"Peter F. Hamilton - A Second Chance At Eden" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

air-conditioning vibrating the air at a frequency guaranteed to induce a migraine. Three hours
of that.
I hate cities.
Midday, and we rolled into the derelict yard like an old-fashioned circus caravan come
to town. I was driver's mate to Jacob, sitting up in the ageing twenty-wheeler's cab, feet up to
squash the tideline of McWrappers littering the dash. Curious roadies from the arena were
milling about on the fractured concrete, staring up at us. The other two vans in our team's
convoy turned in off the road. A big pair of dilapidated metal gates clanged shut behind us.
Jacob locked the wheels and turned off the power cell. I climbed down out of the cab.
The silvered side of the lorry was grimy from the city's airplaque, but my reflection was
clear enough. Blond bob hairstyle that needs attention; same goes for the clothes, I guess:
sleeveless black T-shirt and olive-green Bermuda shorts I've had for over a year, feet
crammed into fraying white plimsolls. I'm twenty-two, though I've got the kind of gaunt
figure thirty-year-old women have when they work out and diet hard to make themselves look
twenty-two again. My face isn't too bad; Jacob rebuilt it to give me the prominent
cheekbones I'd always wanted as a teenager. Maybe it wasn't as expressive as it used to be,
but the distorting curves of the lorry's bodywork made it hard to tell.
Outside the cab's insulation, London's sounds hit me square on, along with its heat and
smell. The three major waste products of eighteen million consumers determined to
preserve their lifestyle by spending and burning their way through domestic goodies and
energy at a rate only twenty-first century industry can supply. And even that struggles to keep
up with demand.
I can plug straight into that beautiful hive of greed; their need for a byte of the action. I
know what they want best of all, and we provide it for them.
Excitement, that's how me and the rest of Sonnie's Predators suckle our money. And
we've brought a big unique chunk of it here to Battersea. Tonight, there's gonna be a fight.
Beastie-baiting: the all-time blood sport; violent, spectacularly gory, and always lethal.
It's new and it's happening; universes away from the sanitized crap of VR games consumers
load into their taksuit processor each night. This is real, it ignites the old instincts, the
strongest and most addictive of all. And Sonnie's Predators are the hottest team to storm
ashore in the two years since the contests started. Seventeen straight wins. We've got Baiter
groupies howling for us all the way from the Orkney Islands down to Cornwall.
I was lucky, signing up at level one, when all the rage was modifying Rottweilers and
Dobermans with fang implants and razor claws. A concept I bet poor old Wing-Tsit Chong
never thought of when he invented the affinity bond.
Karran and Jacob were the team's nucleus, fresh out of Leicester University with their
biotechnology degrees all hot and promising. They could have gone to any company in the
world with those qualifications, plunged straight into the corporate universe of applied
research and annual budget squabbles. It's an exchange millions of graduates make each year,
zest for security, and the big relief of knowing your student loans will be paid off. But that
was about the time when the Pope started appeasing the Church's right wing, and publicly
questioned the morality of affinity and the way it was used to control animals. It didn't take
long for the mullahs to join the chorus. The whole biotechnology ethics problem became
prime topic for newscable studios; not to mention justification for a dozen animal-rights
activists to launch terminal action campaigns against biotechnology labs. Suddenly,
establishment biotechnology wasn't so enticing.
If they didn't start paying off the student loan within six months of graduation, the bank
would just assign them to a company (and take an agency fee from their salary). Baiting was
the only financially viable alternative for their talent.
Ivrina was an ex-surgical nurse who had just started helping them with grafting