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

cloudy pond shimmering with biotic iridescence. Yet what
makes me unusual is not my size or unlikely form. I am
unusual because I thrive almost wholly on ghosts. I eat the
past."
"Wait a minutel Hold on nowl" Carl called through the
thickness of the nightmare. "Are you saying I'm alive? This
isn't the next world?"
"It's another world, Carl," the gray voice answered.
"How. do you know my name?"
"I know everything about you."
"Are you-God?"

A hearty laugh towered like a megalith. "No. I'm as
mortal as you. That's why I can assure you-you're not dead."
"How come I feel I should be?"
"Perhaps because you are, at this moment, bodiless."
`And you call that alive?" The propinquity of madness
alarmed him. "Where am I? I can't see myself."
"You are inside me. I am reshaping you. To even begin to
understand how this is possible, you must know something
about my world. I live in a special region inside the cosmic black
hole at the end of time. The universe around me is small and
hot. Spacetime has long ago completed its expansion, braked,
and begun to fall back on itself. At the time of this telling, one
hundred and twenty-five billion years after your star, Sol,
cindered to frozen rubble, the whole universe is a mere six
hundred thousand parsecs wide, the distance from your earth
to the Andromeda galaxy. All of spacetime has been reduced to
a mote of what you knew the cosmos to be."
"I knew the cosmos to go from Brooklyn to the Bronx,"
Carl's voice quaked. "Where am I?"
"I've told you. You're at the end of time."
"But why?" Carl whined. "I was just at home, taking a
shower-" ,
"One hundred and thirty billion years ago."
"I'm hallucinating. I must be hallucinating."
"Would you rather not hear this?"
"I have a choice?"
"Of course." The eld skyle's voice had the long patience of
a horizon. "I am narrowing my five-space consciousness to
your human smallness because it plea: sures me. It's not at all
necessary. If you prefer, I'll just pass you on into my world.
Words are useful only if you can believe them. In your case,
perhaps, experience itself is the best teacher."
"Well, if you put it that way-go ahead, tell me everything."
The blue space holding Carl brightened like the fever of a
dream. "I'm glad, Carl. I've wanted to tell this story for a long
time. Let me begin again. We are now in a place many years in
your future. So far in the future that the universe itself is old
and dying. It is caving in on itself. In the whirlpool center of