"Jo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barreiros Joao)

Silent Night
a short story by Joуo Barreiros

In the twenty fifth year of this endless war, on the banks of Lake Saimaa,
I finally killed my first Santa Claus. It was pure luck... honestly.
Murphy's law dictated that my comrades in arms, who were all better
trained than me, arrived late, were held up, or stuck in the viscous mire
of some tar pit, were assailed by the cold as the heating systems of their
suits started to fail. Better still, some were kicked to death by a swarm
of reindeer that swooped down from the sky, like silent Furies. The few
that survived had an immediate encounter with a group of elves, or were
seduced by the terrible and almost irresistible offer of presents packed
with our heart's desires. I don't know what happened to them. No corpses
were left to tell the tale. After a certain point, the video cameras in
their helmets took only pearls of absence and white nothingness. Mastoid
implants break down near zones where the ineffable manifests itself. Radio
communications drown in a storm of static. No thermal or infra-red
detector works properly. Smart bombs, launched by the cruisers anchored in
Norwegian territorial water, go off track, because the logic systems in
their paranoid mini-brains get stuck in feedback loops. The targets get
mixed up in the protein chips and they turn back and smash into the hulls
of the vessels from which they were launched.
How then can we be certain that he is there, in precisely that zone,
blooming like some sinister, beautiful flower before the inevitable
pollination on the twenty fifth of December? All-seeing satellites
suddenly see nothing at all. There's always a part of Finland that
disappears from the map, gobbled up by this conceptual negation, fifteen
to twenty days before the event.
When this happens, when the nodule's location becomes almost certain
instead of just probable, they pluck us from the Barents Sea training
camp, put a credit balance into our bank accounts, which will only be
truly ours if we make it, and stuff us into the belly of a glider towed by
an ancient Tupolev. A deadly slow aircraft with not a single Artificial
Intelligence support system. Armed with katanas and rifles more than a
hundred years old, they drop us in the sky about ten kilometres from the
virtual target. Then it's a panic dive into the morning as the sun rises
over the Balkans of Capitalist Russia, with the snow packed wind smashing
into the glider's hull, while all of us, or at least those of this elite
unit of ten commandos, tangled in the shock absorber nets of our seats,
chew psychotropic capsules, anti-hypnotics, serotonin and adrenaline
stimulators. We bid farewell to the Infonet which has been with us all our
lives, ready to plunge into the autistic silence that envelopes all
mysteries. The Imagos of family members and loved ones shatter into
scattered points of light on our retinas. The synthetic voices of our
virtual advisers are suddenly replaced be a menacing carolling which
repeats, Silent Night, Holy Night ...
"Shut this shit off will you", shouts Yosef Wu, our salariman lieutenant.
"And block all sound reception. Are you stupid or what? You can't wait to
hear what you didn't ought'a. Am I right?"
Big Corporation officers don't bother me. The suit may be an expert with