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Ribofunk :: Филиппо Пол Ди
Страница: 153 из 156Stopping next to it, he lashed out at its trunk with a kick.
"Urb! Wake up!"
Unnaturally, the curtains of fabric moved quickly to envelop him, tasting, seeking to analyze and convert. Again, he did not resist. After a few seconds they slowly, reluctantly withdrew.
A pair of bark lips formed on the trunk of the "tree."
"What are you?" said the Urb in an innocuous tenon.
Greenlaw spoke with a bravado he barely felt. To be actually conversing with this monstrosity surpassed all rational thinking.
"Your doom, Urb. Your extinction."
"You are small, alone, unsupported. No tiny system so isolated can be self sufficient for long. Soon you will have to come out of your shell. Then I shall be you, and you me."
The lips were subsumed back into the tree, and the conversation was clearly at an end.
The Urb did not sound concerned. Did it understand emotions, threats, and bluffs? What had it retained of the million human personalities and memories it had swallowed? How much had been integrated into the core of its being?
Greenlaw knew that the original biological codings of the converted inhabitants of his region-animal, var, human,
plant, and virus-no longer existed as such. The original proteins and nucleotides and parabases had all been converted to crafty rogue silicrobes identical to those that had mutated and escaped a dreadful five years ago. The same applied to all the unlucky inorganics of the region, down to an unknown depth.
Isotropy reigned.
The ultimate monoculture.
The orchard, the grass, the rabbit, the snake, the very crust: all these were now composed of Urb-stuff masquerading as what it had consumed. The simulation was perfect and complete until examined on a molecular level. Had Greenlaw, for instance, chosen to break off a branch of his recent interlocutor, to his ears it would have snapped convincingly, to his normal vision it would have revealed typical grain and texture, oozed the requisite sap.
The Urb, as best they understood, was able to draw directly somehow on the ultradense original information stored in sheldrakean morphic fields for its disguise. The templates of all that it had engulfed were available to it for instant replication. A feat currently beyond human abilities.
Whether a captured piece of Urb-stuff would allow Greenlaw to retrieve from those selfsame fields the information patterns of his mate, Stroma, was not certain. He had only the tentative promises of his crada that such might be possible.
"Urb! Wake up!"
Unnaturally, the curtains of fabric moved quickly to envelop him, tasting, seeking to analyze and convert. Again, he did not resist. After a few seconds they slowly, reluctantly withdrew.
A pair of bark lips formed on the trunk of the "tree."
"What are you?" said the Urb in an innocuous tenon.
Greenlaw spoke with a bravado he barely felt. To be actually conversing with this monstrosity surpassed all rational thinking.
"Your doom, Urb. Your extinction."
"You are small, alone, unsupported. No tiny system so isolated can be self sufficient for long. Soon you will have to come out of your shell. Then I shall be you, and you me."
The lips were subsumed back into the tree, and the conversation was clearly at an end.
The Urb did not sound concerned. Did it understand emotions, threats, and bluffs? What had it retained of the million human personalities and memories it had swallowed? How much had been integrated into the core of its being?
Greenlaw knew that the original biological codings of the converted inhabitants of his region-animal, var, human,
plant, and virus-no longer existed as such. The original proteins and nucleotides and parabases had all been converted to crafty rogue silicrobes identical to those that had mutated and escaped a dreadful five years ago. The same applied to all the unlucky inorganics of the region, down to an unknown depth.
Isotropy reigned.
The ultimate monoculture.
The orchard, the grass, the rabbit, the snake, the very crust: all these were now composed of Urb-stuff masquerading as what it had consumed. The simulation was perfect and complete until examined on a molecular level. Had Greenlaw, for instance, chosen to break off a branch of his recent interlocutor, to his ears it would have snapped convincingly, to his normal vision it would have revealed typical grain and texture, oozed the requisite sap.
The Urb, as best they understood, was able to draw directly somehow on the ultradense original information stored in sheldrakean morphic fields for its disguise. The templates of all that it had engulfed were available to it for instant replication. A feat currently beyond human abilities.
Whether a captured piece of Urb-stuff would allow Greenlaw to retrieve from those selfsame fields the information patterns of his mate, Stroma, was not certain. He had only the tentative promises of his crada that such might be possible.