"Benford G - Furious Gulf" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

This is illusion. Its body is a treasury of past designs, free of weight,
remembering nothing of planets. Evolution is independent of the substrate,
whether organic or metallic or plasmic. Its design follows cool engineerings
now encased in habit. Function converges on form. Tubular rods of invisible
tension, struts like statements.

Elsewhere along its expanses, gray pods stud the shooting angularities of
it. Scooped curves in smudged silver. Tapering lines blend, uniting skewed
axes. None of these geometries would be possible beneath the dictates of
gravity.

It torques. Grave, careful. Movement is a luxury, scarcely necessary
when what truly stirs is data.

It has little kinesthetic sense. Instead it lives amid encoded interior
universes. Webs, logics, filters. Perceptions are racing patterns flung between
the shifting sands of stars and lives.

Data pours through these spaces. Digital rivers fork into rivulets, seeking
receptors. Stuttering, layer-encoded, as endless as the rain of protons.

Like a feverish need the data-streams fall here on opaque titanium shells.
But it does not sense the particle torrent that flails uselessly at massive shields:
layers of stressed conglomerate cismetal, revolving.

Mass is brute. Inside the crystalline ramparts, there is nothing which
seems like a machine. No obvious movement, no sliding mechanical
torques. Here the essence is static, eternal, a fulcrum of fixed forces.

Thought is infinitely tenuous. The inner mind flits down tiny stalks of
dark diamond, fashioned from the cores of ancient supernovas. Codes race in
fine sprays of polarized nuclei, dancing forever in buoyant fields. Electrons
pinch and snake, bearing luminescent ideas.

From the distance come spectral streamers of a red giant, laboring
toward supernova. Plasma casts ruby shafts across the slowly revolving
planes. The tossing, frenzied flush traces out the worn rims of craters. Random
impacts, long forgotten. Pocks and scratches cross the massive shanks.
These tell strange stories, unreadable now.

Death crowns the spiral spine: antennae tinged in jarring yellow. They
can slice through the galactic hiss here, stab electromagnetic needles through
prey light-minutes away.

For the moment it converses. Its interior selves are free of the swallowing
mandates of self-preservation. Their task is to think long. Within them, data
dances.

8