"Greg Egan - Diaspora" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

have been the last stream of Morse, fleeing through the void past a distant star. But the womb was a
virtual machine designed to execute the seed's instructions, and a dozen more layers of software led
down to the polis itself, a lattice of flickering molecular switches. A sequence of bits, a string of passive
data, could do nothing, change nothing-but in the womb, the seed's meaning fell into perfect alignment
with all the immutable rules of all the levels beneath it. Like a punched card fed into a jacquard loom, it
ceased to be an abstract message and became a part of the machine.
When the womb read the seed, the seed's first shaper caused the space around it to be filled with a
simple pattern of data: a single, frozen numerical wave train, sculpted across the emptiness like a billion
perfect ranks of sand dunes. This distinguished each point from its immediate neighbors further up or
down the same slope-but each crest was still identical to every other crest, each trough the same as every
other trough. The womb's memory was arranged as a space with three dimensions, and the numbers
stored at each point implied a fourth. So these dunes were four-dimensional.
A second wave was added-running askew to the first, modulated with a slow steady rise-carving each
ridge into a series of ascending mounds. Then a third, and a fourth, each successive wave enriching the
pattern, complicating and fracturing its symmetries: defining directions, building up gradients,
establishing a hierarchy of scales.
The fortieth wave plowed through an abstract topography bearing no trace of the crystalline regularity of
its origins, with ridges and furrows as convoluted as the whorls of a fingerprint. Not every point had
been rendered unique---hut enough structure had been created to act as the framework for everything to
come. So the seed gave instructions for a hundred copies of itself to he scattered across the freshly
calibrated landscape.
In the second iteration, the womb read all of the replicated seeds---and at first, the instructions they
issued were the same, everywhere. Then, one instruction called for the point where each seed was being
read to jump forward along the hit string to the next field adjacent to a certain pattern in the surrounding
data: a sequence of ridges with a certain shape, distinctive but not unique. Since each seed was
embedded in different terrain, each local version of this landmark was situated differently, and the womb
began reading instructions from a different part of every seed. The seeds themselves were all still
identical, but each one could now unleash a different set of shapers on the space around it, preparing the
foundations for a different specialized region of the psychoblast, the embryonic mind.
The technique was an ancient one: a budding flower's nondescript stem cells followed a self-laid pattern
of chemical cues to differentiate into sepals or petals, stamens or carpels; an insect pupa doused itself
with a protein gradient which triggered, at different doses, the different cascades of gene activity needed
to sculpt abdomen, thorax, or head. Konishi's digital version skimmed off the essence of the process:
divide up space by marking it distinctively, then let the local markings inflect the unwinding of all
further instructions,
switching specialized subprograms on and off-subprograms which in turn would repeat the whole cycle
on ever finer scales, gradually transforming the first roughhewn structures into miracles of filigreed
precision.
By the eighth iteration, the womb's memory contained a hundred trillion copies of the mind seed; no
more would he required. Most continued to carve new detail into the landscape around them-hut some
gave up on shapers altogether, and started running shriekers: brief loops of instructions which fed

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streams of pulses into the primitive networks which had grown up between the seeds. The tracks of these
networks were just the highest ridges the shapers had built, and the pulses were tiny arrowheads, one and
two steps higher. The shapers had worked in four dimensions, so the networks themselves were three-
dimensional. The womb breathed life into these conventions, making the pulses race along the tracks
like a quadrillion cars shuttling between the trillion junctions of a ten-thousand-tiered monorail.