"Ringo, John - Council Wars 2 - Emerald Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

removed from the bodies of women and moved to uterine replicators, raising
children was at the very bottom of most people's wish lists. And strong
protocols, enforced by Mother and voted upon in earlier times when massive
social mistakes had occurred, prevented any group from willy-nilly producing
children. Each human being created in a uterine replicator had to be from the
base genetics of two humans and one or both had to take responsibility for
rearing the child "properly." Failure to do so resulted in the loss of birth
privileges to both individuals.
In the year before the Fall, less than ten percent of the population had
produced children. Using straight-line projections, in an estimated five hundred
to a thousand years, the last human would have closed the door on an extinct
species.
Scientific progress had gone the same way. While there continued to be
individuals who liked to "tinker" with the borders of science, the last major
breakthrough, teleportation, had occurred nearly five hundred years ago.
Looking at both of these trends, the most senior council member, Paul Bowman,
decided that Something Must Be Done. He had decided that humans needed to learn
to work again. That humans needed to learn to be "strong" again. That
implementing a work ethic, by limiting power to only those who "produced" for
the community, would bring back the science, and art and literature and
birthrates, which had languished over the past millennia.
Over the years he had gathered members of the Council who, for their own
reasons, looked to him for leadership. And in the end, when the rest of the
Council refused his demands, they had struck, attacking the others at a Council
meeting with insects that carried a deadly binary neurotoxin.
Sheida was one of the Council who opposed him, arguably the leader of the
opposition. And she, a student of history as most of them were not, had feared
that his fanaticism would lead to violence. She had consulted with a friend who
was even more steeped in the history of violence and had prepared as well as she
could. Very little that was dangerous could be brought into the Council chamber.
The toxic wasps had only worked because individually they were not poisonous; it
was only with the sting from two different types that the neurotoxin activated.
She had been stung, twice, by one type. Others of her faction had died.
But at the same time, they had struck back, killing members of Paul's faction.
The late Javlatanugs Cantor, a werebear, had killed one, falling himself in the
battle. Ungphakorn, a Changed quetzacoatl, had killed another, and seized that
one's key.
However, in the end, Sheida and her surviving cohorts had retreated. And the war
had begun. And the Fall started.
The Council now waged war amongst itself with the energy that had once powered
the society. The lava outside her home was the side effect of the massive energy
beam being directed upon the shields of her fastness by Paul's side, which had
taken the name "New Destiny." Just as other energy beams attacked the power
stations under the control of her faction, which had taken the name "The Freedom
Coalition." The Coalition had attacked in turn and now virtually all of the
energy that had supported human society had been used in attacks and defense by
the Council.
This had left the rest of the world in a truly apocalyptic state. Food had been
teleported or replicated for centuries. Homes were often in places impossible to
live without ongoing power. Failure of personal energy shields had doomed humans