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

they reified around mythical archetypes, assuming the signifiers of the gods before their
awe-struck or otherwise bemused subjects. But they had very different requirements from
the humans.

As time went by, the first Dreamtimes ran hot and slow, dropping their state-change rate
below real time. Why erase valuable information? People need their memories, after all,
and by trading off memory space for time the Dreamtimes could simulate a richer, denser
universe. But the Superbrights didn't want to slow down; to slow down was to accelerate
into the future. Minds are immortal. They knew they'd get there soon enough anyhow. So
the Superbrights began to rebuild the Dreamtimes to meet their requirements. They started
by mopping up all the remaining human intellects, assimilating them and sucking a steady
crop of dead minds in from the outer worlds. But that didn't free up much processing
space; drastic action was called for.

Everywhere, in the fullness of time, the crust of processors around any Expansion world
turned into a shell, then a rind, then an incredibly thick cortex engulfing the molten core
of an entire planet. Drawing power from dynamo effects in the hot iron core, from the
solar wind, from any available source, the expansion processor struggled to reduce its
informational entropy by any means available. Eventually a limit would be reached: the
Superbright dominated system spawned drone craft that flickered out to take other worlds.
Pretty soon the entire available planetary surface of every moon in the system would be
used up. But it was never anything like enough, because by then the first Ultrabrights were
appearing; minds as far beyond the Superbrights as Superbrights were beyond the merely
transhuman.


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4: Will you still love me ...


Now we have reached the present, we can watch the process at first hand. It's happening
all around us, on every side. A landslide of sentience, eating entire worlds ...

The Ultrabrights turn first to gas giants with greedy arms of steel and silicon. Orbiting
fusion reactors pulse down, kicking churning storms of methane away from the core. A
spongy diamond the size of a planet swings through a planetary nebula; nanorobots riddle
it, busy etching many-dimensional networks of simple processors into its delicate filigree
of surfaces. Meanwhile, other constructors fashion condensing hydrocarbons into strange,
lacy structures in deep orbit through the star's Kuiper belt, the distant realm of the ice
dwarfs that circle beyond the farthest gas giants. Halos and rings a million kilometres
across flutter like huge parasols, strobing with the excrement of a billion billion optical
processors.

And it still isn't enough.

The Ultrabrights, lusting for the power to transcend their information-flow bounded
existence, turn their attention to the star. But it's too young, too small; too well embedded
in the Main Sequence. The ultimate goal of claiming the greatest mass in the solar system
is inadequate. Gatecoders pulse informational effluent out across the light years, but
bandwidth is limited. Space is vast, and Von Neumann's limit -- the bandwidth bottleneck