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

transplanted humans built a civilization of their own, whose center was a city that never
fell.
For the gods in the Solar System, the human civilization of the Second Sphere was a
history too recent for them to have heard of. They knew only that the saurs’ snatch-
squads continued their work with ever-increasing caution as the human population grew.
The clutter of images generated by Gaia’s excitable response to the saurs’ presence
provided the perfect cover for their activities. The gods had real aliens to worry about.
The starships might bring back news from the Second Sphere a hundred thousand years
out of date, but they collected much more recent news in their occasional stops on the
way back. From these the gods learned that the octopods were a few tens of light-years
away, and heading toward the Solar System.
The god in 10049 Lora had already lived a long life when it and its peers noticed the
rising electronic racket from Earth. It volunteered to swing by for a closer look. It
absorbed the contents of the Internet in seconds, and then found, microseconds later, that
it was already out of date. It was still struggling with the exponential growth when the
European Union’s cosmonauts arrived. To them, it was a convenient Near-Earth Object,
and a possible source of raw materials for further expansion.
The humans had plans for the Solar System, the god discovered—plans that made the
past octopod incursion seem like a happy memory. But the coming octopod incursion
might be still worse. If the humans could expand into space without the devastatingly
profligate use of resources that their crude rocket technology required, an elegant solution
could be expected to the presence of both species of vermin.
Bypassing the local saurs, who were quite incapable of dealing with the problem, the god
scattered information about the interstellar drive and the gravity skiff across the Earth’s
data-sphere. Several top-secret military projects were already apparently inspired by
glimpses of skiff technology, but their sponsors unaccountably failed to take the hint. (In
their mutual mental transparency, the celestial minds found the concepts of lies, fiction,
and disinformation difficult to grasp.) The minds within 10049 Lora opened
communication with the cosmonauts on its surface, where the ESA mining station
Marshal Titov was giving the god a severe headache.
Having their computers hacked into by a carbonaceous chondrite came as a surprise to
the cosmonauts. In the sudden glut of information, they failed to notice the instructions
for a radical new technology of space travel until it was almost too late. Politics dictated
first that the contact should be secret, then that it should be public. Political and military
conflicts resulted in a mutiny on the station. Before the space marines of the European
People’s Army could arrive to suppress it, the cosmonauts built a lightspeed drive that
took the entire station away. They thought they had understood how to navigate it. They
had not. It returned to its default setting, and arrived at the Second Sphere.
Before their departure, one of the cosmonauts made sure that the instructions distributed
by the god would not be ignored, and could not be hidden. The gods approved. Soon the
noisy humans would be somebody else’s problem.




The Advancement of Learning
the jump is instantaneous. To a photon, the whole history of the universe may be like this:
over in a flash, before it’s had time to blink. To a human, it’s disorienting. One moment,
you’re an hour out from the last planet you visited—then, without transition, you’re an
hour away from the next.