"Charles Stross - Generation Gap" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

"I want you to take me to this glade of yours," I said, "and lay me down for a dreamy
good time. With no script. And stay with me afterward and talk."
"By bus?" he asked, dubiously.
"Via bus," I affirmed. Our logic gate was now true: we went off and coupled in a
secret glade, beneath a tree dripping with torpid landpussies and peaches. That was how it
was before this started.
It's about now that I must insert personal values into this narrative. Distasteful as it
may be, I've got to tell you something about me, myself, my speciality. We youth are not
parasitic drains on the community. Absolutely the contrary. Our simplistic logical modes
ensure continuity for the processes of "science." "Art" is another matter, but "science" you
can safely leave to us children!
To be brief, my speciality is applied pharmacokinetics. Not to be confused with
pharmacodynamics, which is an entirely different subtree. Pharmacokinetics interfaces with
thermodynamics; it's the principle of diffusion across phase boundaries, biomolecules
providing the context. Rates of reaction mechanisms are a vital component of the field; they
define interface phenomena.
I was attempting to develop a revision of a classical, almost extinct application of rate
kinetics called kinetics of kill.
It was a requirement of an obsolete biotechnology where bacterial contamination had
to be avoided because death could be caused by microbial overgrowth. The rate of death of a
population of organisms can be viewed as a statistical process akin to a chemical reaction;
time/environment dependant autolysis. Potentially a mathematical description of genocide;
harmless, in itself, but it had military implications. Which became obvious...
Jerzy lay in my arms, a leg resting across one of my hips. The grass was warm and
the turf springy from subdome support systems. We lay there, breathing shallowly in the
aftermath of our exertions, and the landpussies presently began rustling in the branches.
Ignoring us. A particularly bold one flopped down from a low branch and squirmed towards a
fruit that lay, rotting, just beyond my fingertips.
As it crossed from sunlight into shade and back again, it switched from grey to green
to dull. Patterns rippled across its skin. It extended a tentative tentacle, and I wiggled a finger
at it; natural curiosity warred with fear, won out, and we shook manipulators. Then I picked it
up bodily, flipped it topside down and bit it between the eyes, killing it instantly. Curiosity is
not a permitted survival trait among 'pussies.
Jerzy opened a sleepy eye. "Why d'you do that?" he asked, lazily.
"Think," I said. "We're on a cull, aren't we?"
He whistled something improbably convoluted in modemspeak, at a baud rate I
couldn't follow. Every dangling tentacle vanished instantly, and I heard a rustling of branches.
"I don't like it," he said; "we've stuffed our quota, haven't we?" His lips were beautifully full,
ideal for pouting, kissing, and modemspeak – they were enhanced with piezoelectrics. He
grimaced. "I didn't want to be disturbed."
"Oh." I was silent for a while. "Do you want to bus, now?" I asked. He licked the base
of my throat gently, and transmitted a synchronicity pulse. I lay back, relaxed, and left my
skull behind.
The "bus" is identifier for a private communications mode used by us anachronisms.
It's a wetware bus; a kiss on the lips of the cerebral cortex. You can't bus with a non-linear
thought processor like a kiddie. Some of them are so out of it that even duration loses
significance; a subjective timespace inversion takes place, so that they can think backwards
and sideways at once. That makes bussing a kind of private code, a childspeak language.
Quickspeak, too. It would be better than copulation, except tha t it locks out your Wisdom at
the same time because it uses the same pathways. It also locks out LAZ, because Wisdom is