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

Echo was struck with a sideways bit of associational logic. "Show me where you got this from," he said.

An hour later, he had cracked the chunk of code he had been assigned.

It was a movie, highly compressed by pasting every bit of non-moving background into each frame
instead of generating fresh code, and recycling common motion elements from a palette stuck at the front
end, mixed up with instructions on polygon types, greyscales, and scan rates.

It ran for just under a minute, black and white, fourteen frames a second, one hundred ninety-two scan
lines, as low rez as stone age teevee. Echo looped it and played it over and over. He fell asleep with it
still playing, woke to find the other techs watching it raptly.

It showed a thing like a half-squashed crab built out of bubblewrap sidling up to the camera, slowly
turning on a fringe of tiny legs. At what might be its front end was a bug face above a rack of crushing
and chiselling and biting mouthparts like an organic Swiss Army knife; the camera or whatever had taken
the movie zoomed jerkily in on the mouthparts at the end, as if their frantic twitching was significant.

"There's your alien," Echo said.
"It isn't an alien," Basic said abstractedly, pushing greasy hair away from her eyes as she leaned in,
watching the loop start over. "Look at that recycled critter dance."

"It doesn't seem to have eyes," Echo said.

Slash tapped the screen of Echo's computer. "There are apertures all around the rim of the shell. Like
pinhole cameras. We have the gross morphology of the boogers from other chunks of code."

"Just stills," Port said, giving Echo a challenging look. He was a rangy fellow with a wolfish look, pale as
a ghost, long wispy hairs at the corners of his mouth. "Stills and diagrams."

Echo said, "I'm not pissed. I know you held stuff back from me, and I would have done the same in your
place. So you call these things boogers?"

The other four techs looked at each other. Syntax said, "There have to be dozens of loops like this in the
code. You did good, Echo."

"I didn't think it would look like a crab," Echo said.

"It doesn't," Slash said. "Not exactly."

"Well," Echo insisted, "it isn't a very alien-looking alien."

The other four techs looked at each other again.

Echo said, "I'm not getting out of here alive, right? I might as well know what I'm gonna die for."

Syntax said, "It isn't exactly an alien. It came from Earth, just like us. It seems that everyone got the
history of life on Earth wrong."

Syntax did most of the explaining, with the others chipping in now and then.