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

humanity. She felt oppressed by the implication of their existence; being here is like being
a spectator during a birth, she thought. It was an alien feeling, a reminder that humans
were -- when it came down to definitions -- merely a more compact kind of replicant
factory. Breeders.

Sweating uncomfortably, she hung head-down above the placentory windows. Wisdom
dumped a mass of raw life support data across her field of vision; she stared in fascination
at the graphics, indicators of life being bootstrapped. Briefly she harboured a conceit that
she was actually a machine, at home among the uterine technologies of the medicentre.

Childbearing was something Oshi had never expected to undergo. When she had been a
child she had expected to die, insofar as she had expected anything: and later, her
Superbright owners had deliberately supressed any maternal inclinations she might have
succumbed to. They had stripped her down and tuned her up like a machine, to become
the mother of battle, not the mother of soldiers. Now she was to be both, but only by
proxy. She sighed and looked at her dim reflection in the wall screen. There were bags
under her eyes; this was the second day running that she'd had bloody diarrhoea. She
wasn't going to die, but she felt like it. She felt ancient -- a very soft machine.

"Talk to me," she said. "Online systems?"

" You called?" answered the machine.The voice came from the wall behind her. Her
neck twinged in irritation; she resisted the urge to turn her head.

"Is this a sentient sub-system?"

" Class structure undefined," replied the voice. Good, she thought. So the
medical monitor system was dumb.

"List neobirths in progress," she requested. The lights dimmed and the wall in front of her
lit up in cool red relief. There were nine tanks; in four of them floated a perfectly formed

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adult skeleton at the centre of a haze of blood-tinged connective tissues.

"Components present are derived from download specifications comprising alpha twelve
program. Calceous support-structures already formed for initial batch of four. Cellular
assembly progressing nominally on basal infrastructure. Individual subjects are referenced
to your contacts database as Boris, Raisa, Mikhail, Lorma, Mai Winh ..." the control
system continued, listing about twenty names; Boris had been very explicit in his requests.
This was to be the strategic command crew, travelling together on one ship. It looked
about right, Oshi noted; all the bones were adult-sized. High-speed downloading required
a radically new way of growing tissues; the gatecoder fiddled with tissue differentiation
mechanisms to build a new body as fast as possible. The skeleton came first, plugged into
support systems, then a cardiovascular network capable of supporting the rapid growth of
new organs. Twenty years of growth could be compressed into a matter of weeks.

"Speed it up," Oshi ordered. "I want them hatched as soon as possible. Don't accept any