"L. Timmel Dochamp - Memory Work" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duchamp L Timmel)

Memory Work
by L. Timmel Duchamp
L. Timmel Duchamp is the author of The Grand Conversation (2004), a
collection of essays; LoveтАЩs Body , Dancing in Time (2004), a collection of
short fiction; and Alanya to Alanya (2005), a novel. She has been a finalist for
the Sturgeon, Homer, and Nebula awards, and has been short-listed four
times for the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award. An ample selection of her
critical writing as well as a few of her stories can be found at
ltimmel.home.mindspring.com. In her powerful new story, the author explores
how humanity might survive even the most devastating alien invasion.
****
Each time тАЬIтАЭ speaks, a virtual self is born.
тАФAmanda S. Fielding
****
1.
She called it the End of the World, a designation that marked the limits of her
attempt to comprehend the intolerably incomprehensible. On January sixteenth, the
world was much as it had been the previous day (which is not to say what it had
been the previous year, given the rapidity of change in her world), but on January
seventeenth it began to collapse, and a few days after that it was gone, irretrievably.
From perhaps January nineteenth on she began to think that though the means
bringing about the End were not any she could ever have imagined, the feel of her
tenuous day-to-day survival was exactly what she remembered experiencing in the
many End-of-the-World scenes she had been dreaming since childhood.
January seventeenth was a gray, cold, gloomy day in her city. At around noon
reports of тАЬwidespread wildnessтАЭ of youth began to filter into her office from
around the world. At 3:30, she and her coworkers were dismissed early so that there
would be no chance that any of them would be out and about after dark. The
тАЬwildnessтАЭ had arrived in her city, too.
She spent the evening chatting on the phone, explaining it all to friends and
relatives as simple mass hysteria exacerbated by the copycat syndrome, and that the
news media were making too much of it. She had been glued to CNN since arriving
home from work, tearing herself away only for telephone solace and to cruise the
Internet for additional, less official, information. She was not at first overly
concerned, because the media initially portrayed the тАЬwildnessтАЭ as a sort of global
gang World War, organized along racial and ethnic lines, and also because she was
used to watching catastrophic situations on CNN, whose anchors had been trained
to keep viewersтАЩ fear and despair aroused but distanced.
By daybreak she understood that the situation had gone beyond even the
possibility of control. Throughout the night a constant barrage of gunfire and bursts
of screams, shrieks, and bellows had been carried to her on the wind. In the morning
she saw from her fourth-floor windows that a significant portion of the city was
ablaze. Local television stations advised people not to call 911 or indeed any
municipal or county numbers at all. тАЬThe authorities are overwhelmed,тАЭ they said at
frequent intervals. A tape of the mayor pleading with people to keep their adolescent
children home for their own (and the communityтАЩs) safety reran every fifteen
minutes.
All morning she tried to get through to the friends and relatives she had
spoken with the night before, but the circuits were always busy. A few minutes
before noon, her phone went dead. CNN reported that most national guard units and