"Robert A. Metzger - Quad-World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Metzger Robert)

I didn't have long to consider the strangeness of all this. The room went black.

And I knew what'd happened.

There wasn't the slightest doubt in my mind.

I had just dropped dead at the start of the eight-thirty Tuesday Silicon Integrated Circuits meeting.
Unbelievable. Deaths in the workplace always peak on Monday mornings and Thursday afternoons. That
was a scientific fact.

I had no right to be dying on a Tuesday morning.
 CHAPTER 1
Welcome

I wondered what had gotten me. Thirty-four-year-olds who didn't smoke or drink weren't supposed to
drop dead. My heart was good, and my blood pressure a respectable 78/115. I shouldn't have died, and
especially not on a Tuesday. I didn't even have a will. But of course, it wasn't as if I had actually needed
one. There hadn't been anyone to leave anything to. My folks had died almost fifteen years earlier when a
drunk in a Cadillac, who couldn't tell right from left, had made it almost a mile on the wrong side of the
Santa Monica Freeway before he caught my parentsтАЩ little Toyota head-on. There were no relatives. I
was single, and didn't really have what one could call friends. I had acquaintances, people to say hello to
while racing down the hallway, or someone to share a cafeteria bench with while trying to down a
greaseburger and a Coke.

There wasn't anyone crying at my tombstone. Hell, I doubted that there even was a tombstone. I was
probably planted in the far corner of a ten-acre patch of green in some place like Van Nuys or Mission
Hills. I'd be right out there at the intersection of row 876 and column 239. Beneath smoggy skies, and
within earshot of a freeway, a little brass marker in the overgrown grass would mark my eternal resting
spot:
JOHN SMITH
BORN MAY 21, 1956
DIED JULY 10, 1990
My estate, including the life insurance that the company insisted I carry, was probably worth a couple of
hundred grand. Every last dime of that would go to the State. My legacy to mankind would probably be
the funding of twenty yards of sewer line on the outskirts of Barstow. Thousands would be indebted to
me whenever they flushed.

I coughed.

My lungs were congested, full of liquid.

Very strange. Dead men shouldn't be coughing, and they certainly shouldn't be worrying about
congested lungs. My head pounded as if I'd just caught a speeding two-by-four above the eyes. I felt
feverish and my joints throbbed. It felt an awful lot like the flu.

Flu?

Being dead was certainly bad enough, but to also be subjected to the flu was adding insult to injury. My
throat was dry, and I couldn't swallow past what felt like some large glob of mucus. What I really needed