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

Miniruta joined Ari's communion a year after Ari set out to convert her.
She lost interest in the Eight as soon as she acquired a new affiliation--
just as Morgan's profiles had predicted she would. Morgan had been preparing
plans for three other members of the group but Miniruta's withdrawal produced
an unexpected dividend. Two of the male members drifted away a few tendays
after Miniruta proclaimed her new allegiance. Their departure apparently
disrupted the dynamics of the entire clique. Nine tendays after their
defection, Morgan could detect no indications the Eight had ever existed.

****

On the outside of the ship, in an area where the terrain still retained
most of the asteroid's original contours, there was a structure that resembled
a squat slab with four circular antennas mounted at its corners. The slab
itself was a comfortable, two story building, with a swimming pool, recreation
facilities, and six apartments that included fully equipped communication
rooms.
The structure was the communications module that received messages from
the Solar System and the other ships currently creeping through interstellar
space. It was totally isolated from the ship's electronic systems. The
messages it picked up could only be examined by someone who was actually
sitting in one of the apartments. You couldn't transfer a message from the
module to the ship's databanks. You couldn't even carry a recording into the
ship.
The module had been isolated from the rest of the ship in response to a
very real threat: the possibility someone in the Solar System would transmit a
message that would sabotage the ship's information system. There were eight
billion people living in the Solar System. When you were dealing with a
population that size, you had to assume it contained thousands of individuals
who felt the starships were legitimate targets for lethal pranks.
Morgan had been spending regular periods in the communications module
since the first years of the voyage. During the first decades, the messages he
had examined had become increasingly strange. The population in the Solar
System had been evolving at a rate that compressed kilocenturies of natural
evolution into decades of engineered modification. The messages that had
disturbed him the most had been composed in the languages he had learned in
his childhood. The words were familiar but the meaning of the messages kept
slipping away from him.
Morgan could understand that the terraforming of Mars, Venus, and Mercury
might have been speeded up and complexified by a factor of ten. He could even
grasp that some of the electronically interlinked communal personalities in
the Solar System might include several million individual personalities. But
did he really understand the messages that seemed to imply millions of people
had expanded their personal physiologies into complexes that encompassed
entire asteroids?
The messages included videos that should have eliminated most of his
confusion. Somehow he always turned away from the screen feeling there was
something he hadn't grasped.
The situation in the Solar System had begun to stabilize just before