"Carter, Raphael - The Fortunate Fall" - читать интересную книгу автора (Carter Raphael)

"Then we look for an interview."
Keishi raised her eyebrows. Oh--she'd tricked me into saying "we." Well, it wouldn't matter. We'd be reassigned soon enough.
"Then I'll call you in the morning. You should sleep in. Shall we say around noon?"
I hesitated, nodded, then turned to the bartender and asked for the bill. He laid a matte black card before me on the bar. When I pressed my thumb into it, gold script numbers appeared, displaying the usual breakdown--this much of your cup of coffee was produced by human labor, and the rest is owing to the labor of robots, so we suggest you pay so much in green and the rest in red. I always read that stuff; it's interesting; but I don't go by it. It's not always accurate, anyway. For example, they'll tell you that your steak dinner is ninety percent robot-made, but they get that by counting animals as robots. And my Netcasts count as a hundred percent human, though my head's as much metal as bone.
I touched the right side of the card, to pay all in red. Old habits--I like to use the robots' earnings first, and hold on to what I've produced myself. Actually, of course, the Robot Dollar is just as good as the Reconstructed Ruble, unless you're going to go to Africa, and what are the chances of that?
"Confirm," I said to the card. Thank You, Maya Tatyanichna Andreyeva, it scripted.
The bartender picked up the card and glanced at the back, where my name and Net address were displayed. "That page earlier--it was for you. You're on News One."
This didn't seem to be a question, so I didn't bother answering.
"I've seen your Netcasts," he said. "Not this history thing-- that's a little dry for me--but I saw your piece on that bastard Shimanski. You really told it like it is."
I grunted noncommittally. After an awkward pause he blurted out: "You don't look much like your Net-portrait."
"It keeps me from being recognized by duraks whose fathers never taught them any manners," I snapped back, out of reflex. But I could not help looking past him at the mirror behind the bar. I look in the mirror every morning, of course, but there are certain things my eyes have ceased to notice. In that mirror, I saw the five palm-sized holes drilled in my head, capped with black adapters into which the brightly colored modern chips were plugged. I saw the Net-rune in my cheek, a scar of garish luminescence slashing down from eye to jaw in swoops and angles. I saw the places where the hair has never grown back right since surgery, and the bumps and bulges in the left side of my skull where implants nestled in the connective tissue, like baby spiders hidden in the tangle of their egg sac.
"I saved you the trouble of killing him," Keishi said from behind me. "Over the next thirty-six hours his body parts will be arriving in twenty different Historical Nations in the luggage of unsuspecting passengers."
I stole a glance at the bartender. He was alive, but involved in a heated phone debate which he seemed to be getting much the worst of.
"Don't punish him for pointing out the obvious," I said.
She put her chin on my shoulder--not an easy feat for a virtual ghost--and looked my reflection in the eye. I hated the smoothness, youth, perfection of her face next to mine. "How many people know your face, Maya?" she asked me gravely. "A few hundred? Well, a hundred million know you from the inside out. They know who you really are, not just what you look like. What's a face but Nature's blind kludge at a way of letting minds communicate? You have a better interface than that, a faster cable. You've evolved beyond the body. The face is a sheath for the mind. It's nothing--it's maya, illusion," she said, smiling. "Forget about it."
I could think of nothing that she could have said that would have been less comforting.
She drew back. "Besides," she said, "a lot of people think scars are sexy." And she drew her finger along my cheek and around to the back of my head, over Net-rune and camerasoft and bare occipital socket. If she had been there in her body, my ruined nerves would have felt nothing. But because she was a virtual ghost, a thing of air and shadows, I could feel her soft, warm fingers just as if the flesh were whole.




