"L. Timmel Duchamp - Quinn's Deal" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duchamp L Timmel)

Quinn waited fifteen minutes before he heard the teller instruct a woman to ? stand by, a manager will be
out shortly to assist you.?

Quinn knew very well about the teller's loose use of ? shortly.? He settled down onto the linoleum for a
long, uncomfortable wait. He knew he'd have to be ready to move when the steel door opened. And
then what? Alarm bells going off? Security arriving to drag me off to detention? The very thought
of being handled by security-bots chilled Quinn. Man, he hadn't gotten the gene repair yet. If they took
him off to detention, he might never get it. The hospital wouldn't be required by the contract to see to
it-only to provide it on its own terms. Man ... It wasn't like he had nothing to lose. Man, he could lose
his life. Go into a diabetic coma in detention, and he'd be heading for that old lime-pit in no time. They
only took people to the ER when they were cluttering up the streets.

After about ten minutes of scaring himself dry, Quinn left the hospital quietly-and quickly. He knew all
about the techniques of security-bots; he knew all about their programming; and he knew all about the
attitudes of those who deployed them. Clearly, trying to crash the Bursar's Office was not the way to go.
He'd get hold of Penneman, no question, but just not in that way. And then what? Quinn's inner demon
queried. You think he's going to know, right off the top of his head, or be willing to find out for
you, and then tell you?

God, he felt like a fool. A shrewder dealer would never have made the mistakes he'd made. And in
Quinn's view, he had only himself to blame for making them.

***

Quinn spent the remainder of Saturday in a VR Parlor, participating in a multi-user fiction. The fiction was
based on Pride and Prejudice, and Quinn was pleased to get to play his second choice of character,
Jane Bennet (Bingley being his first). He remembered the spy-eye in his head only at the most tedious of
moments. The persons playing Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mr. Collins hammed it up so grotesquely
that every scene featuring them inevitably put the rest of the players in danger of reacting out of character.
Self-styled comics and hams always messed up fictions based on old novels. But most people liked the
old novels for the fun of the scenery and costumes more than anything else. One's real life and the rest of
the world did not-could not-exist in those settings. Quinn simply loved them.

On Sunday, Quinn didn't remember about the spy-eye until well into the afternoon. Just as he spent most
of Saturdays playing in one or two multi-user fictions, so he spent Sundays at his terminal, logged on to
catch up with his e-mail, and then to cyber-socialize, and maybe read some hard news (which he couldn't
stomach during the work week), or fiction. It was the beeping of the diagnostic patch the pharmacy had
given him, beeping that warned him it was time to apply a new insulin patch, that made him remember.
He looked away from his computer screen, and glanced around the room, and suddenly had the strange
sensation of someone else in the room with him, invisible to his sight, peering over his shoulder, seeing out
of only one eye, but seeing Quinn's room, Quinn's life. It made him queasy, even a little dizzy, to see the
room so strangely. It was as though it wasn't his room-simultaneous with his feeling utterly familiar and
bored with it. It was like a strange experience of d├йj├а vu. Only it was, of course, something else.

Quinn told himself he shouldn't be feeling anything. That it was a matter of his consciousness, nothing else.
But a part of him began to doubt he had any reliable idea of exactly what that med-bot had been doing
inside his head.

***