"Michael Swanwick - Radiant Doors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

supposed to save a per-unit of thirteen cents a week in tracking costs. You walked
through a smart doorway, it registered your presence, you picked up your food,
and a second doorway checked you off on the way out. There was nothing in it to
get upset about.

But the woman began screaming and crying andтАУthis happened right by the
kitchensтАУsnatched up a cooking knife and began stabbing herself, over and over.
She managed to make nine whacking big holes in herself before the thing was
wrestled away from her. The orderlies took her to Intensive, where the doctors
said it would be a close thing either way.

After word of that got around, none of the refugees would allow themselves to be
identi-chipped. Which really pissed off the UN peacekeepers assigned to the
camp, because earlier a couple hundred vics had accepted the chips without so
much as a murmur. The Indian troops thought the refugees were willfully trying
to make their job more difficult. There were complaints of racism, and rumors of
planned retaliation.

I spent the morning doing my bit to calm down things downтАУhopelessтАУand the
afternoon writing up reports that everyone upstream wanted to receive ASAP and
would probably file without reading. So I didn't have time to think about the
device at all.

But I did. Constantly.

It was getting to be a burden.

For health class, one year in high school, I was given a ten-pound sack of flour,

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 Radiant Doors by Michael Swanwick This story first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 1998


which I had to name and then carry around for a month, as if it were a baby.
Bippy couldn't be left unattended; I had to carry it everywhere or else find
somebody willing to baby-sit it. The exercise was supposed to teach us
responsibility and scare us off of sex. The first thing I did when the month was
over was to steal my father's .45, put Bippy in the backyard, and empty the clip
into it, shot after shot. Until all that was left of the little bastard was a cloud of
white dust.

The machine from the future was like that. Just another bippy. I had it, and dared
not get rid of it. It was obviously valuable. It was equally obviously dangerous.
Did I really want the government to get hold of something that could compel
people to act against their own wishes? Did I honestly trust them not to
immediately turn themselves into everything that we were supposedly fighting to
prevent?

I'd been asking myself the same questions forтАУwhat?тАУfour days. I'd thought I'd
have some answers by now.