"Walter Jon Williams - Videostar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

The treatment and the humming in Ric's brain went on for a week. When
it was over he missed it. He was also more or less healed.
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The week of Genesios therapy took fifteen thousand dollars out of Ric's spike.
The previous months of treatment had accounted for another sixty-two thousand.
What Ric didn't know was that Genesios therapy could have been started at once
and saved him most of his funds, but that the artificial intelligences working
for the hospital had tagged him as a suspect character, an alien of no
particular standing, with no work history, no policorporate citizenship, and a
large amount of cash in his breast pocket. The AIs concluded that Ric was in
no position to complain, and they were right.
Computers can't be sued for malpractice. The doctors followed their
advice.
All that remained of Ric's money was three thousand SM dollars. Ric
could live off of that for a few years, but it wasn't much of a retirement.
The hospital was nice enough to schedule an appointment for him with a
career counselor, a woman who would find him a job. She worked in the basement
of the vast glass hospital building, and her name was Marlene.
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Marlene worked behind a desk littered with the artifacts of other people's
lives. There were no windows in the office, two ashtrays, both full, and on
the walls there were travel posters that showed long stretches of emptiness,
white beaches, blue ocean, faraway clouds. Nothing alive.
Her green eyes had an opaque quality, as if she was watching a private
video screen somewhere in her mind. She wore a lot of silver jewelry on her
fingers and forearms and a grey rollneck sweater with cigarette burn marks.
Her eyes bore elaborate makeup that looked like the wings of a Red Admirable.
Her hair was almost blond. The only job she could find him was for a legal
firm, something called assistant data evaluator.
Before Ric left Marlene's office he asked her to dinner. She turned him
down without even changing expression. Ric had the feeling he wasn't quite
real to her.
The job of assistant data evaluator consisted of spending the day
walking up and down a four-story spiral staircase in the suite of a law firm,
moving files from one office to another. The files were supposedly sensitive
and not committed to the firm's computer lest someone attempt to steal them.
The salary was insulting. Ric told the law firm that the job was just what he
was looking for. They told him to start in two days.
Ric stopped into Marlene's office to tell her he got the job and to ask
her to dinner again. She laughed, for what reason he couldn't tell, and said
yes.
A slow spring snowfall dropped onto the streets while they ate dinner.
With her food Marlene took two red capsules and a yellow pill, grew lively,
drank a lot of wine. He walked her home through the snow to her apartment on
the seventh floor of an old fourth-rate condeco, a place with water stains on
the ceiling and bare bulbs hanging in the halls, the only home she could
afford. In the hallway Ric brushed snow from her shoulders and hair and kissed
her. He took Marlene to bed and tried to prove to her that he was real.
The next day he checked out of the hospital and moved in.
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