"Rudy Rucker - Chu and the Nants" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

the nants, and that's why I wouldn't want them to get at my son."

"So then?" said Nektar. "We babysit him for the rest of our lives?" Though Chu could be sweet, he could
also be difficult. Hardly an hour went by without a fierce tantrum--and half the time you didn't even know
why.

"Don't give up," said Ond, reaching out to smooth the furrow between Nektar's eyebrows. "He might get
better on his own. Vitamins, special education--and later I bet I can teach him to write code."

"I'm going to pray," said Nektar. "And give him lots of love. And not let him watch so much video."

"Video is good," said Ond, who loved his games.

"Video is totally autistic," said Nektar. "You stare at the screen and you never talk. If it weren't for me,
you two would be hopeless."

"Ma chine ma chine ma chine," said Chu.

"Pray to who?" said Ond.

"The goddess," said Nektar. "Gaia. Mother Earth. Here's our car."

Chu did get a little better. By the time he was five, he'd ask for things instead of just pointing and
mewling. There was a boy next door, Willy, who liked to play with Chu, which was nice to see. The two
boys played videogames together, mostly. Despite Nektar's attempts, there was no cutting down on
Chu's video sessions. He watched movies and shows, cruised the web, and logged endless hours of
those games. Chu acted as if ordinary life were just another website, a rather dull one.

Indeed, whenever Nektar dragged Chu outside for some fresh air, he'd stand beside the house next to
the wall separating him from the video room, and scream until the neighbors complained. Now and then
Nektar found herself wishing Chu would disappear--and she hated herself for it.

Ond wasn't around as much as before--he was putting in long hours at Nantel. The project remained
secret until the day President Joe Doakes announced that the US was going to rocket an eggcase of
nants to Mars. The semi-living micron-sized dust specks had been programmed to turn Mars entirely
into--more nants! Ten-to-the-thirty-ninth nants, to be precise, each of them with a billion bytes of
memory and a computational engine cranking along at a billion updates a second. The nants would
spread out across the celestial sphere of the Mars orbit, tiling it with what would in effect become a
quakkaflop quakkabyte solar-powered computer, the greatest intellectual resource ever under the
control of man, a Dyson sphere with a radius of a quarter-billion kilometers.

"Quakka what?" Nektar asked Ond, not quite understanding what was going on.

They were watching an excited newscaster talking about the nant-launch on TV. Ond and his
co-workers had all stayed home to share the launch with their families--the Nantel administrators had
closed down their headquarters for the month, fearing that mobs of demonstrators might converge on
them as the story broke. Ond was sharing the launch excitement with his co-workers live on little screens
scattered around the room. Many of them were drinking champagne and, for a wonder, so was Ond.
Ond never drank.