"Sean Williams - The Perfect Gun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Sean)

gestures, behaviours--and set loose in C20. With me on its tail.
I remembered how badly 'Derringer' had driven that day. The substitute must
have stepped into the real Derringer's shoes that morning, primed to lead me
on a wild goose chase for almost an hour. Savants were unreliable robots at
best, so I assumed that the suicide routine had lain dormant until an external
 trigger had set it off somehow. Then it had killed itself.
Why? So I, Kamen & Subs and the police would assume that the real Derringer
was dead. Obviously.
I stared at the cutaway of the savant's skull, aware of a depth of conspiracy
widening around me. The coroner, at least, had to be involved, for covering
the facts after the event; the people who had grown the savant, then triggered
the suicide; Kamen & Subs for having me tail Derringer in the first place; and
Derringer himself, whoever he was and whyever he was so important. Whatever it
was he was involved in, it had to be big.
I had come no closer to unravelling the mystery. If anything, my fool
questions had made it magnitudes worse. But I was hooked, now more than ever.
And the last thing a PI does is turn from an interesting case. God knows, life
is boring enough without doing that.

Thirty minutes later, while I was still grappling with the mystery, my phone
buzzed again. Half-annoyed at having my train of thought broken, I keyed the
Receive button.
"What?"
"Hi, cheerful," said Marilyn, her face smiling out of the glowing flatscreen.
"Remember me?"
I returned her smile. "Yeah, sorry. I was doing something, and you kinda
interrupted me."
"Well, she can wait." Her smile slipped a notch. "I ran that second test."
"Good girl. What did you find?"
"I'm sorry, Court. This guy, whoever he is, just doesn't exist as far as the
city's concerned."
That seemed reasonable, in hindsight. After all, the cadaver I'd lifted the
sample from was a genetically modified savant, not the real Derringer whose
complete code would be on file. But then I thought of the coroner's report,
with its positive ID, and decided not to mention it. "Do you have the full
sequence?"
"Sure do. I'll squirt it to you while we talk. In the meantime, I want to ask
you something."
I glanced at the PC to make sure it was receiving the data, then turned back
to her. "Sure, darling. Go ahead."
"What do you know about this guy?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Because his genome is abnormal, radically so."
I leaned forward, interested. "In what way?"
"In every way. When the ID match failed, I ran it through a CP algorithm to
pinpoint its overall structure, but that didn't work either. He doesn't belong
to any of the castes, Court. What is he? A mutant?"
"I don't know," I answered, hoping she'd read the naked honesty in my voice.
"If I knew that I'd be half way to solving the problem."
Her smile had slipped completely by this time. "I'm worried you're getting