"Richard Laymon - Dreambox Junkies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laymon Richard)

he didn't have the blood supply. He'd gone to the doctor, had operations, several, to shorten it, reduce it,
cut it back down to size. But it had quickly grown back again, and rather than have it clutter up the ward,
the nurses had coiled it round the bed for him, around and around, over and under, a ridiculous long
fleshy hose. Dog-tired but unfailingly sympathetic, the nice, nice nurses had done their best to soothe his
distress, andтАФand then the timer had come to the rescue, fetching him out.

It was easy to laugh, now, looking back on it, and Ruth had pissed her knickers when he'd told her. But
at the time, his boxworld terror had felt as real, as deep, as deleterious to mind and body as any fear he
had ever experienced down here on the ground.

The physical toll of dethanning was another matter. The long-term effects of excessive Crowning Glory
consumption were anyone's guess, and there had even been claims that you could end up with corrupted
DNA from too much Vitamin C. But Paulie wasn't intending his box junkiedom to last; once his goal had
been achieved, the world would have no need for Dreamboxes.

It was no good expectingBoxRuth to understand what things were like for a user; she had never boxed
up, never once. She had no interest, any more than she had in the Net, in ware hard or soft, in
boxworlds, in anything techy. Little Kali was enough for her, along with her books and her carpentry, the
wooden furniture she made and sold to win their bread, along with the occasional supplement of a paying
guest. She was right, correct in her adultness. Someone had to mind the mundane. They weren't rich like
Frances. Babies couldn't look after themselves.

Dreamboxes meant nothing to Ruth, personally. But, because she loved him, and was thus prepared to
humour him, to listen with patience to his ideas, Ruth had gone out and bought him a Dreambox. She had
purchased it out of the money she'd earned for a beautiful rustic pine dresser, stained with cheap
teaтАФwhich Ruth always used in place of woodstainтАФand finished off with just the right amount of wax.
Times were lean; they'd barely managed to pay their last water bill, and Ruth's artifacts hadn't been selling
so well in recent months, thanks to a short-lived, frantic craze for Early Flatpack, the retro
peeling-veneered-chipboard look that had briefly made honest-to-goodness pine seem so very
five-minutes-ago. Yet still Ruth hadn't skimped, going out and getting him a good, solid brand of box, a
Shintube. She hadn't just plumped for the cheapest, one of those fuckawful brands you'd never heard of,
with shit chronocomp, hideous neo-1970s mock-woodgrain inlays, and timers that could never fetch you
out without inducing panic. They'd been known to give users fits. But there they were, still on the market.
Like with everything else in this life it was all up in the air: what to do about safety, what standards to set,
what legislation to pass. You kept hearing that a ban was in the offing, total Dreambox prohibitionтАФas
the Islamic world was struggling to instigate, in the face of global techanarchyтАФbut now the genie was
out of the bottle, it seemed a forlorn hope. Worldwide, the megacorps pretty much held sway in this and
most other concerns, and you didn't slap bans on hotcakes.

But once the megacorps found that the Dreambox was causing the consumer pool to evaporate, maybe,
then, something would be done. Box sales were soaring; but, he had heard, gamecard sales were
significantly down. And the same with cinextrapolation cards; entering into your favourite movie was no
longer quite such a craze. It appeared, then, that more and more users were slotting in the supplied
wildcard, as Paulie himself had, for freeform psychsurfing, building a boxlife fashioned from one's
innermost desires, your own imagination rather than that of some gamegrammer.

Innermost desires, Paulie thought. You live with a woman, you box up, and your transconscious mind
chooses the same woman to be there with you in boxworld. Not some model, singer, synthesp, some
crush from your pastтАФor even Frances, for that matterтАФbut Ruth, the very same woman you live with,
here in the purportedly ontodefinitive Grundwelt, Groundworld. That happens, and surely you know