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

SmarTampax for the twenty-first century gir-hirl...

Sma-har-Ta-a-a-a-am-pax for inside infor-ma-tion...

Of course, Mindseye was merely the first stage. Electrotelepathy was as yet in its infancy; you could only
receive, like with early TV. The much-vaunted ThoughtNet remained a dream of tomorrow, along with
cities on Mars, inoculations against envy, and men you could actually live with.

Her head ached like fruck. And little wonder, with a hole in it. Pain-free Mindseye removal? The
analgesics were crap. Her brain, her eyes and her jaw, her back teeth, evenтАФTHROB THROB frucking
THROB. She couldn't bear to wear her smartspecs, and to have to keep peering at the poky screen of
her mobe was to court ocular peril. Serves me right, Sesha thought ruefully. Early adoption's a mug's
game. They rush out all this fadgetry and use us as cost-cutting guinea pigs.

Needless to say, this would put her at a grave disadvantage, marketwise, in the event of her moving on
from the Institute. If you couldn't wear a MindseyeтАФyour ticket to the brave, brained-up world of the
futureтАФbosses, most bosses, soon wouldn't want to know. To quote that famous Bertrand Laurel
soundbite: тАШCommerce is combat.'

Not that Sesha would have been contemplating a move, ordinarily. She was happy working for Frances,
quite content with the sweet deal all PsyTri employees enjoyed. And they weren't about to dismiss her on
incap grounds, claiming a Mindseye assine qua non. Frances wasn't a bloodshark. Frances Rayle valued
people.

But Sesha had nevertheless felt the need for one or two career precautions. For the sake of her resume
she had gone along the previous evening to the new McClinic in Bayswater, taking advantage of their
special introductory limited-period low-cost implantation offer, having first okayed it with her stars.

Well, so much for frucking astrology.

It had started out as an unpleasant rumour, that Frances had been undergoing anti-age telotherapy and
had begun to show signs of that dreadful, dreadful side-effect, Angel Syndrome. And now today Ajit, the
London chief, had confirmed it: Frances was being treated for AS at her hideaway in Spain. It was
incredible bad luck; AS was so rare. And no one, so far, had recovered from it. How could you not
worry?

And yet, perversely, from time to time Sesha still found herself wondering whether in, say, a decade or
so, once the ageing process really went to town on herтАФand telotherapy was no longer so prohibitively
expensiveтАФshe would herself turn to telothine to try and stablilize her cellsтАЩ reparative powers. Probably.
Even at the risk of AS? Probably, yes.

Rain coursed across the windscreen, great dirty inky clouds denying the city its sunset, as they had for
most of this dull, wet February. The traffic, as ever, was horrendous. Sesha couldn't imagine what it must
have been like before Backseat, although half the drivers out there, if surveys were to be believed, got
their kicks from leaving it switched off and relying on their own reflexes. At least there were no more
meetings to attend for the rest of the week. Renowned for her quirkiness, Frances insisted on a maximum
of physprox and as little telepresence as possible, set great store by face-to-faceness. Which was wise,
in all probability, but on a day as damp as this, simply disastrous for someone with Sesha's PsyTri profile.
For the weather had, yet again, gone and put paid to her Psychotrichological Congruence. Her hair had