"Charles Stross - Rogue Farm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

"No, why?"

She pulled out a fist-sized box and pushed a button on the side of it, waited for a light
on its side to blink green, and nodded. "Fuckin' polis bugs."

"Isn't that a --"

"Ask me no questions an' I'll tell you no fibs." Wendy grinned.

"Uhhuh." Joe took a deep breath: he'd guessed Wendy had some dodgy connections,
and this -- a portable local jammer -- was proof: any police bugs within two or three
metres would be blind and dumb, unable to relay their chat to the keyword-trawling
subsentient coppers whose job it was to prevent consipracy-to-commit offenses before
they happened. It was a relic of the internet age, when enthusiastic legislators had
accidentally demolished the right of free speech in public by demanding keyword
monitoring of everything within range of a network terminal-- not realising that in
another few decades 'network terminals' would be self-replicating bots the size of fleas
and about as common as dirt. (The 'net itself had collapsed shortly thereafter, under the
weight of self-replicating viral libel lawsuits, but the legacy of public surveillance
remained.) "Okay. Tell me about metal, meta --"

"Metabolism." Wendy began walking towards the field behind the pub. "And stage trees.
Stage trees started out as science fiction, like? Some guy called Niven -- anyway. What
you do is, you take a pine tree and you hack it. The xylem vessels running up the
heartwood, usually they just lignify and die in a normal tree. Stage trees go one better,
and before the cells die they nitrate the cellulose in their walls. Takes one fuckin' crazy
bunch of hacked 'zymes to do it, right? And lots of energy, more energy than trees'd
normally have to waste. Anyways, by the time the tree's dead it's like ninety percent
nitrocellulose, plus built-in stiffeners and baffles and microstructures. It's not, like,
straight explosive -- it detonates cell by cell, and some of the xylemtubes are, eh, well,
the farm grows custom-hacked fungal hyphae witha depolarizing membrane nicked from
human axons down them to trigger the reaction. It's about efficient as'at old-time Ariane
or Atlasrocket. Not very, but enough."

"Uh." Joe blinked. "That meant to mean something to me?"

"Oh 'eck, Joe." Wendy shook her head. "Think I'd bend your ear if it wasn't?"

"Okay." He nodded, seriously. "What can I do?"

"Well." Wendy stopped and stared at the sky. High above them, a belt of faint light
sparkled with a multitude of tiny pinpricks; a deep green wagon train making its orbital
transfer window, self-sufficient post-human Lamarckian colonists, space-adapted,
embarking on the long, slow transferto Jupiter.

"Well?" He waited expectantly.

"You're wondering where all that fertilizer's from," Wendy said eliptically.