"Tom Easton - Silicon Karma" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

sold their imaginings of food or sex or fashion to their fellow
residents. One popular product for those with programming skills was the
image-transformation routines necessary to strip the years away from
one's age of entry, or to grow fur or tails, or to make other changes.
And some cheated. "I have heard," Ada had said. "That some of my guests
have disappeared."

"Why don't you just reboot them?"

The computer's representation shook her head. "They're not dead. They
haven't really vanished. They're still around. That much I know. But
none of their friends have seen them, and they don't answer calls."

"If they're still around, you could force them to answer. Or pick them
up and drop them in the same room as those friends."

"You know I can't do that. I can't interfere." He had sighed, and when
she had added, "Would you look into it?" he had agreed. Now he could
only shrug. "I must have been close, but ..."

The memory just wasn't there. "Then you'll have to start over."

"Not quite." His memory was fine, up to his last B-cup three days
before. He had only three days of investigation to repeat. And then, if
whatever he had found before could still be found, if it had not been
hidden or destroyed, he would know why he had been murdered. He
suspected that he would also have fulfilled the mission Ada had handed
him. "Did they have anything in common?"
"Several of them had recently bought custom image transformation
routines from the Image Shop."

"Then there's a place to start." # The Coleridge Corporation occupied
the twenty-sixth through the thirty-first floors of the forty-story
building it owned in the heart of the city. The executive boardroom was
on the uppermost of these floors, its broad expanse of glass looking out
over sun-sparkled ocean, distant freighters, and closer sailboats, a
ferry, a snow-white cruise ship. The foreground was filled with the
roofs of lower buildings, fragments of street, a green scrap of
waterfront park. Swimmers could not be seen because the water was toxic
with sewage and chemical wastes. The only persons who entered the water
in the flesh were those who did not intend to return. The four people
sitting at the boardroom's long table were paying no attention to the
view. They were there to discuss certain difficulties the Corporation
was encountering, fully aware that if they could find no solution ...
Well, each of them had enough in investments and savings to live out
their lives in comfort. They were not about to go down to the beach.
That, or its equivalent, would be for the Corporation. One of the chairs
of polished wood and thick leather upholstery creaked discreetly. "It's
gobbling memory," said Jonathon Spander. The official head of the
division, he had thinning hair, a round nose, and bad teeth that he