"Daniel Keys Moran - A Tale of the Continuing Time 04 - The AI War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

had learned not merely to take precautions, but levels of precautions --

-- most of them directed at the Peace Keeping Force's Elite cyborgs. The Elite were stronger and faster
and much tougher than ordinary humans, with senses that spanned the electromagnetic spectrum. Their
eyes were lenses, their ears mechanisms. In early Elite the skin had been toughened into a rigid mask; in
later models, their skin, though superficially the skin of a normal human, still would not burn beneath a
cutting laser. Direct vacuum would hurt; but it would not kill an Elite if the Elite could reach air again
before suffocating. Transform viruses sped their neural reactions by a factor of three, up from a mere
forty percent improvement in earlier Elite. Early models of PKF Elite had required that their power
sources be replaced every six months; modern Elite were good for up to five years. Carbon-ceramic
filaments were woven throughout their bodies, around the joints and ligaments, supporting the internal
organs, the heart and lungs and organs of the abdominal cavity, allowing PKF Elite to withstand
acceleration that would kill an ordinary human, or even a genie such as Trent.

They boasted an optical secondary nerve network that was thousands of times faster than the clumsy
neuro-chemical nerve nets humans were born with, controlled by a combat computer implanted at the
base of the Elite's skull. Their index fingers sported small-weapons-caliber lasers -- the ultimate in
point-and-shoot.

One flaw in Elite design had gone unnoticed for over thirty years until the TriCentennial rebellion. All
PKF Elite, through 2076, had been produced with a superconducting mesh buried immediately beneath
the skin. Given the caliber of energy weapons available in the 2040s, when the Elite were designed, the
decision had made sense. Shooting an Elite with an energy weapon, a laser or maser, might make him
warm, as the superconducting mesh spread the heat across the surface of the Elite's body, but was
unlikely to kill him --

In 2076, during the rebellion in Occupied America, three hundred and forty-seven PKF Elite had died
beneath the beams of rebel x-lasers, slightly detuned so that the lasers would not cut well, and pumped
up to burn the rifle's power supply out in four or five shots. The superconducting meshes had done their
jobs, distributing the huge blasts of heat across the body of the Elite; the rebels had fried Elite like bacon.

For most of the last two years, Trent had lived the life of an ascetic -- in a four-room suite at the end of
an expansion corridor he had purchased. Trent lived in the Krishna end of town, and the Krishnas,
accustomed to holy men who fasted and starved themselves, found it something to comment on -- that
one holy man could require so much space just to be ascetic in.

The outer two rooms were for guests -- Trent had more guests than most pilgrims; going beyond that,
one found a bedroom with suspiciously sybaritic bathing arrangements; and beyond that, presumably, the
room in which Augustus Allen meditated. Presumably because, so far as any of the Krishnas knew,
nobody except 'Sieur Allen had ever seen that room.

No one who knew Trent, rather than the pilgrim Augustus Allen, would have been surprised by the
contents of that fourth room.

An emergency airlock, leading to the asteroid's surface, stood mounted on one of the walls. But the
emergency exit was not the interesting thing about the room --

Blazing along in a sphere called the Black Beast, floating in the center of the room, was nearly four
percent of the processing power to be found off of Earth itself.