"Charles Stross - Dechlorinating The Moderator" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

experiments, and like Sunday morning word is that Pion Overdrive are building a long
column down the banquet hall and coopting some heavy control bandwidth. Should be
fireworks, maybe some stray neutron soup boiling off of that if they kick it into the fifty
TeV range. And there's some dude from CERN knocking around to give a talk on
law'n'order and basement nucleonics. He's kind of weird, but I don't think he's stasi.
Me:
What's with the fusion gig?
Dok: [raises eyebrow suspiciously]:
mean you haven't heard?
Me: [hastily]:
well, there've been rumours about a breakthrough in self-criticalizing muon-catalysis
reactions ...
Dok: [playing hard to get]:
that remains to be seen. Buy me a drink?
Me:
I thought you were ...
Dok:
Minimum drinking age is 21 here.
Me:
Okay.
That's the way it is. The nerds are on parade. They've always been paranoid about the
way outsiders see them. First it was SF fans. Then computer hackers and phone
phreaks. These days it's extropians, roboticists, and hard physics geeks. But the
character type is the same: very bright, highly strung, defensive about their hobby,
competitive within their field. They realize it's not something the rest of society
understands or cares much about, but they care and that's what makes the difference.

I staggered out of the cafe with my lungs on fire and my eyes streaming and headed for
the swimming pool. The swimming pool is a really good place to hang out at a Particulate
gig, but it's not worth bringing your swimsuit: it's where the re-enactment crowd get
together. A bunch of kids in sarongs and TELLER IS GOD t-shirts were pouring
ion-exchange beads into the pool and there was a suspicious-looking bunch of metal
piping already sitting in racks on the bottom. The pool looked very blue. When I asked
what they were doing they stared at me as if I was crazy: "dechlorinating the moderator,"
one of them finally deigned to tell me. I nodded and backed out fast; I could see I wasn't
wanted.

Opening speech. Some middle-aged American guy in a three-piece suit, probably ex-
Wall Street rocket scientist, told the assembled geekswarm that they were the future of
mankind. He said it in a voice choking with deep emotion. Physicists always did their
best work by thirty, and this guy talked about his own career on the SSC project out in
Texas, before the Death of Big Physics in the mid-nineties. The audience were hushed, as
if chastened by the idea of being deprived of their accelerators by fiat.

Next on was a gangling youth named Curtis in baggy shorts, baseball cap, and iguana. (It
was green, about half a metre long, and sat placidly on his shoulder throughout the talk.)
Curtis talked very fast indeed about the fractal dimensionality of the universe as measured
using the Genocide Mechanics' new beat-wave petatron and some really eldritch decay
paths they scoped out in a quark-gluon plasma when they cranked it up high enough to
fuse the power supply. "I tell ya, at first I thought it was the drugs, man, but then I