"Paul Di Filippo - And The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

overturned wastebasket weighted down with
a two-liter bottle of Mango Coke. It bounced
around frantically inside, raising a racket like
an insane drum solo. Wearing a pair of oven
mitts, I dared to reach in and grab the
sphere.
It was composed of Cody's socks and mine,
tightly wrapped around a kernel consisting of
a travel-sized alarm clock. Cody's socks
featured MEMS massage soles, a necessity for
her job, which involved hours of standing. My
own socks were standard models, but still
featured plenty of processing power.
Having disassembled the sock ball, I did all
the laundry and made sure to put Cody's
socks and mine in separate drawers.
The incident had completely unnerved me. I
felt certain that other blebs, possibly larger
and more dangerous, were going to
spontaneously assemble themselves in the
house.
From that day on I began to get more and
more paranoid.



·····


Handling one hundred potential security
incidents per shift had become second-nature
for me. I hardly had to exert myself at all to
earn my high job-performance ratings.
Previously, I had used whatever patches of
downtime occurred to read mystery novels on
my ViewMaster. (I liked Gifford Jain's series
about Yanika Zapsu, a female Turkish
private eye transplanted to Palestine.) But
once I became obsessed with the danger of
blebs in my home, I began to utilize Aunty's
omnipresent network illicitly, to monitor my
neighborhood and townhouse.
The first thing I did when I got to work at
nine in the morning, duties permitting, was to
send a Damselfly to check up on Cody. It was
summertime, late June, and my window
air-conditioners were in place against the
average ninety-plus D.C. temperatures. But
the seals around the units were imperfect, and
it was easy to maneuver the little entologue