"James Patrick Kelly - The Prisoner of Chillon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

something to flash the edges off."
"My name is Wynne Cage," I said. Bonivard seemed relieved when I did
not offer to shake his hand. "I'm a freelance...."
"Introductions not necessary. I follow your work closely; we have
mutual interests. Your father is Tony Cage, no? The flash artist?" He waited
for an answer; I didn't give him one.
It was hard to look at the man who called himself Francois Bonivard. He
was at once hideous and astonishingly photogenic; the camera would have loved
him. Both of his legs had been amputated at the hip joint and his torso was
fitted into some kind of bionic collar. I saw readouts marked _renal function,
blood profile, bladder_, and _bowel_. The entire left side of Bonivard's torso
was withered, as if some malign giant had pinched him between thumb and
forefinger. The left arm dangled uselessly, the hand curled into a frozen
claw. The face was relatively untouched, although pain had left its tracks,
particularly around the eyes. And it was the clarity with which those wide
brown eyes saw that was the most awful thing about the man. I could feel his
gaze effortlessly penetrate the mask of politeness, pierce the false sympathy,
and find my horror. Looking into those eyes I was sure that Bonivard knew how
the very sight of his ruined body made me sick.
I had to say something to escape that awful gaze. "Are you related to
_the_ Bonivard?"
He smiled. "I am the current prisoner." And then turned away. "There
was a pilot."
"Was. Past tense." Django nibbled at a radish from the vegetable bowl.
"How about my flash?"
"Business first." Bonivard rolled back to the table. "You have it
then?"
Django reached into his pocket and produced a stack of smart chips
peppered with memory dots and held together with a wide blue rubber band.
"Whatever WILDLIFE is, he's one heavy son of a bitch. You realize these are
hundred Gb chips." He set them on the table in front of him. "Hell of a lot of
code, even compressed."
Bonivard rolled to his place at the head of the table and put two smart
chips in front of him. "Cash cards from the Swiss Volksbank, Zurich.
Negotiable anywhere. All yours now." He slid them toward Django. "You made
only one copy?"
Here was the juice and the great spook journalist was blind. How could
I peddle this story to Infoline without the payoff scene?
Django eyed the cash cards but did not reach for them. "Not going to do
me much good if the ops catch me."
"No." Bonivard leaned back in his wheelchair. "But you're safe for
now." He glanced up at the ceiling and laughed. "They won't look in a prison."
"No?" Django snapped the rubber band on his stack of chips. "Maybe you
should tell me about WILDLIFE. I put my plug on the cutting board to get it
for you."
"An architecture." Bonivard shrugged. "For a cognizor."
The look on Django's face said it all. Cognizor was the latest buzz for
the mythical human-equivalent artificial intelligence. Django was already
convinced that Bonivard was scrambled; here was proof. He might just as well
have claimed that WILDLIFE was a plan for a perpetual motion machine. "Come