"Human-Praxcelis Universe - 01 - The Existential Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

This is a little old, now. Before Existential Blues ever gets published -- if it ever does -- the following will be rewritten:

Copyright 1996 by Daniel Keys Moran.
All rights reserved.

I, Daniel Keys Moran, "The Author," hereby release this text as freeware. It may be transmitted as a text file anywhere in this or any other dimension, without reservation, so long as the story text is not altered IN ANY WAY. No fee may be charged for such transmission, save handling fees comparable to those charged for shareware programs.

THIS WORK MAY NOT BE PRINTED OR PUBLISHED IN A BOOK, MAGAZINE, ELECTRONIC OR CD-ROM STORY COLLECTION, OR VIA ANY OTHER MEDIUM NOW EXISTING OR WHICH MAY IN THE FUTURE COME INTO EXISTENCE, WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR. THIS WORK IS LICENSED FOR READING PURPOSES ONLY. ALL OTHER RIGHTS ARE RESERVED BY THE AUTHOR.

The Existential Blues, Part One:
On the Boulevard of Dreams

Sometimes I feel
Like the world is unreal
I think it has to be
There ain't no answers,
Only dancers
Who dance real slow with me.

The Armageddon Blues Band
Dancers, from the album
Why Are These Drums So Round?


     The Great Wheel lived.
     That was the Enemy's first thought in the moments after the warheads annihilated it.
     It reassembled itself slowly in the first moments after the death of the being Mordreaux. Echoes of a being named ENCELIS it touched briefly, cherished, enhanced, and left with a being known as PRAXCELIS.
     The Great Wheel lived.
     The structure of the timeline on which it had incubated revealed itself to the Enemy's gaze. The timeline existed with a probability of near-totality; its total energy level was eight times as great as that of the timelines immediately surrounding it. . . .
     . . .surrounding it.
     Suddenly it found the way outside. It moved up, and found itself in the midst of a swirling gray storm that filled the walls between the worlds, looking down on a vast structure, a wheel, upon which timelines were laid at right angles around the rim. The timelines had form, and structure; they were discrete spokes of energy that radiated up and down from the rim of the Great Wheel. The Enemy saw, as it drifted along the Great Wheel, that the Uncertainty Principle grew more powerful; that Law degenerated.
     It looked away to the direction that seemed to it to be the top of the Great Wheel. At the north end of the great wheel, there was a brightness.
     A glow.
     The Enemy of Entropy oriented itself slowly. It found itself drifting away from the glow. Years were passing in those moments, as the Enemy came to grips with the pulse of time and particle its life had become.
     The north pole of the Great Wheel radiated law, gave reason to all of existence. As the Enemy drifted south along the Wheel, the power of Law waned; the Uncertainty Principle appeared, grew powerful, and dominated. Time travel became possible, in a wild zone where no timeline was more secure than a candle in the wind, where timelines shifted, vanished, and were created anew.
     Further past that, the timelines at the far side of the Great Wheel opposite the Pole of Law; those timelines were bastions of anarchy and unreason, timelines embedded in a swirling gray maelstrom of chaos.
     The Enemy made a decision. It willed and then by its will moved. It ghosted north crossing countless trillions of timelines, across the territory of the timeline-spanning Walks-Far Empire, where a tribe of Indians that were all but extinct on most timelines had come to know power. It approached the bright, living pole of Law that gave structure to the Great Wheel of Existence.
     The Enemy of Entropy, the being who had once been a man, approached the Pole of Law, and the radiance that surrounded it grew. It came to know that the Force behind the Pole of Law was a very structured being. Elements of its structure made the Enemy of Entropy pause in thought: in many ways, the Pole of Law was similar to the Enemy itself, though on an incredibly vaster scale.
     The Enemy moved into the nimbus surrounding the Pole of Law.
     The Being at the Pole of Law was Power, and Law; it was Form and Structure; it bound creation together.
     The Being became aware of the Enemy of Entropy.
     In a microcosm of time, too short for it ever to recover fully in memory again, the Enemy learned many things in great detail:
     The Being at the Pole of Law knew itself as an Envoy. It was older than the Great Wheel itself; it was capable of understanding none of what its presence meant to the Great Wheel; and it was there not because it wished to be, but because it had been chained there by some force greater than itself.
     It was God.
     It was insane, perfect, and perfectly malevolent -- and in that moment it became aware of the Enemy's presence and
     -- struck.
     The Enemy, blasted and dazed, fled, south, into the safe darkness, into the gray maelstrom. . . .
     . . .into Chaos.