"Charles Stross - Love me" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

could not arise. Not just a Lamarckian organism that coded into genes the characteristics it


file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20loveme%20(ss).html (15 of 41)4-7-2007 2:25:53
4: Will you still love me ...

required to deal with its environment, but something worse: a machine designed to out-
evolve and out-eat everything in the colony by integrating them into itself. There was a
name for a huge cell with several nuclei, Oshi recalled: a syncitium. The worm was a
Lamarckian, heterogenous syncitium. It could eat anything. Including the gatecoder and
its placentory module, which they would need for the hijacking. Maybe the worm
wouldn't have got there yet. Maybe it would be alright ...

Eventually Oshi arrived at the edge of the necropolis. She stared at the darkened shell of
the nearest habitat. The door gaped on blackness. Something crackled faintly in her
earphones; a mindless crepitation from the dying forest behind the twilit structure.

Stripped of the burden of life, she imagined the winds of time scouring the colony clean.
She could see it as it would appear in a thousand years: a bizarre fossil lined with the
ossified corpses of trees, baked by the heat of a distant sun. Distant protruberances would
fall away over the years, dropping off the axial docking modules: the colony would roll
and tumble unwatched through the centuries, at the heart of a belt of debris around Turing.
The air would eventually leak away, but for a long time before then there would be a
deathly silence broken by the pings and groans of metal warming and cooling. There were
no barbarians in this star system, no witnesses to stare and marvel at the dusty artefacts.
The diseased eye would darken, collapse, the contents sucked out of it by the vacuum of
time: in the end, nothing would remain but a husk, a vacant socket that had once borne
light and life, falling in orbit around the skull of a dead planet.

Where has everyone gone? she wondered, almost desperate to see a human face. This can't
be the end yet. It's too early!

Stepping forward, she saw a pathetic bundle lying beside the path. Booster muscles
whined in her knee joint as she rolled the corpse over with a boot, far enough to see an
unfamiliar face before it fell back. She shuddered, cranked up the oxygen flow through
her mask. The wisdom net was silent as the grave. She moved onwards.

The door to the medicentre was open. She stood on the threshold for a minute, breathing
deeply and trying to think. A faint hissing came from inside, like escaping gas. The sniffer
on the outside of her exoskeleton locked in, feeding olfactory insights to her. Something in
there stinks, she decided. But what? It was an indeterminate worry; unrealistic. She felt
like a tourist visiting a souvenir shop in a death camp, decades later, witnessing
disconnected horrors with no toe-hold in reality. This couldn't be happening. She stepped
inside. There was a manual light control just inside the doorway, a concession to primitive
instincts. She slapped it lightly and looked around as the ceiling brightened.

Lying before her was the source of the smell; sickly sweet and withered, with empty eye
sockets that buzzed. Rotting placentories hung like strange fruit on either side, each