"Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doctorow Cory)

can’t get over hating us, even though we don’t even know they exist. Offworld,
they can pretend that they’re still living rough and hard. ” He rubbed
his chin again, his hard calluses grating over his whiskers. “But for me, the
real rough life is right here, on-world. The little enclaves, each one is like an
alternate history of humanity—what if we’d taken the Free Energy, but not
deadheading? What if we’d taken deadheading, but only for the critically ill,
not for people who didn’t want to be bored on long bus-rides? Or no
hyperlinks, no ad-hocracy, no Whuffie? Each one is different and
wonderful.”
I have a stupid habit of arguing for the sake of, and I found myself
saying, “Wonderful? Oh sure, nothing finer than, oh, let’s see, dying,
starving, freezing, broiling, killing, cruelty and ignorance and pain and
misery. I know I sure miss it.”
Keep A-Movin’ Dan snorted. “You think a junkie misses sobriety?”
I knocked on the bar. “Hello! There aren’t any junkies anymore!”
He struck another cig. “But you know what a junkie is, right? Junkies
don’t miss sobriety, because they don’t remember how sharp everything
was, how the pain made the joy sweeter. We can’t remember what it was
like to work to earn our keep; to worry that there might not be enough, that
we might get sick or get hit by a bus. We don’t remember what it was like
to take chances, and we sure as shit don’t remember what it felt like to have
them pay off.”
He had a point. Here I was, only in my second or third adulthood, and
already ready to toss it all in and do something, anything, else. He had a
point—but I wasn’t about to admit it. “So you say. I say, I take a chance
when I strike up a conversation in a bar, when I fall in love . . . And what
about the deadheads? Two people I know, they just went deadhead for ten
thousand years! Tell me that’s not taking a chance!” Truth be told, almost
everyone I’d known in my eighty-some years were deadheading or jaunting
or just gone. Lonely days, then.
“Brother, that’s committing half-assed suicide. The way we’re going,
they’ll be lucky if someone doesn’t just switch ’em off when it comes time
to reanimate. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s getting a little crowded
around here.”
I made pish-tosh sounds and wiped off my forehead with a barnapkin—
the Gazoo was beastly hot on summer nights. “Uh-huh, just like
the world was getting a little crowded a hundred years ago, before Free
Energy. Like it was getting too greenhousey, too nukey, too hot or too cold.
We fixed it then, we’ll fix it again when the time comes. I’m gonna be here
in ten thousand years, you damn betcha, but I think I’ll do it the long way
around.”
He cocked his head again, and gave it some thought. If it had been any
of the other grad students, I’d have assumed he was grepping for some
bolstering factoids to support his next sally. But with him, I just knew he
was thinking about it, the old-fashioned way.
“I think that if I’m still here in ten thousand years, I’m going to be crazy
as hell. Ten thousand years, pal! Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art
was a goat. You really think you’re going to be anything recognizably
human in a hundred centuries? Me, I’m not interested in being a postperson.
I’m going to wake up one day, and I’m going to say, ’Well, I guess