"John Varley - The Phantom of Kansas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

The
Phantom of Kan/a/
I do my banking at the Archimedes Trust Association. Their security is first-rate, their service is
courteous, and they have their own medico facility that does nothing but take recordings for their vaults.

And they had been robbed two weeks ago.

It was a break for me. I had been approaching my regular recording date and dreading the chunk it
would take from my savings. Then these thieves break into my bank, steal a huge amount of negotiable
paper, and in an excess of enthusiasm they destroy all the recording cubes. Every last one of them,
crunched into tiny shards of plastic. Of course the bank had to replace them all, and very fast, too. They
weren't stupid; it wasn't the first time someone had used such a bank robbery to facilitate a murder. So
the bank had to record everyone who had an account, and do it in a few days. It must have cost them
more than the robbery.

How that scheme works, incidentally, is like this. The robber couldn't care less about the money stolen.
Mostly it's very risky to pass such loot, anyway. The programs written into the money computers these
days are enough to foil all but the most exceptional robber. You have to let that kind of money lie for on
the order of a century to have any hope of realizing gains on it. Not impossible, of course, but the police
types have found out that few criminals are temperamentally able to wait that long. The robber's real
motive in a case where memory cubes have been destroyed is murder, not robbery.

2 John Varley

The Phantom of Kansas 3

Every so often someone comes along who must commit a crime of passion. There are very few left open,
and murder is the most awkward of all. It just doesn't satisfy this type to kill someone and see them
walking around six months later. When the victim sues the killer for alienation of personalityтАФand
collects up to 99 percent of the killer's worldly goodsтАФit's just twisting the knife. So if you really hate
someone, the temptation is great to really kill them, forever and ever, just like in the old days, by
destroying their memory cube first, then killing the body.

That's what the ATA feared, and I had rated a private bodyguard over the last week as part of my
contract. It was sort of a status symbol to show your friends, but otherwise I hadn't been much
impressed until I realized that ATA was going to pay for my next recording as part of their crash program
to cover all their policy holders. They had contracted to keep me alive forever, so even though I had
been scheduled for a recording in only three weeks they had to pay for this one. The courts had ruled
that a lost or damaged cube must be replaced with all possible speed.

So I should have been very happy. I wasn't, but tried to be brave.

I was shown into the recording room with no delay and told to strip and lie on the table. The medico, a
man who looked like someone I might have met several decades ago, busied himself with his equipment
as I tried to control my breathing. I was grateful when he plugged the computer lead into my occipital
socket and turned off my motor control. Now I didn't have to worry about whether to ask if I knew him
or not. As I grow older, I find that's more of a problem. I must have met twenty thousand people by now
and talked to them long enough to make an impression. It gets confusing.

He removed the top of my head and prepared to take a multiholo picture of me, a chemical analog of