"Geoffrey A. Landis - Approaching Perimelasma" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

Sure, somebody said. It might have been me. What do you figure? Download
yourself to temp storage and then uplink frames from yourself as you drop?
That works, Jenna said. Better: we copy our bodies first, then link the two
brains. One body drops; the other copy hotlinks to it.
Somehow, I donтАЩt remember when, the word тАЬweтАЭ had grown to include me.
тАЬSure,тАЭ I said. тАЬAnd the copy on top is in null-input suspension; experiences
the whole thing realtime!тАЭ
In the morning, when we were focused again, I might have dismissed the idea
as a whim of the fuzz, but for Jenna the decision was already immovable as a droplet
of neutronium. Sure weтАЩre dropping, letтАЩs start now.
We made a few changes. It takes a long time to fall into a star, even a small
one like Bee, so the copy was reengineered to a slower thought-rate, and the original
body in null-input was frame-synched to the drop copy with impulse-echoers. Since
the two brains were molecule by molecule identical, the uplink bandwidth required
was minimal.
The probes were reworked to take a biological, which meant mostly that a
cooling system had to be added to hold the interior temperature within the liquidus
range of water. We did that by the simplest method possible: we surrounded the
probes with a huge block of cometary ice. As it sublimated, the ionized gas would
carry away heat. A secondary advantage of the ice was that our friends, watching
from orbit, would have a blazing cometary trail to cheer on. When the ice was used
up, of course, the body would slowly vaporize. None of us would actually survive to
hit the star.
But that was no particular concern. If the experience turned out to be too
undesirable, we could always edit the pain part of it out of the memory later.
It would have made more sense, perhaps, to have simply recorded the
brain-uplink from the copy onto a local high-temp buffer, squirted it back, and linked
to it as a memory upload. But Jenna would have none of that. She wanted to
experience it in realtime, or at least in as close to realtime as speed-of-light delays
allow.
Three of usтАФJenna, Martha, and meтАФdropped. Something seems to be
miss-ing from my memory here; I canтАЩt remember the reason I decided to do it. It
must have been something about a biological body, some a-rational consideration
that seemed normal to my then-body, that I could never back down from a crazy
whim of JennaтАЩs.
And I had the same experience, the same feeling then, as I, you, did, always
do, the feeling that my god I am the copy and I am going to die. But that time, of
course, thinking every thought in synchrony, there was no way at all to tell the copy
from the original, to split the me from you.
It is, in its way, a glorious feeling.
I dropped.
You felt it, you remember it. Boring at first, the long drop with nothing but
freefall and the chatter of friends over the radio-link. Then the ice shell slowly flaking
away, ionizing and beginning to glow, a diaphanous cocoon of pale violet, and
below the red star getting larger and larger, the surface mottled and wrinkled, and
then suddenly we fell into and through the flare, a huge luminous vault above us,
dwarfing our bodies in the immensity of creation.
An unguessable distance beneath me, the curvature of the star vanished, and,
still falling at three hundred kilometers per second, I was hanging motionless over an
infinite plane stretching from horizon to horizon.