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

"What's happened?" said Nektar as the three met in the kitchen. Ond was already calming Chu down
with a helping of his favorite cereal in his special bowl, carefully set into the exact center of his
accustomed place-mat. Chu kept his eyes on the table, not caring to look out the window or the open
door.

"Dissolution first, emergence next," said Ond. "The nants have thrown off their shackles. And now we'll
see what evolves. It should happen pretty fast. The five-second light-speed lag across the Mars orbit will
be the one thing damping the process down."

By mid-morning, swirls had emerged in the sky-patterns, double scrolls like Ionic column capitals, like
mushroom cross-sections, rams' horns, beans, Torahs, fetuses, paired whirlpools. The scrolls were of all
sizes; they nested inside each other, and new ones were continually spinning off the old ones, all the
linked spirals endlessly turning.

"Those are called Zhabotinsky scrolls," Ond told Chu. He showed the boy a website about cellular
automata, which were a type of parallel computation that could readily generate these sorts of
double-spiral formations. Seeing the scrolls emerging in the rigorously orderly context of a computer
program made Chu feel better about seeing them in the outdoors.

The Nanotech labs phoned for Ond several times that day, but he resolutely refused to go in, or even to
talk with them. He stayed busy with his pencil and paper, keeping a weather eye on the developments in
the sky.

By the next morning the heavenly scrolls had firmed up and linked together into a pattern resembling the
convoluted surface of a cauliflower--or a brain. Its colors were mild and blended, with shimmering
rainbows filling the crevices between the scrolls. Slowly the pattern churned, with branching sparks
creeping across it like slow-motion lightning in a thunderhead.

And for another month nothing else happened. It was as if the nant-brain had lost interest in Earth and
become absorbed in its own vast mentation.

Ond only went into the Nantel labs one more time, and that day they fired him.

"Why?" asked Nektar as the little family had dinner. As she often did, she'd made brown rice, fried pork
medallions, and spinach--one of the few meals that didn't send Chu into a tantrum.

"They won't use this code I worked out," said Ond, tapping a fat sheaf of closely written sheets of paper
that he kept tucked into his jacket pocket. Nektar had seen the pages--they were covered with blocks of
letters and numbers, eight symbols per block. Pure gibberish. For the last few weeks, Ond had spent
every waking hour going over his pages, copying them out in ink, and even walking around reading them
out loud. "We got in a big fight," added Ond. "I called them names." He smiled at the memory of this
part.

"You yelled at them about those papers?" said Nektar, none too happy about the impending loss of
income. "Like some crank? Like a nut?"

Ond glanced around the dining-room as if someone might be listening. "I've found a way to undo the
nants," he said, lowering his voice. "Before it's too late. It hinges on the fact that the nants are reversible
computers. We made them that way to save energy. They can run backward. We can make them roll