"Ellen Datlow - SciFiction Originals vol.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Datlow Ellen)

She stuck her fists on her hips. "Read the freaking manual."
Humiliated, he slowly moved his arm around to his front and looked at it under the light. Vic waited, glancing at her
watch several times.
"This seems pretty straightforward," he said after a while.
"Almost too simple."
Vic nodded. "Try to remember that arm was meant for grunts who would see action. The documentation had to be
easy to read and understand."
"Yeah, but they'd have received a certain amount of training beforehand." He let out a breath. "But okay, I'll give it
a try."
"Good boy, Danny. There's just one thing."
"What?"
"If-when you turn that barrier insubstantial, all the alarms are going to go off up here."
He started to wipe his right hand over his face and then used his left instead. "Because the disc didn't cover this
eventuality."
"Right. I've got no code that's going to camouflage a security device ceasing to exist on this plane. Or dimension,
or something." She paused. "Do you want to quit?"
"Will your disc still work on the stuff it's already worked on? I mean, to cover our escape?"
She nodded. "It should. Until midnight."
"Until midnight," he echoed. "Well, it's not getting any earlier, and I hate to go all the way up to the ninety-first
floor of any building and have it all be for nothing. Do you know the layout of the floor?"
"This is it. There's only one room, and you saw it on the surveillance cam at my place. It's halfway down the hall
behind that barrier, on the inside, not an outside wall."
"How fast can you get to the room and get... whatever that is in there? And more important, will it go with you?"
"I can do it fast enough that we'll be on our way down in the elevator before they can get one themselves. We can
go out the way we came in, but the van's trashed. They'd trace us."
"We can drive the van to the edge of the parking lot and jump out and run," Danny said. "Now, get behind me, and
hang onto my waist. I don't know how this will feel, or if there'll be a recoil or what, so I need you to steady me."
Vic obeyed. Danny stretched his arm out toward the barrier, cradling his elbow in his other hand, and concentrated
on feeling power begin to build up at his shoulder and move through his arm. He expected to feel the arm grow warm or
heavy; instead, there was a pleasantly cool, bubbly sensation, as if his arm were being filled up with champagne. Vic's
arms tightened around his waist, as if she could feel something happening to him.
His arm began to glow; in a moment it was too bright to look at and he closed his eyes just as there was an
eruption of even brighter light. He'd expected to feel power flying out from his hand, but instead, it felt more like the
power was flying into him. He braced himself for the scream of alarms but nothing happened.
"Uh... could they be silent alarms?" he asked Vic, his eyes still closed. Vic's arms slipped from around his waist as
she straightened up.
"Danny," she said in a strange voice. "Open your eyes."
He did so and found that the barrier had not disappeared at all. Instead, they were now on the other side of it. "Oh,
God," he moaned. "This is worse than the old stories about Windows 2000."
"No, it's okay, it worked better than we wanted it to. Instead of making the barrier insubstantial, you made us
insubstantial." Vic shook his left arm, the normal one. "And-pay attention, Danny-we still are."
He looked at his hands and then at her. She was right; he could see through them to the hallway, the walls and
floor.
"Oh, God," he moaned again, "I'm going to have hysterics here-"
She slapped him sharply across the face.
"Hey!" he yelled. "Don't do that to someone who's-" He stopped, and grabbed her hand, feeling it.
"We're not insubstantial to each other because we're both in the same state. The same quantum state, I guess. And
we can move relative to the building, any way we want. So let's just walk on air over to that room, waft through the
door like ghosts and see how whatever's in that room looks to us from here." She jerked her head toward the hallway.
"Sorry about the slap. I had to get your attention back fast. Let's go."