"Alastair Reynolds - Signal to Noise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

“You’ll regret it later. Just like you’ll regret canceling our match, or not calling And
know you, Mick. You’re one of life’s born regretters.”

“Five minutes, then.”

In truth, Mick always enjoyed having a nose around Joe’s basement. As solid as
Mick’s own early-universe work was, Joe had really struck gold. There were hundreds
researchers around the world who would have killed for a guided tour of the Liversedg
laboratory.

In the basement were ten hulking machines, each as large as a steam turbine. Y
couldn’t go near them if you were wearing a pacemaker or any other kind of implant, bu
Mick knew that, and he’d been careful to remove all metallic items before he came dow
stairs and through the security doors. Each machine contained a ten-ton bar of
ultra-high-purity iron, encased in vacuum and suspended in a magnetic cradle. Joe like
wax lyrical about the hardness of the vacuum, about the dynamic stability of the magne
field generators. Cardiff could be hit by a Richter six earthquake, and the bars wouldn’
the slightest tremor.

Joe called it the call center.

The machines were called correlators. At any one time eight were online, while tw
were down for repairs and upgrades. What the eight functional machines were doing w
cold-calling: dialing random numbers across the gap between quantum realities, waitin
someone to answer on the other end.

In each machine, a laser repeatedly pumped the iron into an excited quantum sta
By monitoring vibrational harmonics in the excited iron—what Joe called the
back-chirp—the same laser could determine if the bar had achieved a lock onto anothe
strand of quantum reality—another worldline. In effect, the bar would be resonating wit
counterpart in another version of the same basement, in another version of Cardiff.
 Once that lock was established—once the cold-calling machine had achieved a
hit—then those two previously indistinguishable worldlines were linked together by an
information conduit. If the laser tapped the bar with low-energy pulses, enough to influ
but not upset the lock, then the counterpart in the other lab would also register those ta
meant that it was possible to send signals from one lab to the other, in both directions.

“This is the boy,” Joe said, patting one of the active machines.

“Looks like a solid lock, too. Should be good for a full ten or twelve days. I think t
might be the one that does it for us.”

Mick glanced again at the bandage on the back of Joe’s neck. “You’ve had a
nervelink inserted, haven’t you.”

“Straight to the medical center as soon as I got the alert on the lock. I was
nervous—first time, and all that. But it turned out to be dead easy. No pain at all. I was
and out within half an hour. They even gave me a Rich Tea Biscuit.”

“Ooh. A Rich Tea Biscuit. It doesn’t get any better than that, does it. You’ll be go