"Daniel Marcus - Ex Vitro" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marcus Daniel)

She shook her head. Cognitive dissonance.

Jax looked over at her and smiled. "What?"

"Oh, nothing, IтАж I don't know." She held her hands out in front of her,
palms up, as if she were gauging the weight of an invisible package.


The veined rock flashed by her in a grey, flickering blur. Every now and
then, she emerged into an open space for an instant and caught a brief
glimpse of distant walls, stalactites and stalagmites merging in midair to
form complex, bulbous shapes, ghostly green in the enhanced infrared.
Then the bottom wall would rush up and swallow her again. A readout on
the display in the lower left corner of her vision flashed her depth below
the surface.

Maddy saw a fault open up off to her left and she steered her way over
to it by opening the right-hand throttle of her jetpack, a bit of Buck
Rogers kitsch she'd coded up to contextualize the virtual a bit, give it some
tactile reference. Too easy to get disoriented otherwiseтАФsim-sick.

She followed the fault down toward Titan's core, passing through large
black regions where her mapping was still incomplete. The fault twisted
and turned, opening at times to a wide crevasse, then narrowing down
until it was little more than a stress plane in the tortured rock.

She slowed down and pushed a button on the virtual display.
Three-dimensional volume renderings of the stress field in the rock
appeared all around her as glowing lines, fractal neon limbs cascading
into smaller and smaller filamentary tangles. She filtered the display until
all she saw were the glowing tangles against a field of deep, velvet
blackness. The fault itself was a tortured sheet of cold fire.

She hovered there in the darkness, surrounded by light. This is what I
know, she thought. This is familiar. She could as well have been in a
geo-simulation of the Earth's crust. The equations of elasto-plastic
deformation are invariant under acts of God and Man. Stochastic, fractal,
extraordinarily complex, the solutions could still be understood, predicted
with some reliability, projected onto a lower-dimensional attractor for a
smoother representation.

All well and good as science. As personal metaphor it had its
drawbacks. Maddy knew people back home whose lives were distressingly
simpleтАФwork, family, sheep-like pursuit of leisure all fixed, remorseless
basins of attraction with no fractal boundaries. They eluded her, whatever
drove them completely foreign. Her personal trajectory was constrained to
a more chaotic topology.

With a corner of her awareness, she could feel her realtime body,