"Lisa Smedman - Psychotrope" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smedman Lisa)

Pip closed her eyes. Her body relaxed into a slump.
Deni stared at the kid on the couch beside Pip, wanting to take the silly scarf around his throat and choke him with
it.
The kid stood up and walked over to a telecom outlet. Seeing him pull a fiber-optic computer connection cable from
it, Deni figured he was going to attach it to a cyberdeck. But instead the kid slotted the cable directly into the datajack
in his skull. Carefully paying out the ca-ble, the kid sat back down on the couch beside Pip. Then he too leaned back
and closed his eyes.
A strange thing happened. The kid's aura went totally weird.
The weirdness began just above the kid's scalp. His aura turned a bright silver color over a point on his datajack,
and then lines of energy suddenly sprayed out from this point. Tiny bolts of light, maybe as long as a monowhip
stretched out straight, spiked out like roving spotlights, growing thinner and thinner the farther out from the kid's head
they got, until they just disappeared. They smelled hot somehow, like electricity.
"I'm in the Matrix," the kid told Pip. "Can you see me?"
"Yes," Pip whispered. "It's beautiful here."
"Just wait," the kid said. "It'll get better."
Even through his rage, Deni knew this had to be a scam. There was no way that kid was in the Matrix. Deni knew
enough tech to realize that you had to have a cyberdeck to jack into the virtual reality of the Matrix. You couldn't just
slot a cable from a telecom outlet into your datajack. No deck, no dice.
But there was that weird aura . . .
Deni glanced at the kid's wristwatch and saw that it was
blankтАФthen remembered that abstract data like numbers couldn't be seen in astral space. Still, the time had to be
somewhere just before ten a.m. He tried to figure where his chummer Alfie would be at this hour. If he could get her to
buzz him out here on her bike they might arrive in time to save . . .
Pip let out a soft sigh. Then her body suddenly tensed, and her thin chest stopped moving. Was she still
breath-ing? Oh frag. Was she alive?
Pip's chest rose . . . and slowly fell. She looked like a coma patient. Except that her limbs were rigid as death.
Drek. Deni had to do something. Fast.
He booted it on back to his meat bod, loping across Hell's Kitchen as fast as his dog legs would take him.




09:46:12 PST
(18:46:12 WET)
Jackpoint: Amsterdam, Holland
Red Wraith dove for cover as the rumbling tank bore down on him. A nearby I/O port formed a perfect foxhole: a
triangular-shaped "hole" in the military-green corrugated metal floor. The tank clattered closer, a monstrosity that
dwarfed Red Wraith, towering over him like a mobile of-fice block. Its matte-black treads were studded with chromed
spikes, its body warted with rivets. Neon-red lasers beamed out from sensors on all sides of the metal beast, and its
barrel and turret swung back and forth, seek-ing a target. In seconds it would find where Red Wraith had gone to
ground, would crush him into a bloody pulp with its treads or blow him to pieces with its cannon . . .
The tank was just a Matrix constructтАФa metaphor for a computer program. Just as Red Wraith's persona icon, with
its ghostlike body that ended in dripping red mist where the lower legs would normally be, was a virtual
represen-tation of the decker named Daniel Bogdanovich. But Red Wraith used the adrenaline rush the tank image
gave him,
let it spike his consciousness into hyper-awareness. He'd come so far to reach these personnel records .. .
He wasn't going to give up without a fight, even if it cost him his deck. Not when he was this close.
He used his cyberdeck's masking program to change the appearance of his on-line persona into a shimmering cloud
of glittering silver confetti. With luck, the tank-shaped in-trusion countermeasures program that was bearing down on
him would mistake him for a stream of data, one of dozens that flowed back and forth across the inside of the