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

on the rate at which information can be transferred -- is biting at the heels of the new
Ultrabright system.

Human and Dreamtime space has been expanding in a sphere for centuries. The innermost
colony systems are already saturated, their own Ultrabrights unwilling to shoulder the
timeburden of the home systems. Mere humans are long since confined to the outer
colonies, where information swirls endlessly into the entropic wastes of the future. Soon a
vicious war will break out between stellar intelligences: a war for which the prize is
spacetime -- all the spacetime a world-sized simulation processor can offer. The losers
will be suspended, NP-static: the number of processors available to them drops below a
critical level, they can't get enough connections, can't run in anything like real time, can't
even complete a thought. The fate of an NP-static Dreamtime is to be sent on a one-way
trip into the distant future, a long but subjectively rapid journey into the heat-death of the
universe -- unless somebody physically reboots the world, consigning its frozen
inhabitants to oblivion.

The Ultrabrights collectively face this dilemma: they are confined to the systems at the
centre of known space. They will die unless they can find a way to break out of the trap,
side-step their confinement and establish a line of communication with the twilight zone
beyond. Build fast warships to eliminate the troublesome vermin cluttering up the
outermost dreamtimes. Expand into newly available empty mind-space, to reduce the
density of their thoughts. Unless they can do all of this, and more, the Ultrabrights of the


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4: Will you still love me ...

inner sphere, the worlds which once (but no longer) belonged to humanity, will --

Begin to feel the heat.

Oshi had a lot of tasks, all of them pressing. Environmental integrity, systems
maintenance with a workforce of one, the problem of how to keep the axial redoubt biome
balanced: these were the immediate survival issues she faced. But then there were the
other worries. The Dreamtime, rebooting itself laboriously on Pascal (a process that took
days rather than seconds), needed guidance: and there was the desperate fact that she
needed the minds and help of the uploaded colonists. Finally there was the Ultrabright
attacker, lurking at the back of her nightmares. It was not a care-free time.

Small multipurpose telefactors were at work in the sectors of the colony that lay below the
core redoubt. Their motors whined as they dismantled the corpses of animals slain by the
radiation burst from the black hole, in a vain attempt to create a sterile zone that would
hamper the tapeworm's progress. Oshi avoided looking at them on the surveillance wall;
as they chiseled away at their task they resembled so many spindly mass-murderers,
hacking at fused bone and decaying flesh with rotary saws and multigrippers. They
squittered in an obscure modemspeak that filled the microwave bands with static. Even if
the colony managed to stabilize without breaking up, for a year or more to come the
largest lifeforms were going to run on legs of plastic and ceramic, watching their world
with electronic eyes. This, even if the tapeworm could be stopped -- and Lorma had
indicated that she thought it couldn't be. Oshi shuddered at the thought, then put it aside as