"Alastair Reynolds - Digital to Analogue" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

тАШCould I have a drink, please?тАЩ

She reached into a coat pocket, pulled out a tiny black thing the size
of a box of cigarettes. Glanced at a wrist-watch.

тАШLog entry: time 05.30. Subject made first conditioned response a
few seconds ago. Requested fluid. Hypothesis: residual mind-state must
still co-ordinate behaviour compat-ible with normal dietary and physical
requirements; in other words, subjectтАЩs nutritional intake will fall into
stereotypical pattern. Conclude that request probably the expression of a
genuine biological need. Although probably unnecessary in any case, will
administer 250 ccs of glycolated barley-water intra-orally. Entry ends.тАЩ Click.

She cranked something under me, making the couch angle up. Then
she touched a glass to my parched lips, and I drank. God, it was the best
drink IтАЩd ever tasted: sugary sweet and cool as nectar. Lucozade. Blanched
out, towering above me, she looked angelic to my eyes, this beatific giver
of nourishment to the sick.

тАШLetтАЩs get some air in here, shall we,тАЩ she said, without actually
addressing me. She whisked back the curtain, revealing the rest of the
room.

There comes a point, even in the deepest drug-induced para-reality,
where sufficient data from the real world can build up and penetrate the
fiction. YouтАЩre in the deepest shit imaginable, that voice repeated. And I
began, for the first time, to heed my own subconscious. There were no
other patients in the тАШwardтАЩ. The room was small, four, five metres along
each damp-stained wall. They were covered with literally hundreds of ... but
no, IтАЩll come to those in a moment, after IтАЩve set the rest of the scene. High
windows on one wall admitted wan shafts of dawnlight, falling in patches on
the floor. There was a metal door, padlocked on the inside. The roomтАЩs
odour of urine and vomit reminded me of a multi-story carpark stairwell.
There was the couch, two garden seats and a wooden table, an empty
wheelchair, a tripod and anglepoise set-up holding a waiting camcorder.
The rest of the room was crammed with expensive looking electronic
equipment . . . racks of slim black synthesisers, embossed with familiar
names: Casio, Korg, Roland, Yamaha, Hammond, Prophet. The whole
stack wired to a table-load of MIDI monitors and PC keyboards, dove-grey
shells, wrapped in a tangle of cables and optic fibres. There were crushed
Irn Bru cans, Lucozade and BeckтАЩs bottles, tabloids, listings magazines,
ring-bound folders, cassette and video cases, floppy disks and what looked
like piles of twelve-inch white-label records. I looked closer: each sleeve
had the words Digital to Analogue scrawled over it. I remem-bered that:
one of those subsequently sampled club hits from about six months back.
You heard parts of it on many new records.

The shelving held dozens of display devices with gridded screens,
oscilloscopes or cardiogram machines, displaying different blippy patterns,
like the contours on her T-shirt. I knew where IтАЩd seen it now: taken from an