"Jay Lake - The Golden Whip" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

Thing is, after a while, there's people that like you, need you, love you, down there inside Mother
Company. That needle becomes an old ghost, last memory of your life before. Now there's
dependencies and reflexive contracts and mutual-aids, tiers and territories of folk who might live or die on
your simple error. Drop a decimal on a bulk protein trade? 3,700 dead in Delany-on-Mars. Rounding
error in the water purification budget? Sepsis rages through Lower Kowloon like fleas through a dog
pound.

What the hell, there's more people where they came from. Mother Company needs you, not them.
You're part of Her.

After a while, you're running ops for a whole region, life support and basic trade and civil order, all rolling
across your desk while nimble fingers rub your shoulders and it all seems okay.

Then one day some bastard with a Rousseau complex and a hairdo could stop air traffic walks in your
office with the gleam of Enlightenment in his steel teeth and a ball of holy fire in his hand.

"Here," he says, hands it to you.

Nobody hands you shit doesn't belong, not past chimp security and four hundred thousand virteo
cameras and the nanobath in the elevators.

You take it.

***

High fall far falling green flowers exploding in showers of fractured glass pollen fire running in your veins
like oil in an old Arab's dreams the satellites scream in their orbits from the pain of gravity what's left of
you but a cavity open white skin and pale red insides besides the world is gone and your skull gleams
pretty and pale in the desert night and you can see God up there in the sky His great watery eye
unblinking as Mama's stare while grind out your first and last high up on the porcelain pillar who's a good
boy shit and get a kiss and here's your needle Company man and what the hell ever happened to a simple
life with a simple plan and you can see the damned stars and how they connect those red lines are the
blood inside your eyes blooming like those fractured flowers until Mother Company unplugs you from
Her neural net or you unplug Her from yours or the plugging is as mutual as ever it was between mother
and son one long fuck begun with an extrusion when you weighed nine pounds and knew three words
two of them bad but that's all you can say now something which translates around the wet rough burping
as "help..."

***

When that son of a bitch fed me the holy fire, I thought I wanted it. I didn't know what it was, but it
looked good. Candy and babies, right? Or maybe candied babies.

By the time I found my ass and my hands again on the same stretch of real estate, forty thousand people
had died and a tsunami was swamping Dili in the wake of a subaquatic disaster in the Sunda Strait. There
were boys with zap guns and big long hooks standing over me. They looked worried.

"Sir?"

"I..." I couldn't get any further than help. These boys weren't about help. They were beyond it. I