"Vonda N. McIntyre-Steelcollar Worker" - читать интересную книгу автора (McIntyre Vonda N)

"Wait-- " Neko said as Jannine slid her I.D. into the credit slot of a private room.
 The door ate the I.D. and opened.
"What for?" Jannine crossed between the equipment and set her glass down on the small table in the
corner. "Hardly spilled a drop," she said.
Neko hesitated on the threshold.
"Come on, it's paid for," Jannine said.
Neko shrugged and entered. "Yeah, OK. This is kind of extravagant, but thanks." She shut the door,
cutting out the din, somebody yelling at somebody else, a fight about to start. After work, your body was
geared up for action, and your brain was too tired to hold it back.
Jannine drank a long swallow of her beer, then made herself stop and sip it slowly. She was hungry.
She ordered from the picture menu on the back wall.
"Want anything?"
"Sure, OK." Neko sounded distracted. She pushed a couple of pictures, barely glancing at them, then
sat at the table and leaned on her elbows.
Jannine swung up on the stationary bicycle and started to pedal. It felt good to get rid of the physical
energy she had been holding in all day. Sweat broke out on her forehead, under her arms.
"Did you see what we were making?" Neko said again.
"If I'd stopped to think about it, we wouldn't have done such a long stretch and we wouldn't have
gotten any brownie points." Jannine tried not to sound defensive. "Besides, I was worried about the
warm fuzzies."
"It wasn't natural," Neko said. She drained her glass, put it down, and raked her fingers through her
shoulder-length black hair.
Jannine laughed, relieved. "I noticed that," she said. "I thought you meant something important. Jeez.
Nothing we build is natural. If it was natural, we wouldn't need to build it."
"But we weren't using the regular base pairs. We were using analogs."
"Yeah. So?" Jannine wondered if Neko, too, had been set up to test her. "I build what they tell me. It
isn't my job to design it."
Continuing to pedal the bike, she wiped sweat from her face with the clean towel hanging from the
handlebars.
"It must be something dangerous," Neko said stubbornly. "Something they don't want out in the world.
Yet. So they make it with synthetic nucleics. So it can't reproduce."
"It isn't dangerous to us," Jannine said, confused by Neko's distress. They were building a set of
instructions. Neko knew that. Being scared of it made as much sense as being scared of a music tape.
"I don't mean now, I don't mean yet. But later on when they use it. Whatever it's coding for could be
dangerous to us the same way it could be dangerous to anybody."
"I think you're being silly. They always start sterile, till they're sure about the product."
An artificial stupid pushed through the hatch in the bottom of the door, rolled inside, slid their food
onto the table, and backtracked. The hatch latched with a soft snick.
Jannine swung off the exercise bike and wiped her face again. She took the lids off the plates and
pushed Neko's dinner, or breakfast, toward her.
"Do you mind if I have another drink?"
"Go ahead." It was polite of Neko to ask, since Jannine's I.D. was in the slot. But she should've
known she could have whatever she wanted.
Jannine broke open the top of the chicken pie she'd ordered. Steam puffed out, fragrant with sage.
When she had a night job, she liked to eat breakfast before her shift, in the evening, and dinner after, in
the morning.
"How can you work out and then eat?"
Jannine shrugged. "I don't have a problem with it. I'm going to eat and then work out, too."
Neko preferred dinner at night and breakfast in the morning. She had a couple of croissants and an
omelet spotted with dark bits of saut├йed garlic.