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

The biological weapon was unstoppable. After taking root, it had erupted from the corpse
to wage systematic warfare on the entire colony. It ran wild through the residential
sectors, hyphae digesting the putrefying bodies that dotted the complex. Although it had
started as a mere parasite flatworm, it was now the most elaborate predator in the colony.
It cannibalised the genetic heritage of its victims, absorbing the data via an elaborate
nanoscale assimilation engine; a post-Lamarckian organism, it evolved by integrating and
expressing characteristics usually associated with other species. Fat cords and furry ropes
of fungus lay, corpulent and glistening, in pools of purulent fluid that contained anything
it couldn't digest. It randomly interpreted the DNA of dead people and animals, sprouting
random experiments derived from homoeobox control sequences. Strange phalloid
structures towered over the bulbous buildings, the bones of humans and deer and Goon
Squad meat machines scattered around their omnivorous trunks. An arm coated in fur
waved feebly from a bush of throbbing viscera near the medicentre. A cylindrical, dark-
skinned mushroom, its cap a wrinkled topology looted from some other species,
overlooked the wreckage of the Administrator's office with an expression of murine horror
on its flattened rodent face. Dying landpussies -- aerobic octopi, customised for low-gee
harvesting -- hung like purulent fruit from the mycotic trees, their skins strobing through
silvery-green panic hues as they died. Strange, rodent bushes whirred and chittered among
the branches, chained to their parent organism by long umbilical cords that resembled
everted intestines.

Oshi had no desire to share her biosphere with such a runaway horror. She had more than
a suspicion that if it caught her it would treat her as just another parcel of protein: in any
case, there was much that demanded attention in the core. The airlock doors stayed
resolutely shut, the axial redoubt running on canned air. There would be time to explore
later.

Oshi spent the next two days exploring her twilight domain, checking over resources and
making a comprehensive inventory. She didn't stop to think: somehow she knew that if
she stopped she might never start again. She worked with the feverish single-mindedness
of a crash survivor stranded in a desert far from civilization. She paused only to swallow
some meagre rations, or to close her eyes for an hour of exhausted sleep. The colony
central planning methodologies were intact, she discovered, dumped to static store before
the radiation attack. The robot factories, extending from the long axis of the colony like a
string of garlic bulbs attached to a medicine ball, could be powered up and reconfigured to
produce anything she desired. Resources were limited -- only a few megatons of raw
materials were on hand -- but Oshi could hardly see how that mattered. Three things could

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4: Will you still love me ...


happen in the near future. The ultrabright presence (she shuddered at this thought, which
rose to meet her in eerie dreams) might come to the colony; the colony itself might
disintegrate before the depradations of the ontological weapon chewing away at its guts:
or her own survival plan might succeed. Not that she held much hope for it, but it seemed
to her that the third option was little better than the other two. After all, she was twenty
light-years from the nearest other civilized world. And when she got there, if she got
there, the Boss would be sure to notice ...