"Travis S. Taylor - The Quantum Connection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Taylor Travis S)

from the meteor impacts. One storm the size of Brazil pounded the south Pacific and stalled in the ocean,
churning it up and making it impassible by air or sea for more than a month. The mega storm eventually
turned and wreaked havoc on Australia and New Zealand. The other major hypercane system spun up
below the equator just above South America. It plowed through Buenos Aires and bounced along the
coastline moving southward. It churned across the Atlantic and cut a path across the Congo, then on to
India before it died out. That storm killed hundreds of thousands. A couple of large hurricanes and
hundreds of tornados had plagued North America and Russia since The Rain, but after about a month the
weather began to settle down.
It took about all of that month for me to get over my depressed funk or state of disrepair or whatever
it was. I would get so depressed that I would block out hours of time where I had just sat there and
cried. And sometimes, I didn't even remember the hours-at-a-time depression when it would pass. I
went to several different shrinks for help. They ran tests on me and did brain scans and everything came
out normal. It was odd to me that the rest of the world went on about its business and was only fazed
slightly by The Rain. After The Rain our society didn't fall apart at all, but for some reason I seemed to
have. People in general went on about their business while I fell down into a pit of something akin to
despair.
"Buy a bunch of these expensive drugs," the shrinks tell me. "They're the only cure." Damned
headshrinkers!
So I take the drugs, but the only way I seem to survive within my depression and get my mind into
some sort of useful mode is to replay the Sequence against JackieZZ and attempt to reverse engineer her
mini black hole. You see, the Internet II, or the Framework as Realm Citizens call it, enabled RealmSoft
to develop a virtual world with real laws of physics and nature and real ups and downs. Of course, the
developers of The Realm wouldn't tell anybody what the laws were, which is part of what makes it so
interesting. Part of the fun of The Realm adventure is to try and discover its laws. This is done by creating
a virtual persona, such as mine, StevieM09, and living and having adventures in the various worlds of The
Realm. As you learn more and more about The Realm you become more powerful and can manipulate
things within it more readily. The real wizards in there play the Gladiator Sequence and try to show off
their power. If you kill a Sequencer, you get the secrets of The Realm that that Sequencer has
discovered. If you are lucky enough, and you stumble across a Node, you can upload your own code
into the virtual reality and get a royalty for it any time it is used. I had done this with my code for the
EnergyBeingSM09 just as JackieZZ had obviously done with ZZ's Hole. These were two subroutines
that "were not of The Realm." The problem is that if you didn't know where the secret code was hidden,
and the secret button sequence to activate it, you couldn't use it. JackieZZ had died before ever selling
the button sequence to any other Sequencers. So I thought I could recreate it now that I had seen it.
Me, I am a code writer by choice and had been completing my bachelor's degree in computer
science at the University of Dayton in Ohio when the meteors fell. How'd I get to Ohio from California
you ask? Well, when I was in high school back in Bakersfield, before it was . . . destroyed . . . I wrote
my own operating system. I was trying to get my own game designs into the mainstream but thought that
the code requirements were clunky. So, I created an operating system that was much more stable and
more precisely efficient than any other codes I knew of at the time. At the request of my science teacher I
entered it into the school's science fair. I won at school level, then at state, and then won my division at
the International Science and Engineering Fair, or ISEF as we called it, plus I got an honorable mention
overall. I lost to a particle accelerator, an optical computer, some bioluminescence thing, and a wrong
solution to Fermat's Last Theorem.
As a special award I received a full tuition scholarship for both the University of Alabama in
Huntsville and the University of Dayton. Of course, as a California state citizen I could have gone to
school in California for free, but my parents were way overprotective and I was afraid if I stayed in-state
that they would continuously be checking in on me. What college kid wants that? So I didn't want to stay
home, and I sure didn't want to live in a hick town in Alabama, so I chose Dayton; at least they have cool
air shows there.