"Rudy Rucker & Bruce Sterling - Hormiga Canyon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

HORMIGA CANYON
by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling

“Hormiga Canyon,” Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling’s exciting new
tale of giant ants and woolly mammoths residing in Southern
California is the authors’ third collaboration for Asimov’s. Each has
had numerous solo appearances in the magazine as well. Two
sections of Rudy Rucker’s new cyberpunk novel, Postsingular (out
from Tor this fall), first appeared in Asimov’s, as “Chu and the
Nants” (June 2006) and “Postsingular” (Sep-tember 2006). Rudy is
working on a sequel (currently titled Hylozoic) and plans to extend
the series to a trilogy. Other recent publications are a story
anthology, Mad Professor, and a second edition of The Hollow
Earth, a historical SF novel starring Edgar Allan Poe. Rucker spends
an inordinate amount of time writing and photographing for his blog,
www.rudyrucker.com/blog. Bruce Sterling, who gives blogs ten
years to live, has won Hugo Awards for two novelettes, “Bicycle
Repairman” (October/November 1996) and “Taklamakan” (October/
November 1998), that were first published in Asimov’s. Eight of his
stories from Asimov’s will soon appear in Ascendancies: The Best
of Bruce Sterling. His latest book, Shaping Things, is a manifesto on
post-industrial design coming out from MIT Press.

****

Part 1

Stefan Oertel pulled a long strand of salami rind from his teeth. He
stared deep into wonderland.

Look at that program go! Flexible vectors swarming in
ten-dimensional hyperspace! String theory simulation! Under those colored
gouts of special effects, this, at last, was real science!

Stefan munched more of his sandwich and plucked up an old cell
phone, one of the ten thousand such units that he’d assembled into a home
supercomputer. “Twine dimension seven!” he mumbled around the
lunchmeat. “Loop dimension eight!”

The screen continued its eye-warping pastel shapes. Stefan’s
ultracluster of hacked cell phones was searching Calabi-Yau string theory
geometries. The tangling cosmic strings wove gorgeous, abrupt
Necker-cube reversals and inversions. His program’s output was visually
brilliant. And, thus far, useless to anybody. But maybe his latest settings
were precisely the right ones and the One True String Theory was about to
be unveiled—

“Loop dimension eight,” he repeated.

Unfortunately his system seemed to be ignoring his orders. There