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

theyтАЩre welcome to the wreckage.
There arenтАЩt many people about, so when the puffing middle aged guy in the suit comes into view, jogging
along as if heтАЩs chasing his stolen wallet, Gregor spots him instantly. ItтАЩs Brundle, looking slightly pathetic
when removed from his man-hive. Gregor waves hesitantly, and Brundle alters course.
тАЬRunning late,тАЭ he pants, kicking at the pigeons until they flap away to make space for him at the other end of
the bench.
тАЬReally?тАЭ
Brundle nods. тАЬThey should be coming over the horizon in another five minutes.тАЭ
тАЬHow did you engineer it?тАЭ Gregor isnтАЩt particularly interested but technical chit-chat serves to pass the
remaining seconds.
тАЬMan-in-the-middle, ramified by all their intelligence assessments.тАЭ Brundle looks self-satisfied.
тАЬUnderstanding their caste specialization makes it easier. Two weeks ago we told the GRU that MacNamara
was using the NP-101 program as cover for a pre-emptive D-SLAM strike. At the same time we got the NOAA
to increase their mapping launch frequency, and pointed the increased level of Soviet activity out to our
sources in SAC. It doesnтАЩt take much to get the human hives buzzing with positive feedback.тАЭ
Of course, Brundle and Gregor arenтАЩt using words for this incriminating exchange. Their phenotypically human
bodies conceal some useful modifications, knobby encapsulated tumors of neuroectoderm that shield the
delicate tissues of their designers, neural circuits that have capabilities human geneticists havenтАЩt even
imagined. A visitor from a more advanced human society might start excitedly chattering about wet-phase
nanomachines and neural-directed broadband packet radio, but nobody in New York on a sunny day in 1979
plus one million is thinking in those terms. They still think the universe belongs to their own kind, skull-locked
socialтАУbut not eusocialтАУprimates. Brundle and Gregor know better. TheyтАЩre workers of a higher order,
carefully tailored to the task in hand, and although they look human thereтАЩs less to their humanity than meets
the eye. Even Gagarin can probably guess better, an individualist trapped in the machinery of a utopian
political hive. The termites of New Iowa and a host of other Galapagos continents on the disk are not the
future, but theyтАЩre a superior approximation to anything humans have achieved, even those planetary
instantiations that have doctored their own genome in order to successfully implement true eusocial
societies. Group minds arenтАЩt prone to anthropic errors.
тАЬSo itтАЩs over, is it?тАЭ Gregor asks aloud, in the stilted serial speech to which humans are constrained.
тАЬYep. Any minute nowтАУтАЭ
The air raid sirens begin to wail. Pigeons spook, exploding outward in a cloud of white panic.
тАЬOh, look.тАЭ
The entity behind GregorтАЩs eyes stares out across the river, marking time while his cancers call home. HeтАЩs
always vague about these last hours before the end of a missionтАУa destructive time, in which information is
lostтАУbut at least he remembers the rest. As do the hyphae of the huge rhizome network spreading deep
beneath the park, thinking slow vegetable thoughts and relaying his sparky monadic flashes back to his
mother by way of the engineered fungal strands that thread the deep ocean floors. The next version of him will
be created knowing almost everything: the struggle to contain the annoying, hard-to-domesticate primates
with their insistent paranoid individualism, the dismay of having to carefully sterilize the few enlightened ones
like SaganтАж
Humans are not useful. The future belongs to ensemble intelligences, hive minds. Even the mock-termite
aboriginals have more to contribute. And Gregor, with his teratomas and his shortage of limbs, has more to
contribute than most. The culture that sent him, and a million other anthropomorphic infiltrators, understands
this well: he will be rewarded and propagated, his genome and memeome preserved by the collective even as
it systematically eliminates yet another outbreak of humanity. The collective is well on its way towards
occupying a tenth of the disk, or at least of sweeping it clean of competing life forms. Eventually it will open
negotiations with its neighbors on the other disks, joining the process of forming a distributed consciousness
that is a primitive echo of the vast ramified intelligence wheeling across the sky so far away. And this time
round, knowing why it is being birthed, the new God will have a level of self-understanding denied to its
parent.