"Charles Stross - Generation Gap" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

Generation Gap
Charles Stross
I didn't go to school to learn about genocide; I learned it on the bus with Jerzy and
Moira and Hammurabi, and we made beautiful corpses. The light was blue and the time was
five diurns from sunset when we caught on to the idea; and it was slick. Slick and smooth as
my inside parts when I come. My Wisdom pipes me that there's a type-descriptor for what we
were тАУ juvenile delinquents. Pejorative, maybe envious context is implied. (Envious of what?
We shone with youth. Wouldn't you be envious?) Anyway, I guess you'll want to know why we
did it, or at least why I went along, so here goes...
School was irrelevant. That was the initial factor that started the tree growing. It's
public knowledge, I guess; all there is to learn in life is search strategy and people-moving. If
you can dig the data and move masses you can roll. The moon's your runway.
Why the earth we reference it as the moon is beyond me, by the way; moon of what?
Some radioactive dirt-ball? I guess we should redefine "the world" too, while we're about it. In
case some of you are new to this frame of reference, I am Farida Ng-3, junior registered
native, Lunar Administrative Zone. Age thirteen years. Crime: intentional genocide. Guilt:
likely. Sentence тАУ that's running ahead.
Anyway, there were seven of us in this crowd. We weren't the only crowd in
Armstrong, but where age distribution peaks at around a hundred years and has a distinctive
skew to it you just know you're in an etymological minority. The old are a different
administrative bloc; they think things differently. They're mostly kiddies; kind of
indistinguishable to us, you understand. They've got aux modules and life support 'till their
cortices crumble and all the old neurones trip out to make room for brand-new widgets that
may not even exist, except in that logical parahyperspace they use for higher functions.
They're not subject to boolean logic; no more TRUE/FALSE dichotomy.
I sometimes met my genetic predecessor, five rungs up the DNA ladder, and he was
ancient. Saw Armstrong himself on a monitor, in real-time. Said he had no face, just a golden
mirror to stop the sun frazzling his bioptics. Great-grandfather wanted to know what it was like
to be a "little girl" тАУ I had to access my Wisdom to parse the referent. Told him I wasn't, never
had been, a "little girl": I was an intermittent/dominant. His synthesiser laughed for him and
told me not to be silly. "Silly" means non-survival oriented. How can it be survival-oriented to
sublimate copulation? Like I hypothesised, the old don't use self-consistent logic structures
any more. Simulate Godel, Von Neumann, spinning in radioactive graves.
I guess if I revert to consensus reality it might be easier on your referencing. Gives a
rational kind of subset, anyway. Nothing rational about kiddies; they were about as relevant
as dinosaurs and birds and things like that, useless for any purpose. We тАУ the gang тАУ existed
between towering walls of calcite and the most complex biosystem of Solspace. Certainly the
second-oldest, if you disregard Soyuzshells. Armstrong City was domed in diamond slightly
thicker than I'm tall, filled with streams and trees and branching herbivores and insects
coming out of your ears. Earwigs, ugh, horrible; use malathion on sight, guilty of ecological
crimes. So what?
That was my introduction to nihilism. A bug that bit me.
School was irrelevant, as I've already noted. I don't need to learn things to know
them; all I need is to know where to find them. Ditto Jerzy, Moira, Hammurabi, Piet, Pallas,
and Kid Inkatha. So how were our activities allocated?
We were hard-ish cases, about ten percent of our generation in Armstrong City, all
born/decanted/activated in the two-hundred-and-eleventh year of foundation. Armstrong City
and associated robotnik industrial zones had a total human population of over 4 EXP 7, of
whom about ninety-five percent тАУ out past the median to nearly two standard deviations тАУ
were kiddies. That made us deviants. Perverts of the moon, network!