"Davis, Jerry - Death's Head Reunion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davis Jerry)

behind your hands afraid to look at those things you are so close
to having, so close you dare not breathe too hard for fear of
blowing your chance away.
It's sick, he thinks. It's inhuman. It's unfair. But the
words bounce around in his mind like ping-pong balls, full of air.
They lose their meaning, their potency.
Marilyn fakes her fifteenth climax and they call it a rap.
Into the editing chamber George goes, practicing that peculiar
talent he ended up with, one of God's two gifts to him (God's
other gift was a perfect set of naturally healthy teeth).
Bernadette, the Marilyn clone, watches him shuffle off
through the darkened backstage with his collection of golden video
disks. She lights up a cigarette --- which is harmless to her new
body --- and thinks about him, about his wonderful father-like
looks, his warm, nervous smile. A real character, she thinks, a
genuine real person. She wonders if he'd have anything to do with
a mannequin like her.
She pulls on impossibly tight pants and loops on a rotary
shirt, no underwear, no bra, gives Gavin (the Clark clone) a
friendly kiss on the cheek, and wanders out of the studio. Nobody
pays any attention to her whatsoever. She's just a clone, a meat
puppet.
Outside the rain pours down in a torrent, ugly brown rain,
rain that is muddy even before it touches the ground. After the
rain the afternoon sky is still black. Nature is dying; only
man-made things like Bernadette's body will survive. Bernadette's
body and Martinelli's 9 pound apples and Chiquita's patented
tree-less bananas and vat-grown cultured meat by Hormel, and
"Sticky Finger Honey" produced by special bacteria, and
programmable bionic racing horses, and cats and dogs of metal and
plastic, and your best friend, Sexy Susan, an AI sexual surrogate
that now outsells cars and house computers, or her alternate Macho
Maxx, who can go all night and day 'till you beg him to stop.
Beyond the black air, almost straight up --- 55,000 miles
away --- a new condo is being built for Bernadette. It's all
bought and paid for, but it's not finished. There's no air to
breathe yet. Bernadette is only down here until it's ready. Until
then, she takes occasional trips to New California, a mere torus
but very pleasant, or sometimes to Heaven Orleans, the "Europe of
space cities," and for the time being lives in a 7 bedroom
apartment in an archology in Arizona, only 33 minutes via air-taxi
from Hollywood.
She doesn't go home tonight, as the thought of another lonely
and meaningless evening in her apartment might drive her to
suicide. She hails a SmartCab, and when it asks for a destination,
she says, "Just go." The AI programming is prepared for that, and
drives off in a random pattern, charging her credit account by the
millisecond.
At that moment Bernadette is again locked in coitus with the
Clark clone, coming to an orgasm then freezing, un-coming for a