Simmis

From the author of New York Times bestsellers Ана1 Anathema, Reamde Virus and Cryptonicon, read a fascinating and provocative science fiction work - a great story of destruction and survival spanning five thousand years.

What will happen after the end of the world?

The moon exploded suddenly and for no reason. The earth became a bomb with a clockwork. In search of salvation from the inevitable nation, the world has united to pursue an ambitious plan to save humanity far beyond the planet, in outer space. But the complexity and unpredictability of human nature combined with incredible challenges and dangers threatened fearless pioneers. until there were very few people left…

Five thousand years later, their descendants, seven different races, embarked on another bold journey to an unknown, alien world, completely destroyed by the cataclysm and time called the Earth.

Book reviews:

Neil Stevenson "Simmis" (author Oksana Pelyushenko)

Medicine Against the End of the World (author Tatiana Petrenko)

The book won an award " Prometheus "2016 in the category of" Best Novel ".

The book was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2016.

Buy a set of books with a 20% discount!

ЧАСТИНА 1

DAY OF ONE MONTH

The moon exploded without any warning and without any obvious reason. He just grew up, stayed one day until full moon. It was 05:03:12 UTC1. This time was later referred to as A + 0.0.0, or simply Zero.

One amateur astronomer in Utah was the first person on Earth to realize that something unusual was happening. Seconds before the event, he noticed that the albedo of the Rayner Gamma structure near the lunar equator began to grow. He decided it was a dust cloud raised by a meteor. So he pulled out his phone and began posting the news, barely moving his fingers (it happened on a high mountain where the air is as cold as it is clean) as fast as he could to be the first to report it. So. Other astronomers will soon be pointing their telescopes at the same dust cloud - they may already be! But he would be the first to announce it, provided he moved his fingers quickly enough. All the glory will go to him: if the impact of a meteor leaves a visible crater, it may be named after the discoverer.

His name is forgotten. Even before the phone could be taken out of his pocket, its crater ceased to exist.

When he finally hid the phone and fell back into the eyepiece of his telescope, he only cursed - only a yellow-brown muddy spot was visible. Apparently, the telescope accidentally defocused. He turned the focus setting. It didn't help.

He finally pulled away from the telescope and looked with the naked eye to where the moon was supposed to be. At that moment he ceased to be a scientist endowed with some information inaccessible to others, and became quite the same man as millions of others in both Americas, who watched in horror and astonishment the most unusual thing the human race had ever seen in the sky. When a planet explodes in a movie, it turns into a fireball, and then it simply ceases to exist. This did not happen with the Moon. The agent (that's what people will call the mysterious force behind the crash) undoubtedly released a huge amount of energy, but even nearly enough to ignite all the lunar matter.

According to popular theory, a cloud of dust observed astronomer from Utah, rose from the blow. In other words, the Agent flew to the Moon from outside, pierced its surface, drilled deep inside and released his own energy there. Or it just went awry, releasing enough energy along the way to blow up the moon. Another hypothesis was that the Agent was a device buried in the bowels of the moon by aliens in prehistoric times and set to explode under certain conditions.

and countless small fragments. Secondly, these fragments flew far enough away to be distinguished as separate objects - giant round logs of irregular shape - but not enough to move even further. There was still gravity between the wreckage of the moon, resulting in a cluster of huge rocks that chaotically revolved around a common center of mass.

and billions of years before. So now that the earthlings were looking at the place in the night sky where they used to watch the moon, they saw only clusters of white logs that were slowly spinning. At least that's the picture they saw when the dust dissipated. For in the first few hours, what was the Moon was just a little-bigger-than-the-moon cloud that reddened before dawn and sat over the horizon in the west, and which the Utah astronomer watched with bewilderment. Asia watched the usual cloud of the usual pale color all night. When the dust particles gathered to the nearest large objects, lighter spots began to emerge inside. Europe and America face a completely different picture: the seven giant stones where the moon used to be. the word was borrowed, at least from the general public, from tabloids or B-movies, and referred to undercover or FBI agents. People with a more technical mindset used it to refer to certain chemicals, such as a cleaning agent. The closest equivalent to the meaning that will be attached to this word in the future, was among fencers and specialists in martial arts. In sword training, when one pair only has to attack and the other has to respond to attacks, the attacker is called the agent and the defender is called the patient. The agent is acting. The patient remains passive. In our case, an unknown agent influenced the moon. The same, as in all human lives in the sublunary world, was the passive recipient of his action. Someday, in the distant future, people may take action and become agents again. But from now on and for a long time they will remain only patients.