"Nancy Kress - The Sleepless - Sleeping Dogs" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

especially good at cleaning up disasters left by other, malfunctioning bots.

On the twentieth night, the 4-p.M.-to-midnight dog stops on his side of the fence, reaches through the Y-energy wit
paw, and cuffs me roughly on the butt. He's the alpha male, the biggest of the guard dogs, the one who carries his t
highest and his ears pricked forward the farthest. He tears a gash in my padded trousers and then trots away on his r
patrol.
I lie still, waiting for him to return. Six minutes later he does, cuffs me again, and moves on.
By the end of the month, half his body juts through the Y-fence, which from the inside he doesn't know is there, wh
rolls me around on the ground. Sometimes he's rough, sometimes just playful. I have deep scratches on my neck and ha
try to keep him away from my face, and when I fail, I wear heavy makeup at work. When the dog's on top of me, snappin
fake-growling, I try to never remember Precious.
It's not the dog's fault. His brain is hard-wired. All the dogs in a pack pick on one dog. That's the function of the omega dog, the last and lo
to give all the other dogs something to pick on and exploit. The pack needs that outlet to work off tension they might oth
use fighting each other. The omega dog is in their genes.
Sometimes, when Alpha takes my arm in his jaws and shakes it, I put my hand on his neck. I can feel the beeper, just under his s
transmitting the electronic signal that lets him penetrate the fence if he happens to brush up against it without setting off alarms. And anything att
to him would also penetrate: you don't want the alarms going off just because your guard dog's tail brushed a Y-field and that ta
happens to have a burr stuck on it.
On the thirty-third day, I roll through the fence, smelling like a female wolf, my arms wrapped around the Alpha guard dog.
he cuffs me sharply on the shoulder and leaves me there. He's been trained never to let a stranger inside. But I'm a member of his
filling a necessary position. It makes all the difference.

The Subnet claims, over and over, that it keeps no records. But the Subnet itself is a record, endlessly download
there's one, there'll be others. Nobody can remember every business deal without help. Especially if you need to know who yo
better not try to deal with a second time.
Nothing inside Red Goldfish Trucking is locked. But nothing gives me what I want, either. The windowless building is mostly used for
cargo and fixing trucks, with a tiny, filthy office walled off in one corner. There's a terminal, although I know better than to think I'll find anything o
It's free-standing, but the government has new microwave equipment that can lift data off even free-standing terminals, as long as the term
switched on. The Subnet says it also has that equipment for sale. I don't believe it. I don't believe anything on the S
unless I try it out for myself, like I did the dog attractant. However, I know the Red Goldfish records won't be electronic.
They're plastic, written by hand on stiff blue cards stored in a blue box in the back of the closet. And they're in code.
Beta dog comes into the office. He's off duty. I have to let him knock me around for a few minutes before he curls up in the
and goes to sleep.
I take the whole box with me, ride Alpha back through the fence, and catch the next bus out. On the bus I fall in
deepest sleep of my life. It feels like a reward.

There are five blue plastic cards, headed 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. That could mean chronological order, or groupings of dif
kinds of trucking jobs, or almost anything else. Each card is densely covered in small neat handwriting, row after row
letters and numbers and symbols with no breaks between. Card 5 is covered only two-thirds of the way down.
Donna stares as I walk with my suitcase into the Kellsville restaurant where she works. It's not a cheap table-del
soysynth place; it has real food and human servers, including Donna. She wears a black uniform with a blue apron. H
hair is piled on top of her head. She looks like Mama.
"Carol! What on God's green earth . . . Daddy said you went clean over into Ohio to work!"
"I did. I'm back. Can I stay with you a bit?"
 " 'Course you can, honey! And I want you to meet my boyfriend Jim, he's a real sweetie and I just know you two'llтАФ
"Is there a housecleaning firm in town? I've been working as a maid."
Donna laughs. "In Kellsville? You got to be kidding. But in the city, maybe ... there's a gravtrain goes back and
every day now, they just started it. But honey, you look terrible. You all right?"
I look at her. It's like looking at Mama: just as dead to me, just as far away. Donna's put Precious clean out of her
She doesn't know anything about deep black places you can fall into and never get out. She just doesn't know.