"Poppy_Z_Brite_System_Freeze" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brite Poppy Z)

We will contact you when it's completed, and we will pay you very handsomely for it."

"Honest?" she said, absurdly.

"Honest."

"You got it."

And then with no sense of transition she was back on the surface of the mountain, within sight of Camp Four at the base of the South Col. Her limbs were whole and strong, her gear undamaged, her climbing harness hooked onto the ropes. The whole thing might never have happened. In fact, it couldn't have. She was climbing without bottled oxygen, after all; she must have slipped into hypoxia, and her air-starved brain had taken her on one hell of a trip. Though every cell of her body ached, she'd never felt more intensely alive.

Fria started toward Camp Four, where her Sherpa team would have hot tea and a dry tent ready. The next day just before noon, she stood upon the summit of Everest, one foot in China and the other in Nepal.

....................

She'd been staring out the window above her desk for nearly an hour, not seeing the fields of tall grass and summer wildflowers that surrounded her house. She was picturing mountains.

With a shake of her head, Fria brought herself back to reality and forced herself to look at her computer screen. It was filled with lines of code that no longer made sense to her. She didn't know why, but she just couldn't work on this program anymore. Maybe it had too many associations with the climb, with the accident she'd hadЗor, rather, the accident she imagined she'd had. Fria knew she couldn't have survived the kind of fall she remembered, let alone have gotten herself out of the crevasse and continued on to the summit. Therefore, she'd been hypoxicЗperhaps even had a touch of cerebral edemaЗand hallucinated the whole thing.

She was proud of having summited, but it upset her to think about Everest now. The summit was not all she'd thought it would be. The peak of her life, literally the highest point she would ever achieve, was over. Traveling back through Namche Bazaar, Kathmandu, London, New York, home, she'd felt a curious, flat depression.

She decided to put the new AI program aside. Her savings account was still healthy, and it wasn't as if she had promised the program to anybody.

The knock came two days later, catching her in her underwear, drinking cold coffee and trying to make a dent in her huge backlog of e-mail. She struggled into a ratty bathrobe and headed for the door.

She didn't recognize the man at first. With his dark suit and spook shades, he looked as incongruous on her front stoop as he had a hundred feet down in a glacier.

"Fria Canning. Agent John Fine." He offered a hand which she was too confused to shake. "I'm sure you remember me."

"Not really, Mister, uhЗ"

"Agent. Agent Fine. We met under rather uncomfortable circumstancesЗ circumstances I'm sure you wouldn't want to repeat. I'm here about the AI program."

"The new one?"

Fine's silence was confirmation enough.

"I'm afraid I won't be completing that one. I've moved on to other things, and I'm not sure what business it is of yours anyway."

"We had an agreement, Miss Canning."

Then it all came back to her: the crevasse, the pain of her broken body, the searing cold. The promise she had made to the man who walked out of the ice.

"I can't do it," she whispered. "It makes me think too much ofЗofЗ"

"Of this?"

Fine's body was changing, glittering, a mass of proliferating crystals seeming to burst from his mouth, chest, abdomen. Ice. Ice coming out of his body, advancing like a speeded-up film of glacial encroachment. Ice touching her, surrounding her. Ice tightening around her and cracking her bones.

"We hate it when our batteries give out early," she heard Fine say, and then the ice covered her face and she knew no more.