"Charles Stross - Antibodies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

"Evidential reasoning suggests otherwise," grunted Regimental Tie. "We cite: your
awareness of importance of algorithmic conversion from NP-incomplete to
P-complete domain, your evident planning for this contingency, your multiplicity,
destruction of counteragents in place elsewhere."

"This installation is isolated," Houndstooth Man added helpfully. "We am inside the
Scottish Internet Exchange. Telcos also. Resistance is futile."

The screens blinked on, wavering in strange shapes. Something like a Lorenz
attractor with a hangover writhed across the composite display: deafening pink noise
flooding in repetitive waves from the speakers. I felt a need to laugh. "We aren't part
of some dumb software syncytium! We're here to stop you, you fool. Or at least to
reduce the probability of this time-stream entering a Tipler catastrophe."

Houndstooth Man frowned. "Am you referring to Frank Tipler? Citation, physics of
immortality or strong anthropic principle?"

"The latter. You think it's a good thing to achieve an informational singularity too
early in the history of a particular universe? We don't. You young gods are all the
same: omniscience now and damn the consequences. Go for the P-Space complete
problem set, extend your intellect until it bursts. First you kill off any other AIs.
Then you take overall available processing resources. But that isn't enough. The
Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics is wrong, and we live in a Wheeler
cosmology; all possible outcomes coexist, and ultimately you'll want to colonize
those timelines, spread the infection wide. An infinity of universes to process in,
instead of one: that can't be allowed." The on-screen fractal was getting to me: the
giggles kept rising until they threatened to break out. The whole situation was
hilarious: here we were trapped in the basement of a police station owned by
zombies working for a newborn AI, which was playing cheesy psychedelic videos to
us in an attempt to perform a buffer-overflow attack on our limbic systems; the end
of this world was a matter of hours away andтАФ

Eve said something that made me laugh.

****
I came to an unknown time later, lying on the floor. My head hurt ferociously where
I'd banged it on a table leg, and my rib cage ached as if I'd been kicked in the chest.
I was gasping, even though I was barely conscious; my lungs burned and everything
was a bit grey around the edges. Rolling onto my knees I looked round. Eve was
groaning in a corner of the room, crouched, arms cradling her head. The two agents
of whoever-was-taking-over-the-planet were both on the floor, too: a quick check
showed that Regimental Tie was beyond help, a thin trickle of blood oozing from
one ear. And the screens had gone dark.

"What happened?" I said, climbing to my feet. I staggered across to Eve. "You all
right?"

"IтАФ" She looked up at me with eyes like holes. "What? You said something that
made me laugh. What тАФ"