"Frank Herbert - Destination Void 1 Destination Void" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

perimeter, Anderson strangled by a rogue sphincter lock, and lovely Maida
mangled by runaway cargo.

Bickel blamed most of the tragedy on Timberlake. If the damn fool had only
taken the ruthless but obvious step at the first sign of trouble! There had
been plenty of warning -- with the first two of the ship's three OMCs going
catatonic. The seat of trouble had been obvious. And the symptoms -- exactly
the same symptoms that had preceded the breakdown of the old Artificial
Consciousness project back on earth -- insane destruction of people and
materiel. But Tim had refused to see it. Tim had blathered about the
sanctity of all life.

Life, hah! Bickel thought. They were all of them -- even the colonists down
in the hyb tanks -- expendable biopsy material, Doppelgangers grown in
gnotobiotic sterility in the Moonbase. "Untouched by human hands." That had
been their private joke. They had known their Earth-born teachers only as
voices and doll-size images on cathode screens of the base intercom system --
and only occasionally through the triple glass at the locks that sealed off
the sterile creche. They had emerged from the axolotl tanks to the padded
metal claws of nursemaids that were servo extensors of Moonbase personnel,
forever barred from intimate contact with those they served.
Out of contact -- that's the story of our lives, Bickel thought, and the
thought softened his anger at Timberlake.

Timberlake had begun to fidget under Bickel's stare.

Flattery intervened. "Well . . . we'd better do something," he said.

He had to get them moving, Flattery knew. That was part of his job -- keep
them active, working, moving, even if they moved into open conflict. That
could be solved when and if it happened.

Raj is right, Timberlake thought. We have to do something. He took a deep
breath, trying to shake off his sense of shame and failure . . . and the
resentment of Bickel -- damned Bickel, superior Bickel, special Bickel, the
man of countless talents, Bickel upon whom their lives depended.

Timberlake glanced around at the familiar Command Central room in the ship's
core -- a space twenty-seven meters long and twelve meters on the short axis.
Like the ship, Com-central was vaguely egg-shaped. Four cocoonlike action
couches with almost identical control boards lay roughly parallel in the curve
of the room's wider end. Color-coded pipes and wires, dials and instrument
controls, switch banks and warning telltales spread patterned confusion
against the gray metal walls. Here were the necessities for monitoring the
ship and its autonomous consciousness -- an Organic Mental Core.

Organic Mental Core, Timberlake thought, and he felt the full return of his
feelings of guilt and grief. Not human brain, oh no. An Organic Mental Core.
Better yet, an OMC. The euphemism makes it easier to forget that the core
once was a human brain in an infant monster -- doomed to die. We take only