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

Nektar jumped up and ran outside sobbing.

"More?" said Chu to Ond.

Ond gave his son more food then paused, thinking. He laid his sheaf of papers down beside Chu, thirty
pages covered with line after line of hexadecimal code blocks: 02A1B59F, 9812D007, 70FFDEF6, like
that.

"Read the code," he told Chu. "See if you can memorize it. These pages are yours now."

"Code," said Chu, his eyes fastening on the symbols.

Ond went out to Nektar. It was a clear day, with the now-familiar shimmering convolutions above the
sky. The sun was setting, melting into red and gold, each leaf on each tree like a tiny green stained-glass
window. Nektar was lying face down on the grass, her body shaking.

"So horrible," she choked out. "So evil. So plastic. Destroy Earth for, like, a memory upgrade?"

"Don't worry," said Ond. "I have a plan."
Nektar wasn't the only one who was upset. The next morning a huge mob stormed the White House,
heedless of their casualties. They would have gotten Doakes, but just when they'd cornered him, he
dissolved into a cloud of nants. The V-Earth port had begun.

By way of keeping people informed about the progress, the celestial Martian nant-sphere put up a full
map of Earth with the ported regions shaded in red. Although it might take months or years to chew the
planet right down to the core, Earth's surface was going fast. Judging from the map, by evening most of it
would be gone, Gaia's skin eaten away by, like, micron-sized computer chips with wings.

The callow face of Joe Doakes appeared from time to time during that horrible Last Day, smiling and
beckoning like a Messiah calling his sheep into the pastures of his heavenly kingdom. Famous people
who'd already made the transition appeared on the video room's screen to mime how much fun it was,
and how great things were up in V-Earth. Near dusk the power went out.

Ond was on that in a flash. He had a gasoline-powered electrical generator ready in their house's
attached garage, plus gallons and gallons of fuel. He fired the thing up to keep, above all, his home's air
filters and wireless antennas running. He'd tweaked his antennas to produce a frequency that the nants
couldn't bear.

Chu was oddly unconcerned with the apocalypse. He was busy, busy, busy studying Ond's pages of
code. He'd become obsessed with the challenge of learning every single code block.

By suppertime, the red zone had begun eating into the neighborhood where Ond and Nektar lived. Ond
lent their next door neighbors--Willy's parents--an extra wireless network antenna to drive off the nants,
and let them run an extension cord to Ond's generator. President Doakes's face gloated and leered from
the sky.

"02A1B59F, 9812D007, 70FFDEF6," said Chu when Nektar went to tuck him in that night. He had
Ond's sheaf of pages with a flashlight under his blanket.

"Give me that," said Nektar, trying to take the pages away from him.