"John C. Wright - Golden Age 3 - The Golden Transcendence" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wright John C)

Odd, how matter-of-fact that sounded. The machine was merely reporting that he
would, indeed, regret the decision.
And, just as he blacked out again, he did.
Phaethon woke in dull confusion, numb, heavy, paralyzed, blind. He could not
open his eyes, could not move.
For one suffocating moment, he wondered if he had been captured by the enemy,
and was even now a helpless and disembodied brain, floating in a sea of
nutrient muck.
He was glad Atkins had not told him the plan. He remembered that he had agreed
to it; but this was all he remembered.
Where was he? A short-term memory file opened: He was aboard the ship. His
ship.
His ship.
A long-term memory file opened, and he saw the schematics of the mighty
vessel. A hundred kilometers from prow to stern, sleek and streamlined as a
spear blade, a hull of golden adamantium, an artificially stable element of
unimaginable weight: immeasurably strong, inductile, refractory. The
supermetal had an impossibly high melting point: plasma could not make the
adamantium run; it could dive into a medium-sized yellow star and emerge
unscathed.
The core of the ship was all fuel, hundreds of cubic acres of frozen
antihydrogen. Like its positive-matter cousin, antihydrogen took on metallic
properties when condensed to near-absolute-zero temperatures,
and could be magnetized. Millions upon millions of metric tonnes of this fuel
were held inside endless web-works of magnetic cells throughout the hollow
volume of the great ship. Less than 1 percent of her interior was taken up
with living quarters and control minds; everything else was fuel and drive.
It was the ship mind he was interlinked with now. Somehow, he sensed his
wounded half-finished thoughts were being played out by the near-Sophotech
superintelligence of the ship. But what a mind it was! A perfect map of the
galaxy was in its memory, or, at least, the segment of the galaxy visible from
Sol. The massive core, a hell of dust and radiation hiding a black hole
thousands of light-years in radius, blotted out light or radio or any signal
from the far side of the galaxy. Even with such a ship as this, those places
were thousands or millions of years' travel away, a mystery that even
immortals would have to live a long time to solve.
But not he. He was no longer immortal. One of the conditions of his exile was
that his backup copies of himself, his memory and essential self, had been
dumped from the mentality. He was mortal again.
OrтАФwait. The ship mind had just downloaded a copy of himself into himself.
What was going on?
Usually, when a human mind was linked to a machine-mind, opening memory files
required no hesitation, no searching around, no fumbling, no awkward seeking
through indexes and menus: the machine usually knew what he would want to know
before he knew it himself, and would insert it seamlessly and painlessly into
his memory (making such minor adjustments in his nervous system as needed, to
make it seem as if be had always known whatever it was he needed to know).
Had an illegal copy been made of his mind? Was he truly the real Phaethon? Or
had Atkins arranged to have one of the military Sophotechs under the War-mind
make a copy without public knowledge?