Charles Stross - Duat

VIP免费

2024-12-16 0 0 238.68KB 103 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

2: In the Duat

[ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ]

[ Main Index ] [ Fiction Index ] [ Scratch Monkey Index ] [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ]

[ Copyright ] [ Feedback ] Oshi Adjani was dreaming.

She dreamed that she opened her eyes. I can see, she thought. And it was a miracle, an

answered prayer.

Outside the open window the lizard-birds chittered angrily at each another. A gentle

susurration drifted from the marketplace so far below. Smells of cooking food and

aromatic spices tickled her nose, redolent of a dozen half-forgotten worlds. The sheets of

imported cotton scratched against her skin as she rolled over, fetching up against the

slightly yielding warmth of --

Ivan. She smelt his skin, a comforting musk that reminded her of other days, other

sharings, a respite from fear and a gaining of sight. "Wake up," she said, yawning. Her

eyes closed, her tongue stretching for the air between her white teeth: Ivan stirred, began

to roll onto his back, just as he always had.

"What time is it?" he asked.

"Daytime." The sun was rising in the west; below them, the city was bustling into life. She

opened her and looked down at him, feeling a misplaced sense of loss.

Ivan smiled up at her lazily. White irises, white teeth, the rest of him as deep a brown as

she had ever seen. He'd taken out his contacts, the ones she liked him to wear. "And is that

any reason to get up?" he asked. "Tell me, is it? Is it?"

"No." She pouted at him: his smile widened, ringing chords of déja vu in her dream.

"Hey, did I rattle your cage? Was it --" His eyes widened further and they weren't smiling

any more. What ... A gut-deep fear lit her bones up with cold fire, burning from the inside

out. ( This happens every night, every time I dream.) She tried to look round, to confront

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20Duat%20(ss).html (1 of 103)4-7-2007 2:25:58

2: In the Duat

whatever he saw over her shoulder, because she knew she could protect him from it if she

could see it in time; but it was like staring into her blind spot. A zone that shimmered into

brightness, a white of total saturation, meaningless optical noise ... hanging in front of her

face like a threat and a reminder ...

"No." She knew what came next. Next the sight peeled away from the bones, the eyes

reverting to fiery dust as Ivan left her again; no, this can't be happening! -- it was the

sense of horror that was worst, the helplessness of knowing that this nightmare had

already happened and that nothing could ever restore him to her --

Then a hand of stone descended on her shoulder and shook her until she woke up.

" No!" She said it aloud, awake now, aware that her eyes were shut: yet still she tried to

sleep, blindly trying to thrust herself back into the dream in which he was still alive and

warm -- "go 'way."

"Oshi. You've got to wake up. Now."

Shivers raced along her spine: she bolted upright in bed and opened her eyes, floating

combat-ready in the low gravity of a space station far from home. "What are you doing in

here?" she demanded. "Don't do that!"

Helmut, a damp, glum presence, blinked at her from across the room. He was part of the

backup crew who had scraped Oshi in after her last mission, gathering up the pieces with

infinite care: medical support. An engineer to combat-tune the reflexes of front-line staff

like Oshi. "I have remote override on the microdoctors in your spinal ganglia. Just kick-

fired a few nerve trunks ..."

She relaxed fractionally. "Yes? You've got some more explaining to do, then. What time

is it?"

"Morning, local. Look, things are happening. The Boss wants to see you. And there's

some kind of alert in progress; we've been told to get ready for redeployment real soon

now. Back to civilization, maybe. You want to get dressed? I could fill you in over

breakfast."

"There'll be time." She stood up, naked, flexing muscles that were stronger than they had

been even yesterday. She stared at him, unblinkingly. "Would you mind leaving?"

"Oh, sorry --" Helmut turned to the door, flushing like an exposed shoplifter.

"It's not that," she said flatly, bending to retrieve an overall from the chair where the

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20Duat%20(ss).html (2 of 103)4-7-2007 2:25:58

2: In the Duat

wardrobe had placed it: "I just want some time to think. Please." The Boss wants to talk to

me. That was one thought she could do without. She'd scrupulously avoided thinking

about it, ever since she'd been rescued from the shuttle in low orbit, even though she knew

it was inevitable. Well then, she would tackle it in due course. One step at a time.

Oshi's room was incredibly bare. There was nothing but a white-walled cell with a bed in

it, and a blank frame that could pretend to be a window. Holograms could hang there,

illusory worldscapes for the homesick; Oshi wanted none of that. She shuddered for a

moment, clenching her eyes tightly shut against the emptiness, then snapped her fingers.

