"Tom Purdom - Fossil Games" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

Fossil Games
by Tom Purdom




Morgan's mother and father had given him a state-of-the-art inheritance.
It was only state-of-the-art 2117 but they had seen where the world was going.
They had mortgaged twenty percent of their future income so they could order a
package that included all the genetic enhancements Morgan's chromosomes could
absorb, along with two full decades of postnatal development programs. Morgan
was in his fifties when his father committed suicide. By that time his father
could barely communicate with half the people he encountered in his day-to-day
business activities.
Morgan's mother survived by working as a low-level freelance prostitute.
The medical technology that was state-of-the-art 2157 could eliminate all the
relevant physical effects of aging and a hidden computer link could guide her
responses. For half an hour-- as long as no one demanded anything too
unusual-- she could give her younger customers the illusion they were
interacting with someone who was their intellectual and psychological equal.
Morgan tried to help her, but there wasn't much he could do. He had already
decided he couldn't survive in a Solar System in which half the human
population had been born with brains, glands, and nervous systems that were
state-of-the-art-2150 and later. He had blocked his mother's situation out of
his memory and lived at subsistence level for almost three decades. Every yen,
franc, and yuri he could scrape together had been shoved into the safest
investments his management program could locate. Then he had taken all his
hard won capital and bought two hundred shares in an asteroid habitat a group
of developers had outfitted with fusion reactors, plasma drives, solar sails,
and anything else that might make a small island move at nine percent the
speed of light. And he and three thousand other "uncompetitive",
"under-enhanced" humans had crept away from the Solar System. And set off to
explore the galaxy.

****

Morgan had lived through three lengthy pairings back in the Solar System.
Six years after the Island of Adventure had begun its slow drift away from the
sun, he established a fourth pairing with a woman he had met through the
ship's information system. The ship's designers had endowed it with attractive
common spaces, complete with parks and cafes, but most of the passengers
seemed to prefer electronic socialization during the first years of the
voyage. Biographies and lists of interests were filed with the system.
Pseudonyms and electronic personalities proliferated. Morgan thought of old
stories in which prisoners had communicated by tapping on the walls of their
cells.
Savela Insdotter was eleven years younger than Morgan but she was a fully
committed member of the EruLabi communion. She used pharmaceutical mental
enhancers, but she used them sparingly. Morgan consumed all the mental
enhancers his system could accommodate, so his functional intelligence was