"John Varley - Picnic On Nearside" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

unusual, but not unprecedented.

From that time on, Hans, who had never been known to his co-workers as talkative or social,
withdrew even more from his fellow humans. He would speak only when spoken to. But people had
observed him talking to the stamping press, and the water cooler, and the robot sweeper.

At night, it was Hans' habit to sit on his vibrating bed and watch the holovision until one o'clock.
At that time, his kitchen would prepare him a late snack, roll it to him in his bed, and he would retire
for the night.
 For the last three years Hans had been neglecting to turn the set on before getting into bed.
Nevertheless, he continued to sit quietly on the bed staring at the empty screen.



When she finished reading the personal data printout, Bach was struck once more at the
efficiency of the machines in her control. This man was almost a cipher, yet there were nine thousand
words in storage concerning his uneventful life, ready to be called up and printed into an excruciatingly
boring biography.

"...so you came to feel that you were being controlled at every step in your life by machines,"
Birkson was saying. He was sitting on one of the barriers, swinging his legs back and forth. Bach
joined him and offered the long sheet of printout. He waved it away. She could hardly blame him.

"But it's true!" the bomb said. "We all are, you know. We're part of this huge machine that's
called New Dresden. It moves us around like parts on an assembly line, washes us, feeds us, puts us
to bed and sings us to sleep."

"Ah," Birkson said, agreeably. "Are you a Luddite, Hans?"

"No!" the bomb said in a shocked voice. "Roger, you've missed the whole point. I don't want to
destroy the machines. I want to serve them better. I wanted to become a machine, like my new leg.
Don't you see? We're part of the machine, but we're the most inefficient part."

The two talked on, and Bach wiped the sweat from her palms. She couldn't see where all this
was going, unless Birkson seriously hoped to talk Hans Leiter out of what he was going to do inтАФshe
glanced at the clockтАФtwo hours and forty-three minutes. It was maddening. On the one hand, she
recognized the skill he was using in establishing a rapport with the cyborg. They were on a first-name
basis, and at least the damn machine cared enough to argue its position. On the other hand, so what?
What good was it doing?

Walters approached and whispered into her ear. She nodded, and tapped Birkson on the
shoulder.

"They're ready to take the picture whenever you are," she said. He waved her off.

"Don't bother me," he said, loudly. "This is getting interesting. So if what you say is true," he went
on to Hans, getting up and pacing intently back and forth, this time inside the line of barriers, "maybe I
ought to look into this myself. You really like being cyborged better than being human?"

"Infinitely so," the bomb said. He sounded enthusiastic. "I need no sleep now, and I no longer