"Paul Di Filippo - Stink Lines" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

pocket-pal, which the inventor had forgotten whilefocused on impressing
Ginger.Gyro took the all-purpose device from Li'l Bulb. His assistant had
already tunedthe communicator to a news broadcast:"-- solar flares of
unprecedented dimensions. All GPS satellites are out ofcommission. The system
is not expected to come back online for a week. Forfurther details, visit
--""A week," moaned Gyro. "Without proximity constraints on their replication,
theutility fog could fill the Earth's whole atmosphere in a week! This is
awful!What else could go wrong?"The answer to Gyro's rhetorical question was
not long in coming. For overGinger's head, a new kind of balloon had formed.
Nubby-edged in contrast to thesharp lines of the speech capsules, its
connection to its owner made not with atail but with a series of bubbles, its
species was self-evident.It was a thought balloon. And it contained this
observation:What a fuckup!GYRO'S WEARY HEAD lay cradled in his folded arms
atop his silent desk. Suspendedabove the woeful inventor's noggin was a
thought balloon filled with colorfulgraphic images: Gyro strung from a noose,
Gyro with his head in a guillotine,Gyro wilting under a hail of stones thrown
by an angry mob of citizens.Some such fate, it seemed, was very likely to be
his at any moment. For he hadfailed to stop the utility fog. And that mission
was the only reason he retainedhis freedom, instead of languishing in some
Federal oubliette, awaiting thetrial of the young century, followed, no doubt,
by public tarring andfeathering. Oh, the frustration, not to mention the
damage to his pride! And hehad come so closeOf course, a cautious Gyro, under
the earlier influence of his mindbooster hat,had engineered a failsafe into
the fog. A certain signal, broadcast on a certainfrequency, was supposed to
trigger instant shutoff in the nanodevices. And so,with minor reluctance, as
soon as he verified that the fog had indeed seepedpast Duckburg's city-limits,
Gyro had sent that killer message. At first, allseemed well. But Gyro had not
reckoned with mutations. Stray high-energyparticles from the same solar flares
that had decommissioned the GPS satelliteshad also jiggered with the
quantum-sensitive nanodevices. One percent of theinvisible critters ignored
the shutoff command.That proved to be plenty.Consistent with Gyro's
off-the-cuff estimate, during the past week the escapednanomachines from
Duckburg had contaminated every cubic centimeter of theglobe's atmosphere up
to several miles high. Despite their earlynear-extinction, the fecund utility
fog easily filled all available niches.(Replication thereafter among the
communicating contiguous nanomachines, asprogrammed, slowed to replacement
levels.)Within six days, the entire globe had been Barkserized.Not very many
people were happy with this. In fact, practically no one.The bulk of the fog's
pop-ups and hi-litings were surely annoying, yet easyenough to deal with.
Although nobody really appreciated stink lines, forinstance, signaling the
inefficaciousness of their underarm deodorant, theycould live with such
indignities, since everyone else was subject to the sameautomatic insults. (In
fact, one positive aspect of the silent invasion was thatpersonal hygiene, as
monitored by a partially functioning CDC in Atlanta,actually improved.)
Perhaps people could even have learned to tolerate the trulyridiculous
motion-lines that accompanied the intimate actions of lovemaking.(What had
Gyro been thinking?) But the one intolerable aspect of the fog, theultimate
intrusion, were the thought balloons.The same mind-reading circuitry found in
Gyro's intelligence-amplifying hatexisted in distributed form among the
nanodevices. And all censorship filtershad been wiped. Any thought that