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

might be something wrong with the particular phone he was holding—these
phones were, after all, junkers that Stefan’s pal Jayson Rubio had skimmed
from the vast garbage dumps of Los Angeles. Jayson was a junk-hound of
the first order.

Ten thousand networked cell phones had given Stefan serious,
number-crunching heavy muscle. He needed them to search the
staggeringly large state space of all possible string theories. The powerful
Unix and RAM chips inside the phones were in constant wireless
communication with each other. He kept their ten thousand batteries
charged with induction magnets. The whole sprawling shebang was nested
in sets of brightly colored plastic laundry baskets. Stefan dug the eco-fresh
beauty of this abracadabra: he’d transformed a waste-disposal mess into a
post-Einsteinian theory-incubator.

Stefan had earned his programming skills the hard way: years of labor
in the machine-buzzing dungeons of Hollywood. And he’d paid a price:
alienated parents in distant Topeka, no wife, no kids, and his best coder
pals were just email addresses. Furthermore, typing all that computer
graphics code had afflicted him with a burning case of carpal tunnel
syndrome, which was why he preferred yelling his line-commands into
phones. Cell phones had kick-ass voice-recognition capabilities.

Stefan dipped into a brimming pink laundry basket and snagged a
fresher phone, an early-nineties model with a flapping, half-broken jaw.

“Greetings, wizard!” the phone chirped, showing that it was good to
go.

“Twine dimension seven, dammit! Loop dimension eight.”

The system was still ignoring him. Now Stefan was worried. Was the
TV’s wireless chip down? That shouldn’t happen. The giant digital
flat-screen was new. And, yes, the phones were old junk, but with so many
of them in his ultracluster it didn’t matter if a few dozen went dead.

He tried another phone and another. Crisis was at hand.
 The monster screen flickered and skewed. To his deep horror, the
speakers emitted a poisoned death-rattle, prolonged and sizzling and
terrible, like the hissing of the Wicked Witch of the West as she dissolved
in a puddle of stage-magic.

The flat screen went black. Worse yet, the TV began to smell, a
pricey, burnt-meat, molten-plastic odor that any programmer knew as bad
juju. Stefan bolted from his armchair and knelt to peer through the
ventilation slots.

And there he saw—oh please no—the ants. Ants had always infested
Stefan’s rental house. Whenever the local droughts got bad, the ants
arrived in hordes, trooping out of the thick Mulholland brush, waving their