"The Collapsium" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)

thousands of years.
He was all but immortal, by the way, and like everyone else he was still
struggling to come to terms with it. It wasn't so unequivocally wonderful a
thing, really, a society in which death was always by suicide or freak accident
or carefully concocted murder, in which the rare childhood death deprived its
victim not of years or decades of life, but millennia. Such disparity, the very
opposite of fairness. But again, the potentialЕ
Was it strange to be excited, even after all these years? The eternal question,
worn smooth with age: Was obsession a gift? He breathed deeply, preparing to
submerge.
Bruno's fifty collapsons weren't stable in their orbits and couldn't remain
there forever without some sort of collision or ejection event messing the
trajectories up and making a ruin of all his hard work. So he compared them
against the blueprint in his mind, pressed his fingers against the invisible
desk to bring up an interface, and triggered the gravity induction mechanisms.
With them he grabbed a collapson, watched it jerk and flutter on his display.
The forces he could apply here were weak, nothing compared to the gravity of the
collapsons themselves, but of course the collapsons were in free fall. Weak
forces, adding up over time, were just as effective as strong ones applied
suddenly. And Bruno had learned to be a very patient man indeed. Slowly, he took
hold of a second collapson, nudged it toward the first, then nudged it again a
few seconds later to reduce the closing velocity. With ponderous momentum they
drifted together, and finally touched. Their binding produced a flash of green;
they continued on as a single joined piece. He grabbed a third collapson and
carefully added it to the structure, grabbed a fourth and fifth.
The other collapsons seemed almost alarmed, their orbital square dance taking
place now as if on a gigantic quilt being ponderously dragged and folded around
them. Bruno's movements were careful, practiced; he'd done this hundreds of
times, made enough mistakes to feel out the limits and breakpoints and failure
modes, to know what he could and couldn't get away with. Before his network gate
had gone down and stopped the endless questions and exhortations of his fellow
man, he'd often been asked why he did this part by hand, why he didn't devise
some software to handle these exacting manipulations. If the question came from
a scientist or technician he'd generally ignored it, but for the craftsmen and
artisans and landscape designers he'd had a ready reply: Why don't you? The
truth was, if he could automate this creative process he'd do it, and become the
Queendom's richest human all over again.
He found himself singing, quietly, under his breath. Muttering, really; he had
no real gift for song, nor any strong passion, but it bubbled up sometimes,
unbidden, while he worked.
Malgrant ens feia anar a esglщsia
era un mєn petitЕ i meravellєs
un mєn deЕ guixos de colors
que pintрveu vєsЕ
An old lullaby, he supposed. Catalan words, extinct in the absence of Catalan
notes to carry them along. It didn't bother him that he was probably mangling
it, though he briefly imagined his parents wincing and rolling in their graves.
Such thoughts were fleeting, quickly crushed beneath the juggernaut of the
business at hand.
Slowly, his design took shape: something like a bucket, a fan, a lens. The shape