"The Collapsium" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)

always, to answer her every request. The requests of robot messengers, however,
will hardly obligate me. You've interrupted important work, expensive work,
without explanation or apology. Her Majesty is ill served by such tools as you,
and is invited to petition me by the much more reliable method of face-to-face
communication. Unfortunately, my network gate is down. I'm afraid you'll have to
go back and fetch her in the flesh."
He drew a breath, ready to say more, but stopped himself. Baiting robots was a
fool's hobbyЧthey had no feelings to hurt, only needs and obligations to
fulfill. They could be frustrated, in the same way that a deaf man could be
shouted at: They saw you doing it, knew what it was, but would never be affected
in the desired way. But by the same token, this made them ideal absorbers of
displaced anger. Killing the messenger was fine and dandy, when the messenger
was never alive in the first place, when any fax machine could recycle its
smashed components back into the original robot. Not "good as new," but
actually, literally new. So he supposed a little baiting was harmless enough.
Wordlessly, the robots turned and went back up their staircase, which lifted and
closed behind them with a faint clunk and hiss.
Bruno would regret this, or course. He would add it to his collection of
regrets. But it did feel good.
He retreated a bit, waiting for some indication of impending liftoff before
hiding himself back in the house again. But the ship sat, and sat, and sat some
more, and finally he understood: There was a fax gate in there, a fax machine
coupled to a high-bandwidth network gate linked to the Inner-System Collapsiter
Grid, the Iscog. The robots were faxing themselves back to Her Majesty's
throneroom to deliver his "invitation," and clearly, since the ship remained,
they expected her to take him up on it.
His heart quickened a little. So much for his clever manners.
Bruno had his own, fully functional fax machine, of course. For years he'd been
getting his clothing and equipment that way, built up atom by atom from stored
patterns and extruded whole through orifices inside and outside the house. It
produced much of his food as well, supplementing the fruits of his stubbornly
anachronistic garden.
The gate could even reproduce a person; he'd done the old parlor trick a time or
two, spending the afternoon with a perfect copy of himself. Well, two copies
spending time together, actually, with the original Bruno having been destroyed
in the reading process. But this amounted to much the same thing in the end.
With copies, you were supposed to hit it off at first and then quickly get on
your nerves, but Bruno had found his own company alarmingly dull; what did he
have to teach himself that he didn't already know? He could send a copy off to
learn new things, he supposed, but he wouldn't want to be that copy, sent away
from the work that really mattered to him, and of course one of him would have
to do just that. Invariably, he reconverged the copies within the hour, faxing
them back into himself, concluding that maintaining one Bruno de Towaji was
quite trouble enough. Hence the disinterest in repairing his failed network
gate.
The silence of network abstinence had been nice, too. He'd better enjoy the last
of it while he still could, before the robots came back with company, or else
hauled him through their gate by main force.
He was just turning to reenter the house when, to his utter surprise, the hatch
opened once more on the side of the metal teardrop, swinging its staircase out