"Paul J. McAuley - Dead Man Walking" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

lines of code that would have revealed my location, and fired it up. It connected me to
a blank, two-dimensional space in which words began to appear, emerging letter by
letter, traveling from right to left and fading away.
you got rid of the trace function. pretty good for an old guyтАФif thatтАЩs what you really
are.
they trained us well, I typed.
you think you know what i am. you think that i am like you.
Whoever was at the other end of the program wanted to get straight down to
business. That suited me, but I knew that I couldnтАЩt let him take the lead.
we are both children of the vat, I typed. thatтАЩs why I reached out to you. thatтАЩs why i
want to help you.
 There was a pause as my correspondent thought this over.
you could be a trap.
the message got your attention because it is hardwired into your visual cortex, just as
it is hardwired into mine.
that kind of thing is no longer the secret it once was, but letтАЩs say that i believe youтАж
A black disc spun in the blank space for less than a second, its strobing black light
flashing a string of letters and numbers, gone.
do you know where that is?
I realized that the letters and numbers burnt into my brain were a grid reference.
i can find it.
meet me in four hours. i have a little business to take care of first.
It was the middle of the night; the time when the assassin did his work.
please donтАЩt kill anyone else until we have talked.
My words faded. There was no reply.
****
The grid reference was at the precise center of a small eroded crater sixty klicks
south of the facility, an unreconstructed area in the shadow of the grabenтАЩs eastern
rimwall. Before I headed out, I equipped myself from the armory and downloaded a
hack into the security system so that I could move freely and unremarked. I was oddly
happy, foolishly confident. It felt good to be in action again. My head was filled with a
fat, contented hum as I drove a tricycle cart along an old construction road. The
rendezvous point was about an hour away: I would have plenty of time to familiarize
myself with the terrain and make my preparations before the assassin, if that was who
I had been talking to, turned up.
I want to make it clear that my actions were in no way altruistic. The only life I
wanted to save was my own. Yes, I knew that I was dying, but no one loves life more
than those who have only a little of it left; no one else experiences each and every
moment with such vivid immediacy. I didnтАЩt intend to throw away my life in a grand
gesture. I wanted to unmask the assassin and escape the special teamтАЩs inquisition.
The road ran across a flat terrain blanketed in vacuum-cemented grey-brown dust
and littered with big blocks that over the eons had been eroded into soft shapes by
impact cratering. The rimwall reared up to my left, its intricate folds and bulges like a
frozen curtain. Steep cones and rounded hills of mass-wasted talus fringed its base. To
my right, the land sloped away toward a glittering ribbon of fences and dykes more
than a kilometer away, the boundary of the huge patchwork of fields. It was two in the
morning by the clock, but the suspensor lamps were burning as brightly as they
always did, and above the western horizon the sunтАЩs dim spark was almost lost in their
hazy glow.
 I was a couple of klicks from the rendezvous, and the road was cutting through a