"Dennis Danvers - Circuit of Heaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Danvers Dennis)

increasingly clever, even entertaining gene splices, were made to look as if they weren’t human.
Unfortunately (and as Newman had predicted) the partial personalities that made up each Construct
reconstituted themselves over the years, remembering their former lives and identities.

In 2040, Rogers succeeded in designing the Alternative Life Medium Assembly, ALMA for short, a vast
network of silicon crystals in which any number of human personalities might dwell in a world they would
experience as indistinguishable from the real world. The operating system could be programmed to
eliminate disease, violence, and death—and it would last forever. He had invented paradise.

The new world government, shakily formed in 2036, sold the former site of the Pentagon for the
construction of ALMA, dubbed “the Bin” by the media, a nickname that stuck. In 2050 it went on-line,
and some half a million souls who could afford it entered their new world. In 2060, after ten years of
mounting pressure from residents of the real world, ALMA was opened up to everyone eighteen years or
older who did not scan as criminally insane. By 2074, the Supreme Court (the majority of whom now
resided in the Bin) lifted the ban against minors, so that anyone, young and old alike, might enter the Bin
and live forever.

After a few years, the only people left in the real world were members of religious sects who believed the
Bin to be in violation of God’s laws; the criminally insane; and a handful of persons who, for one reason
or another, stubbornly distrusted paradise. By 2080, the remaining population of the real world, not
counting Constructs, was about 2.5 million, though reliable figures were hard to come by. The population
of the Bin was over 12 billion.

As for Newman Rogers, the patron saint of ALMA, no one knew where he was or what he was doing,
though rumors were plentiful.

1
JUSTINE WAS DREAMING SHE WAS SOMEONE ELSE: She was in the real world, a long time
ago, before she was born—there were people everywhere and cars moving up and down the streets like
huge schools of brightly colored fish. All the shop windows were intact, lit up with fluorescent and neon,
full of cheap jewelry and boom boxes and skimpy clothes stretched over chipped mannequins. She
hurried past them, a light drizzle falling, the streets black and slick, glistening with reflected light. The
ozone smell of the rain hovered over the stench of exhaust fumes and urine and rotting food.

She was seventeen, sneaking out at night, hurrying to meet a boy around the corner, at the end of the
next block. His name was Steve, and she remembered his face—maybe twenty, thin, a sharp nose, a
closely trimmed goatee, hungry eyes. She had his address on a slip of paper wadded up in her hand, and
when she thought about him, her hand tightened around the lump of paper, and she walked even faster.
She was crazy for him. She hardly knew him, and Alice, a girlfriend, said he was bad news, but she was
crazy for him anyway.

She started up the narrow stairs to his apartment, when a door opened above her, and he stepped onto
the landing, light blazing at his back. He must’ve had a dozen floods in there. Music blared in the
cavernous stairwell.

“Hey Angelina,” he shouted, and she followed him into his room, cluttered with electronic equipment and
wires snaking across the floor. The lights were on stands, all aimed at the bed in the middle of the room.
He circled around her, taking her jacket, wrapping his arms around her, stripping off her shirt. He
seemed to be everywhere at once. He pushed her onto the bed and looked down at her. She could
hardly see him for the glare of the lights. “Put this on,” he said, pulling something over her head like a