"Castro, Adam Troy - Ego To Go" - читать интересную книгу автора (Castro Adam Troy)

closet, returning with a metallic disk that reflected the single overhead bulb
with a burst of incandescent color that bounced rainbows off the beads f sweat
on Porter's forehead. "Here. Try this on."

Porter's eyes bugged.

"Surely this can't be your first prosthetic!"

"No," Porter said, in the awed tones of a man reliving a long-forgotten horror.
"When I was two years old, I was last in my class to learn Differential
Calculus. My parents fitted me with a 75-G Sony Prosthetic Genius for Math. They
didn't remove it until I was seven. It was years before I learned to communicate
with other people without using polynomials."

"That was a less enlightened age," Feeble assured him. "I myself was a
spectacularly unlikeable child and was almost ruined for life by a prosthetic
Cute. But these days we know how to properly adjust the prosthetic to the
individual personality. We can even implant them subdermally so nobody knows
you're wearing them. Go ahead. Try it."

Porter nodded wanly and placed the disk on his forehead. All at once his entire
bearing changed. He stood up straight -- gaining two inches of height in the
process-- shrugged his shoulders experimentally, and for the very first time,
smiled. "Wow."

"You're a wimp," Feeble said, his face rippling with waves of palpable disgust.
No longer Yiddish, he delivered words resonant with echoes, like the voice of
God in old Bible movies. Beams of blue light burst from the walls on both sides,
turning his cheekbones to caverns and rendering him monstrous. "A nerd. A loser.
A butthead. A weiner. A dope. A waste of oxygen. A sloth with a human face. If
you were worth twenty times what you're worth now you'd still be a worthless
slug."

Porter's face fell. "You really think so?"

The blue light receded. "I think you need a more powerful model," Feeble said,
sans echo, his voice suddenly Yiddish again. He plucked the disk off Porter's
forehead, disappeared through the curtains, then returned bearing another disk
which he applied where the first one had been. "Boy, are you pathetic. I mean,
jeez, I look at some of the gobs of human waste who come shuffling in here on
their hind legs and I think they're pretty hard to take, but you, mister, you're
a --"

Porter hauled off and punched him. Or tried to, anyway; Feeble's personal
force-field engaged as soon as it sensed the onrushing fist, deflecting it
harmlessly into the empty air by Feeble's side. Even as Porter tried to regain
his balance, Feeble was plucking the prosthetic from his forehead. All at once
Porter's face fell again: "Oh, dear. I'm sorry. Did I --"

Feeble waggled his index finger, which was yellow from tobacco smoke and had