"downtime" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Eric)

Andy had come to a halt at the edge of the massacre. Amid overturned tables and chairs, the bodies of tourists lay dead and dying. Blood and krassi were spilled in equal measures, staining the table-clothes and the white marble floor two shades of red.

Andy was kneeling beside a blonde woman lying on her back, bullet wounds drilled across her white blouse. She was staring up at Andy, her face twisted.

"It shouldn't hurt," she said in barely a whisper, her tone incredulous. "They said nothing could hurt us!"

She winced, the colour draining from her face. As Sinclair stared down, her eyes glazed and her feeble protests ceased.

Then the bodies, one by one, lost their solidity and dissolved, along with the spilled tables and chair, the blood and the wine. Within seconds, nothing remained to evidence the slaughter - except a ring of appalled onlookers, strangely silent under the vast domed awning of the Greek national flag.

He grabbed Andy's arm. "Let's get out of here," he said. "Back to the villa."

As they hurried up the hillside, Andy said, as if in a daze, "They should have pulled us out. There's obviously some terrible malfunction in the system - why didn't they just pull us out?"

Sinclair tried to calm him. "They're no doubt working on it. It probably takes time."

"And what about the tourists? Did they really die?"

"Of course not! There's no way... You read the company guarantees." But he did not, even to himself, sound convincing.

They reached the villa and locked the doors behind them. In the bedroom they shut and barred the balcony door against the garish flag that served in lieu of a sky.
Andy sat on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. "If you bastards are listening in," he said, levelly, "I'd like to tell you that we want out."

Sinclair stared at his reflection in the wall mirror. It was still a shock to apprehend how he had looked six years ago, before the ravages of the disease had reduced him to little more than skin and bone. While across the room Andy quietly petitioned the operatives to pull them out, Sinclair contemplated the healthy slabs of muscle on his arms and legs.

They made love on the double bed in silence, as if they each realised that it might be for the last time. Later, while Andy quietly slept, Sinclair disengaged himself, pulled on his shorts and walked across to the balcony. He unbolted the door, stepped through and closed it behind him.

The Greek flag no longer adorned the night sky: piercing stars shone down from a jet backdrop. He thought for an exhilarating second that perhaps the malfunction had been repaired, that perhaps he might yet see out the full span of his vacation. Then he noticed, across the bay on the slope of the opposite headland, purple and orange luminescent blobs where olive trees should have stood.

Before him, the air began to shimmer - an effect not unlike a heat haze above a hot road in summer. As he stared, a figure materialised beyond the balcony, suspended in mid-air like some phantom visitation. Fearing another attack, Sinclair stepped back - then he made out the ghostly features of the operative responsible for his translation at the Milton Keynes holiday centre.

"Mr Lewis Sinclair?"

"What is it? What's going on?"

The materialisation was only partially successful. Sinclair could actually make out the bay through the bobbing figure. Its voice was slowed, slurred.

"I've come to explain the situation to all vacationers," the operative said.

"Are you going to pull us out?"

"Please, let me first explain." The figure was silent for seconds, like a radio broadcast on a poor frequency. "The Keynes computer network was breached by a team of hackers representing the Greek Popular Front. They planned to destroy the system and the five thousand vacationers currently enjoying the New Crete Consensus Reality. They are a political faction fighting for the economic independence of Crete - they claim that since the development of the Keynes CR, and other centres across Europe, tourism has ceased and Crete has suffered a debilitating recession. They also struck at other centres in Germany, France and Sweden. Fortunately, at Keynes they managed to inflict only minor damage."

"But the tourists we saw gunned down?"

"Tragically, they were real-time casualties - they suffered associative somatic trauma and perished as a result."

"Christ..." Sinclair struggled to overcome the shock, gather his thoughts. He asked, "So we're all in danger. Any second these thugs could materialise and blow us away?"

The spectral operative was shaking his head. "Not at all. We have dealt with the hackers; our own experts effected successful counter-measures. The anomalies you see now-" the figure indicated the luminescent shapes across the bay "-are the results of the disruption, minor glitches."