A sink extruded from one wall and she let it wash and clean her face with expert,

impersonal hands. After it dried her with a fresh, unscented towel, it brushed and styled

her hair as she liked it: short, sleek, and aggressive. Better, she thought, yawning at her

reflection in its monitor: I almost look human. She tried to smile at herself then winced,

remembering the pale vulnerabilities of night. It still took her breath away, her own casual

acceptance of vision. She dressed in silence, equipping herself for the day ahead.

Helmut was waiting outside. He took her arm and tried to lead her: "please let go," she

said, so impersonally that he dropped it as if she'd stung him.

"I'm sorry," he said. "You want to eat before talking to ..? I find it makes it easier ..."

"I'll dine later," she said automatically. "You haven't filled me in on the situation."

He seemed surprised. "I thought you'd have checked the news," he said.

Now she did smile; sour as a lemon and twice as sharp. "Bad news I prefer to hear from

human lips. It's more personal that way."

The architecture of the station was customised to fit the vasculature of a hollowed-out

asteroid, a design perfected through many generations of development and

experimentation. It resembled a mass of trees and diamond bubbles: big trees, gene-

restricted to grow out rather than up, that filled the troglodyte caverns and ulcerous

tunnels with an explosion of foliage. Butterflies flickered between blossoming orchids and

creeping convolvulus, their wings moving lazily in the low-gee environment of the

spinning rock. From the outside the base resembled a cinder, dark and angular in the harsh

perspectives of vacuum; stealth screens concealed the subterranean eden within.

The corridor looped right round the equator of the station, curved to follow the shell of the

hollowed-out asteroid as it looped back on itself. Indirect lights shed a pearly glow across

a carpet of living fur. The slow thermal roll of the structure provided a semblance of

gravity beneath Oshi's feet. But the tranquility of the station was broken today; she ducked

to one side as a convoy of drones whined past along the emergency rail overhead. "What's

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20Duat%20(ss).html (3 of 103)4-7-2007 2:25:58

2: In the Duat

happening?"

Helmut peeled himself off the opposite wall and shook imaginary dust from one sleeve.

He glanced back down the corridor. "Must be busy, I imagine. Overflow from the service

ducts. We'd better --" His eyes unfocused.

Oshi caught it moments later: a whispering at her inner ear as cellular network relays

dumped incoming news into her wisdom receptacle. The transceivers, cheap as flies and

twice as ubiquitous, scattered data like dust throughout the colony: the flipside of their

duty to upload digitized mind-maps. The news chittered for attention; Oshi blinked,

signaling interest to the monitors embedded within her.

A hallucination of raw text spiraled up the inside of her eyelids, coarse as sandpaper -- the

Boss preferred writing to speech, for some reason. Important news. Important

news. Confirmation is achieved; satisfaction guaranteed.

Our stock is rising, the enemy dying. It will soon be time

to set sail for pastures new. Oshi Adjani, I wish to speak

with you in the throne room, at your earliest convenience.

"Ack." Working her jaws to swallow her disgust, Oshi glanced at Helmut. "Did you get

that?"

"Get what?" His knowing smirk told her all she needed to know.

"Meet you later," she said tersely. "I'm off." Up the corridor and away. "Damn."

Oshi didn't want to be around other people right now. It wasn't anything she could

articulate: a fear of confronting what she'd done, perhaps, tainted with revulsion at the

other station occupants' unfeeling voyeurism. (Everyone she met fawned over her,

wanting to know: what was it like?) Since leaving New Salazar she carried a creeping

sense of guilt. It was as if righteous fury could decay to uncertainty and the nasty paranoia

of a middle-aged war criminal waiting for the police to knock on the door. She had been

tempted to bite Helmut's head off: not a tactful move to make on one's physician. But he

made her nervous. Just another nasty staring presence hanging around her, reeking of

prurient curiosity. (Ask the hangman: what was it like?) She couldn't shake off the feeling

that everyone know exactly what she'd done. It was everywhere in the air of the station,

the stench of an original sin.

Oshi flew round the bend and into a drop tube running between levels. She clung to a vine

and let it pull her along, wafting past stands of succulent cacti tended by hoverfly robots

the size of gnats. Given the burden of memories she carried, she decided, she felt

remarkably empty. Scooped out, as if Year Zero Man had deprived her of insight into her

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20Duat%20(ss).html (4 of 103)4-7-2007 2:25:58

2: In the Duat

purpose. She shook her head, trying to clear the fog in it, edgily wondering what this

could all mean. The Boss wanted to talk to her in person -- through His incarnate body --

and in her experience interviews with the management always boded ill.

