"Thomas Marcinko - The Nixon Wrangler's Tale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marcinko Thomas)

The urge to create dies hard. Believe me, I know.

Why do we hate the nixons, I ask the Chief on graduation day. We protect
all the fleshkon greats of stage and screen Ч the elvises, the marilyns,
the grouchos. And we look after the educational fleshkons, the great
figures from history. Though fleshkons aren't strictly human, most people
treat them decently. But there's always somebody who wants to cause them
pain. Sick, sick people who find the lookalike of their choice too
attractive, too disturbing. . . . It's not always easy to spot the sickos,
either. But we fear and hate the nixons, and we act as if it's we who need
protection from them. Yet we crank them out by the planeload. Why?
And the Chief answers me: Because they're everything we now know to be
evil. Because we need them to be scapegoats. The Big Reform of '17 won't
hold without a constant reminder of how bad things can get. We need to put
our dark side out where we can see it. The hitlers were too obvious, the
saddams laughable, the reagans likable. The other fascist bastards of the
past are lucky if their names are taught in school anymore. So we go with
something more familiar. Closer to home. Scary but not too scary. Evil
though they may be, we even empathize with them.
Not me.
Yes, you.
Even then the Chief's office was full of the ghost-light flowers. Even
though he cultivated only the breeds that produced the approved whites and
golds, it was hard not to take their presence as a personal rebuke. Like
he was trying to tell me something about my father. For my own good, of
course.

Summoned back to Global, I rushed through the Hall of Artificial Life,
past Biologic Ikon Programming, past Security Enhancements, past Copyright
Clearance. I watched marilyns in growth-expression stages, james deans in
proving simulations, elvises half-baked. In Test Marketing, madonnas and
stallones and cobains scrolled out as genomic manifestations, into the
lives of audiences planetary and offworld.
"Sorry you had to run all the way to Costa Rica," the Chief told me. "Our
lead from that designer in the Disney Republic was a ruse. GlobeIntel
fucked up bad."
"Little trickster must have ripped out its tracking implant."
"It never had a 'plant. We've got a bootlegger."
"Trick-eee." Bootlegging explained why there were so many runaway
milhouses lately. I saw them everywhere. Even the faces of the capuchin
monkeys in Costa seemed to have noses too long, cheeks too puffy, widow's
peaks a bit too well-defined, manners too furtive. Call me paranoid.
The Chief's face, worn and comfortable like old leather, split into a
sadistic little smile. "I'm assigning you a partner," he said.
By reflex I ran through the Litany Against Bureaucracy. "I'm a good cop,"
I said; "a damned good cop; I work alone, I make my own rules . . ."
He hit back with the Litany Against Insubordination. "You're overworked,"
he recited. "You're too close to the case, man! Back off!"
My street dealer had promised the Litany would counter the buttons
mandated for cops by the Reforms of 2017, especially the buttons for