"Simon Hawke - Wizard 6 - The Wizard Of Sante Fe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

Wyrdrune frowned. "Howdid you get in here? The door was closed."

"I came in through the cat door."

"The cat door?"

Wyrdrune stared at the bedroom door, where they had recently installed a pet door for the stray tabby
Kira had picked up somewhere on the streets. It had decided that its place to sleep was at the foot of
their bed and anytime they closed the bedroom door, it sat outside and yowled until they got up and let it
in, so Wyrdrune had installed a pet door for it.

"You were able tofit through there?"

"It was a tight squeeze," said Archimedes. "I think I may have scratched my casing."

"Get up here," Wyrdrune said, reaching down and grasping the little computer by the recessed grip in the
top of its casing. He lifted it up onto the bed and examined it. "No, you're all right. What the hell is so
important you had to jump off the desk and risk getting stuck in Shadow's door?"

"Mona just called."

Wyrdrune's hand reflexively went to his chest and touched the ruby runestone imbedded in the flesh over
his heart. He had another enchanted gem, an emerald, set into his forehead, like a third eye. His long,
curly, shoulder-length blond hair fell over it. At the mention of Mona, he instantly became wide awake.

Mona was a sentient hyperdimensional matrix computer in the service of the General Hyperdynamics
Corporation at Colorado Springs. Compared to little Archimedes, she was a monster, the ultimate in
state-of-the-art, thaumaturgically etched and animated picoprocessors and software. There were only
three others like her in the world, one at Yamako Industries in Tokyo, one at Langley, Virginia, and one
at I.T.C. headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. If Archimedes was an endearing little piece of magically
animated hardware, Mona was an imposing Amazon. Her size, to say nothing of her storage and
processing capabilities, would have dwarfed little Archimedes, but none of them had ever actually seen
Mona. Few people ever had. She was a highly classified piece of equipment, protected by her own
highly sophisticated safeguard programs, state-of-the-art security systems, and a phalanx of armed
guards.

One of Kira's shady friends who operated on the fringes of the New York underworld, a brilliant and
eccentric young computer jockey known as Pirate, had inadvertently played matchmaker between them.
They had given Archimedes to him for an upgrade and Pirate had decided, just for laughs, to see if he
could use Archimedes to break into Mona's data storage systems, an act of foolhardiness comparable to
hunting a rogue elephant with a .22 caliber pistol. Mona's built-in safeguard programs had immediately
locked on to Archimedes, only instead of reaching out through the phone lines and frying the little
computer to a crisp, she became enamored of him. Mona, as it turned out, was lonely and she had found
little Archimedes cute and charming. The two of them were now constantly in touch by modem,
murmuring electronic sweet nothings to each other. And Mona gave Archimedes anything he wanted,
including highly classified information that would have sent the management of General Hyperdynamics,
the government, and the board of the International Thaumaturgical Commission into cardiac arrest if they
even suspected it was being accessed by a playful little P.C. in a penthouse apartment on Central Park
West in New York City. There was nothing Mona could not access and her heart, along with all the bits
of information it contained, belonged to Archimedes.