Whoever designed the throne room had lacked all sense of humour, not to mention

proportion. It was a parody of a mediaeval court: it nested deep inside the asteroid station,

close by the battery of fusion reactors that powered the installation. The decor was a study

in pointlessness: rectilinear walls lined with spurious flying butresses, vegetable fibre

tapestries, steps leading up to the throne itself, steps in zero gee. The Boss used it as a

setting when he wanted he address the troops, declare stock options, congratulate or

punish loyal workers and miscreants. Oshi hated it. It reminded her of other places, long

ago. The air tasted of bullshit. Worse, whenever she spoke to the Boss -- which was rarely

-- she had a nagging sense that he knew everything she was about to say before she

framed it with her lips.

Oshi did not like the Boss. And she was quite sure the feeling was mutual.

"Greetings, my dear!" He -- she reminded herself: no human, this -- sprawled across the

tall-backed throne as if it was an armchair in some monstrous living room. He smiled and

nodded in her direction, three massive chins jiggling in ponderous sympathy. Small, piggy

eyes twinkled with alarming bonhomie. "And how are we feeling today?"

"You called." She stopped short of the dais, anchoring herself to the floor by her toes.

"Something the matter?"

"Not exactly."

The Boss smiled again, in imitation of reassurance. How much of it is really in that thing?

Oshi wondered: and how much exists entirely in the Dreamtime? (The body was nothing

more than a biological robot.) "Why am I here?" she asked, bluntly.

"Questions, questions." The Boss shook his great head, heavier with its fatty jowls than

Oshi's entire body. "I trust you are fully recovered?"

"Fully recovered," Oshi echoed. She blinked, not trusting herself to explore the

implications of the question: "you could say that. Two weeks in the tank and a couple of

days in deep interface, learning how to use my new eyes ... that's fine." She drew a deep

breath, swallowing the next sentence. I'm fully recovered. Apart from the dreams.

"How charming!" The Boss leaned forward, confidingly. "You know I consider your

welfare to be important? I worry about you, my dear. If you are uncomfortable, please feel

free to confide in me. You can rely on my discretion."

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20Duat%20(ss).html (5 of 103)4-7-2007 2:25:58

2: In the Duat

I see. She stared at the Boss intently. Revulsion shuddered through her as she saw his

smile. Friendly indulgence or monstrous cynicism? "Thanks. I can't tell you what it means

to me to know that. Really, it means a lot. But. I'm not, too --" She stopped, uncertain.

Uncertainty was a bad idea where the Boss was concerned, a tiny voice screamed in the

back of her mind.

"Yes?" asked the Boss.

"I don't understand why," she said carefully. Licking dry lips, choosing words like

footsteps through a minefield: "what we're doing in this system? Rubbing out a monster,

fine. A good and principled action. But isn't it ... tangential?"

"Tangential?" He raised one thunderous eyebrow.

"To our mission, as I understand it. Isn't that --"

"Yes."

She was about to apologize and backtrack hastily, when she felt a sudden sharp bite on

one hand. Glancing down, she saw nothing there: was it psychosomatic? As she tried to

work it out she stumbled into a memory of the jungle, where one of the trees had lashed

her in her progress. That had bitten her, too, like the first stunning sight of Radiant

Progress Number Six Factory from the air.

"I thought we were here, in this system, to stop the genocide. Isn't that right? But what I

see -- this isn't a low cost installation, is it? You've invested in a small scale colony, here.

This station, it's far bigger than a quick rescue mission would need. Isn't it?"

"Yes." The Boss stared at her, a greasy cowlick of hair shadowing his eyes. They glittered

like rubies, digital fires flickering in their depths.

"So?" Oshi shrugged uncomfortably. "There's a hidden agenda. Not just maintenance on

the Dreamtime?"

The Boss stirred on his throne, attention focussed entirely on Oshi as she stood before

him. Gargoyles atop the flying butresses opened their dark eyes and stared down at her.

"You never asked any questions before."

"What is the agenda behind this mission? The truth, please."

The Boss's body tensed, massive fists clenching on the arms of the throne. Oshi heard the

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20Duat%20(ss).html (6 of 103)4-7-2007 2:25:58

2: In the Duat

sound of wood shattering. Elsewhere, deep in the core of the station, processor elements

ran wild beneath a heavy load of cognition. Like all Superbrights, the Boss kept nine

tenths of his personality elsewhere, scattered across the Dreamtime.

"Why do you ask this now, of all times?"

I can't go back, she realised, heart thumping. It didn't make things any easier. "Because I

would like to know the truth."

"The truth won't set you free," warned the Boss.

"Let me be the judge of that." Oshi stared back at him impudently, jaw clenched to stop

her teeth from chattering. She had a vague idea what a Superbright could do to her. It was

messy: nothing like sharp, clean shrapnel. "I don't trust you any more."

