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

Countless centuries ago there was only one world. In the last days of humanity's terrestrial
gestation, the environmental situation on Earth was desperate. The ecosystem was
imploding under the weight of population bloom and biodiversity crash. Gaia was on life
support, held together by a tenuous weave of nanomachinery and artificial bioforms. The
first Von Neumann machines were mining the moons and planets of the system: robot
factories, just intelligent enough to build copies of themselves from local raw materials,
universal enough to fabricate anything else their controllers could design. Their
productivity was limited only by available energy and mineral resources.

Your species has always been inclined to light out for the colonies when overpopulation
looms. But in those days there were no free territories: the nearest stars were decades
away, the cost of travel so vast that a payload as heavy as a single human body would
bankrupt nations. Terraforming Mars or Venus would take millennia, offering scant relief
from the crisis. Some other solution was necessary.

Well, nobody ever accused human beings of not being ingenious. The very population
pressure that threatened to destroy your home world gave you the tool to overcome the


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2: In the Duat

constraints: brains and minds, a million stellar geniuses, the creativity of a dozen ages
crammed into a single generation. You literally thought your way out of the trap ... and
into something larger.

The solution to being trapped in one solar system was a happy coincidence: simultaneous
breakthroughs in the fields of bionics and computer science. Nanoprobes allowed the
human brain to be mapped from the inside out, its configuration and software states
transmitted to any external processor complex enough to run it as a program. Your minds
are not qualitatively more complex than any other piece of software: you can run on
processors other than those developed by biological evolution. Robot spacecraft could
travel to the stars, but not in a human lifetime. But once they got there they could build
human bodies and transcribe stored human personalities back into the virgin grey matter.
A kind of reincarnation.

The ships carried Von Neumann machines; self-replicating robots programmed to explore,
spawn, and explore again. Autonomous and cheap, they visited and mapped the nearer star
systems before they and their descendants moved on, rippling outward in an expanding
sphere of exploration. Every time a probe entered and mapped a new system, it left behind
a beacon. Occasionally a probe from one family tree would enter a new star system which
had been mapped by a probe from one of the other families: recognizing the beacon, the
Von Neumann machine would switch to an alternative behaviour. Picking a suitable
airless moon, it would land and begin to reproduce. After twenty or so generations there
were enough robot factories to begin the construction of an expansion processor, a vast
solar-powered computing surface covering the entire surface of the planet. Huge slabs of
processing circuitry spread rapidly across the airless moons of gas giants. Once
completed, the expansion surface was hooked up to a gatecoder -- a laser communicator --
and signalled its readiness to the slowly-developing interstellar processor network. Which,
vast as it was, served mainly to execute a single, ferociously complex, distributed