"Charles Stross - Scratch Monkey" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

tall as I am, skin tanned and tattooed in strange designs -- vortices and death's heads and the more
arcane geometries of soft tissue injuries -- and her hair is cropped into a narrow, spiky helmet.
Her fatigues are stained and grimy and there's a knife at her belt. I ditch the toothpick and pick
her up, somehow roll her across my shoulders, and head for the edge of the road.
Picking my way through trees and bushes carrying a woman who weighs nearly as much as I do
is not exactly my idea of fun, but neither is getting a bullet in the back of the neck. It seems to go
on forever, but my chronometer keeps me informed with merciless precision; I spend fifteen
minutes and eight seconds pushing through a seething wall of turquoise-streaked khaki
vegetation. Frond-like leaves brush my sweat-slick face, and thorny branches whip around after
me or catch on my chameleon suit. There are strange rustlings in the undergrowth and all the
while a chorus of beetles and arthropods covers the possible sound of pursuit.
I pitch her down at the foot of a forest giant and stop to breathe. Black spots swim before my
eyes; I've pushed half a kilometre into this wilderness just to get away from that ochre killing-
ground. The raw, eyeless sockets of the victims seem to stare at me through the jungle, accusing
me of ... shit, I think, why couldn't someone else have pulled this end of the stick? Mannanash, or
Davud ... anyone? Anyone but me! Maybe it was the Boss's decision. I've never trusted his sense
of humour; it's as unhuman as He is. This is just the sort of assignment that would strike him as
amusing.
I blink and tell my eyes to run their power-on self-test. They flash through it in two seconds,
sequences of light shimmering on the inside of my eyelids to tell me that all's well and I can see
as easily as anyone else. Twenty-two years I've had the ability to see; twenty-two years out of my
thirty-four subjective. Distant Intervention gave me my eyes back when they recruited me. I open
them and look about, then down at the body that's muttering incoherent gibberish. There's work
to be done, I see; work to justify my vision. And yes ... it's going to be grim.
I slip my hand through my left pocket and unzip the inside lining, then open my belt pouch.
There are a number of small items inside; I select the ring and slide it onto my index finger, then
remove a couple of tiny cylinders. Then I seal the pouch and pocket, roll my hood back, and
switch my suit to a dust-grey colour that is anything but invisible against the lunatic glare of the
vegetation.
First cylinder. I peel back the tag and press it against the side of her neck; she sighs slightly and
relaxes. "Tell me your name," I say.
"Ash fnargle ... " she swallows and twitches slightly. My mind goes a blank as something rams
my tongue into gear, and my mouth makes strange noises. The culture of nanobots in the injector
are making their way to her brain, linking up with and reprogramming the monitors that cluster
thickly throughout her cerebral cortex. Soon they'll have her language centres dowloading direct
into my own head, ready for me to make use of their neural mappings. She makes some more
inarticulate gargling sounds and coughs; my mouth writhes through glottal stops and half-
swallowed vowels as my hijacked larynx shadows her vocalisation. The nanosensors that thread
her brain, constantly transmitting her sensory encoded personality to the afterlife receivers, are
amenable to some low level reprogramming; and she's undefended. Like everyone else on this
world, she doesn't even know she's got them. (How much else have they lost? Or remembered?)
For a minute longer she spouts gibberish; then, suddenly, everything seems to shift and clear, and
it all makes perfect sense.
" ... Seventh special action team. Blasted Hv'ranth flyer picked us up on the run back home and ...
here I am. Here you are too, I guess. Where's here? Who're you?"
"Never mind where we are," I say smoothly, "who are you? Tell me about yourself ..."
There are standard methods for lifting material out of brains. Everyone, everywhere in human
space, is riddled with nanotech Dreamtime encoders. They're in the air, in the soil, in their cells
and reproducing like bacteria. They constantly monitor cerebral activity, transmitting updates of
their host personality to the encoders, that upload minds into the Dreamtime when their bodies