"Gardner Dozois - Machines of Loving Grace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

replied automatically, then still tracing the symbols with his finger: “Christ, do you
know who this is? The deader? It’s her again. That crazy broad. Christ, this is the
third time this month.”
“Fuck her. She’s nuts.”
The tech looked at the dead light, shook his head. The chair eased back down
into its rest position before the metal desk. He squirmed around to get comfortable,
drank the dregs of his coffee, rested his feet on the rim of the desk and settled back.
The whole thing had taken maybe eight, maybe ten minutes. Not bad. He reached out
and found the article he’d been reading.
By the time they brought her back, he was deep in the magazine again.


They carried her in and put her into the machines. The machines kept her in
stasis to retard decay while they synthesized blood from sample cells and pumped it
into her, grew new skin and tissue from scrapings, repaired the veins in throat and
wrists, grafted the skin over them and flash-healed them without a scar. It took about
an hour and a half, all told. It wasn’t a big job. It was said that the machines could
rebuild life from a sample as small as fifty grams of flesh, although that took a few
weeks—even resurrect personality/identity from the psychocybernetic records for a
brain that had been completely destroyed, although that was trickier, and might take
months. This was nothing. The machines spread open the flesh of her upper
abdomen, deactivated the monitor that was surgically implanted in every citizen in
accordance with the law, and primed it again so that it would go off when her
life-functions fell below a certain level. The machines sewed her up again, the
monitor ticking smoothly inside her. The machines toned up her muscles, flushed
out an accumulated excess of body poisons, burned off a few pounds of
unnecessary fat, revitalized the gloss of her hair, upped her ratio of adrenaline
secretion slightly, repaired minor tissue damage. The machines restarted her heart,
got her lungs functioning, regulated her circulatory and respiratory systems, then
switched off the stasis field and spat her into consciousness.
She opened her eyes. Above, a metal ceiling, rivets, phosphorescent lights.
Behind, a mountain of smoothly chased machinery, herself resting on an iron tongue
that had been thrust out of the machine: a rejected wafer. Ahead, a plastic window,
and someone looking through it. Physically, she felt fine. Not even a headache.
The man in the window stared at her disapprovingly, then beckoned. Dully,
she got up and followed him out. She found that someone had dressed her in street
clothes, mismatched, colors clashing, hastily snatched from her closet. She had on
two different kinds of shoes. She didn’t care.
Mechanically, she followed him down a long corridor to a plush, overstuffed
office. He opened the door for her, shook his head primly as she passed, closed it
again. The older man inside the office told her to sit down. She sat down. He had
white hair (bleached), and sat behind a huge mahogany desk (plastic). He gave her a
long lecture, gently, fatherly, sorrowfully, trying to keep the perplexity out of his
voice, the hint of fear. He said that he was concerned for her. He told her that she
was a very lucky girl, even if she didn’t realize it. He told her about the millions of
people in the world who still weren’t as lucky as she was. “Mankind is free of the
fear of death for the first time in the history of the race,” he told her earnestly, “at
least in the Western world. Free of the threat of extinction.” She listened impassively.
The office was stuffy; flies battered against the closed windowpane. He asked her if
she understood. She said that she understood. Her voice was dull. He stared at her,