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

? I couldn't begin to tell you,? Quinn said with considerable discomfort. He glanced at Courtney, then
quickly away. She'd been his baby-sitter when they were kids. And though she was about eight years
older than he, had always seemed just a regular age, not that much older at all. But over the last year or
so it had become painfully obvious just how old she was. She didn't wear cosmetics, and had had no
free-radical cleanouts, nor any cosmetic surgery, either. As a result, her face looked ... puffy, or
something. In strong light it drove him crazy. It seemed that right before his very eyes she was joining the
old people, sliding into that big, ever-growing generation of has-beens.

Though of course she owned that house, her great aunt (an old-time feminist who'd never married) had
willed it to her, and she had a job that wasn't likely to be yanked out from under her, so getting old
wasn't going to be the totally dire problem for her it was for most people.
Quinn snarfed down the soup and muffins in front of the television, and drank down an entire liter bottle
of water. Somehow, though he really really really wanted to be distracted, the sitcoms just didn't catch
on. Instead he kept thinking about the med-bot, and the preppy, and the deal he'd made with the preppy,
and the fact that there was no single person in the world he felt he could tell the horror to.

It was like a lump inside him, undigested. It was like a terrible guilty secret. It was like trading a deadly
disease for another, less socially acceptable (but nonlethal) one. He imagined himself wearing a bell, like
a leper of old, to warn everyone around him that they weren't safe in his presence.

L. Quinn, spy-eye. Or cat's paw. Or just plain pimp for a voyeur.

***

The implantation of the spy-eye took less than two hours. Mostly it was boring. The medical ? team?
(one med-bot plus the ? supervisory tech? whose presence was required by hospital regs) told Quinn
nothing, answered none of his requests for specific information about the procedure; clearly it considered
nothing but streamlined efficiency of any importance whatsoever. Quinn suspected that the med-bot was
not programmed to take substantive questions, and that the supervisory tech was probably just a warm
human body without real knowledge of what the med-bot was doing and so could not answer questions.
? You signed the informed-consent agreement,? she said when he tried pressing her. ? If your questions
come out of those kinds of concerns, that was the time to be asking them. If they come out of mere
curiosity and boredom, then they're inappropriate.?

The deal was sealed, in other words, and getting medical info wasn't part of it. Quinn got the message,
and settled down into the sensuwrap entertainment available during the first two-thirds of the procedure
(obviously designed to keep him from worrying about what they were doing inside his head). The
skydiving scenario successfully diverted him for almost half an hour, but when he smelled the strange
vanilla-like odor tantalizingly familiar yet unnamable, he could not integrate it with the scenario, and so
could not help wondering whether the smell was temporarily with him, or might become a permanent part
of his consciousness, as a ? side-effect? of the implantation.

By the time the med-bot had finished messing with the inside of his head, the smell had gone away. The
med-bot then put him through a series of tests requiring his conscious participation. His vision was the
same as always. Quinn stood before the mirror and examined his reflection as he hadn't done since
adolescence. ? Which eye is the spy-eye?? he asked anxiously, unable to see any difference in his
appearance in the mirror, unable to feel any difference in his head or eyes.

The med-bot went into idle. Quinn had a brief fantasy of kicking it, of taking a hammer to it, but then