"Gibson, William - Johnny Mnemonic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

'Crude.' It might have been a compliment.'
Ralfi said nothing at all.
'Name's Millions. Molly Millions. You want to get out of here, boss?
People are starting to stare.' She stood up. She was wearing leather
jeans the colour of dried blood.
And I saw for the first time that the mirrored lenses were surgical
inlays, the silver rising smoothly from her high cheekbones, sealing her
eyes in their sockets, I saw my new face twinned there.
'I'm Johnny,' I said. 'We're taking Mr face with us.'

He was outside, waiting. Looking like your standard tourist tech, in
plastic zoris and a silly Hawaiian shirt printed with blowups of his
firm's most popular microprocessor; a mild little guy, the kind most
likely to wind up drunk on sake in a bar that puts out miniature rice
crackers with seaweed garnish. He looked like the kind who sing the
corporate anthem and cry, who shake hands endlessly with the bartender.
And the pimps and the dealers would leave him alone, pegging him as
innately conservative. Not up for much, and carefull with his credit
when he was.
The way I figured it later, they must have amputated part of his left
thumb, somewhere behind the first joint, replacing it with a prosthetic
tip, and cored the stump, fiting it with a spool and socket molded from
one of the Ono-Sendai diamond analogs. Then they'd carefully wound the
spool with three meters of monomolecular filement.
Molly got into some kind of exchange with the Magnetic Dog Sisters,
giving me a chance to usher Ralfi through the door with the gym bag
pressed lightly against the base of his spine. She seemend to know them.
I heard the black one laugh.
I glanced up, out of some passing reflex, maybe because I've never got
used to it, to the soaring arcs of light and the shadows of the
geodesics above them. maybe that saved me.
Ralfi kept walking, but I don't think he was trying to escape. I think
he'd already given up. Probably he already had an idea of what we were
up against.
I looked back down in time to see him explode.
Playback on full recall shows Ralfi stepping foward as the little tech
sidles out os nowhere, smilling. Just a suggestion of a bow, and his
left thumb falls of. It'a a conjuring trick. The thumb hangs suspended.
Mirrors? Wires? And Ralfi stops, his back to us, dark crescents of sweat
under the armpits of his pale summer suit. He knows. He must have known.
And then the joke-shop thumbtip, heavy as lead, arcs out in a lighting
yo-yo trick, and the invisible thread connectingit to the killer's hand
passes laterally through Ralfi's skull, just above his eyebrows, whips
up, and descends, slicing the pearshaped torso diaganally from shoulder
to rib cage. Cuts so fine that no blood flows until synapses misfire and
the first tremors surrender the body to gravity.
Ralfi tumbled apart in a pink cloud of fluids, the three mismatched
section rolling forwardon the tiled pavement. In total silence.
I brought the gym bag up, and my hand convulsed. The recoil nearly broke
my wrist.