"Alastair Reynolds - Chasm City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

In truth, it was a glorious time. It was also the likely state of affairs which you were expecting
upon your arrival.

This is unfortunately not the case.
Seven years ago something happened to our system. The exact transmission vector
remains unclear even now, but it is almost certain that the plague arrived aboard a ship,
perhaps in dormant form and unknown to the crew who carried it. It might even have arrived
years earlier. It seems unlikely now that the truth will ever be known; too much has been
destroyed or forgotten. Vast swathes of our digitally stored planetary history were erased or
corrupted by the plague. In many cases only human memory remains intact . . . and human
memory is not without its fallibilities.

The Melding Plague attacked our society at the core.

It was not quite a biological virus, not quite a software virus, but a strange and shifting
chimera of the two. No pure strain of the plague has ever been isolated, but in its pure form
it must resemble a kind of nanomachinery, analogous to the molecular-scale assemblers of
our own medichine technology. That it must be of alien origin seems beyond doubt. Equally
clear is the fact that nothing we have thrown against the plague has done more than slow it.
More often than not, our interventions have only made things worse. The plague adapts to
our attacks; it perverts our weapons and turns them against us. Some kind of buried
intelligence seems to guide it. We don't know whether the plague was directed toward
humanity-or whether we have just been terribly unlucky.
At this point, based on our prior experiences, your most likely reaction is to assume that this
document is a hoax. Our experience has also shown that our denying this will accelerate the
process of adjustment by a small but statistically significant factor.

This document is not a hoax.

The Melding Plague actually happened, and its effects were far worse than you are currently
capable of imagining. At the time of the plague's manifestation our society was
supersaturated by trillions of tiny machines. They were our unthinking, uncomplaining
servants, givers of life and shapers of matter, and yet we barely gave them a moment's
thought. They swarmed tirelessly through our blood. They toiled ceaselessly in our cells.
They clotted our brains, linking us all into the Demarchy's web of near-instantaneous
decision-making. We moved through virtual environments woven by direct manipulation of
the brain's sensory mechanisms, or scanned and uploaded our minds into lightning-fast
computer systems. We forged and sculpted matter on the scale of mountains; wrote
symphonies out of matter; caused it to dance to our whims like tamed fire. Only the
Conjoiners had taken a step closer to Godhead . . . and some said we were not far behind
them.

Machines grew our orbiting city-states from raw rock and ice, and then bootstrapped inert
matter towards life within their biomes. Thinking machines ran those city-states,
shepherding the ten thousand habitats of the Glitter Band as they processed around
Yellowstone. Machines made Chasm City what it was; shaping its amorphous architecture
towards a fabulous and phantasmagoric beauty.

All that is gone.
It was worse than you are thinking. If the plague had only killed our machines, millions would