"Sean McMullen - Alone in His Chariot" - читать интересную книгу автора (McMullen Sean)

TEFG," he suggested.
"That may not be easy," said Drake. "This morning we found what the users call a 'time machine'. It was
just a bed in a locked room, but the dreamouter had rigged a gallon of nutrient drip to hang from the
ceiling and run a hose from his penis to a bucket. A timer was connected to his other arm, and set to
deliver a second dose of Nostalgia after ten days. The man was middle aged and very successful. His
wife said that he'd watched his 'Neighbours' videos for twelve hours before disappearing. She hired a
detective to find him, she thought he'd run off with another woman. In a way, he had."
Cottak remained impassive. Schilden laughed without smiling.
"So they can get back by themselves," he observed. "We can never be sure if someone is secretly
affected by dreamout."
The coroner nodded. "We could even impose the death penalty for TEFG-7 abuse, but that would only
make more people closet users. Society may soon be in a shambles."

Vuner was creating a world. It was not to be merely an image of Earth, but totally new, condensed from
a swirling dust cloud by the disembodied spirit of Vuner himself, so that he would literally be the soul of
this world, its gaia. He revelled in the hot, fine dust, a young, vital god with eternity before him.
Over time, which had grown meaningless for him, he had learned a great deal about being divine, and had
discovered that the worst problem was boredom. There had been too many enemies effortlessly blasted
to cinders, too many ultimate orgasms, too many familiar images of Earth-like worlds that arose and
dispersed at his will. He had realised that he had been acting like a deified mortal, rather than a true god.
He would not merely control this new world and the laws that governed it, he would actually be those
very laws. Vuner the Law moulded a great vortex of dust . . .
Suddenly he sprawled, powerless, and in a human body! The sand was cold beneath his naked skin, and
a pale, scarlet sun lit up the desert around him. A shadowy form coalesced nearby. It had a vaguely
human shape. Vuner gasped.
"My interface chip recognised a sound from your speech centre, Vuner," it said in a contralto voice. "Try
to speak normally."
He burned it with beams of light from his eyes. Abruptly the ground heaved, and several suns began to
dance in the sky. Then the world became livid, brilliant pain. As it faded the shadow returned.
"We've made a lot of advances in neural interface methods over the last thirty years," it explained.
"Dreamouters can no longer avoid the stimulation of pain centres."
"I'm your God!" shrieked Vuner. "In the name of Vudraken -"
"Vudraken, eh?" his tormentor laughed. "I'm your doctor. I suggest that you conjure up a short, blonde
woman wearing a green smock." It was somehow easier for him to cope with the shadow.
"Are you a prison doctor?" he asked, suddenly mortal again.
"Hah, there have been no prisons for decades. Those who can be rehabilitated, are. Hopeless cases, like
you, are forced to dreamout, and your bodies are put to better use. Your arms went to a shark attack
victim from Bermuda, I believe."
Vuner looked down at his arms, then raised them easily.
"Very good, Vuner," said the shape. "I registered arm movement."
"What do you want? What the hell do you want?"
"Don't shout. It only flashes the overload light on the ALC. As to what I want . . . maybe I should tell you
some history first. TEFG-7 really changed the place after you went into dreamout. Seems like half the
country started using it. Some said it was the end of Western Democracy, that the Soviets would march
in and take over. Hah. In two years there were so many Russians in partial or permanent dreamout that
we had to go in and help them.
"Things settled down though. Dreamouters run factory processes now, in return for nutrient solution and a
bed, but they spend their free time in fantasies very like yours. The rest of us live in quite a good world. It
has to be, to stop people going dreamout."
"Go away!" he shouted. "You can't do this. The law -"