"James Patrick Kelly - The Best Christmas Ever" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

fingers, as if he thought it might try to leap from his grasp. "You do that." He captured it on the second
attempt.




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End Interaction 4022932




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The man was fifty-six years old and in good health, considering. His name was Albert Paul Hopkins, but
none of the biops called him that. Aunty Em called him Bertie. The girlfriend called him sweetie or Al.
The pal biops called him Al or Hoppy or Sport. The stranger biops called him Mr. Hopkins or sir. The
animal biops didn't speak much, but the dog called him Buddy and the cat called him Mario.
When Aunty Em beamed a summary of the interaction to the girlfriend biop, the girlfriend immediately
volunteered to try the Kathy body again. The girlfriend had been desperate of late, since the man didn't
want anything to do with her. His slump had been hard on her, hard on Aunty Em too. Taking care of the
man had changed the biops. They were all so much more emotional than they had been when they were
first budded.

But Aunty Em told the girlfriend to hold off. Instead she decided to throw a Christmas. She hadn't done
Christmas in almost eight months. She'd given him a Gone With The Wind Halloween and a Fourth of
July with whistling busters, panoramas, phantom balls, and double-break shells, but those were only
stopgaps. The man needed cookies, he needed presents, he was absolutely aching for a sleigh filled with
Christmas cheer. So she beamed an alert to all of her biops and assigned roles. She warned them that if
this wasn't the best Christmas ever, they might lose the last man on earth.




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Aunty Em spent three days baking cookies. She dumped eight sticks of fatty acid triglycerides, four cups
of C 12 H22 O11 , four vat-grown ova, four teaspoons of flavor potentiator, twelve cups of milled grain
endosperm, and five teaspoons each of NaHCO 3 and KHC 4H4O6 into the bathtub and then trod on the
mixture with her best baking boots. She rolled the dough and then pulled cookie cutters off the top shelf
of the pantry: the mitten and the dollar sign and the snake and the double-bladed ax. She dusted the
cookies with red nutriceutical sprinkles, baked them at 190┬░C, and brought a plate to the man while they
were still warm.
The poor thing was melting into the recliner in the television room. He clutched a half-full tumbler of
Sins-of-the-Mother, as if it were the anchor that was keeping him from floating out of the window. He