.

The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile and ultimately lethal.

There was despair and loneliness.