"Bloom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)

First Edition: September 1998

zERO
SOMETIMES 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 centera 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
soundtrack recording a different cacophony of whimpers and death
screams andjarringly 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 (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 organhms 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.