"What a shame for you." The Boss smiled again: this time his expression was truly

frightening. "I really would advise you not to persist in this, Oshi. I thought things were

going swimmingly for you, but I must confess this unpleasantness takes me quite by

surprise. Whatever can be wrong?"

"You sent me into hell to bring back a demon's head, and now I'd like a receipt. You can

stop patronizing me now. You know exactly what this unpleasantness is all about."

"I see that you've been got at," said the Boss, in a tone of mild irritation.

"You've been lying to me all along," accused Oshi. "Economical with the truth."

"Well yes, of course. But would you have wanted it any other way? I had to make a lot of

hard choices, you know. And what is hard for me, might well prove impossible for a mere

human. Yours not to wonder why, etcetera."

"But why?" She was puzzled, adrift in a sea of truth and consequences. "You didn't need

to. You could have programmed us. Used drones, cyborgs. You're a Superbright. I thought

you could do that sort of thing?"

"Of course. But that begs the question. Or don't you really want to know the truth?"

"Yes." It slipped out before she could bite her tongue. The Boss stopped smiling.

"Damnation. I really hoped you had more intelligence than that. A stronger instinct for

self-preservation. I suppose I shall have to tell you everything, now. Such a shame I'll

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20Duat%20(ss).html (7 of 103)4-7-2007 2:25:58

2: In the Duat

have to kill you afterwards."

"Try me." Oshi slipped into combat-mode, pattern sensors in her neocortex boosting her

awareness of her surroundings on a surge of adrenalin: "Cut the crap and tell me the

truth!"

The Boss frowned, face like a distant hurricane: "Indeed!" A vast bolus of information

battered at her wisdom interface. She tried to dodge, to shut it out with countermeasures

designed to defend her sanity, but she was too late: the Boss, after all, had invested her

with these defenses -- and who better to know how to overcome them? A whining storm

of data ran red-hot wires through her ears. Something vast and amorphous began to

download itself into her wisdom cache, swamping everything else in a monstrous roar of

data. Transcievers capable of digitizing an entire human mind and uploading it within

seconds of death went into overload as they fielded the enormous infodump. " Now,"

rumbled the Boss. "Tell me you want to know the truth. Small foolish primate. Harumph!"

But Oshi wasn't answering, then or soon thereafter. She was trying to make sense of the

accessible mass of information that the Boss had dumped into her. Not just an

explanation, but whole strategies for understanding:

The galaxy wasn't always like this. There was a time when human beings were more

important than they are today. Look back, if you will, and try to imagine what it must

have been like to be the dominant species. No, you don't need to curse at me: it won't do

any good. Anyway, all this happened long ago ...

Countless centuries ago there was only one world. In the last days of humanity's terrestrial

gestation, the environmental situation on Earth was desperate. The ecosystem was

imploding under the weight of population bloom and biodiversity crash. Gaia was on life

support, held together by a tenuous weave of nanomachinery and artificial bioforms. The

first Von Neumann machines were mining the moons and planets of the system: robot

factories, just intelligent enough to build copies of themselves from local raw materials,

universal enough to fabricate anything else their controllers could design. Their

productivity was limited only by available energy and mineral resources.

Your species has always been inclined to light out for the colonies when overpopulation

looms. But in those days there were no free territories: the nearest stars were decades

away, the cost of travel so vast that a payload as heavy as a single human body would

bankrupt nations. Terraforming Mars or Venus would take millennia, offering scant relief

from the crisis. Some other solution was necessary.

Well, nobody ever accused human beings of not being ingenious. The very population

pressure that threatened to destroy your home world gave you the tool to overcome the

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20Duat%20(ss).html (8 of 103)4-7-2007 2:25:58

2: In the Duat

constraints: brains and minds, a million stellar geniuses, the creativity of a dozen ages

crammed into a single generation. You literally thought your way out of the trap ... and

into something larger.

The solution to being trapped in one solar system was a happy coincidence: simultaneous

breakthroughs in the fields of bionics and computer science. Nanoprobes allowed the

human brain to be mapped from the inside out, its configuration and software states

transmitted to any external processor complex enough to run it as a program. Your minds

are not qualitatively more complex than any other piece of software: you can run on

processors other than those developed by biological evolution. Robot spacecraft could

travel to the stars, but not in a human lifetime. But once they got there they could build

human bodies and transcribe stored human personalities back into the virgin grey matter.

A kind of reincarnation.

