"Kathleen Ann Goonan - The Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

I was hired by the artificial personтАЩs sister.

****

She knocked on my office-door window on a Friday evening just after
I had poured myself a Scotch. It was mid-December, gloomy at four-thirty
PM, and that was evening enough to justify the first drink of the day. A light
snow was falling, and the flakes outside my third-floor window glowed
green, gold, and blue each time the HarryтАЩs Bar sign just below changed
color.

My office is in Rosslyn, Virginia, a few blocks from the Potomac
River. Across Key Bridge is whatever was left of Washington, D.C. It had
been utterly changed by a nanotech surge five years earlier.

We unchanged huddle here across the river. Many of the buildings
here are altered, of course; new forms of communication are in full swing:
giant beelike creatures fill the sky during the day, moving information here
and there. Broadcast communication works only sporadically.

Almost everything else has changed.

But for me, on that day, nothing had changed. I had made sure of that.
In fact, most days I entertained thoughts of cashing out completely, but
even that seemed like too much trouble.

The woman cupped her hands to the glass in an attempt to see inside
my dark office.

Illuminated by the dim bulb in the hallway, her face was pale, her eyes
large and dark. Her hair was black. She wore a small, blue felt hat perched
atop a sophisticated hairdo, with a net that swept across her eyes without
hiding them. Her blue wool suit fit tightly; when she stepped back from the
door, and looked doubtfully up and down the hall, I could see that her skirt
was long and tight, with a little fillip at the bottom that gave her legs just
enough room to take mincing steps. I knew that she wore high heels
because I had heard them as she approached down the hall.
 I decided that I wanted to see what they looked like.

I pushed my rumpled self up from my rumpled couch, tucked in my
shirt, straightened my slightly stained tie. I am middle-aged, unable to
affordтАФbut not wanting, eitherтАФso many of the bionan enhancements at
large in the world today. My looks are plainтАФa slightly heavy face, whiskers
that grow too quickly, small blue eyes, a receding hairline, and a depressive
personality that dulls whatever sparkle my mother might have seen in me.
Like most private eyes, I used to be a police detective. For many years, I
was quite successful. Most days, now, I sat in my office and wondered what
I could do to make a living. IтАЩd already put in a notice to the landlord that I
was leaving at the end of the year. My office was cheap, but not cheap
enough.