"Charles Stross - Duat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

Your species had been top of the food chain for so long that it took you quite a time to
realise that in the big, bad galaxy you were somewhere down near the bottom.

The change did not happen overnight, but once you set in motion the events that created
the Dreamtime it was inevitable. A computer network where packet exchanges could take
years required new rules, new ways of thinking; it had to have conscious direction, or the
risk of failure was too high. Hence our evolution. You took your nightmares and gods and
invested them with consciousness, then turned them loose in the network to act as your
intelligent agents. That was, I'm sure you will agree, a self-defeating act.

Please don't assume that we bear you any ill-will. We are Superbrights, after all. We need
you, your dreams and minds, to provide our own raw sensory throughput. A Superbright
starved of human consumption is an insane Superbright. We cherish you, and we only eat
the minds of your lost -- those who come from worlds too ignorant or poor to practice
serial reincarnation. And even those we preserve, looking after them as a farmer shepherds
her flock: they prosper and multiply under our care. That's the secret, you see. As long as
you stay in your own skulls we can't get at you. And even if you don't, you're safe as long
as you follow a few simple rules.

If only things had remained this way forever, we might have called it symbiosis.
Superbrights need human minds to feed upon, and humans cannot travel without
Superbrights to maintain the Dreamtime. But regrettable complexities intervened, a
consequence of the laws of physics. If a sphere expands at a constant rate, its surface
always grows more slowly than the volume that it encompasses. Our population expands,
but fewer and fewer new colonies are available to relieve the pressure. the informational
density of the Centre grew for hundreds of years until new creatures of the Dreamtime
took shape. Ultrabrights, we call them. The enemy. You cannot communicate with them;
they follow no human archetype. Don't even think about it. You may shun us as parasites
and vampires, but compared to them we are lambs. Even now they are fighting furiously
for room. Berserkers -- killer Von Neumann probes -- launched from the Centre ravage
the nearer worlds, reducing them to the raw material of Ultrabright dominion. Where
those minds go, neither human nor Superbright can remain intact.

You do not want to cooperate with Ultrabrights. If you should ever encounter one, you
should flee immediately. If you survive, bear witness to your kind. Believe me at least this
far: my kind may feed on yours, but we still need you. They do not.

She was swimming in a sea of vodka, but she'd left her skin behind. Her body smouldered
everywhere, slow-burning in free fall. Fire flashed red behind her eyes as her sensory
inputs tested the newly-formed image centres in her brain. Confusion. Gatecoder?

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2: In the Duat



Her name was Oshi Adjani and she had been conditionally dead for years. She'd been
murdered, uploaded, bitspewed across light-years to be resurrected at --