"Karen Traviss - Nanny Estate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Traviss Karen)

"Is that safe?" the guest asked, taking a step back.
"It's a discrete area," Barton assured him. "Don't worry about it. Plenty
of
fail-safes in the system, I promise. The waste-eating nanites are confined
in
that corner and in the soil stack, and they stay put. They're programmed
not
to react to human or animal tissues, so they wouldn't eat your dog, but
they'd
certainly stop the kids leaving their shoes lying around."
"I'll stick to a waste bin, thanks."
"Oh, you don't have that option," Barton said. "It's the way this structure
builds itself. It manages its own waste. If we gave people too many
override
choices, they'd be back to clogging up landfill sites in no time. No, the
main
point of this is that it does the green thinking for you."
"What a good idea," the guest said.
When everyone had left, Barton looked out over the gardens and smooth
nanite-built roads that separated the houses on the new estate.
Electric vehicles and the occasional low-pollution conventional car stood
shining in drives: bicycles with panniers stood propped against soft,
leaf-like walls. It was a very green community in every sense.
"It's great, isn't it?" he said to Lin. The words sighed out of him: he
truly
loved what he saw. "IsnтАЩt it worth all the time and sweat to prove it can
be
done? "
"I expect it is, love," she said, and wandered off. He knew she had never
shared his evangelism on green matters, but at least she had stood by him.
He
reached for his beer can, and missed.
It had gone.
He thought Lin might have picked it up in a moment of tidiness until he saw
the last gleam of a metal rim sinking into the floor.
"Bugger," he said. It had never done that before. He made a mental note to
check the nanitesтАЩ boundary programming.

#


Later that week the last resident moved in to the estate. He introduced
himself as Harry and said he that now he'd retired, he was looking forward
to
having a house that maintained itself.
"YouтАЩll certainly get that," Barton said.
Harry drove up in an elderly German performance car, the sort that required
a
punitive tax to be kept on the road. Barton and the rest of the residents
tut-tutted about the pollution: but the smart houses could filter out the