"Weiner-PurplePill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weiner Andrew)

"Or should I say Cogan?"

He got up from his desk and pulled on his jacket, possessed by an urgent need to
get out of the room.

The walls of the corridor glowed a soft metallic pink. The elevator door looked
different, too, sleek and ultra-modem and smaller than he remembered.

When the elevator arrived, he got in. A heavily tattooed man nodded to him, and
he nodded back. They rode downward in silence.

He had not taken his pill that morning. He had been about to, and then Melanie
had distracted him with some question about her birthday party, and it had
slipped his mind. Everything had been going so well that he had allowed himself
to become careless.

This isn't real, he told himself, as he stepped out into the lobby. None of this
is real.

Except that there was no lobby, only another corridor, this one a dull blue.
There was no front door leading to the street, only a large metal hatch.

"What do you think you're doing, Cogan?"

This time he did not look for the source of the voice. He knew that the voice
was in his head.

"I'm going home," he said.

He stepped up toward the hatch.

"That door leads directly into space," the voice said. "Open it, and you'll be
sucked out."

"The door leads to the street," Conway said. But he hesitated, all the same.

"You've been in fugue for weeks," the voice said. "Now you're coming out of it.
You're remembering that you are Cogan Phillips, a crew member on an interstellar
starship. But your unconscious mind still resists that knowledge. It would
rather kill you than accept the truth."

"No," he said, shaking his head. "You've got it all wrong."

"I've scanned the dreams from your cold-sleep," the voice said. "They are of an
astounding mundanity. They reveal to me a life lived with no breadth of vision,
with no higher purpose than getting through the day-to-day grind. A life filled
with small betrayals of yourself and the people around you, with meaningless
victories and pitiful defeats. Here you are doing important work, helping
humanity populate the stars, building a better future for everyone. And yet you