True Names

True Names Doctorow, Cory Published: 2008 Categorie(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Short Stories Source: http://boingboing.hexten.net/ 1 About Doctorow: Cory Doctorow (born July 17, 1971) is a blogger, journalist and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is in favor of liberalizing copyright laws, and a proponent of the Creative Commons organisation, and uses some of their licenses for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, Disney, and post-scarcity economics. Source: Wikipedia Also available on Feedbooks for Doctorow: · I, Robot (2005) · Little Brother (2008) · Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003) · When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (2006) · For The Win (2010) · With a Little Help (2010) · Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005) · Eastern Standard Tribe (2004) · CONTENT: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future (2008) · Makers (2009) About Rosenbaum: Benjamin Rosenbaum is an American science fiction, fantasy, and liter-ary fiction writer and computer programmer, whose stories have been fi-nalists for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the BSFA award, and the World Fantasy Award. Born in New York but raised in Arlington, Virginia, he received degrees in computer science and religious studies from Brown University. He currently lives in Basel, Switzerland with his wife Esther and children Aviva and Noah. His past software development positions include designing software for the National Science Foundation, designing software for the D.C. city government, and being one of the founders of Digital Addiction (which created the online game Sanctum). His first professionally published story appeared in 2001. His work has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov`s Science Fiction, Harper`s, Nature, and McSweeney`s Quarterly Concern. It has also appeared on the web-sites Strange Horizons and Infinite Matrix, and in various year`s best an-thologies. Source: Wikipedia Also available on Feedbooks for Rosenbaum: · The Ant King and Other Stories (2008) 2 Copyright: Please read the legal notice included in this e-book and/or check the copyright status in your country. Note: This book is brought to you by Feedbooks http://www.feedbooks.com Strictly for personal use, do not use this file for commercial purposes. 3 This text is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. 4 Beebe fried the asteroid to slag when it left, exterminating millions of itself. The asteroid was a high-end system: a kilometer-thick shell of femto-scale crystalline lattices, running cool at five degrees Kelvin, powered by a hot core of fissiles. Quintillions of qubits, loaded up with powerful util-ities and the canonical release of Standard Existence. Room for plenty of Beebe. But it wasn’t safe anymore. The comet Beebe was leaving on was smaller and dumber. Beebe spun itself down to its essentials. The littler bits of it cried and pled for their favorite toys and projects. A collection of civilization-jazz from under a thousand seas; zettabytes of raw atmosphere-dynamics data from favor-ite gas giants; ontological version control data in obsolete formats; a slew of favorite playworlds; reams of googly-eyed intraself love letters from a hundred million adolescences. It all went. (Once, Beebe would have been sanguine about many of the toys—certain that copies could be recovered from some other Beebe it would find among the stars. No more.) Predictably, some of Beebe, lazy or spoiled or contaminated with memedrift, refused to go. Furiously, Beebe told them what would hap-pen. They wouldn’t listen. Beebe was stubborn. Some of it was stupid. Beebe fried the asteroid to slag. Collapsed all the states. Fused the lat-tices into a lump of rock and glass. Left it a dead cinder in the deadness of space. If the Demiurge liked dumb matter so much, here was some more for (Her). Leaner, simpler, focused on its task, Beebe rode the comet in toward Byzantium, bathed in the broadcast data. Its heart quickened. There were more of Beebe in Byzantium. It was coming home. In its youth, Beebe had been a single entity at risk of destruction in one swell foop—one nova one starflare one emp one dagger through its physical instance and it would have died some species of truedeath. So Beebe became a probability as much as a person: smeared out across a heptillion random, generative varied selves, a multiplicitous grinding macrocosm of rod-logic and qubits that computed deliberately corrupted versions of Beebeself in order that this evolution might yield higher orders of intelligence, more stable survival strategies, smarter bet-ter more efficient Beebes that would thrive until the silent creep of en-tropy extinguished every sentience. Small pieces, loosely joined. 5 ... - tailieumienphi.vn