"Paul Di Filippo - Stink Lines" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

draft a press release.I'm sure we'll be getting quite a number of calls about
this enchantingmodification to Duckburg's environment."As Mina was leaving,
Li'l Bulb entered. Confronting Gyro with hands placed onimaginary hips, Li'l
Bulb regarded his boss sternly for a moment, then reachedout and snapped his
fingers. The snap was represented as a green bubble thatpopped out of
existence rather than faded.Gyro handed his assistant a pen and paper, and got
back this message: "You don'tknow how glad I am that I cannot speak."Gyro
smiled. "Oh, don't worry. The utility fog will soon respond to other
thingsthan sound. Just wait and see."WHEN THE MAYOR of Duckburg stormed into
Gyro's office, he found the giddyinventor testing the limits of the
unasked-for civic improvement. Uttering anyold gibberish that came into his
head in order to keep a speech balloon alive --the Gettysburg Address, pop
song lyrics, his projected Nobel acceptance speech-- Gyro was attempting to
discover the self-repair capacity of the utility fog.Ripping big hunks out of
the floating speech display -- the ragged weightlessfragments remained alive
for a few hundred milliseconds in Gyro's cupped hands,their portion of print
warped and distorted -- Gyro watched appreciatively asnew nanomachines swarmed
into the damaged area to repair the hovering textballoon.Seeing the Mayor,
Gyro called out gleefully, "It's just incredible! Without myhat, I can't even
recall all the routines I put into these little rascals, but Imust have
cobbled together some really neat code!"Already once retired, the octogenarian
Mayor Floyd Ramie was not generally anexcitable type. From 2005 to 2015 he had
had a flourishing career with Disney intheir Touchstone division, performing
in such cinematic hits as Voodoo Lounge(2012), where he co-starred with a
geriatric Mick Jagger as one of a pair ofdoddering hippies intent on opening a
Club Med franchise in Haiti upon thatnation's ascension to statehood.
Pensioned off to Duckburg, he had won themayoral post in an uncontested
election.The Mayor's generally benevolent and somnolent disposition, however,
had beendrastically frayed by an hour of watching his own speech -- and that
of all thefrantic visitors to his office -- come and go above his head. Mayor
Ramie hadnever realized how full of awkward pauses (indicated in the speech
balloons bythe conventional three-dot ellipsis), stutters, fragments, and
senselessinterjections his own unscripted conversation was.Now the Mayor
banged a fist down on Gyro's desk. His action was accompanied by adull brown
THUMP!, causing Gyro's desk to cry "Ouch!", an exclamation which
wassimultaneously ballooned in a square shape, indicating machine
speech."Goddamn it, Gearloose, what the, urn, hell is going on here? What've
you done?Er, does Disney know about this? Is it something they, ah, asked you
to do? Whywasn't I informed first? Do you realize it took me, er, over an hour
to catch upwith your, um...press release?"Gyro smiled. "No, Floyd, this is
entirely my scheme. I thought I'd bringDuckburg a little welcome notoriety.
Ticket sales have been off this year,haven't they? Ever since RioDisney
opened. Mighty hard for Uncle Scrooge tocompete with all those thong-clad
Carioca babes."Watching his own just-uttered words while simultaneously trying
to formulate newones was inducing a kind of psychic vertigo in Mayor Ramie,
introducing strangeloops into his neural speech circuits. Face flushed, he
groped for coherence."Jesus, Gearloose, I can't believe you thought I believe
you can't Jesus --"At that moment the perpetually replicating utility fog
crossed a new threshold,exhibiting a startling emergent property.Mayor Ramie's
head caught fire.Wide-eyed, Gyro felt his jaw drop. The Mayor, realizing by