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

no means the worst of all possible worlds. It had problems, sure, but nothing serious
тАФ until now. Now it had just acquired a sucking chest wound; none of those wars
were more than a stubbed toe in comparison to the nightmare future that lay ahead.

Insert key in lock, open door. Drive away, secrets open to the wind, everything
blown to hell and gone.

I'd have to call Eve. We'd have to evacuate everybody.

I had a bank account, a savings account and two credit cards. In the next fifteen
minutes I did a grand tour of the available ATMS and drained every asset I could get
my hands on into a fat wodge of banknotes. Fungible and anonymous cash. It didn't
come to a huge amountтАФthe usual exigencies of urban living had seen to thatтАФbut it
only had to last me a few days.

By the time I headed home to my flat, I felt slightly sheepish. Nothing there seemed
to have changed: I turned on the TV but CNN and the BBC weren't running any
coverage of the end of the world. With deep unease I sat in the living room in front
of my ancient PC: turned it on and pulled up my net link.

More mail ... a second bulletin from comp.risks, full of earnest comments about the
paper. One caught my eye, at the bottom: a message from one of No Such Agency's
tame stoolpigeon academics, pointing out that the theorem hadn't yet been publicly
disclosed and might turn out to be deficient. (Subtext: trust the Government. The
Government is your friend.) It wouldn't be the first time such a major discovery had
been announced and subsequently withdrawn. But then again, they couldn't actually
produce a refutation, so the letter was basically valueless disinformation. I prodded
at the web site again, and this time didn't even get the ACCESS FORBIDDEN
message. The paper had disappeared from the internet, and only the print-out in my
pocket told me that I hadn't imag-ined it.
It takes a while for the magnitude of a catastrophe to sink in. The mathematician who
had posted the original finding would be listed in his university's directory, wouldn't
he? I pointed my web browser at their administrative pages, then picked up my
phone. Dialled a couple of very obscure numbers, waited while the line quality
dropped considerably and the charges began racking up at an enormousтАФbut
untraceably anonymizedтАФrate, and dialled the university switchboard.

"Hello, John Durant's office. Who is that?"

"Hi, I've read the paper about his new theorem," I said, too fast. "Is John Durant
available?"

"Who are you?" asked the voice at the other end of the phone. Female voice, twangy
mid-western accent.

"A researcher. Can I talk to Dr Durant, please?

"I'm afraid he won't be in today," said the voice on the phone. "He's on vacation at
present. Stress due to overwork."