"James Patrick Kelly - The Propagation Of Light In A Vacuum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

(Other women kept staring at you. You were so handsome and everyone knew
you'd be famous someday. I didn't like the way you looked back. I wanted
you to see me. Only me.)
I never stay in the fx lounge very long. I want to relax but I can't. I
hear things, even over the ocean soundtrack. The hull creaks under the
stress of whatever is outside. If I rest my head on the floor, I can feel
the vibration of the ship in my molars. My imaginary wife tries to make
conversation, divert me with her memories of what might have been. But
somewhere on board a thermostat clicks and a vent opens. What machine
makes a sound like a cough? I have to get up and see. Either the ship or
my imagination is haunted. I miss Varina.
(I can be her for you. Anyone you want. Where are you going? Wait. At
least get dressed first.)
Here's a theory. Say you're travelling at 299,792.46 kilometers per second
and for some unknown reason you want to go faster. You would then exceed
the speed of light propagated in a vacuum. But what if spacetime does not
yield up its absolute so easily? You attempt to accelerate beyond c to,
say, c+v, the smallest, the most infinitesimal increment in velocity you
can imagine. However, there's still a little infinity lurking between c
and c+v, no matter what value you assign to v. What if it takes forever to
achieve c+v? What if the speed of light is not a limit, only a barrier?
You could spend all time crossing it -- probability's revenge.
(But that doesn't explain where everyone went.)
Maybe they realized what was happening. That we were trapped. So they step
into the airlock, cycle through and leap into eternity.
(All of them? What about you?)
I see them going one by one at first. Later in groups. They ask me; I
can't bring myself to make the leap. Because I have you. Obviously. I'm
traumatized; I blank it out. And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.
(Very dramatic; it fits you. You've always had a bigger ego than you cared
to admit. But please don't go in there. It always upsets you.)
A typical day, my sweet. This is the control room of a starship. The
bridge between reason and the irrational. Not what you expected? Every
surface here is a screen, just like in the fx. I can black the entire room
out or put on a light show of instrumentation. From here I can access the
computer, view just about any corner of the ship, cook pizza for
fifty-one, fiddle with the internal gravity, even vacuum-flush the
toilets. If there was a god in this machine, that couch would be his
throne. Once I cranked up the humidity until the air was just about
saturated and then dropped the temperature twenty degrees in two minutes.
My own rainstorm. A one-time miracle, though. Hell of a mess.
Unfortunately, while I can examine the inside of the ship in almost
microscopic detail, I have no idea what's outside. Try the sensors and
what do we get? Blank screen. Here's external telemetry ... every readout
is flat. It's maddening. I actually used to punch the walls after I
brought this display mode up. Wham, just like that. The cursors jump into
the red for a second before dropping back. Most of the time I don't even
know what's being measured; all I want is a reaction. It must have shaken
them, the scientists and engineers and programmers. No data across
eternity -- nothing but the uneasy play of imagination. Well, it took a