"Charles Stross - Remade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

Remade
Issue 3 of COSMOS, September 2005
by Charles Stross

Illustration by Justin Randall
Who said that death has to signal the end? It may just be an opportunity.
A dark-skinned human with four arms walks towards me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt
strung with human skulls. Her hair forms a smoky wreath around her open and curious face. She's
interested in me.

"You're new around here, aren't you?" she asks, pausing in front of my table.

I stare at her. Apart from the neatly articulated extra shoulder joints, the body she's wearing is roughly
ortho, following the traditional human body-plan. The skulls are sub-sized, strung together on a necklace
threaded with barbed wire and roses. "Yes, I'm a nube," I say. My parole ring makes my left index finger
tingle, a little reminder. "I'm required to warn you that I'm undergoing identity reindexing and
rehabilitation. People in my state may be prone to violent outbursts. Don't worry, that's just a statutory
warning: I won't hurt you. What makes you ask?"

She shrugs. It's an elaborate rippling gesture that ends with a wiggle of her hips. "Because I haven't seen
you here before, and I've been coming here most nights for the past twenty or thirty diurns. You can earn
extra rehab credit by helping out. Don't worry about the parole ring, most of us here have them. I had to
warn people myself a while ago."

I manage to force a smile. A fellow inmate? Further along the program? "Would you like a drink?" I ask,
gesturing at the chair next to me. "And what are you called, if you don't mind me asking?"

"I'm Kay." She pulls out the chair and sits, flipping her great mass of dark hair over her shoulder and
tucking her skulls under the table with two hands as she glances at the menu. "I'll have an iced double
mocha pickup, easy on the coca." She looks at me again, staring at my eyes. "The clinic arranges things
so that there's always a volunteer around to greet nubes. It's my turn this swing shift. Do you want to tell
me your name? Or where you're from?"

"If you like." My ring tingles and I remember to smile. "My name's Robin, and you're right, I'm fresh out
of the rehab tank. Only been out for a meg, to tell the truth." A bit over ten planetary days, a million
seconds. "I'm from" - I go into quicktime for a few subseconds, trying to work out what story to give her,
ending up with an approximation of the truth - "around these parts, actually. But just out of memory
excision. I was getting stale and needed to do something about whatever it was I was getting stale over."

Kay smiles. She's got sharp cheekbones, bright teeth framed between perfect lips; she's got bilateral
symmetry, three billion years of evolutionary heuristics and homeobox genes generating a face that's a
mirror of itself - and where did that thought come from? I ask myself, annoyed. It's tough, not being
able to tell the difference between your own thoughts and a post-surgical identity prosthesis.

"I haven't been human for long," she admits. "I just moved here from Zemlya." Pause. "For my surgery,"
she adds quietly.

I fiddle with the tassels dangling from my sword pommel. There's something not quite right about them,
and it's bugging me intensely. "You lived with the ice ghouls?" I ask.
"Not quite - I was an ice ghoul." She crosses both pairs of arms defensively. "I'd feel like a liar looking