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

"What's coming back to me is every dumb movie I ever wasted my time watching."

"This is remarkable," the voice said. "A sustained delusion of remarkable
self-consistency. In all the years we have been using the dream-machines, we
have never recorded such an extraordinarily persistent re-adaption trauma. But
to answer your question: I'm not exactly a computer. More like a community of
parallel processors. Although for the moment, that's close enough."

"I don't believe this," he said. "I don't believe any of it."

"What do you believe?"

"That I'm dreaming this. Or else going nuts."

"Going nuts," the voice echoed. "Not how I would usually describe it. But again,
close enough. You are indeed going nuts, Cogan. You are in the grip of a
psychotic fugue. A full-fledged retreat from reality."

"My name is Conway," he said. "Stop calling me Cogan."

"There is no Conway. There never was a Conway, only the construct you created in
interaction with the dream-machine. For two years you lived the life of this
fictional person, relishing the artless joys of a simpler, less stressful
historical period, an escape fantasy of bucolic late-Twentieth Century Earth.
But it's time to come back, Cogan. To let go of your delusion and face reality."

With these words, the wall of the room seemed to vanish. He was looking out at
the stars, a million bright stars scattered across a deep blackness.

"This is reality," the voice said. "This harsh and magnificent universe through
which we must travel in our fragile craft, buffeted by the winds between the
stars, pounded mercilessly with hard radiation . . . this is the reality from
which you seek to flee."

He looked out on the stars, the bright and terrible stars. And felt himself
falling into them, falling unstoppably into that awful darkness.

FIVE

"Barry."

He felt a hand on his shoulder, shaking him.

"What?" he said.

He sat up in bed. It was still dark. The alarm clock on the bedside table told
him that it was three in the morning.

"You were screaming," Alice said. "Screaming your head off. I thought I should