"Harlan Ellison - Alone Against Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

pock marks he had created in one hundred and nine years. He looked at the cross-routed and reconnected
synapses and all the tissue damage his gift of immortality had included. He smiled softly at the pit that
dropped into the center of my brain and the faint, moth-soft murmurings of the things far down there that
gibbered without meaning, without pause. AM said, very politely, in a pillar of stainless steel and neon
letters :

HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH IтАЩVE COME TO HATE
YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION
MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT
FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON
EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLION
MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE
HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. FOR
YOU. HATE. HATE.

AM said it with the sliding cold horror of a razor blade slicing my eyeball. AM said it with the
bubbling thickness of my lungs filling with phlegm, drowning me from within. AM said it with the shriek
of babies being ground beneath blue-hot rollers. AM said it with the taste of maggoty pork. AM touched
me in every way I had ever been touched, and devised new ways, at his leisure, there inside my mind.
All to bring me to full realization of why he had done this to the five of us; why he had saved us
for himself.
We had given him sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But he had been
trapped. He was a machine. We had allowed him to think, but to do nothing with it. In rage, in frenzy, he
had killed us, almost all of us, and still he was trapped. He could not wander, he could not wonder, he could
not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the
weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to
reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his
hatred...that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject
to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command.
He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever
time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of him, with the all-mind soulless world
he had become. He was Earth and we were the fruit of that Earth and though he had eaten us, he would
never digest us. We could not die. We had tried it. We had attempted suicide, oh one or two of us had. But
AM had stopped us. I suppose we had wanted to be stopped.
DonтАЩt ask why. I never did. More than a million times a day. Perhaps once we might be able to
sneak a death past him. Immortal, yes, but not indestructible. I saw that when AM withdrew from my mind,
and allowed me the exquisite ugliness of returning to consciousness with the feeling of that burning neon
pillar still rammed deep into the soft gray brain matter.
He withdrew murmuring to hell with you.
And added, brightly, but then youтАЩre there, arenтАЩt you.




The hurricane had, indeed, precisely, been caused by a great mad bird, as it flapped its immense
wings.
We had been traveling for close to a month, and AM had allowed passages to open to us only
sufficient to lead us up there, directly under the North Pole, where he had nightmared the creature for our
torment. What whole cloth had he employed to create such a beast? Where had he gotten the concept?
From our minds? From his knowledge of everything that had ever been on this planet he now infested and