"Alex Irvine - Volunteers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Irvine Alexander C)

tables, a pinball machine, and a full bar. There was a jukebox with a killer selection of Elvis and Little
Richard and Buddy Holly downloaded from Susan Constant, and a fake little 45 that spun while the
digital music played. A league started up on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was something to do after
school that didn't involve walking in the park or watching robots frame a new building, and right away
everyone in the school started going there. There was general agreement that a good old-fashioned place
to hang out was doing the colony good.

When, that is, anyone would admit they were part of a colony.

This was where the Lodge came in. It started off when Julio Furcal, a social-studies teacher who had
once been some kind of neurotech consultant, realized that Grant City's problems weren't just an
affectation and weren't going away. The colony was sick, would get sicker, and needed a group of
people to stand off to the side, nod and smile and pretend to go along while in fact they made sure that
we all survived. At first there were six of them: Julio, Sharon Pelletier, Vince Tukwiler, Miss Callahan,
and I don't know the other two. When I went to my first meeting, Julio said they were on assignment.
Like spies, and they were spies, but they also thought of themselves as guardians. "We're hoping that this
delusion is just a temporary kind of collective defense mechanism," Pelletier told me. "In the meantime,
we try to get some science done, make sure everyone can eat, and hope that people wake up before
things get to a crisis stage."

I have to put this in a kind of Fifties perspective to get across how terrifying and thrilling it was. Imagine
finding out that a breakfast-cereal decoder ring really did put you in touch with a secret society of
superheroes; that's what this was like. I hated everything about Grant City except Iris and sometimes my
dad, but now I had been welcomed into a grand subterfuge. Someone understood. I wasn't crazy. And
maybe there was a plan to get everything back on the right track.

Julio told me I didn't need to come to meetings unless I had something important to tell them. People
were already watching me because of the spex and my tendency to shoot off my mouth in class, which
made me a bit of a danger to what they were trying to do. "But now we'll be watching you, too," he said.
"And once you get a little older, we'll ask you to do certain things."

I imagined lurking in an alleyтАФGrant City didn't have any, but I'd seen vidsтАФwaiting to stick a knife
between Justin Rowe's ribs. Then Julio let me down by saying that they wouldn't want me to do anything
violent or even illegal. It wasn't that kind of a group. "What we need from you is your eyes and your
brain," he said. "Keep both sharp, okay?"

"Okay," I said.

"And don't tell your father. He knows about us, and he knows we've asked you to join, but it's best for
now if the two of you don't discuss it."

This was easy. Not discussing things came pretty naturally to the Brennans.
├Дt
But he was still my dad, and I was still a kid, and I was so wound up with the knowledge of secrets that I
had to talk to him about something just to distract myself. So I found the old man on his bench looking
out at the woods, and I sat down next to him. "Dad, is Evelyn a robot?"
Dad opened his mouth, shut it again, got up for one of his slow circuits of the bench. When he sat again,
he said, "No. She's not a robot."

"What is she?"