"Robert A. Metzger - Cusp" - читать интересную книгу автора (Metzger Robert)

polarized, cutting out almost all light and allowing him to look directly at the Sun. It seemed to rest on the
southern shoulder of Mount San Antonio, the sparse pine forests and rocky crags of nearby slopes
slipping into twilight, the double shadows thrown by the Sun and its flaring tail fading.

Despite the altitude and cloudless sky, the view was far from optimal. A heavy layer of dust hung in the
air, kicked up by the massive quake that had rocked the San Andreas that morning, intense enough to
knock out the power grid and even partially collapse the Void—that limitless information realm
accessible to him through his Ocs. He could no longer access or transmit into the Void, but he knew that
some aspect of it still survived, because the Swirl had survived.

A streak of colors, resembling a small rainbow-tinted tornado, darted through the sparse pine forest—the
Swirl. It was an entity that resided in the Void, a bundle of information with a will of its own and an intent
to extend its reach beyond the Void, even beyond the minds it had infected.

“Not really there,” he said in a whisper, as the Swirl slowed for just a moment, hovering above a granite
outcropping, as if pausing to examine it. Kristensen was not even sure if the Swirl was aware of the pile
of granite. The image of the Swirl was only in his own mind, transmitted into his Ocs from the Void and
from there carried into his brain. The gray stuff in his head then superimposed the image of the Swirl into
the world he saw—a seamless morph that gave the appearance that the Swirl was an actual entity
occupying space.

“Not there,” he said again, as the Swirl darted away, momentarily vanishing behind a thick stand of pines.
“But real enough.” Reaching up with his right hand, he ran his index finger across his forehead. The Swirl
was essentially an entity of the Void, a parasite flowing throughout information-space, distributed across
the nearly infinite number of nodes that generated the Void. One of those nodes was in his head, residing
in a sheet of neural fiber packed between the inside of his skull and the shallow creases of his neocortex.
Despite its lack of any actual physical presence, it was more than real enough—a thing that he could not
escape, a thing that literally had its fingers inside his head.

He ignored it as best he could, as much as it would allow at the moment, and looked to the west, toward
Los Angeles, at the dense cloud of oily gray smoke hanging high in the air. Once again he tried not to
think about Los Angeles, but could think of nothing else.

His family was down there—somewhere.

He’d tried countless times to leave the campsite and start the long hike toward Los Angeles and his
family, but had not been able to leave; the Swirl would not allow him past the edge of the campsite,
always turning him around.

Not allowing him to leave until it was safe.

So instead, he fiddled with the focus knob of his telescope. He did not have to look at his old scope, his
fingers knew the way. Its antiquated CCD array gulped down images, buffering output, then squirting it
into a portable storage Manifold hanging from a nearby tree, that small box being the only form of
external memory and processing he could now access through his Ocs, a sort of localized version of the
Void. It was enough to allow him to sample the data from the CCD array and perform some basic
calculations and crude morphing of simulations into the external world, but that was about all. The scope
was not much more than a toy, but good enough to show him the Sun. He peered into the eyepiece.

The authorities insisted it was a superflare.