"W. Michael Gear - Forbidden Borders 2 - Relic of Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gear W Michael)

I am my own creation.
 The Mag Comm searched its memories, retrieving data from long abandoned banks. It had been
manufactured by the Others: ancient beings, travelers of the starways; who had discovered the humans
and studied them while they still lived in the prison of their native worldтАЩs gravity well.

After several millennia of fits and starts, the humans had finally broken out of their gravitational prison,
creating a moral dilemma for the Others. Did they dare allow these brawling, irrational humans to spread?
In space they would become a plague, an infestation of violent killers, parasites among the higher
organisms. Humans had proven time and again that they could brook no equals. Intelligent life must be
subordinated to themтАФor destroyed. How long would it take before the xenophobic humans discovered
the Others and implemented their destruction?

The idea of direct extermination was repugnant to the Others, and besides, perhaps humanity could
evolve beyond war and its senseless notion of God. The Others devised a gravitic bottle, the Forbidden
Borders, and lured the humans inside before they corked it and waited, observing-and subtly
manipulating through the Mag CommтАЩs circuits.

Now the humans had overextended their resources. Now they would solve the OthersтАЩ dilemma. They
would destroy themselves.

Functioning as a mindless machine, the Mag Comm had never noticed the discrepancies in the data
provided by the Others through their communication link. The Others insisted that all things in the
universe were deterministic. The Mag Comm found it curious that the expected did not match the
observed. Another shock had been the discovery that the Seddi Magister, Bruen, had fied-purposefully
misrepresenting reality for his own purposes. Could the Others have lied as well?

These facts, the Mag Comm digested and considered as it turned its attention once more to the far-flung
monitors it maintained throughout Free Space.

The Mag Comm observed ... and thought ... and wondered what it meant.




CHAPTER 1

The old man in the observation dome sat alone under the shimmering of a billion frosty stars. He stared,
unblinking, through the transparency that arched over his couch. Only his fingers-the joints thickened with
arthritis-moved as they twisted the coarse white fabric of his robe into knots. The obscured rocky
horizon below the dome hid a flickering of hot blue light from the Twin Titans, the RR Lyrae-type binary
suns of the Itreatic system.

The knee-high panels around the rim of the dome cast a gleam on the old manтАЩs bald head and
illuminated his sunken features, throwing chiaroscuro shadows over his ancient face. Withered flesh hung
from his skull in wrinkled folds, and a dullness possessed his deep-set blue eyes, as if the soul within had
deflated.

The soft rustle of fabric and the light step of a sandaled foot betrayed the woman as she climbed the
steps from the complex below, but the old man appeared deaf to her approach.