"Kathleen Ann Goonan - Nanotech 02- Mississippi Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

hands. Those metapheromones were a precise language, and the
questions were translated by the membrane of the interstice; that
information met the DNA of the e. coli within. The DNA formed an
unimaginably vast storage system .
But the buildings were not working correctly. SYSTEM WIDE
CRASH was the disconcerting message given forth, and, even more
alarming: 100 HOURS BEFORE CONVERSIONтАФNEW
INFORMATION AVAILABLE AT THAT TIME.
But the strangest message of all was much more simple and
direct: PLEASE DONтАЩT LEAVE ME!
And sputtering through at odd times was a single word: VERITY.
The First Nanotech Wave occurred after a decade of
nanotechnologyтАЩs infancy, during which limited self-replication
came into wide use, with applications ranging from manufacturing
to medicine. During this period, self-replicating molecules entered
the world via small secret labs and the vaults of prestigious
international consortiums, promising heaven but often delivering
hell. Some were legal. Most violated the international laws and
treaties set up in haste.
Verity, who was absorbing this information from a learning
cocoon, a clear membrane that surrounded her snugly as she lay
within it on the third floor of the Cincinnati library, was jarred to
awareness of the outside world by a faint vibration. It subsided
quickly, though, and Verity sank back into the history she had
never before known as into a rich, real dream.
Radio had failed. She knew this, of course. Go on, she prompted
silently, her will translated into metapheromonal commands below
the threshold of her consciousness.
The information flow resumed.
When radio failed, washed out more and more often by a puzzling
source sometimes rumored to be a previously hidden quasar (this
particular history had no further details concerning the matter,
apparently), the Second Nanotech Wave emerged, and Flower
Cities began to flourish. Radio waves and all magnetic mediums
became completely undependable, sending civilization backward,
but also forward into a new world where the human body itself
could be modified to receive and transmit precise information.
Nanotech terrorist acts constantly threatened the integrity of every
link in the grid that maintained even fitful functioning. Work on
nanotechnology took on new seriousness and intensity in industry,
government, and at universities, then surged out of control in
unforeseeable ways. Those who did not accept the changes were left
behind in more primitive communities. Those who were changed
experienced terror and wonder; enslavement, and release into
utterly new ways of knowing.
As feared, international research came to an abrupt halt as
communications ceased; terrorist destruction of wire and fiber
optics proved far too easy in the post-nan world. But genetic
engineering reached a state where it was not only possible but
supremely sensible to integrate biologyтАЩs speed, intensity, and