Four

To MAKE MUCH OF TIME

I woke at ten that morning to a pounding on the door. I answered it holding my bathrobe closed with one hand, with what hair I have matted or standing on end; hastily thumbed the offered card; and accepted the package. The box was a triangular prism a meter long, such as roses are sometimes shipped in. If Keishi had sent me roses, we were going to have to have a serious talk. I sat down in the little passageway between inner and outer doors, which in winter keeps the warmth inside the house from mixing with the cold outside, and opened it.
It was not roses. The box had three separate flaps, one for each side. I opened the first and found a set of kopek-sized chips, already plugged into the adapters that they'd need to fit my old style ruble sockets. Both the chips and the adapters were a medium brown and no thicker than a fingernail. When I pried one out of the foam and held it up, it slowly changed color and lustre until it matched the skin of my hand perfectly, even mimicking the pores. Oh, of course; a brown default color because they were African. It was probably the skin color of some drone in quality control--inspected by cafe au lait. If I put the chips in, then from a few feet away, maybe even close up, you'd hardly know I'd been drilled at all.
The second flap revealed another set of adapters and chips, just like the first set, but teal blue instead of brown. I touched one and it displayed a palette; when I chose a color at random, the whole set of chips turned a dusty rose. The chip asked if I wanted to explore textures, but I touched the box marked "no."
Behind the third flap was a blaze of gold: some chips inscribed with hieroglyphs, others painted with jackal-headed gods and lapis scarabs, all in holographic bas-relief. Ooh, Egyptian kitsch. It was African, all right. I read the card:

Even though the mother country thought her girlchild was too white, I still have connections there. Nice to use them for something halfway legal just this once. Wear these if you ever decide to quit camera work and take up modeling--you've got the bones, girl.

Mirabara.

