"Ken MacLeod - Engines of Light 3 - Engine City" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

Prologue: States of Mind
the god who later became known as the asteroid 10049 Lora, and shortly afterwards as
the ESA mining station Marshal Titov, was not unusual of its kind. Around the Sun, as
with most stars, gods swarm like flies around a sacrifice. Life arises from states of matter.
From some of these states of matter arise states of mind.
In the asteroids and cometary bodies the units of life were extremophile nanobacteria.
Regulating their ultra-cold molecular processes, the vanishingly tiny temperature
differentials, detecting the quantum signature of usable energy—over millions of years,
these and other selective advantages drove the development of delicate networks adapted
to processing information. Random variations in the effects of their activities on the
asteroid’s outgassings and on the glacially slow transport of mass within it were selected
for whenever they resulted in more stable orbits and fewer collisions. Increasingly
complex networks formed. Subjectivity flickered into being on trillions of separate sites
within each life-bearing asteroid or cometary mass.
Those within 10049 Lora found themselves in a society of other such minds, exchanging
information across light-hours. They had much to learn, and many to learn from. Billions
of years of evolutionary fine-tuning had given the cometary and asteroid minds an
exquisite sensitivity to the electromagnetic output of each other’s internal chemical and
physical processes.
Communication, exchange of information and material between cometary clouds, became
rumor that ran around the galaxy’s outer reaches, which ring like residential suburbs its
industrial core where the heavy elements are forged.
Just as minds are built from smaller information exchangers—neurons or bacteria or
switches—so from the vast assembly of intercommunicating minds within the asteroid
emerged a greater phenomenon, a sum of those minds: a god. It was aware of the smaller
minds, of their vast civilizations and long histories. It was also aware of itself and others
like itself. Its component minds, in moments of introspection or exaltation, were aware of
it. In moments of enlightened contemplation, which could last millennia, the god was
aware of a power of which it was a part: the sum of all the gods within the Solar System.
That solar god, too, had its peers, but whether they in their turn were part of some greater
entity was a subject on which lesser minds could only speculate.
On Earth, evolution worked out differently. On its surface, the multicellular trick took
off. Beneath the surface, the extremophile microorganisms that riddled the lithosphere
and made up the bulk of the planet’s life formed extensive interacting networks which
became attuned to the electromagnetic fields of the planet and its atmosphere. Constantly
disrupted by processes far more violent than those of the smaller celestial bodies, they
attained the level of symbolic thought, but never quite intelligence. Earth’s mind—
Gaia—was like that of a pre-verbal child or an animal. Its thoughts were dreams,
afterimages, abstractions that floated free and illuminated like sheet lightning.
The large squid of the genus Architeuthys, which men later called krakens, were the first
real intelligences on Earth, and the ones whose outlook on life was closest to that of the
gods. They communicated by varying the colored patterns of the chromatophores on their
skins. The minute electrical currents thus generated interacted with the electromagnetic
flux of the planet and were amplified by it to come to the cometary minds’ acutely
sensitive attention. Responses tickled back from the sky. As the gods began to make
sense of the squids’ sensoria—a research project which kept the equivalent of a billion
civilizations’ worth of scientists happily occupied for several centuries—they modified
their own internal models accordingly. The visible spectrum and the visual field burst
upon astonished inner eyes. Sight dawned for the gods, and enlightenment for the squid.