"Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space 04 - Absolution Gap" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

deconstruction would be grotesquely obvious. The body would be
dismantled, its constituent chemicals recycled for use elsewhere in the
factory.
A voice buzzed in his earpiece. He touched a finger to the device.
“Grelier… I was expecting you already.”
“I’m on my way, ma’am.”
A red light started flashing on top of the vivification tank, synchronised
to an alarm. Grelier cuffed the override, silencing the alarm and blanking
the emergency signal Calm returned to the body factory, a silence broken
only by the occasional gurgle of nutrient flows or the muffled click of some
distant valve regulator.
Grelier nodded, satisfied that all was in hand, and resumed his
unhurried progress.


At the same instant that Grelier pushed in the last of the nutrient valves,
an anomaly occurred in the sensor apparatus of the Gnostic Ascension.
The anomaly was brief, lasting only a fraction over half a second, but it
was sufficiently unusual that a flag was raised in the data stream: an
exceptional event marker indicating that something merited attention.
 As far as the sensor software was concerned that was the end of it: the
anomaly had not continued, and all systems were now performing
normally. The flag was a mere formality; whether it was to be acted on
was the responsibility of an entirely separate and slightly more intelligent
layer of monitoring software.
The second layer—dedicated to health-monitoring all ship-wide sensor
subsystems—detected the flag, along with several million others raised in
the same cycle, and assigned it a schedule in its task profile. Less than two
hundred thousandths of a second had lapsed since the end of the anomaly:
an eternity in computational terms, but an inevitable consequence of the
vast size of a lighthugger’s cybernetic nervous system. Communications
between one end of the Gnostic Ascension and the other required three to
four kilometres of main trunk cabling, six to seven for a round-trip signal.
Nothing happened quickly on a ship that large, but it made little
practical difference. The ship’s huge mass meant that it responded
sluggishly to external events: it had precisely the same need for
lightning-fast reflexes as a brontosaurus.
The health-monitoring layer worked its way down the pile.
Most of the several million events it looked at were quite innocuous.
Based on its grasp of the statistical expectation pattern of error events, it
was able to de-assign most of the flags without hesitation. They were
transient errors, not indicative of any deeper malaise in the ship’s
hardware. Only a hundred thousand looked even remotely suspicious.
The second layer did what it always did at this point: it compiled the
hundred thousand anomalous events into a single packet, appended its
own comments and preliminary findings and offered the packet to the
third layer of monitoring software.
The third layer spent most of its time doing nothing: it existed solely to
examine those anomalies forwarded to it by duller layers. Quickened to
alertness, it examined the dossier with as much actual interest as its