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

When these worries assailed her she shook her head impatiently, laughed -- somewhat
dementedly -- and felt a transient sorrow. If only I'd kept my mouth shut in front of the
Boss none of this would have happened, she rationalised. If only the superbrights hadn't
trusted the entire system to one dangerously unstable AI, she would not have been needed
here. If only the escapists hadn't deployed that incredibly stupid biological weapon, or if
only they'd managed to follow her up to the redoubt ... this entire fiasco might have been
avoided by any number of gamits. Oshi felt a vast and tenuous sense of guilt, aggravated
by a sense of failure. It did not strike her as inappropriate. After all, in a very real way she
had failed.

The event that finally broke through her frail shell of obsession occurred on the fifth day.
That morning, Oshi awakened in the core control room with a sense of purpose. The night
before she had planned her day in advance; she was going to enter the factory zones,
locate certain items of equipment that were being assembled to her specification, and
move them to the docking bay. The items were specialised and deadly; lengths of
monofilament cable, refurbished attitude-thrusters, life support components for one of the
docked shuttlecraft.

Almost without thinking she found herself in the factory unit. It was a geodesic sphere
lined with robots that hurled components from one side to the other, guided by sonar and
timing interrupts. There was something organic about the process, like cilia lining the wall
of the gut of some primitive organism. Oshi waited impatiently, having arrived too early.

She floated in the main cargo entrance, keeping well out of the way; she had no desire to
be pulped between a flying thruster-chassis and a blind drone. It was there that she saw
something floating in the twilit centre of the room, not moving despite the barrage of
components drifting past on all sides. She frowned.

The object was asymmetric, lumpy, almost unrecognisable as it slid out of shadow, into a
harsh cone of light cast by a welding torch that illuminated its features mercilessly. Its rag-
doll face was withered and sunken; limbs flopped randomly where slowly-contracting
tendons had pulled them in gravity-free rigor.

Yes, she thought. Even here. Is there no end to it? A wave of depression swept over her.


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4: Will you still love me ...

Yes, that's right. Run away from it. Run away from reality! What else is there to do? Oshi
turned away, unable to express her sense of disconnected despair verbally -- she had a
morbid fear that if she started talking to herself she would slip slowly into a breakdown.
There seemed to be nothing around her but death on all sides; past, present, future.
Turning her face away from the accusing corpse, she made the connection; and she made
another one, via wisdom uplink, to the core communications buffer.

" Tell me your status," she sent. " List uploads in progress."

Status: functional following self-repair self-test
sequence. Pascal gatecoder responding but isolated.