"Attanasio, A A - Radix 02 - In Other Worlds 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Attanasio A.A)

surprised at this mess. She didn't know I'd lost my teaching
post. I think she was drunk. She wanted to see the mirror and
the photo again, and she sat for a long time by the window
looking at them. She wanted to know what they meant. I was
five or six gins into forgetting that day, and I told her
everything I've guessed about the ghost hole. When I was
done, she asked why other scientists weren't studying what had
happened to Carl. I tried to tell her that the mirror had become
scientifically inadmissible after I took it off the wall, but I
cracked up-laughing as much as cryingand that scared her o$:
Later, as it was growing darker and I was coming up from that
day's drunk, I remembered her bird-bright eyes and the queer
way she peered at the photo close up, the silver of leer breath
cutting the gloss again and again until she was sure of what she
was seeing. And now I'm sure. Carl isn't screaming with pain in
this photo. He's grimacing with intense pleasure!
-excerpts from The Decomposition Notebook by Zeke
Zhdarnov

Orgasm ignited him. Hot as the sun's weight, space
molded his shape. He tried to move but could not budge the
pleasure. He tried to see and saw a hard blue sky, deeper than
his sight, quivering with delight. Listening, he heard his heart
moaning and his blood sizzling in his ears.
The voltage of the orgasm wearied, and the himshaped
heat melted to a delicate warmth.
"YOU ARE AWAKE!" A blowtorch voice seared his
hearing, and his whole being juddered.
"Excuse me," the voice said more softly, deep as a man's
but lissome as a woman's. The words came from every
direction. "Can you tell me who you are?"
He tried to speak, but his voice had to cross a dreamgap
between his will and his breath. When at last the words came,
the sound of his voice subtracted him from the pleasurable
stillness, and he immediately felt himself upfalling, floating
and turning through the blue nothing: "Who wants to know?"
Carl drifted a long time. Blue filled the hollow bodiless
center of his mind with peace. Memory was a soft distance.
Expectation was unbegun.
So when the voice returned, directionless as smoke,
intimate as a friend, the words embraced all of him, and he
listened rapt as the face of the world
"At the end of time, in the last million years of the
universe, an unusual creature drifts through the slow hurry of
evolution into the glory and anguish of selfawareness: It is an
eld skyle, and it is I. I am vast by human standards: a cubic
kilometer of silaceous cell matrices intricately and delicately
interpenetrating. A colossal jellyfish floating in ,a lake: a
radiolarial system, highly evolved, yet stationary and witless-
looking as a brain without a body. To you I would look like a