"Robert A. Metzger - Picoverse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Metzger Robert)

metalorganic residues, and a half-dozen two-hundred-gallon liquid nitrogen tanks, long empty, pressure
gauges and relief valves scavenged, the platform was KatieтАЩs roost, a place to think, to fret, to clear a
cluttered mind.

She faced east, in the direction of AtlantaтАЩs midtown, the oil-on-water lenses of her Virtuals reflecting
the morning light. Sunrise was spectacular, the sun hanging behind the Bank of America tower, the light
cutting into the building, refracting through stained glass windows, then erupting from the buildingтАЩs
western face in rainbow streamers that played out across the city. Clouds, tinted blood red, hung low on
the distant horizon, while the air, full of springtime pine and grass pollens, glowed golden. It was a perfect
morning. But Katie saw none of it.

тАЬTwo seconds,тАЭ she said. The lowermost left quadrant in her field of view flickered, locked, and then the
Virtuals began to feed, cycling through channels every two seconds.

CNN.

Cryo-Dyne.

Bold and Beautiful.

ESPN IV.

Real Time.

High resolution video streamed into her retinas, the 50 gigahertz modulated lasers in the frame of her
Virtuals, bouncing light from the imbedded prisms in the lenses and then rastering the input across the
back of her eyeballs. A screaming face replaced the green-blue waters of a tropical paradise.

тАЬQuotas are for the slight ofтАФтАЭ

As quickly as it had appeared, the face vanished in a growing fireball that filled her viewing field as the
next channel locked in. Katie refocused and let the channels blur, as theWireless Local Area Network
within NunnтАЩs multimedia stream flashed channel after channel, rolling through its nearly infinite menu. The
WLAN тАЩs content didnтАЩt matterтАФvolume did. Katie craved the noise, was addicted to the input, and in
fact, could not concentrate unless assaulted by a cacophony of bits. She momentarily checked the
simulation running in the lower right quadrant of her field of visionтАФa bare-bones, three-dimensional plot,
with plasma density contoured in a Day-Glo green mesh, and temperatures textured from cool yellows to
smoking blues. The simulation was a hydrodynamic/kinetic mix, melding a fluid approach to an
atom-by-atom calculation, her latest attempt at predicting the plasma turbulence that was damping the
Sonomak тАЩs ability to really burn.

Katie smiled.

Hydrodynamic/kinetic mix. It was a tricky approach, but the only one that had the slightest chance of
modeling what was occurring in the heart of the Sonomak. The physics describing high-speed liquid
turbulent flow and ultra-hot plasmas were still poorly understood, nearly impossible to model, and when
mixed together, turned into a mathematical nightmare beyond belief.

Impossible.