"Stephen Kenson - Technobabel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kenson Stephen)

to tell me to go slot, but then glances again at the gun I'm holding and
reaches into the pocket of his jacket. I grab the key-ring in the shape of a
little plastic dragon without taking my eyes off him and then back a few steps
away.
Turning from the carnage in the room, I head out the door, my head still
ringing from the ghoul's strike and my ribs and legs aching. I burst out into
the hallway to see a man wearing a pristine white lab coat over his street
clothes. He is studying the flat computer pad in his hand. He looks up as I
rush out of the room, all bloody and wild-eyed, and there is a long instant
where we seem to just stand and stare at each other. I raise the gun and shoot
him

without a second thought and keep moving down the corridor. He drops the
computer pad with a clatter and stumbles back from the impact of the round to
his chest. The look of surprise is frozen on his face, and he leaves streaks
of blood where he slides down the pale gray wall. I have no idea who he is.
I run down the corridor and out the door to the van parked in the alleyway,
still loaded with its macabre cargo of corpses. I yank open the door, jump
into the driver's side, and gun the ignition, body-bags scattering from the
meat-wagon's open rear doors as I peel out of there. A horn blares at me as I
swerve onto the road and accelerate away, but there is no sign of pursuit from
the charnel house. Only when I'm several blocks away do I notice the blood
spattered on my clothes and skin. I look down at my arm where the terrible
curved blade emerged, seeing the faint, pale line on my skin near my wrist
that is its sheath.
I didn't even know it was there.




3
Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men migrated from
the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they
said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly." And
they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us
build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us
make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the.
earth." And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons
of men had built. And the Lord said, "Behold, they are one people, and they
all have one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do;
and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let
us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one
another's speech." So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face
of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was
called Babel, because the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and
from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the earth.
-Genesis 11:1-9
It had been a long time since God felled humanity's last attempt to build a
tower to the heavens, but humanity had now toppled heaven from the sky and
raised up a new heaven to replace it. A heaven of glittering satellites and