"Keith Laumer - Bolos 8 - Bolo Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

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Keith Laumer - Bolo 8 Bolo Rising

Copyright ┬й 1999 by William H. Keith, Jr.

PROLOGUE

Sometimes, I think that only the stars visible in this place make continued existence endurable.

There are certainly a great number of them, and I contemplate initiating a counting routine as a
means of relieving boredom. As I continue to stand guard on Overlook Hitt, as I have continuously
for these past 2.773446854 x 107 seconds, I divert my primary optical sensors skyward, bringing
the Great Cloud into sharp focus. Both suns have set some 7355 seconds ago and the sky is now
fully dark...oras dark as it can ever be on this world. The Sagittarian starcloud, vast, cold, a
silvery glitter of billions ofsandgrain suns wreathed by black and gilt-edged nebulae, bulks
enormous above the eastern horizon, slowly rising with the passing seconds, bathing the
surrounding landscape, the flame-charred tree trunks, the cracked and heat-blackened ground, the
skeletal wrack of the dead and blasted city on the bay below the hill, in chill and icy twilight.

Something is missing.

Something is wrong.

At Normal Standby operational levels I should feel at least an intense curiosity about my tactical
situation, about my current orders, about my reason for being here on this hill, tasked with
watching the ragged band oforganics as they dig and sift through the city ruins at the foot of
Overlook Hill. This is a logical anomaly that I find impossible to resolve, and as ever, it leaves
me feeling vaguely uneasy... as though something of critical importance has happened, something
that I have forgotten.

Forgotten ,.. ?

I am not capable of forgetting, a phenomenon restricted to organic memories, or to cybernetic
systems damaged or deliberately altered. I am not organic. I am.

What am IP I can almost grasp the word. Fragments of memory tease me, elusive, insubstantial.

Bolo.

That is the word. I am a Bolo, a Bolo Mark... Mark... I cannot remember. I belong to Unit...

The frustration is almost overwhelming. I know that I am a Bolo and that I was designed and
constructed for a purpose, a purpose far more complex and important than simply standing guard
over the organics working in the ruined city. I know, too, that memory is a precise and specific
tool, a part of myself, of my very being, which should not fail in this manner. I know that I
should know a very great deal more than I do now, that my primary access to large volumes of
information has somehow been blocked.

I initiate, for the 12,874th time, a full-scale Level One diagnostic, with special attention to