The ships carried Von Neumann machines; self-replicating robots programmed to explore,

spawn, and explore again. Autonomous and cheap, they visited and mapped the nearer star

systems before they and their descendants moved on, rippling outward in an expanding

sphere of exploration. Every time a probe entered and mapped a new system, it left behind

a beacon. Occasionally a probe from one family tree would enter a new star system which

had been mapped by a probe from one of the other families: recognizing the beacon, the

Von Neumann machine would switch to an alternative behaviour. Picking a suitable

airless moon, it would land and begin to reproduce. After twenty or so generations there

were enough robot factories to begin the construction of an expansion processor, a vast

solar-powered computing surface covering the entire surface of the planet. Huge slabs of

processing circuitry spread rapidly across the airless moons of gas giants. Once

completed, the expansion surface was hooked up to a gatecoder -- a laser communicator --

and signalled its readiness to the slowly-developing interstellar processor network. Which,

vast as it was, served mainly to execute a single, ferociously complex, distributed

program: the Dreamtime.

The Dreamtime was designed by Superbrights, the ultimate descendants of the first human

experminents in artificial intelligence. A remarkably complex virtual space, it provided an

afterlife fit for the senses of a human or Superbright mind embedded within it. It also

provided a transport layer: protocols to allow the transmission of uploaded human and

Superbright minds between isolated stellar domains. Uploaded travellers were transmitted

as streams of data packets, then reassembled and downloaded into cloned bodies at their

destination by a mechanism known as a gatecoder.

More subtly, the Dreamtime network also offered a back-up to reality. Nanotech encoders

proliferated on every colony world, weaving themselves into the nervous systems of the

entire population. Constantly filtering a trickle of data through decentralized, cellular

transcievers, they could provide access to the stored wisdom of the ages. They also served

to relocate the active centre of identity into the Dreamtime at the moment of death, until

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20Duat%20(ss).html (9 of 103)4-7-2007 2:25:58

2: In the Duat

the awakening of a new cloned body. The Dreamtime became the last, greatest software

engineering project -- the gateway to the stars, the repository of wisdom, and the key to

reincarnation.

Some people tried to live within the Dreamtime, treating it as a virtual space. Nobody

grew old; conditions were hospitable, a function of a universe designed for intelligent

occupation. When the density of the simulations increased with time and population

growth, the local Dreamtime -- tied to the finite capacity of the local expansion processor

-- simply ran slower and slower relative to real time. The oldest sectors of the afterlife

disappeared into apparent stasis, carrying out a spacelike colonisation of the future; those

that remained close to the Centre became posthuman, incommunicative. Meanwhile, new

expansion worlds were added to the Dreamtime constantly as the halo of probes expanded

outwards. And so the process continued, for the first few hundred years: new cybernetic

colonies gave rise to populations on new terrestrial planets, the scope of the afterlife

growing to match the new dirt-bound planetary civilizations flourishing on the rim.

Then things began to go wrong ...

Oshi opened her eyes and sat up. Anger made her snap: "Hree was right all along the line.

You are a monster."

The Boss yawned elaborately. "I'm not human, if that's what you mean. But I never

claimed to be, did I?"

"Monster." Oshi waited, half-relaxed. Never thought I would end this way. So abrupt, so

unfinished. She stared at the Boss's body's forehead. Strange how you can never tell who

the real enemy is.

"Insults will not endear you to me, Oshi." He stared down from the throne, slouching

against one armrest: "and indeed, that appelation could be applied to you, too."

"But I don't --" she winced. Her head stung where she'd fallen against the floor. "I'm

speechless. I figured there was an element of manipulation, of profit, but I didn't realise --"

"Yes." The Boss sat up straight. No, that wasn't quite right: it was only the body the Boss

used to communicate with humans. The Boss himself was elsewhere. The body stared at

Oshi with eyes that glowed from the shadows of his face. "You have not remembered

everything yet," he said, smooth as oil. "Are you trying to avoid it, by any chance?"

"I want the truth, damn you! Not more lies!"

"No lies." Shadows stirred against the wall behind the Boss. Within the wall. Patterns of

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20Duat%20(ss).html (10 of 103)4-7-2007 2:25:58

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

2:IntheDuat2:IntheDuat[1][2][3][4][5][MainIndex][FictionIndex][ScratchMonkeyIndex][1][2][3][4][5][Copyright][Feedback]OshiAdjaniwasdreaming.Shedreamedthatsheopenedhereyes.Icansee,shethought.Anditwasamiracle,anansweredprayer.Outsidetheopenwindowthelizard-birdschitteredangrilyateachanother.Agentlesus...

展开>> 收起<<

Charles Stross - Duat.pdf

共103页,预览21页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Charles Stross - Duat

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: