"Paul McAuley - Interstitial" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

"It's a message," one of the other techs said.

Echo laughed. "Like a time capsule? Why would Little Tokyo go to all the expense of burying a time
capsule?"

Syntax said, "Little Tokyo didn't make it; they found it. It's a time capsule all right, from the very deep
past."

"You mean the American Empire?"

Syntax flashed her steel teeth. "Hardly. As near as we can tell, it's seven hundred million years old."

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After a scout patrol had discovered the entrance to the tunnel, Syntax's small crew of techs had been
hijacked from the library and put to work on the Artifact. They were all wired with meth so they could
work twenty hours a day, snatching sleep when they fell from exhaustion, sucking food from cold packs
while they worked. One woman had gone bugfuck crazy and had jumped on the bucket elevator after it
had brought down a case of rations; it had come right back down with her bullet-riddled body, and the
others had buried her at the base of the Artifact.

None of the techs trusted Echo because he was so obviously a spy. He didn't blame them. He knew that
if he didn't readily give up whatever he learned here, it would be tortured out of him by his brother. The
other techs were even more cynical about their fates. They believed that once they had finished translating
the Artifact they would all be killed.

"Like Egyptian slaves who constructed the tombs of pharaohs," Syntax told Echo. "Soldiers don't think
techs are human. They'll kill us and bury us all when we're done, so we can't squawk about what we've
discovered."

She set him to translating a huge block of glyphs carved high up on the Artifact. Her crew had already
worked out that the strings of dots and dashes carved deep in the black granite column were binary
code, but no one would tell Echo whether they had translated any of it, or what they had found.

He quickly became as obsessed as the others. All techs loved crypto -- it tickled their maths programs.
Echo worked until he dropped from exhaustion, ate only when the pain in his stomach cut through his
focused concentration. The cold, bone-dry air sucked moisture from his skin, and although he was
constantly taking sips from a bladder of distilled water, his mouth felt as if it had been packed with salt.
His world shrank to the problem at hand. He hardly noticed the other techs, working away on their
separate projects above and below him like monks in isolated carrels. When Port and Slash had a fight
over use of one of the computers, he watched for a few minutes and went back to work as soon as
Syntax swarmed down to break it up.

Echo took pics of every square centimetre of the glyphs, loaded them into one of the disposable
computers, ran dozens of decryption programs, started writing his own when nothing out of the box
cracked the code. He began to think that he had been given a piece of junk info to keep him harmlessly
busy, but there was also a nagging sense that he was missing something familiar and obvious.

On one of his food breaks, he noticed that Basic, the youngest of the techs, was picking about amongst
the rubble at the base of the Artifact, catching and zapping the tiny motile cameras which the soldiers
used to spy on them. Echo joined in, taking pleasure in outsmarting the cameras' hardwired cockroach