"Greg Egan - Dark Integers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

shadows. True, we had once tried to wipe them out, but that had been a
perfectly innocent mistake, more than ten years before.

Sam said, “Someone from your side seems to have jumped the
border.”

“Jumped it?”

“As far as we can see, there’s no trench cutting through it. But a few
hours ago, a cluster of propositions on our side started obeying your
axioms.”

I was stunned. “An isolated cluster? With no derivation leading back
to us?”

“None that we could find.”

I thought for a while. “Maybe it was a natural event. A brief surge
across the border from the background noise that left a kind of tidal pool
behind.”

Sam was dismissive. “The cluster was too big for that. The probability
would be vanishingly small.” Numbers came through on the data channel;
he was right.

I rubbed my eyelids with my fingertips; I suddenly felt very tired. I’d
thought our old nemesis, Industrial Algebra, had given up the chase long
ago. They had stopped offering bribes and sending mercenaries to harass
me, so I’d assumed they’d finally written off the defect as a hoax or a
mirage, and gone back to their core business of helping the world’s military
kill and maim people in ever more technologically sophisticated ways.

Maybe this wasn’t IA. Alison and I had first located the defect—a set
of contradictory results in arithmetic that marked the border between our
mathematics and the version underlying Sam’s world—by means of a vast
set of calculations farmed out over the internet, with thousands of
volunteers donating their computers’ processing power when the machines
would otherwise have been idle. When we’d pulled the plug on that
project—keeping our discovery secret, lest IA find a way to weaponize it—a
few participants had been resentful, and had talked about continuing the
search. It would have been easy enough for them to write their own
software, adapting the same open source framework that Alison and I had
used, but it was difficult to see how they could have gathered enough
supporters without launching some kind of public appeal.

I said, “I can’t offer you an immediate explanation for this. All I can do
is promise to investigate.”

“I understand,” Sam replied.