With roses I would at least have known for certain. This gift was ambiguous. Certainly it was no ordinary podarok. She had spent sweatcoin on this--not robot labor, given in red to every citizen, but her own work in green Reconstructed Rubles. And at that, the gods only knew how she'd gotten them to take it; even red money is about as hard as a three-minute egg, in Africa. Connections, my ass--she had called in a favor for this, I would have bet on it. And getting an African to owe you a favor is slightly less difficult than putting God in your debt.
It might have meant nothing more than overactive thoughtfulness--not an uncommon vice in screeners. Or it could have been a truly world-class effort to curry favor. But there was a chance it was more than that, and no chip in the world, or even in Africa, was worth that kind of trouble.
I looked more closely at the chips, to see what she'd given me. One chip in each set was a memory wedge, and the skin-colored one had a moistdisk stuck into it--a cylinder actually, even less disklike than its Russian cousins. I plugged it in and found it held my research. That, at least, I need not refuse. Most of the others were just copies of what my head already held, some in more up-to-date versions. Then there were a few extra basics, such as four fluency chips with a total of sixty-four languages, most of them African. And there were a few things I didn't recognize at all, chips popular in Africa, I guess: an intuition enhancer, a myth coprocessor. No, don't ask me what a myth coprocessor does. Makes you act like a hero, I guess.
I took a deep breath. Face it, Maya. You want these a lot.
I took the box into the bathroom, where sunlight filtered dimly through the paper wadded up between the double windows. Got to take that insulation out, as soon as this series ends, I thought. Maybe take a week off and do all that stuff. Yeah, right. I set the box on end on the counter, where it promptly extended a pedestal and rotated itself. Typical. The girls in Nairobi had more industrial capacity than common sense. I'd be lucky if I could leave the room without it hopping out after me.
I put shrink-seals over my sockets to protect them--my sockets are guaranteed waterproof, of course, but a guarantee can't restore a scorched forebrain--and showered, hastily because I was getting close to my Strongly Suggested Sustainable Water Usage for the month.
When I had dried my hair and gotten dressed, I opened the box and started to slot in the chameleons. They matched my skin color even better than before, but once I had a couple of them in, my head started to take on a sort of chemotherapy look: patches of sparse hair interrupted by tracts of bare skin. I tried brushing a lock of hair over one of the chips, and they got the idea and mimicked it, but their hologram engines could only produce so much depth. The look would make more sense if I shaved my hair off, which would be fashionable enough, but I wasn't ready for that yet. So I switched to the colored set, slotted them in, and chose a dark blue from the palette the chips superimposed on my field of vision.
Then another problem stopped me. There was one chip I could not take out without risking a number of complications, starting with moderate to severe brain damage and getting worse from there. I'd have to leave it in, but I didn't want Keishi to know I was wearing it. I needed to cover it up somehow.
I went to the bedroom and dug a strip of gray and yellow fabric out of my chest of drawers. It was supposed to be the scarf for my Truth Awards suit, but since I'd worn the same outfit to the last five years' ceremonies, I was probably due for a new one anyway. Or I could just not go, though it was always kind of fun to sit around with all the other Swiss-cheese types and hate the smooth-heads who were walking away with everything. I took the scarf back into the bathroom, folded it down, and tied it around my head so that the frontal socket was covered. Then I menued the chips' color to a gray that matched the fabric. I stepped back and checked the effect in the mirror.
The transformation was amazing. Ten minutes ago, I'd looked like a typically encrusted old-time Netcaster. Now I looked like a dangerous lunatic with no fashion sense. Stop me before I accessorize again.
All right, News One, I thought, taking off the scarf, you may not be a megascops, but you're a reasonably intelligent person. You can figure out what to do about that damned suppressor.
Apparently I'd thought the magic words. My face faded from the mirror, to be replaced by a map of Africa on which the god Osiris was stretched out, as on a crucifix. I recognized the Diaspora motion logo--the one the Africans had on their banners when they took Egypt from the Guardians. This was the full-length version, beginning all the way back with the slave trade. I tried saying "escape" and "cancel," but it wouldn't, so I leaned back against the towel rack to wait it out. The continent was stabbed by ships, and hemorrhaged men; the fertile soil dried up and cracked into countries. At the same time Osiris was torn into parts, which were scattered.
Then the flow reversed: men came back to Africa in planes and ships, the borders healed, and Osiris began to gather himself together. His-Majesty-in-Chains appeared in person to sew Egypt back on--with thread, not missiles as you might expect--whereupon Osiris was at last restored. Behind His Majesty, the two other Known Kings of Africa were briefly visible: a shining tower to represent Its-Ethereal-Highness, and for Only-A-Man, a face that changed from male to female, adult to child. At last Osiris opened his eyes; the deserts exploded with green trees and waving wheat; and the Wall of Souls was raised around the continent, like armor. It's a hell of a mogo. Myself, I wouldn't have gone to war for it, but that's me.
The map of Africa didn't disappear, only faded, until it was as subtle as a watermark on paper. I was expecting something else to show up in the mirror, so I watched and waited. Then suddenly someone was standing beside me: an Egyptian god--Horus, the one with the hawk's head--pressing so close that his beak was only inches from my eye. I was startled, then entranced. He was breathtaking. In the little painted portrait on the chip, he'd looked smooth and cartoonish. But the virtual image overwhelmed me with its bloody realism: feathers accurate in every fibre, some split and notched as if by battle; beak the color of bone, sharp as glass; a yellow raptor's eye without a trace of mercy, in whose lids the throbbing veins were clearly visible. So this is why people become pagans, I thought; this cold, this inhuman regard. The same reason we listen for messages from the stars.
The alien god fixed me with a yellow stare and said--in an absurdly inappropriate Moscow accent--"All Series 6000 moistware is equipped with automatic neural dampeners for the changeout or removal of suppressor chips without the use of chemical anesthetics. Since you have already inserted at least one Series 6000 moistware package, you may safely remove your suppressor chip from its socket. If you do not replace it with the corresponding Series 6000 moistware within thirty seconds, a timed phaseout of the dampening function will automatically initiate. Series 6000 moist-ware is guaranteed to prevent any and all neural damage from suppressor chips, including those that have been implanted as a punitive measure by the agents of fraudulent and tyrannical First World warlords, and this guarantee is backed by the full force of the treasury and army of His-Majesty-In-Chains. We conclude this communication in the confidence that Series 6000 moistware will provide full satisfaction and exceed all reasonable expectations."
And he vanished. For a moment of stunned silence I could only think that if I had known an Egyptian god was going to manifest himself in my bathroom I would at least have scrubbed out the toilet bowl. Then I was clawing the 6000s out of my head and saying aloud, "All right, Maya, don't panic, it's just a standard message, they all come with it, it doesn't mean anything--" but I was not convinced. And I took the chip that looked like an encyclopedia, stuck it in my occipital socket, and asked the Net what it was.