"Will McCarthy - Bloom" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarty Sarah)

BLOOM
Wil McCarthy
Synopsis
Mycora: technogenic life. Fast-reproducing, fast-mutating, and endlessly voracious. In the year 2106,
these microscopic machine/creatures have escaped their creators to populate the inner solar system with
a wild, deadly ecology all their own, pushing the tattered remnants of humanity out into the cold and dark
of the outer planets. Even huddled beneath the ice of Jupiter's moons, protected by a defensive system
known as the Immunity, survivors face the constant risk of mycospores finding their way to the warmth
and brightness inside the habitats, resulting in a calamitous "bloom."

But the human race still has a trick or two up its sleeves; in a ship specially designed to penetrate the
deadly Mycosystem, seven astronauts are about to embark on mankind's boldest venture yetтАФthe
perilous journey home to infected Earth!

Yet it is in these remote conditions, against a virtually omnipotent foe, that we discover how human nature
plays the greatest role in humanity's future.

FOR DOUG AND TOMI LEWIS
Acknowledgments
This book would never have existed without the influence of my agent, Shawna McCarthy, who
doggedly persisted in mining my head on the theory that there must be goldin there somewhere; Stan
Schmidt, who planted the nugget in a 1995 letter on nanotechnology; and Charles C. Ryan, who
purchased the novelette from which this (quite effective) story eventually grew.

I also owe a debt of thanks to Shelly Shapiro for being more editor than executive; to Kuo-Yu Liang,
Tim Kochuba, Eleanor Lang, and the rest of the staff at Del Rey, who've gone well out of their way to
make me feel at home; to Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, Walter John Williams, and countless others for
literary and conceptual influences; John Conway for his Game of Life; NCWW and the Edge Club for
critical and moral support; Kathleen Ann Goonan and Linda Nagata for not pulling punches; and of
course my wife, Cathy, who believed un me even when she shouldn't have.

Zero

SOMETIME
S THEY
GET IN
This much we know: that the Innensburg bloom began with a single spore; that Immune response
was sluggish and ineffective; that the first witness on the scene, one Holger Sanchez Mach, broke
the nearest emergency glass, dropped two magnums and a witch's tit, and died. Did he suffer? Did
it hurt? Conversion must have taken at least four seconds, and we can probably assume it started
with the feet. These things usually do.

By the time the Response teams began arriving, the bloom was some ten meters across, and two
meters high at the centerтАФa fractal-jagged bubble of rainbow fog, class two threaded structure
almost certainly visible to those unfortunate enough to be standing within fecund radius when the
fruiting bodies swelled and popped. Twenty deaths followed almost immediately, and another
hundred in the minutes that followed.

There were cameras and instruments on the scene by this time, windows on what can only seem to
be separate events, each holograph showing a different fleeing mob or collapsing building, each