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.”His grin widened.“And if that is true,” he added, “what does it say about Darius?”***Elyria mulled over the question as the voyage wore on, before eventually coming to the conclusion that there just wasn’t enough information to allow her to answer it properly.If manipulating the quantum foam was a way to hack reality itself – and all of the Confederation’s research indicated that this was the case – it was quite possible that reality might be a little hazy near the Ancient worlds.Technology might fail because it relied upon the universe working in a certain way at all times, but the universe was different near the Ancient worlds.Which sounded insane, and impossible, apart from the minor detail that advanced technology did glitch for no apparent reason.The Ancient worlds concealed their secrets well.“There is no way that they should have a breathable atmosphere,” Adam said, at an evening dinner.Elyria had started the tradition of inviting people to share regular meals, allowing them to socialise outside of actual work.It helped to break down barriers between the team members.“The worlds are dead.There’s nothing living at all, not even grass or anything else that might replenish the atmosphere.And yet we have no trouble living there without life support.”He grinned as he took a bite out of an oversized chicken leg.Like most of the other Changed, he’d had to start shifting back to baseline human so he could go down to Darius, something that had left him with a huge appetite as his body made the adjustments.There was another difference between the Confederation and a pre-singularity society right there; primitives might worry about their appearance, but anyone born in the Confederation could change it at will.What did appearance matter if someone could make themselves as pretty – or ugly – as they chose?“It gets even more surprising on Ancient-46,” he added, a moment later.“We’re not the only ones who have a research program there; the Puppies do as well.Thing is, their atmospheric requirements are different from ours; they find living on our worlds uncomfortable, to say the least.And we find their atmosphere.stinky.But they don’t have any problems on the Ancient worlds and neither do we.“The general theory is that the Ancients somehow determined that their worlds would always be suitable for outsiders to visit, even if they had radically different atmospheric requirements.But how did they do that when we and the Puppies have different requirements? Or, for that matter, us and the Ghosts? There is no way a Ghost can share a human atmosphere, yet they have no trouble on Ancient worlds.”Elyria shook her head in disbelief, wishing – for the first time – that she’d spent more time studying the Ancient worlds.“Like.they programmed them that way,” she said.“They just told the atmosphere to be breathable and it was breathable?”“Even when two different races share the world,” Adam agreed.“As for how they did it, we don’t have a clue.”It was impossible, Elyria knew.The Confederation had pushed baseline humanity to the point where an unsuitable atmosphere wouldn’t poison them, but there was no way that it could allow two radically different races to share the same atmosphere.They could give them life support fields to wear, something that would ensure the local atmosphere was reprocessed into something breathable, yet the Ancients seemed to have done the impossible and made their worlds habitable for everyone.“The word impossible is simply a reflection of the unknown,” Jorlem said, into the silence.He hadn’t said much about the Prometheus Project to the others, although he hadn’t asked Elyria to remain silent about it.“How much of what we do would be impossible to a pre-singularity society?”That started another debate.Elyria listened with some interest, paying close attention to the attempts to compare various different societies with computer simulations, or altered realities created within AI cores.Quite a few humans had uploaded themselves and then taken refuge in fantasy universes created by the Confederation’s designers, some operating according to laws that bore no resemblance to reality.Many of the Uploaded had slipped so far into their private worlds that they no longer remembered the Confederation outside.It would have been easy to believe that someone had designed a world like Darius for a game, if it hadn’t been real [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]