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

"What has Mik come up with?" she asked, opening her eyes.

"Same as before: we hijack the ship, download our entire Dreamtime into it, and move it
on out of the system. But the specifics are a lot more concrete now. We've got a think tank
running a simulation of what an Ultrabright berserker looks like from the inside. We've
got five hundred soldiers uploaded and unfrozen, in training. They'll run the attack drones
locally. We need the meat-body fleet on site; Pascal will be thirty light-seconds away
when we make rendezvous. That's too far for remote control, and we can't be sure of
taking out the berserker with a one minute time lag in the loop. Anyway, Lorma's team
have been working on the architecture. It probably follows a standard Expansion
processor design: modular, scalable, universal symbolic microcode at the bottom of the
abstraction stack. We've been inventing viruses. Really low-level stuff designed to tip it
into NP-stasis. Idea is, we get just one drone in where it counts then patch into the main
communications bus. Then reboot, and we find ourselves in posession of one portable
Dreamtime."

"What happens if we're wrong, and there's already an Ultrabright downloaded into it?"
asked Oshi.


file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20loveme%20(ss).html (26 of 41)4-7-2007 2:25:53
4: Will you still love me ...


Boris stared at her. "Then God eats our brains, of course." His head faded from view in a
blur of increasing granularity, phasing into a featureless blob of voxels. "I'll let you get the
pre-flight finished. Call me when you're ready."

Oshi looked at herself in the mirror and pulled a face. Stress and radiation sickness had
drawn strange lines across her forehead. She shut her mouth and glanced aside; the feeling
that she was being watched persisted until she looked up. I'm g etting too old for this sort
of thing, she thought. Need a new body. New identity, new life. Rinse the old memories
down the bit bucket. She didn't dare think about what she'd do, if -- when -- she convinced
her inner censor that she had completed her task. What she'd do when it discharged her
from Superbright indenture. It hovered over her like a sword suspended by a hair: a sense
of being watched by the ghost of her own lost past ...

Somewhere below her a wire-cage hauled a large cargo pod towards the open front end of
the Bronstein. She felt the jolt as docking spines meshed, but she had a distraction:
Wisdom was downloading the control set for the ship in a flurry of memes and data
objects. Oh Ivan she thought, this would have been something for you. You always loved
flying. A few metres away, a tank full of partly congealed skeletons and nanoassemblers
was plugging itself into the shipboard blood supply. Oshi looked round again, found
herself trapped in the spartan sanitary module between the exercise controllers and the
lavatory. A moment of fear shook her to the core: am I losing my memory already?

She grunted in self-denial, then squeezed through the hatch of the cramped module and
made her way to the bridge.