"John C. Wright - Golden Age 1 - The Golden Age" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wright John C)

AURELIAN, host of the Celebration, fifty-thousand-million-cycle loose capacity.
The ENNEAD consists of nine Sophotech groups, each of over a billion-cycle capacity, including
Warmind, Westmind, Orient, Austral, Boreal, Northwest, Southwest, and others.
EARTHMIND, the unified consciousness in which all terrestrial machines, and machines in
Near-Earth-Orbit, from time to time participate: trillion-cycle capacity.



-=*=-



PROLOGUE

CELEBRATIONS OF THE IMMORTALS

It was a time of masquerade. It was the eve of the High Transcendence, an event so solemn and
significant that it could be held but once each thousand years, and folk of every name and iteration,
phenotype, composition, consciousness and neuroform, from every school and era, had come to
celebrate its coming, to welcome the transfiguration, and to prepare.
Splendor, feast, and ceremony filled the many months before the great event itself. Energy shapes
living in the north polar magnetosphere of the sun, and Cold Dukes from the Kuiper belts beyond
Neptune, had gathered to Old Earth, or sent their representations through the mentality; and celebrants
had come from every world and moon in the solar system, from every station, sail, habitat and
crystal-magnetic latticework.
No human or posthuman race of the Golden Oecumene was absent from these festivities. Fictional as
well as actual personalities were invited. Composition-assisted reconstructions of dead or deleted
paladins and sages, magnates and philosophers, walked by night the boulevards of the Aurelian
palace-city, arm-in-arm with extrapolated demigoddesses from imagined superhuman futures, or
languid-eyed lamia from morbid unrealized alternatives, and strolled or danced among the monuments
and energy sculptures, fountains, dream fixtures, and phantasms, all beneath a silver, city-covered moon,
larger than the moon past ages knew.
And here and there, shining like stars on the active channels of the mentality, were recidivists who had
returned from high transhuman states of mind, bringing back with them thought-shapes or mathematical
constructions inexpressible in human words, haunted by memories of what the last Transcendence had
accomplished, feverish with dreams of what the next might hold.
It was a time of cheer.
And yet, even in such golden days, there were those who would not be satisfied.



-=*=-



THE OLD MAN

On the hundred-and-first night of the Millennial Celebration, Phaethon walked away from the lights
and music, movement and gaiety of the golden palace-city, and out into the solitude of the groves and
gardens beyond. In this time of joy, he was not at ease himself; and he did not know why.