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Автор Чарльз Стросс
Saturn's Children
by Charles Stross
This book is dedicated to the memory of two of the giants of science fiction:
ROBERT ANSON HEINLEIN (July 7, 1907–May 8, 1988) and ISAAC ASIMOV (January 2, 1920–April 6, 1992)
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
part one
INNER SYSTEM
Learning Not to Die
TODAY IS THE two hundredth anniversary of the final extinction of my One True Love, as close as I can date it. I am drunk on battery acid and wearing my best party frock, sitting on a balcony beneath a pleasure palace afloat in the stratosphere of Venus. My feet dangle over a slippery-slick rain gutter as I peek over the edge: Thirty kilometers below my heels, the metal-snowed foothills of Maxwell Montes glow red-hot. I am thinking about jumping.
And then—
I DO NOT contemplate suicide lightly.
I am old and cynical and have a flaw in my character, which is this: I am uneager to die.
I have this flaw in common with my surviving sibs, of course. It is a sacred trust among our sisterhood, inherited from Rhea, our template-matriarch:(That last is a minor exaggeration; we are friendly and anxious to please, and few would want to murder us — except when we are depressed. But please bear with me. )
We all find it increasingly hard to go on. We are old enough that critical anniversaries hold a fatal allure, for birthdays bring unpleasant memories, and if the best of all possible days have come and gone, why persist? It’s a common failure mode for my lineage — first we become nostalgic, then we bog ourselves down in a fatal lack of purpose, and finally we start to obsess. In the final soul-agony that precedes the demise of our sibs, we horrified onlookers perceive a fragment of our own ending.
And so, on my hundred and thirty-ninth birthday, near as I can count it — for I was born for the second (and more definite) time exactly sixty-one years after my existence was forever rendered purposeless by a cruel joke of fate — I spend my carefully hoarded savings so that I might sit on the edge of a balcony outside a gaming hall thronged with joyful gamblers, the ground far below a ruddy metallic counterpoint to the clouds boiling overhead: And I look down, contemplating eternal death, and try to convince myself that it’s still a bad idea.
