"Garbage Day" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)Now there was an edge to Bascal's voice. "Of course it's not an ordinary ring.
I'm the prince of the fucking Solar System. What do I wear, gold? Tin? It's information, darling Ч quadrillions of terabytes in quantum storage. It wants out." With a shiver of excitement and dread, Conrad realized that they weren't just playing at being bad here. They were being bad, they were going to be bad. Bascal was really pissed off about something. Hell, they all were. As fugitives from adult supervision, they had a goddamn point to make. This girl Xmary, hearing the tone of Bascal's voice, sighed once and then said, "I know some people. I can ask for you. It sounds pretty serious, though." "That it is." Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Finally, the girl got up again. Before turning to go she asked, "Am I going to get in trouble?" "Yes," Bascal replied. "We all are. The question is whether anything useful is accomplished beforehand." "Great." She disappeared. Doing as she was told, going along with Bascal and against her own better judgment. "So what's in the ring?" Steve Grush asked. "Garbage," Bascal said. "Garbage?" "Garbage. Reorganization of matter at the atomic level. Into garbage." "You mean programmable matter, right?" Conrad asked, because otherwise that made no sense at all. "Duh. Any wellstone surface. But that's everything, right?" especially in Denver. But Conrad remained confused Ч wellstone was fundamentally a form of silicon. Woven nanofiber, right? Quantum dots to confine electrons in atom like structures. In raw form the stuff looked and felt like some heavy, impermeable, beetle-shiny plastic, but by sending the right signals through it you could fill it with artificial pseudoatoms of any type. Silicon and gold, silicon and sulfur, silicon and plaster of goddamn Paris. Then there were the transuranic pseudoatoms, and the asymmetric ones, and the ones which incorporated exotic particles. You could alter wellstone's apparent composition in so many ways that even after three hundred years, a Queendom full of pseudochemists and hypercomputer search algorithms had barely cataloged even the fundamentals. But pseudoatoms weren't real, and silicon was. Bascal was looking smug. "It's Garbage Day in Denver, me boyos. If we each have one of these, and we spread out, we can make a lot of frigging garbage. We can even threaten infrastructure, which after all is what separates us from the animals. If our demands aren't met, they will at least be remembered." "Raw!" Steve said approvingly, and a number of the boys echoed him. "Where did this software come from?" Conrad couldn't help asking. "Wrote it myself, boyo. Been saving it for a special occasion." Conrad proceeded warily, not wanting to sound negative. "How does it work?" "I archived a year's worth of patterns from the palace waste chutes, and fit them together with a tesselation-tiler. Any surface is mapped with the best possible fit in stored garbage, and the boundaries between garbage objects are heated and acoustically shocked to cut them away from the parent body. Slap it |
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