(многосекторная виртуальная реальность охватом в Солнечную систему, опустевшая Земля с интердиктом на посещение постлюдьми анклавов человека, тлеющее противостояние киборгов и виртуалов, коллективные интеллекты)

(бегство от космического катаклизма в Ядре)

Хотя сцена гибели Атланты бронебойная в плане психологии:

"You are shameless. We expect no honor from the simulacra of the shadows of departed cowards, but will you never give up trying to wipe the last trace of vitality from the face of the Earth?" The static laughed humorlessly. "Did you honestly believe that you could frighten us with this risible fairy-tale of `quarks' and `gamma rays' raining from the sky, and then we'd all file meekly into your insipid virtual paradise? Did you imagine that a few cheap, shocking words would send us fleeing from the real world of pain and ecstasy into your nightmare of perfectibility?" He gazed down at them with a kind of fascinated loathing. "Why can't you stay inside your citadels of infinite blandness, and leave us in peace? We humans are fallen creatures; we'll never come crawling on our bellies into your ersatz Garden of Eden. I tell you this: there will always be flesh, there will always be sin, there will always be dreams and madness, war and famine, torture and slavery."

Even with the language graft, Yatima could make little sense of this, and the translation into Modern Roman was equally opaque. Ve dredged the library for clarification; half the speech seemed to consist of references to a virulent family of Palestinian theistic replicitors.

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Scoaliera Tefwe, who had been a friend and a lover of Ngaroe QiRia long ago, when he was already a very old man and she had been of conventional middle age – a little under two hundred – woke slowly, as she had woken slowly a few dozen times, over the intervening centuries. Only it wasn’t really waking slowly; she was being woken. All dark at first. Stillness and silence too, and yet the sensation that things were happening nearby, and inside her head and body; organs and systems and faculties being woken, revived, checked, primed, readied. It was at once reassuring and somehow disappointing. Here we go again, she thought. She opened her eyes.

SIMULATION, said the glowing red letters along the bottom of her field of vision. Ah, she thought, whereupon the word faded away.

So she was still sort of asleep, after all. But her consciousness and sense of embodiment were being woken up.
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Scoaliera Tefwe woke slowly, as she had woken slowly a few dozen times, over the intervening centuries. Only it wasn’t really waking slowly; she was being woken. All dark at first. Stillness and silence too, and yet the sensation that things were happening nearby, and inside her head and body; organs and systems and faculties being woken, revived, checked, primed, readied. It was at once reassuring and somehow disappointing. Here we go again, she thought. She opened her eyes.

The word SIMULATION, which was what she expected to see first, albeit briefly, wasn’t there. She blinked, looked around.

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Scoaliera Tefwe woke slowly, as she had woken slowly a few dozen times, over the intervening centuries. Only it wasn’t really waking slowly; she was being woken. All dark at first. Stillness and silence too, and yet the sensation that things were happening, both inside her head and body; organs and systems and faculties being woken, revived, checked, primed, readied. It was at once reassuring and somehow disappointing. Here we go again, she thought. Hmm. That thought itself felt … familiar. She opened her eyes.

She was sort of expecting to see the word SIMULATION, however briefly, but it wasn’t there.

Сами знаете где.