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

Vic smiled. "So tell me-what were you watching?"
Danny thought carefully, tapping an index finger against his lower lip. The new index finger.
"Try not to think too long about it," Vic added. When he still didn't answer, she went upside his head, just hard
enough to rouse him. "Quick-what did you see?"
The answer burst out of him almost against his will. "I saw four little girls about nine years old. They were building
something in the middle of the floor!" He looked at Vic, startled. "No, that's wrong. That's not what I saw. I saw-"
Vic put up a hand. "You saw what we're going to go and get tonight. Never mind what it looks like. We don't have
to describe it. We just have to get it."
"But-"
"We know where it is, and we know what room it's in. And you know just as well as I do that we'll know it when we
see it. No matter what we see when we get there."
"Yes, but-"
"But what, Danny?" Vic sat forward and looked into his face. "What's on your mind-stealing's wrong? You're afraid
of getting rich? You want to get rich but you fear Ciel more?"
He fumbled for a few moments. "You know what the problem is. You saw that screen. Aren't you even a little
bit-well, freaked out?"
Vic sat back. "I was, yes. I'm sorry, Danny, I've had a lot more time to get used to the idea of it. Several days, if you
want to know the truth, while you were off having Sibelius fit your arm. I've gone from freaked out to accepting it.
Maybe I'm asking too much of you to get used to it in such a short period of time."
Danny put his head in his hands, registering absently that he really liked the feeling when he did that. "I'll try, Vic, I
really will. I just-this is like, I don't know, dreaming or something. If you can't describe it, can you at least tell me what it
is?"
Vic took a long slow breath. "Software." Pause. "Maybe. Or aliens. Alien software. Aliens turned into software.
People turned into software by aliens. The bastard offspring of aliens and people, turned into software. A little
something Ciel's resident engineers whipped up while they were on drugs. Or while they weren't on drugs. The ghost
of Christmas past. The Second Coming."
"Well, that really narrows it down."
"In any case, I'm not as concerned with what it is so much as I am with what Ciel is going to do with it."
Danny opened his mouth to say something and then couldn't speak at all.
"Right," Vic said, smiling grimly. "That was my reaction." She sat all the way back on the couch and grabbed one
of the throw pillows, hugging it to herself in comfort mode. "Imagine what it would mean for a telecommunications
empire like Ciel to have something that would make you watch any and all of their channels the way you were just
watching that surveillance."
He waited for the wave of nausea sweeping through him to subside. "We don't know that they're going to use
whatever that is for that reason-" He cut off again. "Yeah, okay. The question is actually, how stupid am I?"
"Naïve," Vic corrected him. "Big difference. Naïveté is curable. Stupid is forever. No global corporation should
ever, ever, ever have access to anything with that kind of-of-like that. And if there were one that should, it sure
wouldn't be Ciel. There's a limit to how much power any company should have. And anyone who knows about a
potential for abuse of what could be unlimited power, or something just as good, and does nothing is just as culpable
as anyone who perpetrates it. And you just have to know when you have to do something. And..." Danny's voice
was quiet. "And you've got a buyer."
"Well, that is how I found out about it in the first place," Vic said reasonably.
j

The code Jeremy had written for her, Vic explained as they drove over to the Ciel building in an all-purpose white van
borrowed for the evening, was a passkey-cum-security clearance-i.e., it would decrypt locks and order security
programs to validate their identification.
"That sounds almost too good to be true," Danny said, looking at her skeptically.
"It almost is," Vic said, "in that it's good for tonight only, between the hours of eight-thirty P.M. and midnight, give
or take fifteen minutes. And it's almost nine-thirty now, so we've lost an hour. Not that it could really be helped."