Clarke, Neil (ed) - The Final Frontier / Кларк, Нил (ред) - Последний рубеж [2018, EPUB, ENG]

A Jar of Goodwill novelette by Tobias S. Buckell Mono no Aware / Моно-но аварэ short story by Ken Liu Rescue Mission short story by Jack Skillingstead Shiva in Shadow / Шива в тени novella by Nancy Kress Slow Life / Медленная жизнь novelette by Michael Swanwick Three Bodies at Mitanni short story by Seth Dickinson The Deeps of the Sky / В глубинах неба short story by Elizabeth Bear Diving Into the Wreck / Нырнуть в крушение novella by Kristine Kathryn Rusch The Voyage Out / Приговор short story by Gwyneth Jones The Symphony of Ice and Dust novelette by Julie Novakova Twenty Lights to "The Land of Snow" / Двадцать световых лет до Страны снегов novella by Michael Bishop The Firewall and the Door novelette by Sean McMullen Permanent Fatal Errors short story by Jay Lake Gypsy novella by Carter Scholz Sailing the Antarsa novelette by Vandana Singh The Mind Is Its Own Place novelette by Carrie Vaughn The Wreck of the Godspeed novella by James Patrick Kelly Seeing short story by Genevieve Valentine Travelling Into Nothing novelette by An Owomoyela Glory / Ореол novelette by Greg Egan The Island / Остров novelette by Peter Watts

An ingot of metallic hydrogen gleamed in the starlight, a narrow cylinder half a meter long with a mass of about a kilogram. To the naked eye it was a dense, solid object, but its lattice of tiny nuclei immersed in an insubstantial fog of electrons was one part matter to two hundred trillion parts empty space. A short distance away was a second ingot, apparently identical to the first, but composed of antihydrogen. A sequence of finely tuned gamma rays flooded into both cylinders. The protons that absorbed them in the first ingot spat out positrons and were transformed into neutrons, breaking their bonds to the electron cloud that glued them in place. In the second ingot, antiprotons became antineutrons. A further sequence of pulses herded the neutrons together and forged them into clusters; the antineutrons were similarly rearranged. Both kinds of cluster were unstable, but in order to fall apart they first had to pass through a quantum state that would have strongly absorbed a component of the gamma rays constantly raining down on them. Left to themselves, the probability of their being in this state would have increased rapidly, but each time they measurably failed to absorb the gamma rays, the probability fell back to zero. The quantum Zeno effect endlessly reset the clock, holding the decay in check. . . .