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

soundtrack recording a different cacophony of whimpers and death screams and jarringly
irrelevant conversation. I personally have collaged these scenes a dozen times or more, arranging
the panic this way and that way, over and over again in the hope that some sense will emerge. But
there is no sense in those first few minutes, just the pettiness and blind, stamping fear of the
human animal stripped bare. And the heroism, yes; for me the central image is that of Enrico
Giselle, Tech Two, pushing his smudged helmet and visor back on his forehead and shouting into
a voice phone, while the walls behind him froth and shimmer and disintegrate.

"Class five. Class five. Drop two hundred and flush on my command!"

At this point, finally, the city began to awaken. The Immunity isolated samples of the invading
mycorum, sequenced them, added them to the catalog of known pathogens. Better late than
never, one supposes, but by the time the bloom outmassed the city's Immune system by a factor of
several million, and though submicroscopic phages gathered at its sizzling interface, now ropy
with tendrils that sputtered outward in Escheresque whorls, the growth was not visibly affected.

Fortunately, like all living things, technogenic organims require energy to survive, and where the
witch's tits had fallen or been hurled, pools of bitter cold had arrested the replication process. Not
unusual, as any Response officer will tell you. and like organic lebenforms, mycora are also
vulnerable to excess energy. Backpack UV lasers were proving effective weapons against the
bloom, and soon the streets clanged with discarded chem spritzers and paraphage guns as
bloomfighters concentrated on the things that worked.

High above the city, the cavern roof came alive with UV turrets of its own. Machine-guided and
wary of the soft humans below, the beams swept back and forth, charring trenches through the
rainbow mist, the living dust, the bloom of submicroscopic mycora still eating everything in their
reach and converting it to more of themselves. and to other things, as well, a trillion microscopic
construction projects all running in parallel, following whatever meaningless program the
mycogene codes called out. By now the fecund zone was half a kilometer across, riddled with gaps
and voids in the outer regions but much denser at its core, a thickening haze which already
blocked the view from one side to the other. Up to four stories tall in places, higher than most of
the surrounding buildings, and it had begun to take on structure as wellтАФpicks and urchins,
mostly, standing out visibly in the haze, their prismatic spines lengthening more than fast enough
for the human eye to see.

Some mycora eat lightly, sucking up building blocks like carbon and hydrogen while leaving the
heavier elements alone, but this one was pulling the gold right off the streets, the steel right off
the shingled walls, the zirconium right out of the windowpanes. You've seen the pictures: a giant
bite out of Innensburg's south side, gingerbread houses dissolving like a dream.

The UV lasers, while no doubt satisfying for those employing them, were if anything adding to the
problem by throwing waste heat into the bloom, giving it that much more energy to work with, to
feed on.

Finally, Innensburg's central processor sought permission from the mayor and city council to
move to Final alert. Permission was granted, the overhead lights and household power grid were
shut off, the ladderdown reactors stopped, and the air system reconfigured to pipe through
cooling radiators closer to the surface. The cold, the dark. How we humans hate these things, and
how very much we need them.