"Allison Sinclair - Assassin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sinclair Allison)

"You said 'one'," I said after a while.
"I haven't--I haven't traced the others back yet. I've been distracted. I've
been looking into your records."
She paused, significantly, watching me.
I took it straight: "I hope you appreciate art. The Chief and I spent days on
those records." She stared. "Try the name Julie Beaumont for the other half of
the story. Don't take the date of death as literal."
"How about you tell me?" The cop again.
"I'm probably going to have forgotten details. It's been almost twenty years,
and I wasn't in very good shape, then." Glad's face hardened slightly. I didn't
care; it might be an excuse for discrepancies between what I told her and what
the records showed, but should appreciate what one could do with records from
what D'Inde and I had done.
"Julie Beaumont was Juvenile S in the case trials that restricted mood implants
into juveniles; you'll remember that case."
She nodded.
"I was Julie Beaumont."
I'd said that more for effect than anything, but immediately saw that Glad had
not until that moment realized the connection. She stared at me. "But--" I
waited. She threw herself back into her chair and whistled through her teeth.
"Now there's something I need to know to make sense of this."
"Alright. Julie Beaumont: fourteen years old, gifted and underprivileged; a
troublemaker. School is understaffed and overcrowded, parents overextended with
a disabled child needing ongoing therapy. Mood circuits are ideal for cases like
this, the psychiatrists say. Quite cost effective, can be monitored through
computer. Implants for a couple of years, until the upheavals of adolescence are
over. Everything goes swimmingly until Juvenile S meets an older man who logs
her onto a ThrillNet." And suddenly I am no longer narrating, but remembering.
Remembering him telling me what a lucky girl I was, and here's how to bribe the
policeman. Feeling hands tickling the back of my neck where only the doctors'
touched before. Feeling the little thud in the skull as the lead went in. And
then--There aren't words for it. Pleasure beyond description. I used up most of
his allotment for the month, he said, while he simply sat and stared at my face.
He'd never seen a human being look so happy. It made him feel strange, he said;
made him understand that trying to make someone happy could be more than just an
expected gesture with an expected return.
"Nowadays, after the controversy over her case--and others--therapeutic implants
are metered; nowadays this couldn't happen, or so they say. Because she was poor
and gifted and resentful she had learned how to tap into nets. The thrill of
doing, of pitting her skill and intelligence against the minds of the
privileged--almost as good as any high from the Nets.
"But her understanding of neurochemistry was nil. She did not appreciate
feedback mechanisms, that overstimulated circuits become less sensitive,
understimulated ones more so. Classic addiction, complete with withdrawal. She
needs the nets to live. But depression impairs performance, impairs her ability
to break in. One day after six hours of nothing, she cuts open her wrists
instead."
Glad was watching me silently, appalled. And I realized that if it were anyone
else's story, my rendition would be appalling. The last part of the story, the
part nobody knew, I told in my own voice: "There was a man there while I was