"Michael Swanwick - Trojan Horse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

And it didn't matter.
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A great calmness wrapped itself around Elin, an intelligent detachment, cold and impersonal. She found
herself identify-ing with it, realizing that existence was simply not important. It was all things, objects.



She could not see Tory's back, was no longer willing to assume it even existed. She could look up and
see the near side of the earth. The far side might well not exist, and if it didn't, well that didn't matter
either.



She stripped away the world, ignored the externalities. / never realized how dependent I am on sensory
input, she thought. And if you ignored it-there was the void. It had no shape or color or position, but it
was what underlies the bright interplay of colors that was constantly being destroyed by the gray fires of
time. She contemplated the raw stuff of existence.



"Please don't monkey around with your programming," Tory said.



The body was unimportant, too; it was only the focal point for her senses. Ignore them and you could
ignore it. Elin could feel herself fading in the presence of the void. It had no material existence, no real
being. But neither had the world she had always taken for granted-it was but an echo, a ghost, an image
reflected in water.



It was like being a program in a machine and realizing it for the first time.



Landis's voice flooded her. "Donnelly, for God's sake, keep your fingers off the experiment!" The thing
was, the underlying nothingness was real-if "real" had any meaning. If meaning had meaning. But beyond
real and beyond mean-ing, there is what is. And she had found it.



"Donnelly, you're treading on dangerous ground. You've-" Landis's voice was a distraction, and she shut
it off. Elin felt the desire to merge with what was; one simply had to stop the desire for it, she realized,