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

His thick fingers danced in the space between us. My RECEIVING light went on, and the air before me
came alive with information, image windows and text windows and schematic windows rastering in and
then shrinking to icons as my spec compressed them in working memory. Too quick to see much in the
way of detail. Pictures of blooms, I thought. Pictures of mycora. Well, what to expect from the
Immunity's head of research?

I sat.

"I've seen your work," he said to me, his voice vaguely approving. "And read it. Funny, how nobody
seems to be doing that sort of thing anymore."

"You're talking about Innensburg?"

He nodded. Behind the zee-spec, his eyes were bright green. "Yes, Innensburg. I survey your net
channels from time to time, but it was that piece that really caught my eye. About as close as we have to
a regional history, and plaintext was a тАж curiously appropriate choice of medium. Very astute. I stayed
up all night reading it."

"Thank you," I said, nodding once to accept the compliment. Then I smiled politely, waiting. Whatever
he'd invited me here to discuss, this wasn't it.

He studied me for a moment, then relaxed, turning off the charm like a lamp he no longer needed. "All
right, then."

His fingers stroked the air, manipulating symbols and menus I couldn't see. One of my image icons began
to flicker. I touched and expanded it, moved the resulting window to the lower right corner of my vision.
It was a video loop, false-color, depicting a complex mycorum which replicated itself in slow motion,
over and over again. Not quite crablike, not quite urchinlike, not quite organic in appearance. A tiny
machine, like a digger/constructor but smaller than the smallest bacterium, putting copies of itself together
with cool precision, building them up out of nothing, out of pieces too small for the micrograph to
capture. In short, a pretty typical piece of technogenic life. At the bottom of the window scrolled a
horizontal code ribbon showing, in a series of brightly colored blocks, what was presumably the data
gene sequence which dictated both the mycorum's structure and behavior.

"This," Lottick said, "is Io Sengen 3a, a sulfurated mycorum with unknown environmental tolerance. Gave
us a scare a while back when we thought it could replicate in the volcanic flows on Io, but that turned out
to be a false alarm. Now we're concerned again, for different reasons."

"Okay." I nodded, waiting for more, not yet sure why he was telling me this.

Another image icon flickered. Summoned, expanded, and formatted, it depicted a macrophage of some
sort, immediately recognizable to any Immunity citizen as one of the good guys, though the configuration
was not a familiar one. Rather like a mechanized coral polyp, I'll say, though close inspection revealed
details inconsistent with that tag. At any rate, it was the same apparent size as the mycorum, though of
course the scale must have been ten or twenty times less fine. Indeed, the yellow tick marks along the top
and side of the image probably marked out a grid of one-tenth-micrometer squares. Again, a data gene
sequence scrolled by underneath.

"The Philusburg Optima phage," Lottick said. "Release one-point-four. Thermal IR power coupler, has to