"Rudy Rucker - Post-Singular" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

POST- SINGULAR by Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker’s most recent nonfiction book was about the meaning of
computation: The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation
Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy;
the paperback is out from Thunder’s Mouth Press this fall. The author’s latest SF
novel is Mathematicians in Love, which gives life to some of his ideas about
computation, not to mention parallel worlds, and toppling an evil government. It will
be out from Tor Books later in the year. Rudy is currently working on a novel,
Postsingular, which uses the current tale, as well as “Chu and the Nants” (Asimov’s,
June 2006), as back-story. He tells us he spends an inordinate amount of time writing
and photographing for his blog: www.rudyrucker.com/blog.

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1.

The Singularity happened when, encouraged by his business backers,
President Joe Doakes sent an eggcase of nants to Mars. Nants were self-reproducing
nanomachines: solar-powered, networked, capable of gnatlike flight, and
single-mindedly focused on transforming all available material into more nants. In a
couple of years, the nants had eaten Mars, turning the red planet into a Dyson sphere
of a duodecillion nanomachines, a three-millimeter-thick shell half a billion kilometers
across, with Earth and the Sun trapped inside.

The stars were hidden by giant ads; in daytime the ads were a silvery
background to the sky. Doakes’s backers were well-pleased. And behind the scenes
the nant swarm was solving a number of intractable problems in computer science,
mathematical physics, and process design; these results were privily beamed to the
nants’ parent corporation, Nantel. But before Nantel could profit from the
discoveries, the nants set to work chewing up Earth.

At the last possible moment, a disaffected Nantel engineer named Ond Lutter
managed to throw the nants into reverse gear. The nants restored the sections of
Earth they’d already eaten, reassembled Mars, and returned to their original
eggcase—which was blessedly vaporized by a well-aimed Martian nuclear blast,
courtesy of the Chinese Space Agency.

Public fury over Earth’s near-demolition was such that President Doakes and
his Vice President were impeached, convicted of treason, and executed by lethal
injection. But Nantel fared better. Although three high-ranking execs were put to
sleep like the President, the company itself entered bankruptcy to duck the
lawsuits—and re-emerged as ExaExa, with the corporate motto, “Putting People
First—Building Gaia’s Mind.”

For a while there it seemed as if humanity had nipped the Singularity in the
bud. But then came the orphids.

2.