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

“I think it is. We were set up to run the nervelink experiment as soon
as we had a solid lock, one that we could trust to hold for the full million
seconds. This is it. The only difference is it doesn’t have to be me who
goes through.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I can put you through, Mick. We can get you nervelinked tomorrow
morning. Allowing for a day of bedding in and practice once you arrive in
the other reality… well, you could be walking in Andrea’s world by Monday
afternoon, Tuesday morning at the latest.”

“But you’re the one who is supposed to be going through,” Mick said.
“You’ve already had the nervelink put in.”

“We’ve got a spare,” Joe said.

Mick’s mind raced through the implications. “Then I’d be controlling
the body of the other you, right?”

“No. That won’t work, unfortunately. We’ve had to make some
changes to these nervelinks to get them to work properly through the
correlator, with the limited signal throughput. We had to ditch some of the
channels that handle proprioceptive mapping. They’ll only work properly if
the body on the other end of the link is virtually identical to the one on this
side.”

“Then it won’t work. You’re nothing like me.”

“You’re forgetting your counterpart on the other side,” Joe said. He
glanced past Mick at Bill and Rachel, raising his eyebrows as he did so.
“The way it would work is, you come into the lab and we install the link in
you, just the same way it happened for me yesterday morning. At the same
time your counterpart in Andrea’s world comes into his version of the lab
and gets the other version of the nervelink put into him.”

Mick shivered. He’d become used to thinking about the other version
of Joe; he could even begin to accept that there was a version of Andrea
walking around somewhere who was still alive. But as soon as Joe brought
the other Mick into the argument, he felt his head begin to unravel.

“Wouldn’t he—the other me—need to agree to this?”

“He already has,” Joe said solemnly. “I’ve been in touch with him. The
other Joe called him into the lab. We had a chat over the videolink. He
didn’t go for it at first—you know how you both feel about nervelinking. And
he hasn’t lost his version of Andrea. But I explained how big a deal this was.
This is your only chance to see Andrea again. Once this window
closes—we’re talking about no more than eleven or twelve days from the
start of the lock, by the way—we’ll never make contact with another reality