"Peter Watts - Home" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

This is a nifty little piece, albeit nothing new to those familiar
with Starfish. It started life as a coda to that book, ultimately
discarded except for a paragraph or two that ended up elsewhere
in the plot. But it's a creepy enough tale in its own right, and
stands on its own, and it might even make the point better than the
original "A Niche" did. (It certainly does so more efficiently;
smaller cast, fewer words, less plot.) Ultimately it came out in On
Spec1 in the summer of 1999, coinciding with Starfish's initial
release.
This is also the only story to date that I've illustrated myself,
although OS never used the illustration.




Home
by
Peter Watts



It has forgotten what it was.
Not that that matters, down here. What good is a name when
there's nothing around to use it? This one doesn't remember where
it came from. It doesn't remember the murky twilight of the North
Watts, P. 1999. Home. On Spec 11(1): 69-75.
1
2 Peter Watts

Pacific Drift, or the noise and gasoline aftertaste that drove it back
below the thermocline. It doesn't remember the gelatinous veneer
of language and culture that once sat atop its spinal cord. It
doesn't even remember the long slow dissolution of that overlord
into dozens of autonomous, squabbling subroutines. Now, even
those have fallen silent.
Not much comes down from the cortex any more. Low-level
impulses flicker in from the parietal and occipital lobes. The
motor strip hums in the background. Occasionally, Broca's area
mutters to itself. The rest is mostly dead and dark, worn smooth by
a sluggish black ocean cold as antifreeze. All that's left is pure
reptile.
It pushes on, blind and unthinking, oblivious to the weight of
four hundred liquid atmospheres. It eats whatever it can find.
Desalinators and recyclers keep it hydrated. Sometimes, old
mammalian skin grows sticky with secreted residues; newer skin,
laid on top, opens pores to the ocean and washes everything clean
with aliquots of distilled sea water.
The reptile never wonders about the signal in its head that keeps
it pointing the right way. It doesn't know where it's headed, or
why. It only knows, with pure brute instinct, how to get there.